Immutable links with AWS in latest Web3 gaming push

October 11, 2023 Coin Telegraph

Amazon

The blockchain gaming firm said it will gain access to a vast pipeline of game studio leads and support for successful deal closures.

Web3 gaming platform Immutable has partnered with Amazon Web Services to extend options for game developers as the cloud service provider expands its startup accelerator programs.

In an Oct. 10 blog post, Immutable said AWS added it to a list of companies within its ISV (independent software vendors) Accelerate Program, where organizations provide software solutions that run on or integrate with AWS.

Additionally, developers looking to build on Immutable’s blockchain can join AWS Activate, a program that provides perks including technical support, training and $100,000 worth of AWS cloud credits.

#Immutable @amazon

Amazon Web Services and Immutable are working together to shape the future of gaming!

Through our collaboration with Amazon, we will gain access to a vast pipeline of game studio leads, support for successful deal closures, and up to $100k in AWS cloud… pic.twitter.com/SX7xfFqrtK
— Immutable (@Immutable) October 10, 2023

AWS head of startups Australia, John Kearney, told Cointelegraph that Immutable is a “great example of a local Aussie startup that has gone global” and reaffirmed the cloud provider’s commitment to expanding Web3 game development using its infrastructure.

Immutable has been built with Amazon EventBridge and AWS Lambda, serverless services that use events to connect application components together. This has enabled the platform to "increase its scalability to handle a 10x increase in partnered games,” according to the announcement.

Concerns have previously been raised about the centralization of gaming and Ethereum along with the reliance on Amazon — the market leader capturing about a third of the cloud services market.

Immutable product marketing lead, Michael Powell, alleviated some of those concerns — explaining to Fortune in an Oct. 11 report:

“A lot of blockchain purists are very big into the idea of decentralization and that everything has to be on-chain and that’s a massive deviation from where game developers actually build.”

In August, Immutable began public testing its zkEVM, or zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine, in collaboration with Polygon Labs.

According to the firm, zkEVM will lower development costs for game developers while providing the security and network effects that come with the Ethereum ecosystem.

Immutable was valued at $2.5 billion in March 2022 following a $200 million Series C funding round led primarily by Singaporean state-owned investment firm Temasek.

Magazine: Singer Vérité’s fan-first approach to Web3, music NFTs and community building

AWS went down in the US, but Ethereum kept humming

June 14, 2023 Coin Telegraph

Amazon Web Services

Ethereum hummed along through the latest AWS outage but one commentator said its reliance on Lido for staking could cause issues in the future.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered a minor outage but there was no impact on Ethereum network nodes which largely rely on Amazon’s hosting.

On June 13, the cloud service provider went down temporarily for around three hours. At 12:08 PM PDT, the company first reported it was “investigating increased error rates and latencies” in parts of the United States.

Many mainstream news organizations such as the Associated Press were affected and unable to publish articles.

Ethereum advocate Evan Van Ness observed the outage noting that the Ethereum network was not affected.

AWS is down

Ethereum is humming along unaffected

Bitcoin maxis hardest hit pic.twitter.com/9YGBXRC4CL
— Evan Van Ness (@evan_van_ness) June 13, 2023

According to Ethernodes, 64.5% of the Ethereum network is reliant on Amazon hosting providers.

*Distribution of Ethereum nodes from web service providers. Source: Ethernodes*

Van Ness added the impact may have been more significant if the outage was in Europe due to the amount of Ether (ETH) staked on Lido, which is currently around 7.1 million or 35% of the total:

“I imagine there would be some effect if AWS went down in Europe given how much of Lido is in the cloud.”

Ethereum has previously been criticized for centralization due to its reliance on infrastructure provider Infura which provides network nodes to companies and organizations. Many of these companies, and liquid staking platform Lido, rely heavily on AWS for cloud hosting services

Around 20 minutes after the discovery of the problem AWS said the root cause of the issue was connected to a service called AWS Lambda, which lets customers run code for different types of applications.

Over three hours after AWS went down the company reported that “the issue has been resolved and all AWS Services are operating normally,” at 3.37 PM PDT.

