“We are literally rethinking everything from the ground up,” Colette Grgic, Head of Startup Ecosystem, AU & NZ for AWS said at the recent Startups in the Web3 World AWS Summit 2022. “Like the world that we’re building, the way that we’re transacting, how we’re building community, how we live, how we spend our time, where we spend our money.”
Grgic went on to emphasise the importance of building community for Web3 startups. “Building this community and this ecosystem is really togo telemarketing database what’s going to enable us to all progress faster together.”
The AWS community itself includes huge success stories like Ethereum’s leading NFT platform Immutable, blockchain-powered fintech Block Earner, and Illuvium, a video game developer built on the Ethereum blockchain with collectible NFTs across the DeFi (Decentralised Finance) metaverse.
Then there’s A Township Tale
Alta VR‘s persistent virtual world where players journey together and interact in real time. And VeVe, which allows users to purchase, sell and trade digital collectables in virtual showrooms… if you know, you know.
“This is really where we need to start thinking about how are we enabling the entire next decade of entrepreneurs to build in a completely different way than what’s ever been done before,” said Grgic.
Trusted access to data
Despite the diversity of their products, all of these startups have a very clear commonality, one that’s at the heart of Web3: they are each solving a customer problem that Web2 couldn’t solve in the way they want.
At the Summit, Brendan Myers, Seniors Solutions Architect, AWS, described it as giving “trusted, unfettered access” to data.
“This thing that customers care about is that they can have data that exists outside of a system and they can use it however they want,” Myers explained. “They can take it from one place to another and they don’t need to go through a single gatekeeper to access it.”
He used the example of why NFTs need to sit on a blockchain. “At its core, all an NFT is, is a record of ownership,” he said.
In Web2 you could put that record on a server somewhere and provide access to it
but you’re relying on that service provider to make your record always available, to not modify it and to provide the essential trusted, unfettered access. Under a Web2 system, there’s no way of guaranteeing that what you upload is what others will download.
“By moving that record of ownership to somewhere like a public blockchain, it means we don’t need to seek permission to check the authenticity of that data. We can just read it,” said Myers. “We don’t need to go and sign up for anything [to] verify that it’s authentic.”