After seeing the Cloudflare outage today disrupt a number of crypto services and APIs across the space, I’ve been thinking more seriously about the importance of decentralised infrastructure. The outage didn’t take Splash down, but it highlighted something clear to me: the more the ecosystem relies on a robust peer-to-peer layer, the less it is affected by external service interruptions.
For that reason, I personally believe it’s the right time to consider incentives for people who operate reliable Splash nodes. These operators already provide uptime, bandwidth, and relay capacity that benefit everyone using the offer network — but they currently do it without any recognition or reward.
Why I Think Incentives Make Sense
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The Cloudflare issue today showed how fragile many systems become when a single provider has problems.
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Splash performed well, but it would benefit even more from a larger base of independent, high-uptime peers.
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More nodes running with persistent identities and open inbound ports would strengthen the entire offer-gossip layer.
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Well-distributed nodes reduce information asymmetry and improve fairness for bots, traders, and tools relying on offer feeds.
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Incentives would encourage more technically minded users to join in and support the network.
What the Incentive Model Could Look Like
In my view, rewards should be based on meaningful contribution, not just running a node. Things like:
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Node uptime over each epoch
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Inbound connectivity (port 11511 open)
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Offer relay activity
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Consistent, long-lived identities
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Stable peer connections
A simple Merkle-based claims system could distribute tokens periodically based on these metrics without adding heavy overhead.
Expected Benefits
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More redundancy when centralised services or cloud platforms fail
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Faster and more reliable offer propagation
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Better decentralisation metrics
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Greater resilience for tools that depend on fast offer visibility
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More awareness and participation from the community
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Stronger long-term health of the offer-network layer
Suggested Trial Period
I’d personally favour a short test period — maybe 4 to 6 months — to see how many new nodes join, how uptime improves, and how well the network performs under stress before committing long-term.
Closing Thoughts
Today’s Cloudflare outage was a reminder that distributed systems are only as strong as the peers that support them. Incentivising Splash node operators seems like a natural next step to encourage more people to run high-quality nodes, improve reliability, and protect the network from external service issues.
Just my personal take — but I think it could make a big impact.