Cloud infrastructure is a liability for institutional staking | Opinion

Institutional capital is finally flowing into the crypto sector. It first came through Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) ETFs, but the next frontier is staking, where assets don’t just sit around; they earn yield. Institutions demand growth, compliance, and security. Now that crypto is part of their capital base, staking is destined to become a core strategic pillar.

Here’s the problem: most staking infrastructure still runs on shared cloud services designed for Web 2.0 and consumer apps, not institutional financial systems. Cloud services work fine for mobile games, but they’re woefully inadequate when a single minute of outage can cost millions.

The risks of cloud-based staking infrastructure

Most staking today is built on the wrong foundation. The majority of validator nodes (the servers and systems that secure proof-of-stake blockchains and earn rewards) still cluster on the Big Tech consumer cloud providers, such as AWS, Google Cloud, and a handful of others. That’s because they’re “easy” to deploy and familiar to developers.

But my grandfather used to say, “The easy way usually ain’t the right way,” and he was right. There is a significant, not-so-hidden predicament for the big tech players. A single policy change, pricing shift, or outage at one of these providers can have ripple effects across entire networks, knocking out swaths of validators in one shot.

And that’s just the centralization problem. Compliance and control are another. Meeting the kinds of standards institutions care about — jurisdictional choice, SOC2 for data/information security, and CCSS for crypto operations, while tuning hardware and networks for each protocol — is far harder when you don’t control the physical infrastructure your operation runs on. Cloud platforms are designed to abstract that away, which is great for a weather app, but terrible when the auditors come knocking.

That same abstraction also blinds operators to what’s really happening under the hood. Key performance metrics, such as latency, redundancy configurations, and hardware health, are often hidden behind the provider’s curtain, making uptime guarantees little more than educated guesses. And because cloud infrastructure is shared, you inherit your noisy neighbors’ problems.

Look no further than the history of recent major outages at AWS, including those in November 2020, December 2021, June 2023, and most recently, a 15-hour outage in October 2025, which brought major banks, airlines, and numerous other companies to a halt. In crypto, you are not just missing rewards or taking a hit to your yield; you can trigger material penalties.

Why institutions prefer bare metal infrastructure

Institutions don’t trust black boxes to handle their capital, and rightfully so. They want to see, touch, and control these systems. That’s why, as staking shifts into the institutional domain, bare-metal infrastructure is taking the lead. Running validators on dedicated machines provides operators with complete control over performance, offering real-time visibility. Nothing is hidden behind a provider’s dashboard or locked inside an abstraction layer.

At scale, bare metal is also more cost-effective for staking workloads than renting slices of general-purpose cloud. The economics can be deceptive at first: what starts as a cheaper way to test an idea on AWS becomes an expensive method to run in production. In a dedicated staking environment, the cost per unit of compute and storage drops, operational isolation is guaranteed, and performance improves.

Then there’s compliance. Auditors want transparent, documented chains of control over every component in your environment. With bare metal, you can prove where your servers are, who can physically access them, how they’re secured, and what redundancy measures are in place. The result is an infrastructure that not only meets the letter of the rules but also instills confidence in counterparties.

Bare-metal deployments in high-tier data centers, with physical security and dedicated failover systems, can deliver the kind of enterprise-grade guarantees that make staking a credible part of a treasury strategy. In the coming wave of due diligence, projects that still rely on shared cloud infrastructure will struggle to clear the bar. Those that pair physical decentralization with operational transparency will be the ones that win serious capital.

Serious capital demands serious infrastructure

As staking evolves into a genuine strategy for institutions, the infrastructure behind it will determine who earns trust and who gets left behind. Cloud-based setups may have fueled crypto’s early growth, but they fall well short of the standards that serious capital demands. Institutions aren’t building games or NFT marketplaces; they’re managing risk, compliance, and capital flows.

That changes the definition of “decentralized.” It’s not enough to spread nodes across different wallets and jurisdictions. Those nodes must be dependable, transparent, and resilient. The projects that recognize this shift now and race to build institutional-grade infrastructure will be the ones that capture the long-term upside.