People interact with open-source applications like MetaMask, Web3 games, the metaverse and DeFi protocols every day but don’t often stop to think about what happens in the background for it all to work. If we think of Web3 as a burgeoning new city, node infrastructure providers are the underlying power grid that makes operations possible.
All DApps need to communicate with blockchains, and full nodes serve billions of requests from DApps to read and write data to chains every day. We need a huge node infrastructure to keep up with vastly expanding DApp ecosystems and serve all of the requests. However, running nodes is very time and capital intensive, so DApp builders turn to providers for remote access to nodes. There is a massive monetary incentive for infrastructure providers to power as many of these Web3 ecosystems as possible, but who is winning this race so far?