Our current data infrastructure threatens DeFi’s future

Opinion by: Maxim Legg, founder and CEO of Pangea

The blockchain industry faces a crisis of its own making. While we celebrate theoretical transaction speeds and tout decentralization, our data infrastructure remains firmly rooted in 1970s technology. If a 20-second load time would doom a Web2 app, why are we settling for that in Web3?

With 53% of users abandoning websites after just three seconds of load time, our industry’s acceptance of these delays is an existential threat to adoption.

Slow transactions are not merely a user experience problem. High-performance chains like Aptos are capable of thousands of transactions per second. Yet, we are trying to access their data through “Frankenstein Indexers” — systems cobbled together from tools like Postgres and Kafka that were never designed for blockchain’s unique demands.

The hidden cost of technical debt

The consequences extend far beyond simple delays. Current indexing solutions force development teams into an impossible choice: either build custom infrastructure (consuming up to 90% of development resources) or accept the severe limitations of existing tools. That creates a performance paradox: The faster our blockchains get, the more apparent our data infrastructure bottleneck becomes.

In real-world conditions, when a market maker needs to execute a crosschain arbitrage trade, they are essentially fighting against their own infrastructure, in addition to competing against other traders. Every millisecond spent polling nodes or waiting for state updates represents missed opportunities and lost revenue.

This is no longer theoretical. Major trading firms currently operate hundreds of nodes just to maintain competitive reaction times. The infrastructure bottleneck becomes a critical failure point when the market demands peak performance. 

Traditional automated market makers might work for low-volume token pairs, but they are fundamentally inadequate for institutional-scale trading.

Most blockchain indexers today are better described as data aggregators that build simplified views of chain state that work for basic use cases but fall apart under severe load. This approach might have sufficed for the first-generation DeFi applications, but it becomes entirely inadequate when dealing with real-time state changes across multiple high-performance chains.

Rethinking data architecture

The solution requires fundamentally rethinking how we handle blockchain data. Next-generation systems must push data directly to users instead of centralizing access through traditional database architectures, enabling local processing for true low-latency performance. Every data point needs verifiable provenance, with timestamps and proofs ensuring reliability while reducing manipulation risks.

A fundamental shift is underway. Complex financial products like derivatives become possible onchain with faster blockchains and lower gas fees. Furthermore, derivatives are used for price discovery, which currently happens on centralized exchanges. As chains get quicker and cheaper, derivatives protocols will become the primary venue for price discovery.

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This transition demands infrastructure capable of delivering data “within the blink of an eye” — between 100 to 150 milliseconds. This is not arbitrary. It is the threshold where human perception notices delay. Anything slower fundamentally limits what is possible in decentralized finance.

The imminent convergence of market forces

The current model of excessive node polling and inconsistent latency profiles will not scale for serious financial applications. We are already seeing this with significant trading firms building increasingly complex custom solutions — a clear signal that existing infrastructure is not meeting market needs.

As faster blockchains with lower gas fees enable sophisticated financial instruments, the ability to stream state changes in real time becomes critical for market efficiency. The current model of aggregating data with multi-second delays fundamentally limits what is possible in decentralized finance.

Emerging blockchains are pushing data throughput to unprecedented levels. Without matching advances in data infrastructure, we will have created Ferrari engines connected to bicycle wheels — all the power with no ability to use it effectively.

The imperative for change

The market will force this change. Those who fail to adapt will find themselves increasingly irrelevant in an ecosystem where real-time data access is not just a luxury but a fundamental necessity for participation.

Opinion by: Maxim Legg, founder and CEO of Pangea

This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.