We’ve all been there. You’re trying to play a game online, but the servers are down or the video graphics rendering fails. Or maybe you’re just trying to watch a video and the site is offline. These outages can be frustrating and the downtime is outside of your control.

Today’s centralized cloud computing infrastructure cannot keep up with the demands of our technology-driven society. And, as a result, companies often experience downtime with cloud services failing without warning, affecting potentially millions of users.

This is especially true for online video games which rely on the fastest internet speeds and 99.999 percent or “5-nines” uptime to deliver a lag-free, always-on gaming experience.

The Roblox Outage of 2021 was notable because it forced millions of teen gamers offline when its cloud infrastructure failed. In a blog post, Roblox CEO David Baszucki said the outage was caused when “a core system in our infrastructure became overwhelmed, prompted by a subtle bug in our backend service communications while under heavy load.”

The service interruption was not due to an external traffic spike, it was a result of server growth and a code error in its data centers, he continued. And, as a result, Roblox lost more than $1.5 billion in market cap at the time and an estimated $15 million in revenue.

Our current internet infrastructure — based on centralized services provided by public cloud computing providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) or private cloud infrastructures such as the built by Roblox — may be subject to downtime and provide less than stellar user experiences.

Without a reliable cloud infrastructure — public or private — video game companies building the emerging metaverse, a digital world where users can be physically present together in virtual spaces, will struggle to make them become a viable reality.

Enthusiasts say the metaverse would eventually allow online experiences, like meeting a friend, to feel face-to-face thanks to virtual reality headsets
Enthusiasts say the metaverse would eventually allow online experiences, like meeting a friend, to feel face-to-face thanks to virtual reality headsets AFP / CARLOS COSTA

Scaling the Metaverse

Although blockchain technology has the potential to upend how both consumers and business use the internet, it must also eliminate the need for centralized compute services and embrace a decentralized approach to increase reliability and service levels.

Because metaverses are digital worlds where users interact with each other and software programs in a three-dimensional space, they are also complex systems that require copious computing resources to run their 3D worlds and advanced AI algorithms.

Their collection of interconnected applications and services will allow users to freely move between cross-chain visual worlds, requiring highly-distributed and powerful compute power for reliability.

The metaverse will also be a critical piece of Web3, providing users with access to blockchain-based applications and services as well as new decentralized applications (dApps) to be built that were never possible before.

Fortunately, this infrastructure for a powerful, secure, and scalable computing cloud based on blockchain is already in place and embedded into modern microprocessors. The foundation of this infrastructure is called a trusted execution environment or TEE-based privacy technology.

TEE is a secure area of a microprocessor that can provide confidential and isolated application execution while creating a blockchain compute and transaction infrastructure across nodes distributed everywhere and anywhere and on any personal computer. Despite the higher possibility of single node failure, this compute model can be easily deployed to multiple nodes in a decentralized computing cloud, increasing the overall stability.

By harnessing the power of TEE technology, blockchain developers will be able to build user-friendly applications, process transactions and build metaverse worlds that are faster, more secure, and more scalable than ever before.

Because TEE technology is a platform for building global web-scale services that provide a level of reliability and compute power that wasn’t possible before, it has the potential to become the core of Web3 infrastructure.

This decentralized Web3 infrastructure is fast enough to meet the demands of our modern technology-driven society and be resilient enough to power many metaverses.

All of this compute power can be distributed across a global network of personal computer nodes that provide uptime and reliability beyond that of today’s traditional cloud computing model, powering the metaverse and beyond.

(Marvin Tong is a co-founder of Phala Network, a trustless computation platform that enables massive cloud processing without sacrificing data confidentiality.)

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