The cryptocurrency industry's proclaimed independence from traditional financial infrastructure faced a stark reality check on May 7, 2026, when an overheating incident at an Amazon Web Services data center in Northern Virginia triggered widespread service disruptions across major digital asset trading platforms. The outage, which affected Coinbase and other prominent cryptocurrency venues, exposed the persistent centralization vulnerabilities that continue to plague an industry built on the promise of decentralized finance. The irony could hardly be more pronounced. An ecosystem designed to eliminate single points of failure and reduce dependence on centralized authorities found itself crippled by the failure of a single cloud infrastructure provider. Coinbase (NASDAQ:COIN), one of the world's largest cryptocurrency exchanges, experienced significant trading disruptions as its platform struggled to maintain normal operations during the AWS outage.…