According to hosting platform Kinsta, among cloud hosting providers, AWS has the dominant market share of 34%.

Magazine: Joe Lubin: The truth about ETH founders split and ‘Crypto Google’

Ethereum Archive Node service shuts down saying it ‘succeeded’

April 4, 2023 Coin Telegraph

Archive Nodes

ArchiveNode.io has closed its doors following three years of providing archived Ethereum blockchain node data.

Ethereum mainnet Archive Node service, ArchiveNode.io, said it will be shutting down, claiming that the project has been a success.

On April 4, ArchiveNode.io announced it was “sunsetting” its services after more than three years of providing free Ethereum mainnet Archive Node services to developers, students, and researchers.

An Ethereum Archive Node is an instance of an Ethereum client configured to build an archive of all historical states. This type of node is a useful tool for querying historical blockchain data that is not accessible on full nodes.

While we appreciate everyone’s support over the years, it’s time for ArchiveNode to hang it up and say gm for the last time.

This isn’t a sad ending, but a happy one - we just aren’t needed anymore, and are shutting down.

gm and gn. https://t.co/truuXmDgbT
— Archive Node (@ArchiveNode) April 3, 2023

Additionally, Archive Nodes are not required to participate in block validation so they can theoretically be built from scratch, however, they do require much greater storage capacity.

The announcement was made by “DeFi Dude” who initiated the project and claimed the project was being shut down as "we succeeded," before adding:

“Our service is no longer necessary and other alternatives exist today that did not exist when we got started.”

He added that nobody was running Archive Nodes when the project started. The only option was to pay Ethereum infrastructure provider Infura $250 monthly to access archive data.

The goal of the project was to “get archive data into the hands of developers, students, and researchers who wanted to build cool shit, but didn’t have the time, money, or resources available to run their own archive node.”

He confirmed the project was never to "make money or profit."

He added there is currently a robust remote procedure call (RPC) provider market offering access to archive data making the project obsolete.

ArchiveNode.io thanked the Ethereum Foundation for their initial grant of $10,000 in Amazon Web Services (AWS) credits to get the project off the ground.

According to a Cointelegraph report in August, just three centralized cloud providers account for more than two-thirds of Ethereum nodes. More than half of the total nodes were hosted on AWS, according to data at the time.

Features: ‘Account abstraction’ supercharges Ethereum wallets: Dummies guide

7 real-world cloud computing examples to know

March 21, 2023 Coin Telegraph

Airbnb

From streaming videos to cloud storage solutions, cloud computing has become an integral part of our everyday lives.

Cloud computing has become an important part of our lives, whether we realize it or not. Many of the services and applications we use on a daily basis, such as messaging and streaming music and video, are powered by cloud computing.

Here are real-world cloud computing examples to know.

Netflix

Netflix uses cloud computing to provide streaming services to millions of users worldwide. By hosting its content on cloud servers, it can ensure reliable and scalable delivery to a global audience.

Netflix uses a variety of cloud computing services and technologies, including Amazon Web Services (AWS) and content delivery networks (CDNs). The majority of Netflix's cloud computing requirements, including storage, processing power and data management, are met by AWS. Netflix makes use of CDNs to guarantee that its users receive its content fast and consistently. To enable users to access the content from the closest location, CDNs keep copies of the content in many locations around the globe.

Also, netflix uses CDN (Content Delivery Networks) and they have servers around the world hosted on AWS (Amazon Web Services). The file/video you request is sent to the Content Delivery Network closest to you.
— Timi (@_timiowo) April 13, 2020

Slack

Slack is a cloud-based messaging and collaboration platform that allows teams to communicate and collaborate in real time. It utilizes cloud computing to provide scalability, reliability and accessibility to its users. Slack's cloud infrastructure allows it to support a large number of users and messages, and to provide seamless access to its platform from multiple devices and locations.

Slack runs on cloud-based architecture that is designed to be highly available and fault-tolerant. It uses multiple data centers to ensure that its services are always available, even in the event of a failure in one data center.

Salesforce

Salesforce provides customer relationship management (CRM) services through cloud computing. This allows businesses to manage customer data, automate workflows and streamline sales processes.

