When AWS went down yesterday morning, it took down more than just the internet. It took down the entire "we're building decentralized infrastructure" narrative.

Coinbase froze. Base network (you know, the Ethereum L2 specifically built to scale decentralized finance) couldn't produce blocks. MetaMask showed zero balances. Even Infura—the service that connects wallets to blockchains—went offline.

Three hours. That's all it took for one DNS resolution issue in AWS's DynamoDB service to expose what crypto infrastructure actually runs on.

The part nobody's talking about: While the rest of the internet recovered in 3 hours, crypto platforms took 12-15. Coinbase didn't report full recovery until 5:57pm PDT—nearly 15 hours after the initial outage. Base kept flagging errors even after AWS said systems were stabilized.

Not just dependency. Fragility.

The answer is obvious but uncomfortable: AWS is better at infrastructure than we are.

Thousands of data centers. Redundancy on redundancy. Compute power that makes decentralized alternatives look like hobby projects. When you're building a crypto exchange, you need that reliability. Your users expect platforms to be online when they want to trade.

So you build on AWS. Because it works. Because it scales. Because the alternative is spending millions on infrastructure when you could be building product.

But then you still market yourself as decentralized.

That gap—between what you say you are and what you actually require to function—is where credibility dies.

"But Filecoin! But Arweave! But distributed GPU networks!"

Yes. They exist. They're censorship-resistant and ideologically aligned with crypto's ethos.

But as Ahmad Shadid (CEO of O.XYZ) pointed out during the outage: "AWS has an insane amount of data centers. If decentralized cloud compute providers want to compete, they need to have as many, if not more. Is that even feasible? Where are you going to get the electricity from?"

Consumer GPUs and good vibes don't compete with AWS-level infrastructure. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

If you're building something genuinely decentralized, you need to engineer for the reality that your infrastructure probably isn't. That means:

• Multi-cloud redundancy (AWS + Google Cloud + self-hosted)

• Actual failover systems (not just in your docs, in production)

• Honest marketing about what "decentralized" means in your specific context

Or—and hear me out—just be honest that you're building on centralized infrastructure because it's the pragmatic choice right now, and decentralization is a long-term goal, not a current operational reality.

There's nothing wrong with building on AWS. Most of the internet does. But if you're going to build the future of trustless finance on rented servers, at least have the courage to admit it.

Because right now, your emperor's clothes are an AWS outage away from disappearing. And everyone's starting to notice.