Infura

"Infura is an Ethereum node and API service that is used by most of the Ethereum Dapps ecosystem, including MetaMask, 0x Protocol, CryptoKitties, Truffle, Uport; nearly 13 billion JSON-RPC requests per day on the Ethereum network are channeled through Infura infrastructure and has more than 15,000 registered Ethereum developers"

Basics

• Founded in 2016

History

• From The Defiant (30-11-2020):

"It was at that last company that I met one of my cofounders who, just as a water cooler topic, asked something that was like, how would you verify a piece of data that somebody gave you if you didn't actually trust this person? I joked around with him and said, are you interviewing somewhere? Is this like an interview question you want me to answer for you? He’s like, no, no, it's something that's really interesting going on in the Bitcoin space right now.

I was aware of Bitcoin, I was following up but not heavily involved. He was the one that convinced me that I should be paying more attention to the space. I was getting a little bit bored at my current role, and I wanted to be closer to the R&D side of the industry, and it really seemed like a lot of people were fascinated and interested in the technology behind Bitcoin and what was starting to be called blockchain. I wanted to be a part of that and figure out what it could be used for. 

He was already acquainted with Joe Lubin, and he introduced me to Joe over a call. It was very informal. At the end of the call, Joe was saying like, do you want to join us, work at ConsenSys and find a product or project that you're interested in working on? Shortly after joining ConsenSys, I met a couple of other people who were equally interested in infrastructure and what infrastructure for blockchain could mean, and we started working on Infura almost immediately as initially an internal project for ConsenSys teams and then opening it up as a full-blown public offering."

Launch and Consensys connections

• "Securing funding from ConsenSys, Infura arrived as a “spoke” (start-up) within the ConsenSys family of companies. (in 2016)"
• “INFURA is a foundational part of the ConsenSys family and the emerging decentralized ecosystem. An important challenge faced by Dapp developers and users is the need for Dapps to interface with Ethereum and IPFS nodes. The mission of INFURA is to provide the world with secure, stable, fault tolerant, and scalable Ethereum and IPFS nodes.”
• Then became a ‘Core Component’ of Consensys.
• And finally it has been officially acquired by Consensys in 10-2019.
• There is onething: Infura is operated by a single provider – ConsenSys – and relies on cloud servers hosted by Amazon. As such, concerns exist that the service represents a single point of failure for the entire network.

Audits & Exploits

Bugs/Exploits

• Went down for a couple of hours which made some DeFi break. From The Defiant (11-11-2020):

"Infura, a service which many Ethereum applications use to outsource running their own Ethereum nodes, was running the old, buggy version of Geth. This caused applications using Infura to break. Infura is back up at the time of writing, and so was DeFi."

Tech

• Whitepaper or docs can be found [insert here].
• Code can be viewed [insert here].

Implementations

• Built on: Ethereum. “The most well-known portion of the Infura infrastructure is the network of hosted Ethereum clients that spans four Ethereum networks: Mainnet, Ropsten, Rinkeby, and Kovan (by Parity). “These are load-balanced groups of nodes, that we can scale to meet demand fairly easily, and that we keep up-to-date and secure,” says Cocchiaro. “We have TLS-enabled APIs including JSON-RPC, REST and websocket endpoints as ways to access our node network as if it was your local node. Infura also has additional features built on top of these endpoints for reliability and added value, like the feature we call Transaction Assurance.”
• Uses technology built by Parity.
• Programming language used:

Transaction Details

• Capacity (TPS):
• Latency:

Other Details

• Ethereum nodes are only one part of Infura stack: “We also host IPFS nodes and a public IPFS gateway. We’re in the process of building additional decentralized storage products based on both IFPS and Swarm, that we will detail in the near future.“

Compliance

• From CoinTelegraph (9-8-2022):

"According to Twitter user @0xdev0, on Monday, Web3 development platform Alchemy and Infura.io blocked remote procedure call (RPC) requests to cryptocurrency mixer Tornado Cash, preventing users from accessing the applications."

• Infura & OpenSea blocked users in listed jurisdictions to comply with US sanctions (3-2022).

Roadmap

• Is planning to launch a decentralized protocol in 2023. The network’s working title is the “Decentralized Infrastructure Network.”

Usage

• Says they run 'dozens of nodes (30-11-2020).
• “We now have more than 15,000 registered developers, we’re serving over 6 billion API requests per day and transferring roughly 1.6 petabytes of data per month”

• After the bug of 11-11-2020 it was clear Binance and Uniswap both also rely on Infura. Uniswap however still was able to have swaps due to its decentralized contract.

Projects that use or built on it

• From their website (13-4-2020):

MyCrypto, Compound, MetaMask, 0x, Coinbase Wallet, OpenZeppelin, Opera, Truffle, Maker, CryptoKitties, PoolTogether, Monerium, Lucidity and IDEX.

• From their FAQ (13-4-2020):

"Which clients does Infura use?

Geth: Go Ethereum is one of the three original implementations (along with C++ and Python) of the Ethereum protocol. It is written in Go, fully open source and licensed under the GNU LGPL v3.

Parity: An Ethereum client developed by Parity Technologies using the Rust programming language.

Hyperledger Besu: Hyperledger Besu is an open source Ethereum client developed under the Apache 2.0 license and written in Java."

• Used by Metamask, CryptoKitties, uPort, Cipher Browser, Radar Relay Status and UJO for scalable blockchain solutions.

Pros and Cons

Infura+ and Centralisation

• Premium Ethereum API subscription service. From the Token Economy newsletter "Infura is finally monetizing one of the most centralized points of failure in DeFi land. I guess that's good news, meaning that it reduces the risk that they go away, but it would ideally be better to be able to do away with such a centralized model in the first place."
• From a Delphi Digital report on Ethereum (3-2019):

“Infura, a ConsenSys spoke, is both an important tool and centralization concern for the Ethereum network. It is Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and allows decentralized applications (DApps) to process information on Ethereum without the developers needing to run a full node. It processes more than 10 billion requests per day and serves over 50k developers/DApps. Infura provides an easy way for developers to build on Ethereum without the need to maintain the necessary infrastructure themselves. However, the concern is that Infura is owned and operated by a single company, ConsenSys, while being hosted on AWS. Since many popular Ethereum services/DApps rely on Infura (e.g. MetaMask), it creates a single point of failure for the network. Infura services a disproportionate amount of the network's traffic and accounts for 5%-10% of all nodes. Michael Wuehler, Infura Co-Founder, recently said in an interview “If every single DApp in the world is pointed to Infura, and we decided to turn that off, then we could, and the DApps would stop working. That’s the concern and that’s a valid concern”. “

Team, Funding and Partners

• Michael Wuehler, co-founder
• E.G. Galano (@egalano); co-founder

Funding

• Got mentioned as one of the creditors of FTX (26-1-2023).
• Is part of Consensys Labs portfolio (7-2019)

Partners 

• Listed as a node operator at Chainlink (7-2-2023).
• One of the genesis partners of Palm (31-3-2021).
• Anydot. From EthHub #143 (7-12-2020):

"Anydot acquired by ConsenSys. The Anydot team will be joining Infura to incorporate their technology in order to improve the transaction experience for developers."

• Is a member of the Data Availability Committee of DeversiFi (6-2020).
• Partnered with PegaSys