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On @ethereum Protocol Research Call 2, @VitalikButerin asked, "Why has the RPC market been consolidating so much recently?" @MicahZoltu gave a good answer, and everything he said was true, but I don't think that's the main reason.
First of all, I don't think it happened "recently", it was much more consolidated before 2021-2022 than it is now.
Because before that moment, you had basically 5 options:
1. @infura_io
2. @Alchemy
3. @QuickNode
4. @ankr
5. Self-hosted nodes.
Everything else didn't exist, or exist in a very, very small market share.
And it's just "how the economy works".
Of course, you can run an Ethereum Full node. And you don't need to run it on your laptop, you can do that on some server where you already have other things.
99% of startups in Web3 do not fully rely on "Web3 technologies and services", they use AWS, GCP, Azure, CloudFlare, and many other old Web2 solutions.
You can buy @dappnode and run your own validator + Ethereum RPC node with @LidoFinance and @d_gusakov , it's also not rocket science nowadays.
But the problem is much more apparent:
Running an Ethereum RPC full node now makes no economic sense, and it started at least five years ago.
And with the Archive node, things worsen for the same reasons.
Why:
1. If you don't necessarily need to buy something, you don't buy by default.
For all EVM chains, you can easily find a Free RPC endpoint. Because services above, as well as all newcomers, need to attract new users to their platform. So, you chose So, you need to decide "Find out how to set up an Ethereum node, spend money on servers, spend efforts on maintenance, has fallback node, and host some load-balancer" or just "Use this Free Ethereum RPC Endpoint".
As for me, it's obvious what new Web3 startups will choose. It's just easier for them, and they could focus on product development and not DevOps things.
2. If #1 was more about "efforts" and "knowledge". #2 will be about money. You, as Web3 startup couldn't consume even 80% of the capacity of your node. It means a waste of money every month. Of course they can try to sell this node to someone else, to share the cost. But it will be tough to do. Because they don't have everything that has guys from #1 with Cloud services. And it's not their business to sell RPC nodes; they should focus on and build Web3 product that they initially started.
What do I believe could be a solution here?
Only platforms like @dRPCorg, @POKTnetwork, or @lavanetxyz address all of these problems in different ways. They allow small RPC providers and self-hosted Ethereum nodes to compete with giants and earn money. Yes, all of these are not ideal (but we are close to it :) ), but it's much better than having just 3 RPC providers hosted on top of AWS.
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