Nile Natsheh - Innovating at the Speed of Web3 with AWS - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2025

The sheer amount of brain power, web 3 brain power in the room today is um is truly next level. And I hope that by the end of my talk, I'm able to equip you with some more knowledge in your likely already vast repertoire of web 3 information and whatnot. My name is Nile Nache. I'm a global web 3 lead with Amazon Web Services. I work with customers large and small up and cominging startups to the largest enterprises building in the space both web 3 native companies as well as uh larger traditional financial institutes and just enterprises non-web3 companies in general.

Today is home to the most recognizable companies in the web 3 space. We have crypto exchanges, DeFi protocols, wallet and custody providers, node operators, and the list goes on and on and on. When I think of these logos up on the big screen or when I think of Amazon or any of the companies that you represent in the audience, one thing that holds true is that at some point these all started as either seemingly simple ideas like selling books on an online bookstore in the case of Amazon or radical ideas like creating a completely new asset class, redefining the internet and bringing billions of people into the fold of this new digital economy. And those ideas, many of them were painstakingly taken through the process of going from zero to one. And many of them have flourished and they've become household names.

They've become multi-billion and even trillion dollar companies. But more importantly, many of them have transformed how we live our everyday lives. And they've added numerous benefits to our to our lives as well. This includes commerce and being able to receive goods at our doorsteps within matter of minutes or hours to being able to send money to loved ones overseas in all corners of the world regardless of the financial infrastructure in these different regions. And there's much more that Web 3 is able to unlock for humanity.

Now, at AWS, we recognize that building web 3 products is complex. So, for those early innovators that entered the space many years ago, they had a pretty heavy lift. Building with decentralized technologies, it requires leveraging several core components from blockchain networks to data and analytic providers or solutions, wallet and custody. You have to think of digital asset issuance and more. And each one of these core components, they come with several considerations and requirements that one has to make and that one has to fulfill.

If we take blockchain networks for example, do you plan on deploying on a layer 1 network, a layer 2 network? Perhaps you're thinking of deploying your own network or maybe you'll deploy on multiple networks. And if that's a path you decide on taking, how are you thinking of interoperability? For wallets, are you thinking custodial or non-custodial? multi-party compute wallet, smart contract wallet, and the list goes on and on and on.

And there's many of these requirements, and there's many core components that one has to deal with. Now, the good news is we are now starting to move faster than ever. Over the past couple of years, I've had the privilege of participating and hosting several developer enablement events, hackathons, uh, workshops, developer days, and more. Um, and this is of course in collaboration with some of those really large names that I had up on the screen, the Coinbases and the chain links of the world. And one thing that I've noticed is what used to take months if not years of research and development to build has now shrunk and we're now able to build things within matter of months if not days.

And in some cases the projects that I've seen developers turn out from these hackathons they've been absolutely incredible. um in some cases uh seemingly in in disicable from magic. So how do we do this? At AWS, we provide the building blocks that makes it easy to bring web3 solutions from 0 to one. And we do this across three major pillars.

We have fully managed services. We have do-it-yourself web3 solutions and we also have a large amount of partner web3 solutions available through our marketplace by leading web3 names who are part of the Amazon partner network. So I'll quickly take a moment to walk through each one of these pillars to provide you a little more color. As many of you are likely aware, at Amazon Web Services, we have over 200 fully managed services available. And many of you are probably familiar with our core compute and storage and networking services.

In addition to that, we have several of these services that are highly relevant to the web 3 space. In particular, our AWS key management service and Nitro Enclaves are two examples of a service as well as an EC2 feature or capability that's leveraged heavily by wallet and custody providers. Key management service for the secure management deployment of secure uh or of uh keys, cryptographic keys. And as we all know cryptographic keys is the foundation of wallets public and private keys. Nitro enclaves is a feature that provides isolated compute environment and it keeps data secure not just in rest or in transit but while sensitive data is in use.

And towards the right hand side we also have several artificial intelligence related services. Our flagship service is called Amazon Bedrock which provides developers access to leading foundational models provided by the likes of Anthropic Ma. We also have Amazon's very own family of Nova models which is a multimodal um family of LLMs uh video as well as image models and these can be leveraged for creating all sorts of applications at the intersection of web 3 and artificial intelligence from being able to use natural language to query blockchain data to being able to create autonomous trading agents and more. Moving along to our second pillar, do-it-yourself web3 solutions. At AWS, we're constantly coming out with various blueprints, reference architectures, and best practices that showcases how to go about building various web 3 core components.

So that slide with the squiggly line and those core components, wallets, data and analytics and all that stuff. We have a vast amount of technical documentation, blueprints and more that again enables our developers to move quickly. I'll take a moment to talk about two of our larger programs to date. AWS blockchain node runners as well as our AWS public blockchain data program. So let's go ahead and look at AWS blockchain node runners.

We kicked off this effort back in 2024 with a goal of making it easy for developers to stand up blockchain nodes within their own AWS accounts by providing deployable blueprints. These are blueprints which are available in the form of Amazon cloud development kit templates. And as of today, we support 14 leading blockchain networks. For those of you who recognize those logos, you're probably noticing that this is a blend of layer 1 networks, layer 2 networks, and we also have blueprints available for private permission networks as well, like Hyperledger, Basu. That QR code will take you directly to a GitHub repo where you'll be able to uh leverage these blueprints if you're in the development space.

Now, moving over to our AWS public blockchain data program, what we're doing is at AWS, we are providing free access to fully indexed blockchain data across leading networks. the networks you see up on the screen. As some of you know, working with blockchain data can be difficult. Raw blockchain data is inherently unstructured. It's not index.

It's pretty difficult to uh to leverage for building various use cases whether it's a portfolio tracker, whether it's a DeFi application and more. So at AWS what we're doing is AWS ourselves as well as select third-party data providers in addition to select blockchain foundations we are providing free access to data sets so that our developers can easily acquire data to then use with downstream data and analytics services that AWS provides for example Athena or Glue or Amazon Quicksite. We recently just a couple days ago added the Kronos data set. Kronos has been making headlines in the news. So that data set is now officially live.

Um if you go to the QR code that's up on the screen, it'll take you directly to our registry of open data and pretty soon we'll continue expanding this program and we'll have many many more networks available. Now, last but not least, at AWS, we have several partner solutions available through the AWS marketplace and through providers that have onboarded into the Amazon web services partner network. We have providers across many different verticals from blockchain infrastructure, meaning managed node providers as well as rollup as a service providers. For those of you who are perhaps interested in launching your own chain, uh we have Caldera as one of the the leading rollup as a service providers who has recently onboarded into our marketplace and through the Amazon partner network. We have several wallet and custody solution providers available as well.

Fireblocks for larger institutions that are looking to custody their assets in a safe and secure manner. Uh for developers who are looking for a wallet solution that's more embedded and behind the scenes, we have Magic and we of course support Circle and we have many other uh wallet and custody providers in addition to these. From a data and analytics standpoint, we have Chain Link, we have Dune, Goldsky and several other names available as well for querying blockchain data, getting access to fully indexed data sets and more.