Due to its reliance on Amazon’s centralized cloud services, the decentralized derivatives exchange dYdX suffered an outage. Coinbase and Binance US, both centralized exchanges, were also affected by the glitch.
The dYdX derivatives DEX reported a service failure on December 8 that it attributed to Amazon Web Services (AWS).
The interruption and service disruption lasted for almost 8 hours. The dYdX exchange was back online at the time of publication, according to its status page, but the incident has once again raised the issue of real decentralization.
Is it truly decentralized?
Is a decentralized DeFi protocol truly decentralized if it requires services from a centralized corporation?
The team apologized for the outage, admitting that the platform still relies on centralized services.
Several comments suggested that the team runs the exchange on more decentralized cloud services, although they, too, are susceptible to technical problems and outages.
At the time of publication, the AWS service status dashboard was still reporting some difficulties with systems in the US-EAST-1 region.
According to Statista, AWS controls almost a third of the global cloud infrastructure services industry. Too much reliance on a single centralized service provider is not a good idea, as many people have recently discovered.
DYDX comes back
During the interruption, the exchange’s native token fell to $8.80, but immediately recovered when services were restored.
According to CoinGecko, DYDX was trading up 2.2% on the day at $9.33 at the time of writing. However, the token has been impacted by the overall market downturn, falling 26% in the last week. DYDX is now down 66.5% from its all-time high of $27.86 set on September 30.
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