Outstanding Questions About the Infrastructure Builders Program (IBP) Bounty

Ecosystem
21

To permanently address the off-chain centralization and security risks, the most robust architecture is client-side routing directly within the dApp or wallet.
Instead of routing traffic through a centralized GeoDNS or load balancer—which often terminates TLS and acts as a vulnerable middleman—the client itself should natively manage RPC connections:

  • Decentralized Discovery: The client retrieves a raw pool of available public RPC WebSockets (e.g., via DNS returning multiple A/AAAA records or a decentralized registry).

  • Client-Side Racing: Utilizing a concurrency model similar to the “Happy Eyeballs” algorithm (RFC 8305), the client simultaneously attempts handshakes with multiple nodes, seamlessly establishing a WSS connection with the lowest-latency responder.

  • Stateful Failover: The client caches the top-performing nodes locally and automatically rotates to the next best option if the active connection degrades or drops.

By shifting load-balancing logic directly to the client, we ensure true end-to-end encryption to the bare-metal node, eliminate DNS and proxy single points of failure, and drastically reduce the ecosystem’s reliance on expensive, centralized routing infrastructure.

22

Over the past six months, governance has felt noticeably more centralized, with decisions often seeming to converge around a small circle of core contributors rather than emerging from a truly distributed process.

At this point, it’s becoming harder to ignore the gap between the long-standing narrative of decentralization and permissionless systems and the more operational reality we’re actually dealing with. Let’s just say reality has a strong talent for stress-testing ideology.

24

GeoDNS is actively regressive. It forces a decentralized network to rely on a centralized Web2 directory to tell users where to connect. It creates a single point of failure, enables censorship, and allows the middleman to intercept or log traffic (breaking end-to-end encryption).
For blockchain infrastructure, “state of the art” is bypassing DNS entirely using client-side peer discovery (like DHTs) and Wasm-based light clients (like Smoldot). Relying on GeoDNS for a modern blockchain is like putting wooden wagon wheels on a Tesla.

25

More than 1 Million USD for this for Polkadot is really utterly obscene.