2026-05-09 –, Grégr Stage
October 2025. AWS goes down. So does Coinbase, MetaMask, Base, and half of "decentralized" crypto. We've been lying to ourselves. This talk is an honest audit of where our stack actually breaks; frontends, gateways, RPCs, DNS and why fixing it requires something we're bad at: actually working together instead of pretending we're not all building the same thing.
October 20, 2025 should have been embarrassing. AWS hiccups for three hours and suddenly Coinbase is dark, MetaMask won't connect, Base stops processing transactions. Ethereum kept making blocks. Nobody could reach them because the "decentralized" access layer was all routed through the same building in Virginia.
This talk traces how dApps actually work. Not the architecture diagrams we put in pitch decks, but the real ones. The frontend on Vercel. The RPC calls hitting Alchemy. The DNS managed by... actually, do you even know who manages your DNS?
No shaming here. Everyone's shipped something with centralized duct tape holding it together. The goal is clarity: what breaks when one company has a bad day?
And then the harder question. None of us can fix this alone. Storage projects need frontend solutions. Frontend solutions need identity. We're all building different puzzle pieces while pretending we're in different puzzles.
Maybe it's time we actually talked to each other.
Migle went from actress to documentary filmmaker to blockchain in 2017 to asking why privacy tech is so bad at explaining itself. She co-founded WinPrivacy, a creative agency for privacy and security projects, and leads Womxn in Privacy. Currently supporting Swarm Foundation, building decentralized storage infrastructure and backing public goods since Ethereum's early days.