Date: 19/03/2024
Host: Chris Lennox, Senior research engineer at Callaghan Innovation
Guests: Stacey-Ann Pearson, Head of AWS APAC region
Webinar Length: 48:41
Transcript
0:00 Introduction
02:23 Web3 ecosystem as the future of the internet
04:20 AWS role and support
05:42 How AWS is empowering builders
08:06 Start-up support
10:28 AWS builders use-cases
15:16 Top Web3 use cases
17:20 AWS startup programs
18:49 Trends in use cases for Web2 companies
24:17 How AWS navigates decentralisation as a centralised entity
29:58 AWS as a tool to scale quickly
32:07 AI strategy and focus
37:42 Assistance for founders without coding backgrounds
41:36 DePINs and tokenisation of RWAs
Chris Lennox: All right. Welcome everyone to another Web3NZ learning series. I'm very happy to have Stacey-Ann with us today. Thank you for being here. Stacey-Ann is the head of Web 3 in the Asia Pacific region, part of AWS. And she's here to talk to us today, our topic, which is the role of cloud in empowering Web 3 builders.
Now I'll pass over to Stacey-Ann in just a minute, but first just a few housekeeping items. So, just to let you know, this session will be recorded and we will endeavor to make it available on our Web3NZ Knowledge Hub at a later date. There will also be a YouTube video, so you can watch that at your leisure at a later time.
The way we'll handle questions, we'll let Stacey Ann go through the formal presentation first. If you have a question during that time, just pop it into the chat box, and then I'll circle back around to those at the end. And then the other thing we ask you to do while we're in the Q& A session, I'll just pop up at a little QR code and we do ask if you can fill that in, please.
So it just helps us to align ourselves with future events that you might want to see. So that feedback is always very helpful. And with that, I will now pass over to you, Stacey-Ann. Thank you.
Stacey-Ann Pearson: Awesome. Thanks so much, Chris. And great to meet everyone and hope you're having a fantastic week and year so far as the industry has been having a good year of slow but steady recovery.
So I'm going to share my screen here.
Hopefully everyone can see that. Awesome. So today I'm going to really talk about how AWS and other cloud providers are helping to support the space. I'm very happy to do a little bit of an intro slash Web 3 101 to talk through that. My credentials, I've been working full time in Web 3 for a number of years.
I entered the space in 2017 and started working full time in 2019. I've worked across metaverse companies, you know, digital identity startups. I was doing research with Oxford in China around blockchain. So super excited to see the space grow and where it's headed. The funnest, the most fun project I've worked on is building the Pudgyverse for the Pudgy Penguins with the DigiNation team, so that was really fun.
[00:02:23] Web3 ecosystem as the future of the internet
Stacey-Ann Pearson: For today I'm just going to do a very quick Web3 view, what's the role of AWS, the support that we give to the community, and of course any questions that you might have. So we can start with the Web3 ecosystem. We like to think about it as what is the future of the Internet. So AWS takes big bets on five different areas and Web3 is one of those areas, along with fintech, climate tech, AI/ML, and healthcare life sciences.
So, how we describe Web 3, because it's a question I get all the time, Web 1, you know, back in the really, really long days ago, was when the internet first came around and you could only read what was on the screen. Then, of course, the internet today, which is very heavily interactive, right? You can also write, you can post, you can put your information online.
And then, in today's world, Web 3 is where you actually get to own a piece of the information that you have created as part of your digital journey or your digital identity. And that's where Web3 really thrives, is giving back ownership and value to the individual. So today, when you post on Instagram or TikTok or Facebook it's up to the company in order to give you value or reward you for the information that you're putting on the platform.
And within Web3 ethos, the idea is that you get to own a piece of the platform as well as you get to own a piece of the value that's being generated by you interacting with the platform, interacting by creating content, interacting by being a node provider interacting by, you know, writing or building consensus or exchanging tokens, any activity that you do within the space you get rewarded for that. And that's really the core ethos of the idea or the concept of Web3.
[00:04:20] AWS role and support
Stacey-Ann Pearson: So for AWS, right, you might be wondering, so where does AWS play a role? We actually support every single layer of Web3 from the very core layers, which are around the layer one, layer two blockchains, as well as your tooling and infrastructure layers all the way up to the top layer, which is where you have your consumer facing applications, so your defi, your socialfi, right, your DePIN those kinds of applications. We support all levels. I threw in this slide because I wanted to show some of the examples of Web3 native companies, ranging from exchanges to infrastructure to developer tools, metaverses, so you can see some of the names that maybe you know, some names that maybe you're not so familiar with.
