Ethereum co-founder Di Iorio is trying to make crypto easier to operate

Ethereum co-founder Anthony Di Iorio, who last year announced his retirement from the cryptocurrency world, is back with a new product that he hopes will re-democratize blockchains.

Di Iorio’s team has designed a gadget called the Cube – seven inches wide, high and long – that can act as a node on blockchains such as Bitcoin, Ethereum and Cardano. Nodes can require a lot of technical knowledge to assemble and operate, but Cube is meant to simplify the process. Di Iorio says it’s about as easy to install as a games console or WiFi router.

As the use of blockchains has increased, so have the requirements for power, technical expertise and costs to operate nodes, and today most large blockchains are supported by a small number of large commercial operators. Cloud providers like Amazon Web Services and Infura have a lot of control. The idea behind Cube is to facilitate individuals running their own blockchain networks – something that goes back to the early days of the technology, when early adopters ran nodes with their home PCs.

“That’s how we can empower individuals to be free and get away from the clutches of third parties,” Di Iorio, who stepped back from new crypto projects last year due to security concerns, said in an interview.

Infura – which is owned by another Ethereum founder, Joe Lubin – recently announced plans to offer a decentralized option for the service, potentially allowing non-enterprise nodes to participate.

Cube, which is expected to come out as soon as the latter part of next year, will be part of a gaming ecosystem called Andiami that Di Iorio is setting up. As soon as early 2023, his company Decentral Inc. will begin selling gaming kits that are currently expected to cost between US$500 and US$5,000. Later, Decentral will launch a video game, which will use the kits and generate digital coins that users can pay the Cube operators for their work.

Concerns that only a few parties have much control over many blockchains have increased recently. After Ethereum completed its major Merge software upgrade in September, a handful of key players involved in ordering transactions on the networks have ended up with a lot of control, and with the ability to potentially censor transactions.

“The ‘faster’ and ‘higher performance’ a blockchain gets, the less feasible it becomes for ordinary people to run nodes,” said Christopher Bendiksen, an analyst at CoinShares. “This is the fundamental trade-off between on-chain transaction capacity (data) and decentralization.”

Decentral expects to make money by selling physical items such as cubes and player sets. It does not disclose whether or what share of the digital tokens to be used in the Cube ecosystem it will take for itself, Di Iorio said.