Salesforce cloud computing involves the use of a variety of cloud services and technologies, including:

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS): Salesforce employs IaaS companies like Microsoft Azure and AWS to supply the underlying infrastructure for its cloud-based platform.
Software as a service (SaaS): Salesforce offers its software products as an SaaS platform rather than as traditional software that must be installed on local devices.
Platform as a service (PaaS): To enable developers to create and distribute unique apps on the Salesforce platform, Salesforce also makes use of PaaS technologies like Force.com and Heroku.
Mobile computing: Salesforce also offers its users mobile apps that provide them access to their customer and sales data whenever and wherever they are.

Airbnb

Airbnb is a cloud-based platform for the sharing economy. Using Airbnb's website or mobile app, hosts may offer their properties for rent, and visitors can book such rentals. Massive amounts of data, including property listings, booking information and customer preferences, are stored and managed by Airbnb using cloud computing.

As a result, the platform can offer features like real-time availability and pricing, secure payment processing, and customized recommendations that make the experience easy for both guests and hosts.

Air is the new Cloud. Airbnb, Airtable, Airbyte, Airbase, Airkit...
— Dmitriy Ryaboy (@squarecog) March 23, 2022

Uber

Uber uses cloud computing to manage its ride-hailing platform, including real-time location tracking, trip routing and fare calculation. This allows the platform to provide fast and reliable transportation services, with features such as real-time payment processing and personalized ride options. Cloud computing also enables Uber to scale its services to meet demand, provide 24/7 support, and ensure the safety and security of riders and drivers.

GitHub

GitHub is a cloud-based platform that provides hosting for software development and version control using Git. It allows developers to store and collaborate on code with their team members, manage project tasks and track changes to code over time.

Please don't apply for senior dev roles unless your GitHub looks like this pic.twitter.com/6wptzkrMb2
— Nat Miletic (@natmiletic) February 27, 2023

While GitHub itself is not a cloud computing platform per se, it is often used in conjunction with cloud computing services such as AWS, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure. Developers can use GitHub to host their code and then deploy it to the cloud using services such as AWS Elastic Beanstalk or Microsoft Azure App Service.

Google Cloud Platform

Google Cloud Platform is a cloud computing platform provided by Google that enables users to build, deploy, and scale applications and services using a wide range of computing resources. It is an example of cloud computing because it provides access to a wide range of computing resources on demand, including virtual machines, storage, networking, databases and other services, all delivered through the internet.

One example of how Google Cloud can be used is for building and deploying web applications. Developers can use Google Cloud's compute resources to host their application code and data, and use services such as load balancing, autoscaling and container orchestration to manage the application's performance and availability. They can also use Google Cloud's machine learning services to add intelligent features to their applications, such as image recognition or natural language processing.

Is blockchain a part of cloud computing?

No, blockchain is not a part of cloud computing. While both blockchain and cloud computing are used in the context of modern computing, they are distinct technologies with different characteristics and use cases.

Cloud computing is a delivery model for computing resources such as servers, storage and software applications over the internet. Users who use cloud computing can use these services whenever they need to without having to buy and maintain their own physical IT infrastructure.

Blockchain, on the other hand, is a distributed digital ledger technology that records transactions in a safe, open and unchangeable way. Blockchain is frequently used to build relationships of trust between parties who do not already know or trust one another. In order to prevent any one person or entity from tampering with the data, it accomplishes this by using a decentralized network of computers to verify and record transactions.

While it is possible to use cloud computing to host blockchain-based applications, blockchain is not inherently a part of cloud computing.

FTX Debtors Reveal $6.8 Billion Hole in Balance Sheet Amidst Financial Discrepancies and Payments to Insiders

March 18, 2023 Bitcoin.com

Ava Labs Partners With Amazon Web Services to Accelerate Blockchain Adoption, AVAX Jumps 16%

January 11, 2023 Bitcoin.com

FTX-Hosted NFTs Point to Broken Metadata, Issue Illuminates Flaws With NFTs Tied to Centralized Clouds

December 8, 2022 Bitcoin.com

More resilient and user-controlled than the AWS: Colin Evran’s vision for Filecoin

September 12, 2022 Coin Telegraph

AWS

“Filecoin is more than just storage, one can think of it as an Airbnb for cloud services."