But I also wanted to show some of the non native Web3 companies that are actually building, investing, and exploring products within the Web3 landscape. Personally, I do believe it's quite important to have Web2 or traditional companies also build within Web3 because they bring that existing distribution channel to the industry, but of course, you know, that's a controversial topic that we get within Web3, you know, the DGENs versus sort of the adoptionists within the space.
[00:05:42] How AWS is empowering builders
Stacey-Ann Pearson: So what is AWS doing within Web3? So, very easy, we are focused on empowering builders to redefine the internet. So the idea is that AWS doesn't want to be at the forefront and don't think that we should be at the forefront of Web3. We actually prefer to be the underlying infrastructure, sort of the glue that's holding you know, a lot of the internet and community together.
So for our Web3 customers, we serve four primary functions, which is around go to market and partnerships. So, because we have been in the space more than 10 plus years we have built up a strong relationship with, you know, companies across the spectrum of Web3, and so we provide a partnership and go to market opportunities.
Of course, infrastructure, the visibility aspect, because we do have customers in Web 3 and in Web 2, we help our customers to reach that visibility. And then we do also do a share and product. So we are able and willing to give feedback to Web3 company products. And we also invite Web3 companies to give feedback on the products that we're building as well.
So it's a really win win collaboration that we have going on. So some of the building blocks that we've seen that are most popular within the Web3 customer. So again, AWS is known as an infrastructure player, and so that's really where our bread and butter is, and we have three big buckets that we see that's really popular within Web3.
So the first is around core compute and infrastructure. The second is around storage systems and APIs. Of course, you can imagine storage systems. Blockchains are massively large data driven so you do need really strong, really stable, really reliable storage systems. And then the last piece is around machine learning, well, AI machine learning and analytics.
We do have a small bucket that's related to or managed blockchain solutions, but these are really geared at or towards things that our Web3 customers and our Web2 customers, especially big banks, big financial services institutions have asked us to build because they don't want to manage it themselves.
So, of course, if you have any questions, please feel free if you're a technical lead, or if you're quite technical, feel free to take a screenshot and ask questions about it later.
[00:08:06] Start-up support
Stacey-Ann Pearson: So AWS, because we've been in the space so long, we actually focus very keenly on giving back to the community. This is not just for Web3, this is for actually our entire startup division, because we do believe that startups are the future of every single industry in the world, right? That's where a lot of the innovation comes from is within the startup community.
So we have several programs that are geared towards assisting startups and increasing the probability of their success because as many of you may know, startups have a really high rate of failure. And so anything that we can do to add value and to to the success of startups, that's where we focus on.
That includes. you know investment through credits, AWS activate credits. That includes training sessions on best practices for security. That includes startup and founder networking sessions and networking groups where startup founders can learn from each other. It also includes partner and investor affiliates.
So we have affiliations with many, if not most of the top investors around the world, especially in APJ. I manage the APJ web three native investors. And we will bring those investors together with the startups, founders, startups who have already made it, founders who are trying to make it and facilitate the business making between founders and investors.
We also of course have in house expertise that we are willing to lend to our startup and startups and to our founders because we have a vision of ensuring that Web3 is built on AWS. So I wanted to throw this out there because some of the questions I do get is around, okay, so who is working with you guys, must be some no name company, but actually, you know, we do work with the best of the brightest within Web3 because we do believe in the space.
We believed in it very long, even from the be beginning days of Coinbase, Binance and those original core companies all the way to the newest companies that are coming out, you know, like Shardeum immutable X, which like immutable isn't that new, but you know, companies that are really strong across APJ.
[00:10:28] AWS builders use-cases
Stacey-Ann Pearson: Awesome. So what are our customers building on AWS? I'm going to flip through these because, you know, these can take really long, but I'll spend maybe like three seconds on each page. So I don't know if you guys know one inch or maybe some of you will know one inch. That's the DEX, so decentralized exchange where it aggregates prices from all over, aggregates liquidity from all over, and gives the user the experience of a non custodial exchange, essentially.
