It’s shaping up as a huge year for tech companies in 2022. Over recent weeks, Facebook has run into problems after the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call revealed its metaverse aspirations had caused a $10 billion hit to the bottom line. It’s hardly surprising given the lukewarm reception to its sanitized, centralized VR work meetings.
The fact that Microsoft is being challenged by Shareholders is certain to cause concern. Microsoft has been a dominant player in Office applications including the Teams app and now plans on creating its own metaverse capabilities for enterprise.
However, this approach – to attempt to create a digital metaverse that will somehow upgrade or replace our time spent online is an odd one. Consider the completely different strategies taken by Amazon, Google, and others. The most recent news from the Google camp is that the firm is hiring a “legion” of blockchain experts to help expand its business in blockchain applications.
Google’s idea seems to be to play alongside the players in the established blockchain space, an approach that has been in evidence in various moves over recent years. The firm demonstrated how Chainlink Oracles could be used by developers to transform its BigQuery data into Blockchain smart contracts in 2019. Chainlink was able to rise up the ranks of top crypto projects thanks to this move.
The firm teamed up with Dapper Labs last year to create the NBA Top Shots. The collaboration was for Dapper Labs to use Google’s world-beating infrastructure to help scale and support the growth of the Flow blockchain, which Dapper Labs develops.
Google and Amazon Offer Support for Meta Development
Google’s approach is similar to Amazon’s. The firm’s AWS infrastructure is widely deployed by node operators on blockchain networks. One analyst at Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto-investing arm recently commented on this fact. pointed out that “Amazon is doing more for the metaverse via node hosting than “Meta” or Microsoft will ever accomplish’ [sic].
It’s beyond question that blockchains and blockchain applications are more powerful with the backing of big tech firms. They not only have an abundance of resources, both in infrastructure and investment but they have unrivalled access to data which could greatly enhance blockchain capabilities.
Chainlink was a key partner in the tie-in. Google’s willingness to engage with Chainlink as a middleware oracle provider demonstrated how a smart contract could receive price data from Google’s own BigQuery database. By 2021, DeFi was a booming market, powered in no small part by Chainlink’s decentralized price oracles, and the project now boasts national telecoms firms Swisscom and Deutsche Telekom among its node operating network.
AI on the Chain
What other projects can take advantage of this type of success? While there’s currently much hype around metaverse-type projects and NFT drops, it’s more difficult to drum up excitement about infrastructural developments. Oraichain, however is bringing AI into the blockchain arena. Oraichain provides a comparable service to other oracles, but with a focus on AI APIs and the quality of AI models – a kind of layer one for AI-based services and dApps.
Oraichain is now live and its Data Hub function for AI providers has been activated. Data Hub, a platform that focuses on data, offers individuals and companies a data marketplace and cloud services. It also provides data request and labeling.
Oraichain operates as part Cosmos in an interoperable and collaborative environment. It provides a bridge function to other blockchains, such as Ethereum or BSC. Oraichain brings AI capabilities to the blockchain and can support many AI uses, such as DeFi, manufacturing and healthcare.
The way things are looking, there seem to be two scenarios. In an attempt to win the supremacy of the user acquisition battles, Facebook and Microsoft will be going head-tohead with the Web3 decentralized ecosystem. Google and Amazon, however, are working together with node operator and infrastructure developers in order to establish a solid foundation of data that will support the next generation.