Magma Devs, an engineering team building on the Lava Network decentralized RPC routing protocol, unveiled its RPC Smart Router on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Marketplace on Monday, December 22.
The launch, in partnership with Google, aims to provide businesses with a more reliable way to connect to public blockchains such as Ethereum, Solana and Polygon. The Smart Router distributes blockchain requests across multiple providers and automatically selects the fastest and most stable option in real time.
By avoiding dependency on a single access point, it aims to prevent outages and reduce failed transactions or delays in decentralized applications, according to a press release from The Defiant.
“Blockchain systems are only as reliable as the pipes that connect them to the world,” said Yair Cleper, active chairman of Magma Devs. “If that access layer breaks, everything above it breaks too.”
Magma Devs said the Smart Router has already been used during periods of high traffic and provider outages, including by custodian company Fireblocks, to maintain service availability.
“RPC outages are not minor issues. For enterprises, they are mission-critical events,” Cleper said. “By bringing Smart Router to Google Cloud, we are giving organizations a clearer path to production-grade blockchain infrastructure.”
The launch follows several high-profile outages in cloud and blockchain services this year, including an outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) on October 20 that lasted several hours and disrupted major websites and apps including Robinhood and Coinbase.
The incident exposed the vulnerabilities of the current internet infrastructure, which is concentrated among a handful of cloud providers: AWS controls 29% of the global cloud market, ahead of Microsoft Azure at 20% and Google Cloud at 13%, with the three accounting for more than 60% of the total cloud share, according to Statista.
The outages have also reignited a long-running debate about crypto: While blockchains are designed to be decentralized, much of the infrastructure they rely on is not. In this case, Cleper described the Smart Router as “the gateway to decentralization.”
He told The Defiant that the software layer can run across different environments and deployment models and connects to Lava Network’s decentralized RPC infrastructure by default, while customers can also connect other RPC providers they already use.
Ultimately, control over the routing logic lies with the customer, Cleper emphasizes. He explains that the Smart Router is open source and allows users to define policies that determine how requests are routed, validated and handled under different network conditions.
Cleper also clarified that Magma Devs does not host the service itself, but instead implements the software and provides service-level agreements.
“If a customer is only using the Google Cloud Marketplace implementation and Google Cloud goes down, they will need a backup implementation,” he says. “The SR-hosted version supports this exactly, because it can be deployed across multiple environments or providers, but redundancy in that setup is the customer’s responsibility.”