So 1inch moved to AWS in order to manage its cloud costs while improving its performance, because you can imagine if you're aggregating, volume, liquidity, pricing, action from so many different blockchains from the entire industry you need really fast compute power. You need really fast cloud power. You need really fast storage power. And so they worked with us on one of our new services, which is around Graviton, which is data processing, and we were able to help them reduce that expenditure by 30%.
We have another example, Avalabs, who is the builder of Avalanche blockchain. Avalanche is obviously doing really well with AVAX up many, many percentages this year. And they worked with us to build blockchain specific applications because they are very much a developer focused chain. So that was something we were really excited to do and they're listed in our marketplace where enterprises are able to purchase their solutions through the AWS marketplace.
Obviously, many people should know Coinbase. It's one of the forefront exchanges as they're expanding beyond the U. S. They did machine learning with ID, online ID authentication. Of course, scamming is a big issue within the space, and so securing your user's identity and authentication tied to their account was extremely important, and they worked with us to do that, seeing as we have more than 20 years of experience in the AIML space.
Crypto. com is another huge name within the centralized exchange aspect, although they now have a decentralized component to their product so they use AWS for security and scalability, so if you think about some of these exchanges, they are operating all over the world they're having millions of folks that are calling or logging into their application at any given moment, they need to be able to handle that volume while also keeping their their accounts secure as well as their own internal system secure. And so they're using AWS security solutions in order to help do that.
And then, of course, our decentralized or serverless system in order to do that scalability, especially when it relates to different geos and speed, which, you know, for AWS, we do have serverless options in many, many countries around the world.
Maybe some of you know Amber Data. So Amber Data is one of the data aggregators in the world. One of the largest in the world. So this is like Dune, if you think of Nansen. Some would say CoinGecko as well. This is the likes of AmberData, but AmberData is a little bit more focused on the enterprise side. And so they use AWS big data solutions, obviously, right? Because there's just so much data living on each blockchain.
So they are using our big data solutions to help assimilate and then, of course, sort and then turn it, those into actionable insights that they can then forward sell to enterprise.
Coinhacko, maybe some of you know, maybe some don't know, so coinhacko is a pretty common exchange within Singapore and some parts of Southeast Asia because there is clear but stringent regulations within Singapore.
So this exchange came about. So they rely on AWS for that compliance and availability aspect, which again goes to the fact that you have this serverless solution. So the reason I'm sharing these is just like a reminder that it is really around the idea of availability and core infrastructure that's needed.
But I'll talk more about some of the Web3 products that we've been working with. So maybe some of you know, I know you're sitting in New Zealand, but Fantom that's one of the Australia based blockchains. So they really focus on ensuring that they are bringing better solutions to developers especially within the gaming and DeFi aspect.
So I'll probably skip that last one.
[00:15:16] Top Web3 use cases
Stacey-Ann Pearson: So, what do we do specifically with the Web3 startups? So, there are really six of the most popular things that we see Web3 companies coming to us for. Hosting a blockchain node on AWS, that's typically some of your larger players who don't want to go through the issue of hosting the node themselves, and they have really simple requirements.
If they have, much larger requirements we will often pass them on to our infrastructure partners like BlockDamon or Alchemy or, you know, one of the other large players like Fireblocks, etc. The second aspect is around key management. Obviously, key management is super important within Web3, right, like many of you know, not your keys, not your crypto so it's a similar idea.
We do have this solution where we help large firms, large companies to secure the keys from any kinds of attack, whether internal or external. I already spoke about the serverless infrastructure and the, it's worth mentioning again, sort of the indexing and big data solutions that we have given the massive scale of data that lives on each blockchain.
Nodes as a Service, again, that's really targeted towards really massive institutions that have very simple use cases around, let's say, Hyperledger Fabric or Ethereum, and they want a semi open, semi closed ecosystem, so that's that's who this solution is really targeted towards.
And if the solution or requirements go beyond this, then we pass it on to our partners who are also working with AWS. And then one of our core bread and butters, which is beyond Web3, just really about the internet, right, is ensuring that you have secure APIs between different companies and different solutions.
So I'll skip the details of it, but feel free to, you know, pause and read the description.
