Why Centralized Repositories Are a Single Point of Failure

A single admin can blacklist addresses or freeze assets, undermining permissionless guarantees. This is not hypothetical—major providers like Infura have complied with OFAC sanctions, breaking core Ethereum principles.

• Single Admin Key controls access for millions of users.
• Protocol-Level Neutrality is outsourced to a corporate entity.
• Creates regulatory honeypots for global adversaries.

When a centralized RPC or indexer fails, entire application ecosystems go dark. The AWS us-east-1 outage of 2021 took down dApps controlling ~$10B+ TVL because they shared a single infrastructure dependency.

• Cascading Failure across unrelated protocols.
• Zero Redundancy at the service layer.
• ~500ms of downtime can trigger liquidations and arbitrage failures.

Users and smart contracts must trust the repository's output is correct. A malicious or compromised provider like a centralized oracle (Chainlink node operator) or bridge custodian can feed invalid state data, leading to stolen funds. The Wormhole $325M hack stemmed from a single validator key compromise.

• Truth is not cryptographically verified at the edge.
• Enables sophisticated MEV extraction and fraud.
• Breaks the trust-minimized security model.

Centralized repositories create rent-seeking intermediaries that extract value from the network. Services like Alchemy and centralized sequencers (Optimism, Arbitrum pre-decentralization) capture >90% of transaction fee revenue, creating misaligned incentives and stifling protocol-owned sustainability.

• Value Leakage from the core protocol and its users.
• Monopoly Pricing Power over essential services.
• Inhibits Credible Neutrality and long-term alignment.

Publishers like Elsevier and Springer Nature control access to ~50% of all scientific papers. This creates a $10B+ annual toll on institutions, stifling global research and innovation.

• Gatekeeps Knowledge: Publicly funded research locked behind private paywalls.
• Creates Information Asymmetry: Favors well-funded Western institutions over the Global South.
• Slows Progress: Access delays and costs hinder interdisciplinary and replication studies.

Platforms like NCBI or Figshare act as trusted, centralized custodians. A takedown request, server failure, or policy change can erase foundational datasets.

• Single Point of Failure: One legal or technical event can make critical data vanish.
• Mutable History: Central admins can alter or retract data post-publication.
• Vendor Lock-in: Data formats and APIs are controlled by the platform, hindering portability.

Protocols like Arweave for permanent storage and IPFS for decentralized content addressing create a canonical, unchangeable record of science.

• Guaranteed Persistence: Pay once, store forever models eliminate link rot.
• Censorship-Resistant: No single entity can alter or remove published work.
• Provenance & Integrity: Timestamped hashes provide an immutable chain of custody for data.

Networks like Ocean Protocol for data monetization and Gitcoin for funding shift control from corporations to stakeholder-aligned communities.

• Aligns Incentives: Contributors, reviewers, and curators are rewarded directly via tokens.
• Decentralized Curation: Token-weighted governance decides on funding, not editorial boards.
• Composable Funding: Enables novel mechanisms like Quadratic Funding for public goods science.

Tools like MATLAB or proprietary bioinformatics suites trap methodologies in walled gardens. Reproducibility fails when software licenses expire or environments change.

• Non-Verifiable Results: Black-box algorithms prevent true peer review.
• Environment Drift: "It worked on my machine" kills replicability over time.
• High Cost Barrier: Proprietary software licenses exclude independent researchers.

Frameworks like Bacalhau for decentralized compute and Ethereum for verifiable execution turn methodologies into auditable, open-source protocols.

• Deterministic Outputs: Same input + code guarantees the same result, anywhere.
• Trustless Verification: Anyone can cryptographically verify that a computation was executed correctly.
• Composable Pipelines: Open tooling allows methods to be chained and built upon freely.