In the beginning of 2021, Filecoin was a relatively unknown decentralized peer-to-peer storage service with a total network capacity barely making a dent in the digital storage space. Less than two years later, the Filecoin team claimsthe blockchain has grown to eclipse 10% of the storage capacity of Amazon Web Service, the most popular vendor in the cloud infrastructure services market. This includes use of the storage — by well known blockchain firms such as OpenSea and Magic Eden — of some 239.03 terabytes of nonfungible tokens (NFTs) worth an estimated $26.6 billion as of early September.

NFT storage on Filecoin | Source: NFT.Storage

How did Filecoin become so successful;? And what motivates its developers to grow the ecosystem? Colin Evran, ecosystem lead at Protocol Labs, the creator of Filecoi says a big factor in his desire to join Filecoin was his disillusionment with how things operate in Web 2.0.

"It's still going in the wrong direction," he said. "A handful of companies are now controlling the world's data, in my opinion, without checks and balances in many ways. And I just thought such levels of centralization over a period of many decades isn't going to be the answer for everyday users.

"I fundamentally believe if you zoom out 40 years from now, the answer is not like AWS storing 100% of the world's data. I don't think that's good for society. I don't think that's what users really want," he said.

Evran took some lateral steps in his path towards the blockchain sector. Having finished Ivey Business School at Western University in 2006, he first became an analyst for McKinsey before venturing into the field of private equity. Then he returned to the academic world to get his Masters from Stanford Business School and then for his Master's.

Colin Evran of Filecoin | Source: Twitter

After graduation, Evran founded a startup in the construction tech space called "Yard Club." Four years later the firm was sold to Caterpillar, the world's largest construction equipment designer.

As told by Evan, the financial surety from the deal gave him the ability to focus on a project that was much more in-depth. "I really wanted to work on a piece of technology that could conceivably impact every man, woman, child, and every company in the world if it was successful. So a good friend of mine introduced me to Protocol Labs, the creator of Filecoin."

Filecoin's Interplanetary File System (IPFS) enables users to store and transfer content in a peer-to-peer manner. It is the heart of Filecoin, containing three components; unique identification via content addressing, content linking through directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), and content discovery via distributed hash tables.

As its incentive layer, Filecoin serves to verify that all data is stored with the appropriate cryptographic proofs. Storage providers on Filecoin have two primary sources of revenue, block rewards and network fees. Block rewards are allocated proportionally based on submitted cryptographic proofs of the data they store.

Currently, there are about 25,000 transactions on the Filecoin blockchain per day and in total there is about 127 pebibytes (1PiB = 1,125,900 Gigabytes) worth of data stored on it. In terms of total capacity, Filecoin developers say that the network is currently at around 10% of the AWS' storage capacity.

Filecoin network metrics | Source: Starboard Ventures

At the beginning of the year, storing data on Filecoin was at less than 1% of the cost of comparable services on AWS. But now, Evran explains that some storage costs have fallen into negative territory, while the typical storage costs have also decreased to less than 0.5% of centralized providers.

"With such a magnitude of cost reduction, many small businesses and freelancers worldwide can now afford to store people's data." He continues: "It's similar to how Airbnb unlocked the ability for average homeowners to host guests, which wouldn't have been possible in a hotel-dominated world."

For Evran, the novel Filecoin Virtual Machine is an exciting technological development for the ecosystem this year. "Filecoin has been a storage and retrieval market thus far. But what the FVM can unlock is a multibillion-dollar DeFi economy on top of Filecoin," he said.

"With complete compatibility with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), developers can build across the two networks. We could bring up new use cases such as on-chain voting, data-based decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), decentralized verifiable computation, etc."

At the moment, Filecoin storage providers have about one billion dollars in collateral to store deals and grow operations. Via further updates, it is possible to create DeFi instruments that auto-renew deals for token holders, creating essentially a 'perpetual storage' network.