[00:17:20] AWS startup programs
Stacey-Ann Pearson: Awesome. So maybe some of you are founders and you're wondering how can you be supported by AWS? So we do have four different levels. So the very easiest and probably most recognizable is that building stage. We do have again, that migration and, and credits program, which is where if you are a funded startup in web three, then you are able to qualify for different buckets of credits, AWS credits that you can use in your AWS console.
So this starts, you know, from as low as 5k, $5000 USD, all the way up to 100, 000 USD, meaning that, you know, if you're billing, let's say 10k a month, that's, that's, you know, pretty much a year of free AWS services that you are able to use to scale your business. As you go up the chain, then you have additional services that are unlocked for your benefit and of course for your survival as a startup founder.
Happy to answer any questions related to that, even after, you know, this session here today. So I'll just leave this up for a couple seconds, just so you can see a little bit more details about the credits program. One of the things that I looked at last year, so within my role, I am able to see across Asia Pacific and Japan and see what trends are coming out.
[00:18:49] Trends in use cases for Web2 companies
Stacey-Ann Pearson: It's a super amazing opportunity for us to be able to do. See the full landscape because we do work across the industry. So in 2023, what we were very excited about was even though it was a full bear market, the interest level from Web2 companies and strong Web3 companies were still there. So that was last year was the most amount of inbound inquiries we received from financial services institutions, gaming studios, massive gaming brands consumer brands that were looking at how to involve this kind of NFT as loyalties within their ecosystem. That was the most amount of requests that we had received in the past number of years. So we were very excited about this. For the upcoming year, there are two things that are also very interesting, is the Web3 and AI aspect, of course. And then the other aspect is the core utility, of web three, whether that's through tokenization of real world assets or whether that's related to the decentralized of physical infrastructure.
So, you know, looking at how do you reward people for their everyday behavior or the access that they have to a systems that they are not fully utilizing. So, for example, you know, if you have unused bandwidth for, from your mobile or from your home internet system. You know, there are projects out there that will be willing to compensate you for that, for using that.
If you have unused energy that you, you know, solar energy that you have within your, your home or, you know, within your business property, you know, there are companies out there that are willing to compensate you for that to create a decentralized charging infrastructure for, you know solar powered vehicles, solar powered motorbikes, et cetera.
So it's really exciting to see the utility aspect coming out. There are hotels in Europe and even actually in Australia that are, that are experimenting with tokenizing the hotel and then selling that to individuals and then sharing the profits to individuals through smart contracts, right? So it's very exciting to see what the utility aspect of Web3 will bring as we move away from a speculative trading environment more into a core and integrated products driven environment.
So because I did mention some of the investors that we worked with, I wanted to show some of the names of Investors who continue to invest in Web3, even during the bear market last year and the year before we're very excited to be partnering with all of these amazing companies to offer, you know, either 25k or 100k of AWS credits.
So I did mention about how to get started. This is really the last slide talking about what are the actual activities you can partner with us on within the Web3 space. These are customizable based on what your goals are, what kind of Web3 player you are, and who you're targeting within the segment.
And yeah, so that's, that's something that we're very excited about doing. If you want to reach out to us, feel free to reach out to me. I'm based in Singapore. You can also reach out to Lauren. She's based in Australia, but she covers Australia and New Zealand. So I'll pause here. Very happy to take any questions or you know, I'll throw it back to Chris.
I've also shared the deck with the team. So, you know, also feel free to take a look at the deck and have, if you have questions afterwards, feel free to reach out. Thank you.
Chris Lennox: Awesome. Thank you so much, Stacey-Ann. Yeah, as I said, I'll we'll make sure that we have this video posted up on the Web2RNZ Knowledge Hub. And then I'll also look to get those slides off you and post the link there for everyone. Just, I wanted to go back. You did mention that about the AWS Activate program.
I just wanted to also mention that Callaghan Innovation, which powers Web3NZ is also a member of that, of that program. Yeah, so I'll also, so what's the best way, is it freely available if I just post our code on there? So when we post the video to have the code there and anyone sort of access it, would that be the best way for people to?
Stacey-Ann Pearson: Yes. So for the Callaghan Innovation code, it is freely available to be shared with anyone within the community.
Chris Lennox: Okay. Perfect. Awesome. All right. We'll just check if there's, anyone have any questions? If they want to come off mute and just freely ask away. What I will do, I will just post up quickly the feedback survey.
