How Web3 apps and wallets inevitably depend on centralized services like OpenSea, Infura, and Alchemy, which don't even provide authenticated responses
Despite considering myself a cryptographer, I have not found myself particularly drawn to “crypto.” I don't think I've ever actually said the words …
Context & Ripple Effects
Earlier coverage had already identified wallet security and onboarding as design obstacles for Web3’s next users. This critique narrows the issue to the infrastructure trust boundary: applications may present decentralized ownership while relying on a small set of service providers for operational data.
That dependency matters especially for OpenSea, Infura, and Alchemy because the reported lack of authenticated API responses leaves apps and wallets unable to treat the services’ outputs as independently verifiable.
First-order effects
- Web3 app and wallet builders using OpenSea, Infura, or Alchemy must trust those providers’ API outputs as part of the user experience, rather than relying on the blockchain alone.
- For OpenSea, Infura, and Alchemy, response authentication becomes a direct credibility issue: each is positioned as infrastructure users must trust, not merely a neutral access layer.
Second-order effects
- Wallet-security work becomes inseparable from infrastructure selection, extending the earlier wallet-security challenge from key custody to the integrity of marketplace and node-provider data.
- OpenSea’s marketplace role and Infura and Alchemy’s infrastructure roles concentrate leverage in the services that apps choose as their default data sources.
Third-order effects
- If Web3 products continue to depend on unauthenticated centralized APIs, decentralization will be judged by the full application stack’s verifiability rather than by on-chain ownership alone.
- The pattern reinforces a verification bottleneck in which a few intermediaries can become the practical trust anchors for nominally self-sovereign applications.
The trend: Web3 is confronting an end-to-end trust problem as centralized infrastructure remains essential to decentralized-facing apps and wallets.