Going forward, Evran explains that his vision is to see Protocol Labs and Filecoin to become a hub for building decentralized technologies. "We helped seed the foundation of IPFS, which is now used by every single major blockchain from Ethereum and Polkadot. But we also want people to come to our community and develop something transformational that's aligned with our values for Web 3.0. In spite of the ongoing crypto winter, Filecoin still holds its place among top players with a total market cap of $1.8 billion.

Helium network team resolves consensus error after 4-hour outage

July 12, 2022 Coin Telegraph

AWS

The network downtime affected token transfers and miner rewards, but not devices during the 4-hour outage caused by a failure in the Consensus Group.

The Internet of Things (IoT) blockchain Helium shut down for about 4 hours on July 11 due to validator outages from a software update, causing delayed transaction finality.

During the outage, devices transferring data over the network were not affected, but miner rewards and token transfers were left pending. The team resolved the issue by skipping the blockchain forward by one block and resuming normal functions.

At 10:20 am EDT, the Consensus Group stopped producing blocks at block height 1435692 on the Helium (HNT) blockchain, according to a status update. Lacking network consensus, token transfers could not be completed, and new blocks were not being produced.

We're back folks. The chain just processed block 1,435,693. We'll continue to monitor the chain throughout the day.
— Helium (@helium) July 11, 2022

Helium is an IoT network that uses physical radio hotspots to allow users to connect to their devices from anywhere there is radio coverage. On the Helium network, a Consensus Group consists of 43 validator nodes randomly chosen in fixed intervals to provide network consensus.

In the postmortem for the event, Helium engineers cited two reasons validators stopped creating consensus on the network.

First, an issue with a July 8 software update for validators contributed to the problem. The v1.12.3 update was designed to provide support for the 5G Mobile subnetwork and its MOBILE token.

Additionally, a “local network outage” was also to blame. In the project’s Discord channel, Helium moderator “Digerati” explained that a high concentration of validators randomly chosen as the Consensus Group at the time of the outage was running on the same Amazon Web Service (AWS) network, which experienced technical difficulties.

AWS is a global cloud computing and data storage service that can be used to enhance computer networks like Helium.

A Helium community moderator explains an AWS outage affected validators.

Compounding the problem was the failure of an auto-skip feature that should have chosen a new Consensus Group automatically. The team stated that “a known issue prevented the auto-skip feature from working as expected.” However, it is not clear what the “known issue” is that the team referred to.

Although the network could not choose a different Consensus Group, it was designed with the ability to skip the blockchain a block forward “to mitigate situations such as these,” according to a 10:56 am ET announcement from the team.

By 1:45 pm ET, new block production started with block number 1435693. The team said it worked closely with validator operators to ensure they were synced correctly and released a new software update.

HNT is down 4.1% over the past 24 hours, trading at $8.76 according to CoinGecko. It is down 84% from its November 2021 all-time high.

Finance Redefined: AWS turns crypto exchanges offline, and Sushi CTO resigns, Dec. 3–10

December 11, 2021 Coin Telegraph

Amazon Web Services

An AWS outage sent shockwaves around the crypto industry, Delong left his role as Sushi CTO, and Coinbase opened a cryptography library — all coming to you in this week’s Finance Redefined.

Welcome to the latest edition of Cointelegraph’s decentralized finance newsletter.

Although the markets may be down and technical indicators built upon AWS malfunctioning, fear not young degens, fundamental news and the spirit of Wagmi is abundant as ever. So, read on and discover all you need to know about the most important events of this week.

What you’re about to read is a shorter, more succinct version of the newsletter. For a comprehensive summary of DeFi’s developments over the last week, subscribe below.

AWS outage highlights the need for truly decentralized exchanges.

An Amazon Web Service outage this week produced significant cascading effects on the global supply chain and delivery industry, as well as hours-long operational disruptions to decentralized exchange dYdX and leading centralized exchanges Binance.US and Coinbase.

AWS is the world’s largest cloud service infrastructure, which provides an array of services, including network servers, storage capacities, remote computing and mobile development, to name a few.

According to data published this year by Synergy Research Group, the tech titan holds a 33% share of the cloud infrastructure market, followed by Microsoft and Google with 20% and 10%, respectively.

