Microsoft, Tencent and other tech giants join Decentralized Infura Network

cointelegraph.com:

Microsoft, Tencent and 16 other Web2 giants have partnered with Consensys on its mission to decentralize the Infura network — the key point of access to Ethereum for much of the decentralized finance (DeFi) sector.

The partnerships aim to increase decentralization on the Infura network — key to preventing outages of the Web3 services that leverage it, including the wallet service MetaMask.

Speaking to Cointelegraph, Consensys senior product manager Andrew Breslin said the significance of the partnerships was less about “who they were” and more about the big-name firms aligning with Infura in “wanting to decentralize every layer of the blockchain infrastructure stack.”

Scheduled for a Q4 launch, the Decentralized Infura Network (DIN) stands as a solution to the problem of centralization for Infrua, with the network currently controlled by Consensys, meaning there remains a single point of failure.

“The cost and complexity involved with running a service like Infura was kind of limiting in terms of who we could partner with to serve this traffic,” said Breslin. “Now there’s this huge flourishing ecosystem of Web3 infrastructure providers that can provide a service that’s complimentary to Infura.”

Breslin said one of the first major features offered in the DIN is “failover support” for the Ethereum and Polygon networks. Failover support means that traffic can be re-routed to one or multiple DIN partners in an outage, guaranteeing higher uptime rates in the long run.

Upon launch, the DIN will allow for more reliable and censorship-resistant access to Ethereum as decentralized applications (DApps) won’t need to rely on a single service provider located in just one place, Breslin said.

️ Infura, alongside our partners, is pushing