Austin rolled out the red carpet to blockchain innovators on the eve of South by Southwest by announcing a series of new initiatives aimed at making the city a national leader in Web3 technologies.
At a March 10 news conference on the sun-drenched patio of The Long Center, Mayor Steve Adler and a handful of tech and civic leaders announced that the city is beginning to investigate wider acceptance of cryptocurrencies, the launch of an Austin-based crypto coin and a startup accelerator designed to encourage diverse entrepreneurs to build businesses oriented around Web3 — a third iteration of the web based on decentralized blockchain tech.
“In Austin we are thinking big and bold and want to live up to the moniker of being the city where good ideas go to become real,” Adler said.
City Hall has developed two resolutions that will be discussed at the next Austin City Council meeting dealing with cryptocurrencies and Web3. One resolution calls for the city manager to investigate ways it could accept cryptocurrencies as payments and other applications. The other encourages the city to become a leader in Web3 technologies and explore ways to support blockchain-based innovations.
Success will be measured on the development of new technologies and applications that improve people’s everyday lives, Adler said. He acknowledged that many of the big tech institutions we have today have lacked diversity, and he and other leaders at the event said they believe Web3 is an opportunity to avoid mistakes of the past and build generational wealth for many who didn’t previously have access.
“Shame on us,” Adler said. “More than that, if we don’t develop new technologies and new systems in a way that provides equal access to everybody, that provide opportunity for everyone.”
Adler pointed to the city’s use of blockchain to provide easy access to medical records for people experiencing homelessness last year as an example of how new technologies can have a broad reach.
Aside from the City Hall initiatives, nonprofit startup accelerator DivInc will launch a Web3 accelerator program in August, with applications opening in June. The program will seek diverse applicants, as DivInc has done in its prior accelerator cohorts, and provide experienced mentors to help those startups get the funding and exposure they need.
“Web3 and its related technologies … all lend themselves to a tremendous and unique opportunity to make significant progress [toward diversity in tech],” DivInc CEO Preston James said.
Meanwhile, Capital Factory is partnering with open source blockchain platform Stacks on a startup challenge that will culminate with one company winning a $100,000 investment.
Capital Factory founder Joshua Baer said blockchain technology removes some of the legacy barriers in tech.
“One of the biggest promises of blockchain and distributed technologies is that it decentralizes it, which means it breaks down the gatekeepers and opens it up to a whole bunch more people,” he said.
Baer pointed to Royal.io, which has a platform that allows fans to purchase rights to songs, which can provide income for both the buyer and the artists.
“It’s part of this whole cycle of eliminating a whole bunch of middlemen that puts the creators in control and allows the people everywhere who are making things, who are already distributed and already much more diverse, to be the ones who benefit from it,” he said. “And also allow them to be the investors, to be the ones who are creating generational wealth out of being part of it.”