Stacey-Ann Pearson: And like I said, I know probably the timing, you know, didn't work out for a lot of folks. So if you have questions afterwards and feel free to send it by me.
Chris Lennox: Okay, that should be coming up now.
Chris Lennox: So yeah, please, if you could just scan that code, posting your feedback from the survey there. As I said, I mean, feedback is always good for us. It just helps us align future events in the series about what you want to see. So, if you get your feedback in, we can hopefully target things that people out there want to see most of.
[00:24:17] How AWS navigates decentralisation as a centralised entity
Chris Lennox: I do have a few questions for you, if no-one else is going to chime in. So, I don't know, maybe you hear this a lot, but you know, a big concept with Web3 is the whole decentralization thing, and given that AWS is effectively a cloud provider, a centralized, you know, solution. What, how do you see that you know, like what's the a centralized model versus decentralized?
Like, how does AWS contribute to...
Stacey-Ann Pearson: Essentially, what the heck are we doing in this space?
Chris Lennox: I didn't want to quite go there like that. But yeah, just, I mean, you could kind of just speak to that. I'm sure people are quite curious about how that plays out.
Stacey-Ann Pearson: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's a fantastic question. And I love answering the question coming from the Web3 space myself.
And then now in this role at a centralized company that's serving Web3. So I like to answer this question in two different ways. The first way is philosophically and then logistically. So the philosophical answer first is we first as a community have to decide how decentralized does our stack needs to be for us to be considered decentralized.
So what do I mean by that? So when you talk about decentralization, right? There are certain aspects that are front facing, consumer facing. There are certain aspects that are middleware, backend, underlying infrastructure, and then core powering. So my question is always to the community is at what level do we consider it decentralized, right?
Like how low down the stack do we need to be decentralized? Do we need, do we all need to be throwing up our own satellites for internet services to be considered fully decentralized? Do we all need to be running our own servers in house, right, buildings of servers in order to be decentralized? Do we need to have only the consumer facing aspect and the middleware decentralized?
So, as a community, right, we haven't really agreed on what does full decentralization mean and actually we see that within the community, right? There are some DAOs, which are Decentralized Autonomous Organizations for those who are new to the space, that support themselves to be decentralized, but there are three voting members in the DAO, right?
And, you know, the rest of the community doesn't always get a say. There are some layer one blockchains that, you know, are so called decentralized, but a lot of the operations and logics are still run by two, one or two people. So I think right, philosophically as a community, right? We first have to talk through what does it actually mean to be decentralized?
Does it mean that at the consumer level, I need to have control and access and get utility and value buy in from my community. That's what I personally believe. There are others, of course, that are core decentralized believers that believe the entire stack should be decentralized. So, yes, you should be throwing up your own satellites or getting a very local provider who has access to a satellite in order to power the internet aspect of your application, right? So there, what I believe is that there is a range of decentralization that exists for everyone from an ethos standpoint.
Now, from a logistics standpoint, it's even a clearer example. So for AWS as a global cloud service provider, maybe you know that some of the applications that you are running require access and require availability globally. So for example, if I want to run an application on IPFS, that's perfectly amazing. However, if you want to run any kind of DeFi application, any kind of centralized or decentralized exchange within a different country, you will not be able to use IPFS because the governments there have a requirement about you knowing where your data is sitting at any given point in time, and IPFS is not able to help you do that because of the amazing decentralization of that.
But if you're running a project that is within a region, within a country that doesn't require that level of global availability and adherence to international compliance, then it's the perfect solution for you, right? So I think that the decentralization aspect has two different answers, right?
The ethos answers and then the logistics answer. AWS will be right for some folks, and it will be wrong for others. Deep, fully decentralized solutions like IPFS will be right for some, and it will be the wrong solution for others. So I think the space is new enough, nascent enough, and large enough to incorporate some of these players who are willing to invest and willing to provide solutions to the space while still keeping the ethos of the consumer facing aspect must be decentralized and by decentralized we mean ensuring that the individual gets to share in the value creation and the utility of the platform.
Chris Lennox: Yep. Makes sense. So I guess along those lines, are you also seeing you know, there's scenarios where you have Web3 builders that come in and kind of use AWS tools as a kind of initial, you know fail fast prototyping type application, and then they'll go away and sort of develop their own solution where that's, you know, fully decentralized. Do you see much of that?
