The company ConsenSys, the co-founder of Ethereum’s Joseph Lubin, acquired all of the startup Infura, the company that manages a large part of the traffic of the Dapps that record your transactions in this blockchain. Infura reported that it will continue to operate as a business unit within ConsenSys and that the all-new fusion offers an opportunity for deeper collaboration.The decision of ConsenSys can be considered as a formalization due to the company already operated, in part, with the firm specializing in the design of solutions and projects for Ethereum. None of the companies disclosed the amount shortened to close the deal.“Throughout our conversations with ConsenSys and potential outside investors, we have negotiated hard to ensure that the culture and the vision of the product Infura remain protected and backed up. We believe that ConsenSys is the right place for us to locate to make our vision a reality and continue to expand our offer,” he said Infura through a press release.Among the main contributions of Infura as a platform for the ecosystem Ethereum highlight the criptocoleccionables CryptoKitties or the plugin Metamask, among other services.
Debate on decentralization
The move by ConsenSys with Infura rolled back the waters on the centralization in Ethereum. The main reason is that Infura might be managing a good part of the nodes of this network, which would place at risk the decentralization in this platform. In fact, in December of 2018, a group of developers have warned about this trend.The data provided by the browsers in this regard, indicate that the number of nodes in complete decreased in the span of a year. Currently, there are 7.636 nodes complete in ethernodes.org and 6.637 nodes in etherscan.io, with a decrease of 10% in their numbers over the past few days. In October of last year that figure was more than 11.800 nodes, according to the search engines. At that time, Michael Wuehler was said that between 5% and 10% of that total could be nodes operated by Infura.However, the estimation must consider requests of code, which is a method for creating applications in Ethereum and interact with the blockchain without the need of running an entire node. In this sense, Infura acknowledged last year that they were made to daily 13 billion code requests through their platform. Data that allows you to speculate on the centralization of the network, since then.These figures are particularly significant if we consider that there are approximately 2.619 Dapps in the ecosystem that record your transactions in Ethereum, and handle a daily volume of 68,000 transactions and more than USD 3 million per week, according to data from State-of-the Dapps.Both on Twitter and Reddit, the comments of the users were split between questioning or defending the full merger of both companies. One of the opinions on twitter was user @yojoots who posted: “Congratulations, but there are two sides to this coin. ConsenSys has an undeniable power in the ecosystem Ethereum. With this acquisition, its position as the central authority de facto is strengthened considerably. Decentralization is more than a buzz word”.On the other side of the shore is the point of view of the user of Reddit liberated_u, who defended the takeover as a step to the ecosystem of the cryptocurrencies experience greater progress in the future.“This acquisition will consolidate even more the growing presence of ConsenSys in the space of development of Ethereum / crypto, a smart move of them in my opinion”, said the enthusiast.One of the members of the team Infura also shared on Reddit about his impressions of the acquisition. Identified as slightlymedicated, the person pointed out that the team “wanted to grow with recruitment key, offer more products and drive initiatives in line with the spirit of Ethereum (…) Finally asked us if we would like to stay within ConsenSys. We feel that this allowed us to maintain our happiness and continue what we are doing.”The acquisition is expected to ConsenSys consolidate their projects in order to improve the network of Ethereum, as well as design and develop new tools that allow a sustained growth in the future.