Investing in the Decentralization of Ethereum

Infura has long recognized that the health of a decentralized network depends on a rich ecosystem of nodes capable of delivering on all the needs of its participants. Whether that be miners, light-client servers, or full nodes serving data via RPC, each brings incredible value and utility to the network.

To that end, we have partnered and provided support to projects that have shared this vision and further bring decentralization to the Ethereum network. In 2018, Infura grants and support for this work totaled over $140K.

One such example is the fantastic work that Alexey Akhunov is doing. Turbo-Geth is a project based on the Go-Ethereum codebase focused on optimizing the peer-to-peer network protocol and improving the Ethereum client’s disk usage and performance. These improvements aim to make the task of running a full node more accessible.

Another project we have been very pleased to support is Vipnode developed by Andrey Petrov. Vipnode is an MIT licensed open source development of light and general full node incentivization for the Ethereum ecosystem.

Vipnode recently released milestone 2.0 of their ambitious project and we would like to take this opportunity to offer our sincerest congratulations. The progress and consistent delivery from Andrey has been astounding. We are proud to have been able to support this fantastic work and the value it brings to the network, specifically in the area of incentivizing light client servers. We encourage you to take a look at Vipnode and contribute to enable further development.

Together, Turbo Geth and Vipnode work to reduce the cost of running node infrastructure while creating an incentive to do so and thereby further bringing decentralization to the Ethereum network.