Decentralized dYdX Went Down Due to Reliance on Centralized Cloud Services

The dYdX Decentralized Exchange (DEX) was down for 9 hours from noon Monday through Tuesday morning due to a major outage in Amazon’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud services network, again sparking controversy over decentralization.

Some commentators have questioned whether a decentralized protocol based on the services of a centralized corporation is really decentralized.

“It’s time to move away from ‘decentralized finance’. We are not decentralized, the old guard will continue to try to use it as an “attack vector.” “Open finance” or “web3 finance” is probably the most accurate, ”said André Cronier. founder of Yearn Finance (YFI).

Back in October, when Facebook (now Meta) and its family of apps stopped working, cryptocurrency advocates singled out how decentralized applications will not face such problems. Now users are repeating that true decentralized applications should not have these disadvantages.

For its part, dYdX acknowledged that there are still some parts of the “exchange that rely on centralized services (in this case AWS)”, adding that they are “deeply committed to full decentralization” that “remains one of our top priorities as we we continue to repeat the protocol. ”

All this happens after the DEX tweeted around 7:00 pm UTC last night that “due to a severe AWS outage, the dYdX exchange is currently not working. We are seeing high latency between services and broken functionality, endpoints are down and the website is not loading. ”

According to its status page, at approximately 2:00 UTC this morning, the incident was flagged “resolved to indicate that we believe everything is working correctly again,” while the exchange continues to monitor the situation.

After dYdX gathers more information, an autopsy is expected. said

Cryptonews.com reached out to dYdX for comment.

Amazon has confirmed that they are experiencing problems in the US East-1 region, saying it also affects some of their monitoring and incident response tools. “We have identified the root cause and are actively working to recover,” the statement said.

Coinbase, a major centralized cryptocurrency exchange, is also named among the names reported by a number of news outlets for companies reporting problems resulting from the shutdown. At the time of writing, there was no mention of this on the company’s status page.

Other titles include Robinhood, Cash App, Venmo, Netflix, Roku, Slack, Disney +, Tinder, Ticketmaster, Tinder, etc.

Notably, despite the shutdown and subsequent backlash, the exchange’s own token, DYDX, is in green – at least for the day. At 10:05 UTC, DYDX is trading at $ 9.33, up 0.9% in the past 24 hours. It has dropped 25.7% over the past week and nearly 50% over the past month.