The perils of a decentralized web living in the centralized world

Cointelegraph

Published Feb 20, 2021 07:17AM ET

Updated Feb 21, 2021 09:40AM ET

On Jan. 26, the internet came to a screeching halt along much of the East Coast. Email services went down; YouTube videos flickered out midstream; millions were likely affected, if only temporarily. But the outage, attributed to a surge in traffic, underscores the metastasizing vulnerabilities surrounding the way most of the world conducts commerce, consumes entertainment and communicates.

The implications of such outages should be seen as particularly alarming for those in cryptoland: namely, for the ever-growing numbers of participants in an emerging decentralized ecosystem for transferring peer-to-peer value with Bitcoin (BTC) who build smart contracts on Ethereum or launch any number of platforms and tokens that perform untold numbers of functions and services.

Jonas Simanavicius is the chief technology officer of Syntropy, a San Francisco-based company that focuses on building a programmable internet that delivers novel technologies for making web interactions faster, more reliable and secure for businesses and everyday users. He is responsible for all technology development at the company, including the SDN engine, platform, network and blockchain strategy. Previously, he worked on the engineering teams of Royal Bank of Scotland (NYSE:RBS_old_old) and JPMorgan Chase (NYSE:JPM).

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