Details on the incident were largely undisclosed; however, it was stated on the company’s service health page that “multiple AWS APIs in the US-EAST-1 Region,” located in Northern Virginia, were experiencing connectivity issues.

In a Twitter statement shared on Tuesday, and into the early hours of Wednesday, dYdX spoke about enhanced latency across the network, as well as website loading failures, before disclosing its overreliance on the centralized servers, one of which is AWS.

Unfortunately, there are still some parts of the exchange that rely on centralized services (AWS in this case). We are deeply committed to fully decentralizing and this remains one of our top priorities as we continue to iterate on the protocol. We apologize for this outage.
— dYdX (@dydxprotocol) December 8, 2021

Analytical data from DappRadar reveals that dYdX is the 13th largest decentralized finance application built on the Ethereum Network, registering approximately $1.5 billion in daily trading volume. In September this year, dYdX achieved a historic transactional milestone in surpassing the volume of Coinbase over the course of a single day, with $4.3 billion in comparison to $3.7 billion.

Decentralization is understood by many early crypto adopters to be a core component of the industry’s architecture. Alongside security and scalability, the former makes up the so-called blockchain trilemma, a concept coined by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, to denote the necessity to sacrifice one side of the triad to experience the benefits of the other two.

In the world of crypto exchanges, many opt to prioritize security and scalability in pursuit of mass adoption but, therefore, operate with largely centralized, Web 2.0-like structures.

Joseph Delong wraps up time as SushiSwap CTO

SushiSwap chief technology officer Joseph Delong, announced his immediate departure from the decentralized exchange this week, pledging to honorably pass the proverbial baton onto the next leader, alongside necessary accounting and information data.

Delong explained the reasoning behind his decision in a candid Twitter thread, citing internal conflicts and a lack of unified vision for the project, stating:

“I wish Sushi the best and am saddened that Sushi is so imperiled within and without. The chaos that is occurring now is unlikely to result in a resolution that will leave the DAO as much more of a shadow than it once was without a radical structural transformation.”

Delong has experience working in the Web 3.0 space as a blockchain engineer and developer. Formerly employed as a senior software engineer at ConsenSys, Delong took up the position of chief technology officer at SushiSwap at the beginning of 2021 following Chef Nomi’s infamous exodus in the months prior.

Over the past year, Delong has guided SushiSwap to the 12th ranked position in nominal total value locked value (TVL) with $2.85 billion but also suffered obstacles with stringent whitelisting acceptance on layer-two protocol Optimism, as well as a $3-million supply chain exploit on launchpad MISO and, more recently, a rumored vulnerability in its smart contracts to the value of $1 billion.

Coinbase opens cryptography library to promote innovation

One of the leading cryptocurrency exchanges, Coinbase, this week announced the launch of an open-source library-themed platform, titled Kryptology, designed to provide developers with a suite of “secure, audited, and easy-to-use application programme interfaces (APIs).”

In an official blog post, Coinbase outlined its intentions for the library in fostering the continued development of this long-standing technology:

“While enabling further innovation is our primary goal, we also aim for Kryptology to elevate the standard for what is considered to be a robust, usable cryptographic library.”

Token performances

Analytical data reveals that DeFi’s total value locked has decreased 11.3% across the week to a figure of $143.95 billion.

Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView reveals DeFi’s top 100 tokens by market capitalization exceeding bearish across the last seven days.

Terra (LUNA) was the sole gainer of the top 100 this week with a mere 1.81%. Not the most memorable technical week for DeFi, let’s put it that way, but unsurprising considering the wider context of the crypto-wide market pullback.

Interviews, features and other cool stuff

Thanks for reading our summary of this week’s most impactful DeFi developments. Join us again next Friday for more stories, insights and education in this dynamically advancing space.

AWS

Netflix

Slack

Salesforce

Airbnb

Uber

GitHub

Google Cloud Platform

Is blockchain a part of cloud computing?

AWS outage highlights the need for truly decentralized exchanges.

Joseph Delong wraps up time as SushiSwap CTO

Coinbase opens cryptography library to promote innovation

Token performances

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