A change to WhatsApp's terms of service has triggered a mass exodus from the messaging platform to more individual and independent rivals like Telegram and Signal, which have registered millions of new users over the concluding week.

Rather than agreeing to new terms specifying the app's right to share user data with Facebook, millions of WhatsApp users but gave up using the platform, abandoning information technology for less-intrusive competitors. Telegram solitary has been downloaded 25 1000000 times in the terminal 72 hours.

Some of those new sign-ups include refugees from the free speech platform Parler, looking for a way to connect and organize subsequently the correct-wing Twitter culling was of a sudden yanked offline past hosting services provider Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The ability of web hosting giants like AWS to unilaterally close down sites and infrastructure has some in the cryptocurrency industry worried for the hereafter health of blockchain-related projects.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin described Parler'due south takedown every bit "very worrying" in a series of tweets, noting that AWS was much more of a "mutual infrastructure provider" than a social media site. Buterin also expressed a sure level of dismay over Twitter's decision to permanently ban President Donald Trump from its platform:

"The fact that then many people who would normally never support such corporate ability are now auspicious tech CEOs running roughshod over democratically elected officials deserves some introspection…"

In the past, estimates have suggested that around threescore% of Ethereum nodes run on AWS.

EOS and Bitshares co-founder Daniel Larimer recently called for the mass abandonment of big social media platforms prior to the takedown of Parler. He correctly predicted that it may have been the "last chance" to download certain social media apps. Larimer recently quit his position as CTO at EOSIO developers block.ane, vowing to work on censorship-resistant platforms which he believes will become increasingly of import every bit more people find themselves banned or suspended from traditional platforms.

Other crypto projects are wary of the centralized nature of tech giants like Amazon and conceptualize problems relying upon them. The decentralized liquidity network THORChain, for example, incentivizes nodes running its software to avoid AWS by awarding them extra perks for using alternative service providers.

Decentralized solutions providers, similar domain name server Handshake, are censorship-resistant in that they avoid reliance on classical processes for domain name resolution. Pirate academic journal archivists Sci-Hub switched DNS providers using Handshake, as mentioned past Buterin.

Censorship concerns aren't the only reason why reliance on a single hosting service provider poses risks to crypto-based services. In November, AWS outages affected Coinbase, causing users to have problems logging in to and navigating their accounts.