Ethereum co-founder pitches dApps for 2025 Cloudflare disruption solution

Vitalik Buterin, one of the co-founders of the Ethereum blockchain, said that decentralized applications (DApps) can mitigate failures in Internet infrastructure, such as the massive outage Internet service provider Cloudflare experienced in November.

In Thursday's X-Post, Buterin said Ethereum needs to do more to achieve its “mission.”[building] The World Computer, which serves as the central infrastructure, is a more free and open Internet service. According to the co-founder, that started with DApps that work “without fraud, censorship or third-party interference” and are used at scale on the blockchain.

“If you're a user, you won't notice if Cloudflare goes down — or even if all of Cloudflare is hacked by North Korea,” Buterin said. All this – for money, and also for identity, administration and other infrastructure of civilization that people want to build.

The Cloudflare outage that caused 20% of the platform's websites to go down in November was caused by a software failure. According to the company's postmortem report, the “behavior file” used by its bot management system to respond to cyber attacks has grown beyond normal limits.

Related: Cloudflare outage shows why crypto needs end-to-end decentralization

As many crypto platforms suffered similar outages, including the one at Amazon Web Services in October, many questioned the reliability of centralized internet infrastructure. Websites including Coinbase, Blockchain.com, BitMEX and Ledger went offline.

“Decentralization is eroded not by possession, but by convenience,” said Buterin and Ethereum Foundation researchers Yoav Weiss and Marissa Posner in a manifesto released on November 11. “Automatically, continuously—it moves toward trust.”

Buterin floats the future of Ethereum on-chain gas

The founder of Ethereum has become a regular figure on social issues of the crypto industry and technology through blogs and other media. In early December, he argued that the crypto market needed a “good faith onchain gas futures market” to give users certainty over blockchain transaction fees.

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