[00:29:58] AWS as a tool to scale quickly
Stacey-Ann Pearson: Yeah, so actually what happens the most is we work with, very closely with, most of the L1, L2 blockchains because obviously their core customer is the developer, right? They need the developer to come in and build applications on their blockchain in order to build adoption. So Solana is really good at that from a developer standpoint.
Near and AVAX, they're also very good at that. And we will do hackathons with these Layer 1, Layer 2 blockchains and give these builders the tools that they need in order to scale their application. And what very often will happen is that they're not interested in building the tools, right? They want to use the tools to build a really great, cool application, consumer facing or enterprise facing application, and that's what AWS wants. AWS doesn't want to build front end Web3 applications. We want to provide the tools and the infrastructure to allow Web3 builders to really build really cool applications that will change the internet.
So we actually see more common that builders come to us, they use our tools, and then they build really cool apps that, you know, are used by your everyday Web3 user, your Degen user or your casually interested user. One of the other things that we do see is where we, once in a while, we'll see a core shift idea.
So an example of this is BNB Chain's Greenfield project, which is a decentralized storage project and AWS is, is part of that project because even though storage is one of our biggest services that we sell, we also see that there is extreme value in an open market open source version of aggregating storage for your different uses.
And so that's something that we signed up for as an enterprise provider of storage solutions. So, you know, for AWS, we are constantly looking at what are the amazing ideas that are coming out from Web3 and ensuring that we are either supporting it or being a part of it ourselves.
[00:32:07] AI strategy and focus
Chris Lennox: Very good. Cool. I did have a quick look before this about you know, there's an Amazon Bedrock product.
I mean, obviously AI and large language models are a big kind of thing at the moment. Yep. So I was wondering maybe if you could just sort of speak on that a little bit. There are kind of a overarching strategy where, you know, AWS tools and AI are combining.
Stacey-Ann Pearson: Yes. Yeah. So for AWS, we take the same approach to AIML that we take actually to our entire business, which is we don't take bets on who the winner will be in any, in any industry, we serve everyone equally, and we want to provide the tools again equally to everyone.
So the concept and the ethos behind Amazon Bedrock is that we don't want to pick or offer any singular LLM or foundation model for the individual because we realize that for each individual or for each enterprise, the right LLM will be different, right? So if you're sitting in Vietnam, right, GPT 4 might not be the right LLM for you.
If you're sitting in Germany, Gemini might not be the right LLM for you, right? If you're sitting in Japan, Llama 2 might not be the right model for you. So instead of pushing one singular foundation model, we essentially have made a platform where you will have access to multiple foundation models at your fingertip that you will be able to utilize based on what is your need.
So for Bedrock, we have essentially created a, an, an aggregated view of the different models that you can have access to by going through one service. So on Bedrock, we have the enthropics Claude model
We have Meta or Facebook's Lama 2 model. We have AI 21 Labs model. We have stability AI model. We have hugging face model. We have, of course, Amazon's own model that we use for, that we've built for logistics and more are coming on every day. We have a whole team working with onboarding models that folks are able to access.
And again, it's behind, it's, it's in line with this ethos that we don't pick one winner because we don't think that one model can serve all the needs across the world. So that's the idea behind how we are approaching the AI revolution.
Chris Lennox: Hmm. And so what does that look like, you know, if someone goes into it and wants to, how do people interface with that?
Like, could you go down one path with one particular model? And then also, you know, could you streamline it and put it down a few different avenues and then see what you get back from that.
Stacey-Ann Pearson: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. So that's the idea. You bring it, you can either bring your data, your own training data that you can use to tune a model. We typically recommend that through our SageMaker product, SageMaker Jumpstart. Or you can utilize the models that exist with that are already fine tuned with data that they've scraped from the internet and just apply it to your use cases. So let's say you've started off with using Claude and you realize, Oh, you know, Claude, well, actually Claude is has been performing, you know, top of market. So let me not say Claude, maybe Llama 2, right? Then you realize, oh, it's not as good as performing, let's say software engineering tasks. And so you flip to the Claude model that you realize performs a little better on software engineering tasks. That's absolutely something that you can do.
And that's the reason that we created the idea of Bedrock is so that you can have that flexibility within your solution.
Chris Lennox: And will the platform provide that feedback to the end user, or is it up to them to sort of read between the lines and look at the data and see what sort of performance they're getting back from each and make their own decision on that.
