The recent nationwide internet outage in Afghanistan highlighted a critical weakness of the world’s leading decentralized blockchains: their reliance on centralized internet providers that remain vulnerable to government intervention and technical outages.
The country suffered a near-total internet blackout that lasted about 48 hours before connectivity was restored on October 1, Reuters reported. The disruption was reportedly ordered by the Taliban administration, although officials later blamed “technical problems” with fiber optic cables.
While blockchains aim to provide people with a censorship-resistant public network for value transfers, their reliance on centralized internet providers makes these use cases difficult in the event of an outage.
“The power outage in Afghanistan is not just a regional connectivity crisis: it is a wake-up call,” according to Michail Angelov, co-founder of the decentralized WiFi platform Roam Network. “When connectivity is monopolized by a handful of centralized providers, the promise of blockchain can collapse overnight,” he said.
The nationwide outage of internet and mobile data services affected approximately 13 million citizens, according to a September report from ABC News. It was the first nationwide internet shutdown under Taliban rule, following regional restrictions imposed earlier in September to curb online activities deemed “immoral”.
The Taliban denied the ban, blaming the internet outage on technical problems, including fiber optic cable problems.
Iran has also faced problems with internet censorship since the start of its conflict with Israel.
The Iranian government shut down internet access for 13 days in June except for domestic messaging apps, prompting Iranians to search for hidden internet proxy links for temporary access, The Guardian reported on June 25.
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DePIN projects build decentralized internet infrastructure
Afghanistan’s power outage gives new impetus to calls for decentralized connectivity solutions that remove single points of control.
Decentralized wireless networks are emerging as alternatives to centralized Internet service providers, part of a broader technological shift known as the decentralized physical infrastructure network, or DePIN.
Roam aims to create a decentralized, smartphone-powered wireless network that brings together mobile signal measurements to create a “living map of connectivity.”
Alongside the project’s new eSIM implementation, this allows devices to automatically select the best available internet options, including public carriers, a private mesh, or a peer-powered local network.
“Roaming users can see in real time what’s working where: no guesswork during outages,” ensuring a connection even when “centralized backbone networks go down,” Angelov said.
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World Mobile is the largest decentralized network with 2.3 million daily active users, spread across more than 20 countries, according to worldmobile.io data
The project surpassed $9.8 million in total revenue in August, representing revenue split between AirNode operators, stakeholders, and other contributors.
Helium is the second largest decentralized wireless network, with over 190 countries and 112,000 total hotspots worldwide. It claims to have over 1.3 million daily users on its decentralized network.
Users are incentivized to host a hotspot for internet coverage through Helium Token (HNT) rewards.
Proponents say blockchain technology’s promise of financial freedom and censorship resistance cannot be fully realized until the underlying Internet itself is more distributed.
As Angelov said: “If decentralization stops at the protocol level, we won’t have really solved the problem – we’ve just moved where the control is. »
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