In October 2025, a major outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) exposed critical vulnerabilities in the web3 ecosystem, disrupting key DeFi protocols and services. The outage, caused by a DNS race condition in AWS's automated DNS management system, led to widespread issues for platforms like Coinbase, Robinhood, MetaMask, and Infura. Specifically, Infura's downtime impacted Ethereum layer-2 networks such as Base and Optimism, causing trading freezes on Uniswap and stalled borrowing/lending on Aave due to delayed oracle updates.
Aware of these risks, Consensys, the company behind Infura, launched the Decentralized Infrastructure Network (DIN) as an Actively Validated Service (AVS) on EigenLayer (referenced as EigenCloud in some sources) on November 17, 2025. This integration aims to create a decentralized RPC and API marketplace where node operators are economically incentivized to maintain service reliability. Operators can stake ETH or liquid-staked tokens like stETH to secure the network, with rewards for uptime and penalties (slashing) for failures, enhancing resilience against centralized dependencies.
The DIN is open-source and allows permissionless onboarding of node providers, who compete on performance and earn traffic fees and restaking rewards. Since February 2024, DIN has handled over 13 billion monthly requests across 30+ networks, including Ethereum mainnet and Linea. This move could reduce market share for centralized competitors like QuickNode and Alchemy, addressing the fact that 70-80% of RPC traffic currently flows through a small group of providers, with over half of Ethereum nodes hosted on cloud services like AWS.