Stacey-Ann Pearson: That's a good question. So AWS as a service if you are a customer with AWS, you have access to solutions architects that can help you identify what are these grading modules that you can use to see what is best performing for your use case. We also realized that we have a lot of customers who might not know how to utilize these solutions.
So actually my colleague and I, who are, who sit in Singapore, we have created a whole new series called Gen AI Pivot. And this series is essentially bringing all the tech leaders together from, you know, customers who are interested and just starting from the beginning, right, talking through what are some of the most common use cases that we've seen using Bedrock and how you can first do efficiency and then how you can accelerate your products that's consumer facing or the B2B facing and also walk them through what does that look like from an architecture standpoint.
And then how do you grade the success of this with one model versus another model. So we realized that there is a knowledge and information gap that is sitting there, even though there's so much excitement. And we've created programs around that in order to empower our founders and startups to better utilize the right models for the right use cases, for the right products.
[00:37:42] Assistance for founders without coding backgrounds
Chris Lennox: Hmm. Well, that's a good segue. So on the whole Web3 founders front, are there tools available also for, you know, say there's a founder has a great idea and wants to get into the whole Web3 scene they don't maybe come from a programming or coding background? Are there tools available for them to kind of get started or, you know, on-ramp them in a simpler way?
Stacey-Ann Pearson: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So the first thing that's available is that we do have a 1000 tier founder credit which means that even if you don't have, you know, your idea fully baked out yet, you can spend up to 1, 000 just playing around with your idea and your product, building that on AWS. So that's the easiest tool that we give for folks who are programmers, or they're engineers, and they know how to build stuff, so you can tinker with your idea on AWS.
The second aspect is, we are partnered with, Web3 academies that are doing these Web2, Web3 conversions, helping founders to test and build ideas. So one of the examples is you know, Tenity, who does Web3 specific programs. They have one with Ripple. Another example is AngelHack. That's the tribe folks.
They are doing a world global tour this year focused on ensuring that you know, Web 2 and Web 3 programmers can come together and build a lot of the layer 1 layer 2 blockchains. They also have partnerships with AWS that we support through solution architects as well as credits. So those are the most common tools that we see being used for Web 3 builders.
Chris Lennox: And what are you seeing in terms of, do you get a lot of companies that are sort of purely Web2 focused and that want to sort of bridge into the Web3 space? Is there something available also, you know, in that sense to kind of bridge that gap?
Stacey-Ann Pearson: Absolutely. So part of my role, so my role is split into two, is to help Web3 companies to scale and grow.
And then the other role is to help Web 2 companies who are looking to get involved in Web 3.. And we have teams of go to market Web 3 solution architects that will, you know, work with the company. I think this year, of course, the focus is a little bit more on AI aspect, the AI ML aspect.
But, you know companies who are building on AWS, they can work with their account managers to win those internal global resources around web 3 that will help them to build out what does that solution look like? So, for example, we worked with is it public? Yes, yes, it's already public. It's already announced.
So we worked with the NASDAQ when they were building out their digital asset custody solution. That was something that we worked together with them on. We have a couple of banks that were building digital asset exchanges, and we worked with them on that, both on the architecture and design side, as well as the launch and go to market.
And we've worked with. Okay, that one isn't public, so I'll just give the idea. So we've worked with vehicle manufacturers who were thinking about, let me say, luxury vehicle manufacturer from Germany, you know, who are looking at how do you incorporate NFT as a brand loyalty incentivization mechanism for their most loyal customers.
And we worked with them on that. And by worked with them, I mean, we helped organize pitch sessions for the aspects that AWS wasn't willing or interested in building ourselves. So we both support the Web2 company as well as provide opportunities for our Web3 customers. So we have a range of tools that we can use to support Web2 companies who are looking to explore the space.
[00:41:36] DePINs and tokenisation of RWAs
Chris Lennox: And in the course of your presentation, you mentioned DePINs yes. So, yeah, I've sort of looked into these a little bit and I am quite curious about these. I wonder, do you have any kind of examples you can share on that? Because we actually had a few ideas internally about how we might be able to utilize some of our, you know, maybe tokenize something that that utilizes a real world asset or something like that.
Is there something you could go into?
