Censorship Resistance

Fringe Finance’s backend was initially hosted by the Fringe Finance project. However, to ensure greater decentralization and reduce the likelihood of censorship by state actors or hosting providers, Fringe Finance has now released a decentralized backend that employs subgraphs on The Graph.

The Graph records specified on-chain statistical activity that can then be rendered on the Fringe dApp, thus removing the need for a separate Fringe backend. This is part of Fringe fulfilling its aim to increase its censorship resistance.

Decentralized back-end

Fringe’s v2 includes two crucial features designed to protect us against the risk of censorship posed to DeFi apps: a decentralized back-end and integration with decentralized indexing services.

The move to a decentralized back-end, motivated by increased security, makes the platform less vulnerable to attacks and improves transparency. Fringe Lending now employs The Graph and this enhancement is one of our new features to continually increase the platform’s censorship resistance.

As a follow-on after v2, we will provide an open-source, free-to-download front-end that anyone can host. This includes deploying a front-end on IPFS in the near future, which will allow multiple instances of the dApp front-end to be hosted simultaneously by independent parties. By doing so, any single actor’s attempt to deactivate any single front-end instance will be rendered powerless. Additionally, we will open-source our front-end codebase, offer grants for actors to host the front-end, and plan to deploy it via IPFS.

To mitigate the risk of backends being deactivated by cloud service providers, we will integrate with decentralized blockchain indexing services and make API endpoints open-source and accessible. This will enable us to provide our users with a more secure and reliable experience.

We are also taking steps to minimize the risk of centralized RPC providers by designing our RPC integration to be easily reconfigured in case the need arises to change RPC providers. Other solutions are being considered to further reduce the risk of centralized RPC providers.