4 ms·

But the question was how hard is it to run a competitor to Infura. And the answer is trivially easy. Infura is just an Ethereum node API that's publicly exposed

• matthewdgreen 5y ago
  This is true today. But the standard approach in this industry is to start by offering access to an open service and then quickly build in value-add services that aren’t available in the open service. So for example, the smart move would be for Infura to offer a proprietary chain or rollup that gets widely used but isn’t available outside of Infura. If they can pull that off, competition could get much harder.
  • des1nderlase 5y ago
    I second this. If history has thought us anything is that every web3 company will work toward increasing the competitive gap.
• mritchie712 5y ago
  Right, this was my point. People don't usually run Postgres themselves (e.g. set up Postgres in a docker container), but it's not very hard to do. The article makes it sound like Infura has a moat. There's no moat, it's as easy to switch as it is to switch Postgres clouds. To be clear, I agree with most of their findings, this on is just a bit off.
  • biorach 5y ago
    > People don't usually run Postgres themselves (e.g. set up Postgres in a docker container), but it's not very hard to do. It's easy to do a basic install. It's quite hard to do it right, at scale, with workload-appropriate configuration, replication, backup etc. My point... neither Postures nor Indira, or any other blockchain solution are easy to install and maintain in a fully scaled-up, fault-tolerant, multi-node deployment