Stacey-Ann Pearson: Yeah, absolutely. So one of the best reports that I've seen on DePIN they published it early this year, but it was the 2023 data is by Escape Velocity. So let me see if it's here. So Masari was the one who posted it and made it popular, because you know, Masari is very well known for being able to find the best reports or present the best reports.
I just put the link in the chat. It was one of the most comprehensive reports I saw on DePIN last year or early this year. Take a look, it gives hundreds of examples of some of the best projects that are out there. My favorite right now is a combination of Wi Fi maps and the grass. So the grass is a new one grass. io essentially, they will compensate you for your excess bandwidth, your Internet excess bandwidth and they are onward selling it to, you know, small AI build AI model builders. That might not have the kind of access to data or energy and internet to, you know, properly scrape the internet.
And so we are selling our unused bandwidth to Grass and then Grass onward sells it and then we get compensated for that. Of course, Wi Fi maps is where you are helping to create a more decentralized peer to peer telecom, mobile to mobile communication, as well as finding free, you know, Wi Fi hotspots, and then you get compensated if you help to test the networks that have been listed in the app, as well as find new networks that are available in different countries. So essentially mapping the world of, you know, proper Wi Fi networks that you can get access to as well as peer to peer, mobile to mobile connectivity.
So, you know, really phenomenal projects that are already happening. And yeah, that's one of the best reports I've seen so far.
Chris Lennox: Okay, very cool. I'll make sure to have a look through that. Thank you. And then maybe if you could just touch on, you know, I think we've had previous sessions on like tokenization of real world assets.
Is there anything you can kind of tell us about what's happening in that space that you might be actively involved in?
Stacey-Ann Pearson: Yeah, so for us, actually, the most common use case that we saw was from banks. So from financial services institutions, they were interested in shockingly tokenizing different assets of investment vehicles.
So security is a bond, etc. In order to make either derivatives or derivative derivative trading or the core asset trading easier across different platforms. So essentially what that means is that they were looking at how do you tokenize different asset classes within their offerings and offer the tokens to their customers, which would be like a wrapped product of the solutions that they already have.
Because once you have these tokens, they're much more easily tradable than the underlying assets themselves. So that was something that was really surprising to us that we didn't think that the banks themselves or the institutions, financial institutions would be interested in doing, but they were one of the biggest users of or experimenters of tokenized real world assets that we saw last year. The second largest was probably real estate, where we had folks who had been in real estate development and know the challenges that come from getting funding building and then having to reimburse or repay loans that you received from that.
And of course, the liability and risk that you have with then having to figure out how do you repay these loans if you aren't at, you know, at least 70 percent capacity for your building, for your commercial building. So, we also saw some intriguing use cases around tokenizing the commercial property and then selling those to you know, private buyers who were interested in owning a piece of that property.
So, obviously, for the developer, that's great because they don't have to take on a variable interest loan, which of course in this environment, right, can be such a high volatility or liability. And then you have individual private buyers who they don't really want to put down 50 million for one building, but they can put up a hundred thousand for a piece of that building.
So that was something that we also saw, which again comes to the idea of how do we make things more equitable and accessible to everyday individuals?
Chris Lennox: Hmm. Yeah, that has been a common use case that I have seen, you know, pop up in terms of, yeah, like buildings and exactly like that. Yeah, it'd be interesting kind of where that, that whole thing goes in the future.
Yeah. Yeah.
Stacey-Ann Pearson: Yeah. Very cool. I love those questions, by the way, I think you know, really looking forward to the continued great work that you guys are doing. For AWS so we love, you know, we're always looking for ways to build out the community in New Zealand. Cause we know that your neighbors, right they have a, a thriving community there.
So always feel free to utilize the AWS resources to build that out.
Chris Lennox: Yeah. Yeah. No, appreciate that. Well, it doesn't look like there's any more questions. So I think we will draw this presentation to a close. Stacey-Ann, thank you very much for your time. And yeah, for taking a second stab at this I appreciate it's been I think a couple of times that we've had to do this, but we made it happen. So thank you very much for your time. And as I said, with this will be posted out soon and I'll make sure to put in your slides there as well as the the Activate links, if people want to get a hold of that.
Stacey-Ann Pearson: Sounds great. Thanks so much, Chris. Thanks so much, Sam.
Chris Lennox: Awesome. Cool. Cheers.