Magma Devs, the engineering team behind the distributed RPC routing protocol Lava Network, announced the RPC Smart Router on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Marketplace on Monday, December 22nd.
The launch aims to partner with Google to provide businesses with a more reliable way to connect to public blockchains such as Ethereum, Solana, and Polygon. A smart router distributes blockchain requests across multiple providers and automatically selects the fastest and most stable option in real-time.
It aims to prevent outages and reduce transaction failures and delays in decentralized applications by avoiding dependence on a single point of access, according to a press release seen by The Defiant.
“The trustworthiness of a blockchain system is as important as the pipes that connect it to the world,” said Yair Cleper, active chairman of Magma Devs. “If that access layer breaks, everything above it breaks as well.”
Magma Devs said Smart Router is already being used by custody providers such as Fireblocks to maintain service availability during periods of high traffic or provider outages.
“RPC failures are not a small problem; for enterprises, they are business-critical events,” says Cleper. “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 across cloud and blockchain services this year, including an Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage that lasted several hours on October 20 and disrupted major websites and apps such as Robinhood and Coinbase.
This incident highlighted the vulnerabilities of today's Internet infrastructure, which is concentrated in a small number of cloud providers. AWS controls 29% of the global cloud market, ahead of Microsoft Azure's 20% and Google Cloud's 13%, and together the three account for more than 60% of total cloud share, according to Statista.
The failure also reignited a long-standing debate about cryptocurrencies. Although blockchains are designed to be decentralized, much of the infrastructure they rely on is not. In this example, Cleper described smart routers as “gateways for decentralization.”
He told The Defiant that the software layer can run across a variety of environments and deployment models, connecting by default to Lava Network's distributed RPC infrastructure, while also allowing customers to plug in other RPC providers they are already using.
Control of the routing logic ultimately lies with the customer, Kleper emphasized, explaining that smart routers are open source and allow users to define policies that govern how requests are routed, validated, and handled under various network conditions.
Cleper also revealed that Magma Devs will deploy the software and provide service level agreements, rather than hosting the service itself.
“If a customer only uses Google Cloud Marketplace deployments and Google Cloud goes down, they will need a backup deployment,” he said. “The SR host version supports exactly this as it can be deployed across multiple environments or providers, but redundancy in that setup is the customer's responsibility.”
