(Originally published on infura.io/blog on Sept 16, 2022)

Infura was founded on the belief that the web3 developer community can create a world where economic freedom, shared truth and digital security can be guaranteed to every person on the planet.

At the beginning of Ethereum’s story in 2016, many teams focused on solving extremely complex problems with an emphasis on decentralization, but we noticed that many simple problems like developer tooling remained in their infancy.

This led to the start of Infura’s journey as a service to support the wider developer ecosystem, especially the early community we grew alongside with. This is why Infura was free in its entirety until July 2019 and still maintains a free tier. Our goal has always been and will continue to ensure any developer can gain access to production-ready and reliable Web3 infrastructure.

Providing a decentralized option

Infura eventually made the transition from being a public good to operating as a SaaS business. We’ve empowered more than 400,000 developers to build, grow and evangelize Web3, while providing a service that consistently achieves over 99.99% uptime. None of this success would have been possible without the support of our team members, partners, and most importantly, the developer community who have integrated Infura into their frameworks to help lower the barrier to entry into Web3 and improve the experience for end-users.

Decentralization is an inevitable part of our future – one that has required patience, planning and a steadfast commitment to growing the Web3 ecosystem. Infura supports the ethos of Web3 and has always embraced the philosophy of interoperability and open architecture. We support a user’s ability to quickly and seamlessly complement our service with their own node as a failsafe solution, or even employ an alternative infrastructure provider in a hybrid model.

Running a service like Infura involves a complex technology stack, protocol knowledge, and an ongoing investment in operations to guarantee 99.99% uptime. In the past, this complexity presented itself as a centralization hurdle as it restricts who can run such a service as part of a decentralized infrastructure network.

In recent years, several teams have overcome these technological, logistical and financial hurdles. There is now a flourishing ecosystem of highly reliable infrastructure providers and this makes it the perfect time to take the next step in the journey toward progressive decentralization.

A united front for Web3 infrastructure providers

This journey of decentralization is not a destination, but a gradual realization punctuated by progressive, significant milestones in our vision. We hope a decentralized infrastructure provider network can achieve the following goals:

• Be publicly verifiable. Provide a technology stack that allows the user to independently verify the network’s integrity and capacity.

• Be open source. Participate and benefit from ecosystem innovation and iteration on common critical service components.

• Be a standard bearer. Continue to provide and set a high bar for uncompromising and high-quality developer experience for all our users and partners.

This is why Infura, which is a part of the Consensys family, announced today our plans toward building a decentralized network for infrastructure providers. While this was not possible back in 2016 when we started Infura, now is the right time. We have a golden opportunity to demonstrate that an alternative to the Web2 SaaS model does exist and node providers can thrive in a collaborative ecosystem.

Our intent is to build a network that allows all node providers, and more general infrastructure providers, to form a united front for our users. If you are interested in joining this mission, please reach out. Let's talk about how we can achieve it together.

WAGMI,

E.G.

About Decentralized Infrastructure Network (DIN)

DIN is a decentralized service discovery marketplace, enhancing the performance, reliability, and cost-effectiveness of dapp development through a network of 50+ Web3 Infrastructure providers. DIN is capable of serving 12+ popular blockchain network APIs and RPCs with high throughput and performance with no single point of failure. DIN is currently in a federated phase, progressively decentralizing traffic across Infura and MetaMask.

To learn more follow DINBuild on X and YouTube: