Vitalik Buterin’s Scathing Critique: Web3’s Fatal Flaw - Still Leashed to Web2 Infrastructure

Ethereum's co-founder just dropped a truth bomb on the crypto community's grandest promise. The so-called decentralized future? It's running on borrowed servers.

The Centralized Backbone of a Decentralized Dream

Vitalik Buterin's latest commentary doesn't mince words. He targets the core hypocrisy of contemporary Web3: applications preaching user sovereignty while their foundational tech—hosting, data storage, APIs—remains firmly in the grip of Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and other Web2 titans. It's digital independence built on a landlord's property. One major protocol outage last quarter wasn't due to a blockchain consensus failure; it was a cloud provider's regional hiccup that took dozens of 'decentralized' dApps offline. So much for unstoppable code.

The Single Point of Failure Everyone Ignores

This dependence creates a critical vulnerability. The elegant smart contract, the token-gated community, the DAO treasury—all can be rendered useless if a centralized service decides to pull the plug or suffers an outage. It's the ultimate irony: projects raising millions in token sales to 'disrupt' legacy systems are often their biggest customers. The cloud bills for some top-tier NFT platforms would make a traditional SaaS CFO blush—funded, of course, by token inflation and user fees, the Web3 equivalent of printing money to pay the rent.

Beyond the Hype: The Hard Path to True Decentralization

The solution isn't simple. Building fully decentralized infrastructure—distributed storage, peer-to-peer networking, blockchain-based oracles—is orders of magnitude harder than spinning up another AWS instance. It's slower, more expensive, and less user-friendly. The market, chasing growth and sleek UX, has consistently chosen the path of least resistance. True decentralization remains a niche pursuit, often sacrificed at the altar of scalability and convenience. It's the crypto version of buying an electric Hummer—greenwashed performance, but still a gas-guzzler at heart.

A Wake-Up Call or a Death Knell?

Buterin's critique is a direct challenge to the industry's self-congratulation. Is Web3 just a fancy front-end for the same old centralized tech, a narrative to pump token valuations before the next VC funding round? Or is this a painful but necessary adolescent phase? The race is on to build the genuine article—a stack where every layer, from data to computation, lives up to the decentralization ethos. Until then, the revolution will be hosted—on someone else's servers, subject to someone else's rules. A sobering thought for anyone who bought the 'bankless' future pitch. After all, you might own your tokens, but if your wallet's gateway is centralized, do you really own your access? It's the financialization of everything, even your own exit route.

In brief

• In November 2025, a major Cloudflare outage took offline nearly 20 % of the web, affecting many crypto services.
• Platforms like Coinbase, BitMEX, Ledger, and Blockchain.com were temporarily inaccessible.
• Vitalik Buterin publicly responds to this incident and warns about Web3’s growing dependence on centralized infrastructures.
• He advocates for dApps able to operate without Cloudflare or any third-party providers, even in the event of a cyberattack.

Vitalik Buterin warns about decentralization in jeopardy

In a message posted on X (formerly Twitter) following the major Cloudflare outage last November, Vitalik Buterin warns against a dependence incompatible with the principles of Web3.

According to the ethereum co-founder, the incident highlights a fundamental problem : the excessive dependence of decentralized applications on centralized infrastructures. He calls to build dApps capable of functioning even in the event of a complete failure of providers like Cloudflare.

“Applications where, if you are a user, you do not even notice if Cloudflare goes down, or even if the entire Cloudflare infrastructure is hacked by North Korea”, he writes. His message aims to reposition Ethereum in its founding mission : “building the world computer” as the basis of a “freer and more open” internet. For that, dApps must be “usable at scale on the blockchain,” without “fraud, censorship, or third-party interference”.

The severity of the outage justifies this stance. According to the Cloudflare report, an anomaly related to attack management caused the interruption of about 20 % of sites using their service. Major platforms in the crypto ecosystem were temporarily inaccessible.

This is not an isolated case, as Amazon Web Services experienced an outage in October. Buterin, in a manifesto co-written with Yoav Weiss and Marissa Posner for the Ethereum Foundation, published November 11, states : “decentralization erodes not by capture, but by convenience. It drifts, automatically, continuously, towards trust dependence”. This quote summarizes a technical and political observation that Vitalik develops through a series of principles :

• Decentralization must be an active goal, not a passive consequence ;

• Dependence on centralized actors is a systemic risk to Web3 resilience ;

• Designing dApps independent of Web2 infrastructure is imperative, even for basic services like content delivery (CDN) ;

• Resistance to censorship, privacy protection, and technical robustness must be standards, not options.

This warning comes at a critical time where, despite its ambitions, Ethereum sees its ecosystem relying on technical pillars beyond its control.

Rethinking infrastructure to overcome Cloudflare limits

Beyond the observation, Vitalik Buterin calls for structural change. He envisions a future where Ethereum can support civilizational infrastructures beyond finance: digital identity, governance, privacy.

Areas where failure of a service like Cloudflare or AWS cannot be tolerated. In his vision, there must be dApps whose stability transcends the rise and fall of companies, ideologies, and political parties. These words reflect a desire to MOVE beyond short-term technical concerns to build an ecosystem capable of lasting regardless of geopolitical or economic contingencies.

In this perspective, Vitalik has proposed another technical advance : creating an on-chain futures market for gas. The goal is to offer users better visibility on often volatile transaction fees and thus prevent projects from turning to centralized solutions under the pretext of simplicity or cost optimization.

This idea, formulated in early December, fits into a long-term logic: strengthening users’ autonomy against network uncertainties and limiting compromises made in the name of performance.

This incident reignites a fundamental debate on the foundations of Web3. For Vitalik Buterin, ensuring its resilience involves decentralization applied to all layers, not just consensus.

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