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.