Saving Web3 Protocols from the fate of Web2 Companies with Maggie Love

This talk will focus on showcasing the challenges of relying on centralized cloud providers, and the promise of decentralized cloud infrastructure for protocols. It will have charts, numbers and analysis to back up all claims. It's important that Web3 protocols are not just decentralized in name but decentralized in infrastructure for costs, resiliency and performance. Summary below: Cloud is one of the greatest shifts in the history of computing. For the first time in history, organizations didn’t have to deal with the technical burden and costs of running their own infrastructure. Instead, they could rely entirely on a cloud that offered infrastructure on-demand, at any scale, to organizations of any size, driving efficiencies and economics. The cloud industry is growing rapidly growing rapidly on a base of over $100B of annual public cloud spend. Yet, what started out as the most efficient and economical way to scale has become the largest area of spend for many Web2, and dare I say Web3 companies operating at scale. We will get to Web3, but first, focusing on Web2. The longterm cost implications of shifting entirely to cloud is costing Web2 companies billions of dollars each year. “Across 50 of the top public software companies, an estimated $100B of market value is being lost among them due to cloud impact on margins.” a16z. They could be saving billions of dollars they had run their own infrastructure or taken a hybrid approach to their infrastructure. Not only is it a challenge when it comes to costs, but these organizations get cloud vendor lock-in, and it’s difficult to move their tech stack or start from scratch once they’ve reached scale. Web3 protocols are in their early days, and the decisions they make when it comes to infrastructure is critical. Many protocols today are dealing with the same challenges that Web2 companies face with large cloud providers, and they are looking for ways to decentralize while they try to scale or die. There are challenges with operating costs, lock-in and an inability to operate efficiently with the hardware that cloud providers offer. Web3 protocols and their infrastructure ecosystem (node runners, operators, shakers, future zk provers, etc.) have to consider not only the short term ease of spinning up on a cloud provider, but the longterm implications for their protocol. This talk will start off by covering the above, and then it will go into an analysis of different infrastructure options and their associated challenges, benefits, costs. In contrast to the centralized cloud providers Web2 companies and many Web3 companies rely on to start running infrastructure, there is are infrastructure options that are decentralized, align with the values of Web3 while saving protocols money now and in the future. This will not highlight any specific Web3 company -- just compare and contrast data and analysis of different infrastructure options. Maggie Love