A note and reminder about Relays in general are that they are more of a convenience in the protocol than a hard requirement. The "firehose" API is the exact same on the PDS and on a Relay. Any service which subscribes to the Relay could instead connect to one or more PDS instances directly.
Bluesky Social has pledged to transfer the protocol's development to a standards body such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in the near future.[11]