ZEW Uses AWS for Transparent Crowdsourced Funding of Global Sustainability Projects

ZEW was founded in Portugal in 2021 and aims to promote more active contribution to solving environmental and social issues worldwide. It partners with local foundations and nongovernmental organizations that have proven track records and need more funding to achieve their goals.

For its crowdsourcing solution, ZEW envisioned an innovative, game-like experience, where social projects would be “missions” and people would be encouraged to stay engaged with these causes. The solution needed global reach to support ongoing projects, transparency to provide donors with insight into what their donations help achieve, and scalability to support increasing engagement. In addition to being essential for donors, transparency helps ZEW attract celebrities and global brands—and, in turn, their followers—to increase the level of engagement with the missions that it supports. To meet these needs, ZEW chose to build its solution natively on AWS.

ZEW embraced cloud computing because of its sustainability benefits. According to 451 Research, AWS infrastructure is up to five times more energy efficient than the average European data center, and moving on-premises workloads to AWS can lower carbon emissions by up to 80 percent. So ZEW reduces carbon emissions by using AWS.

To improve transparency in how donations are used compared with the standard practice for social improvement projects, ZEW uses Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (Amazon QLDB), a fully managed ledger database that provides a transparent, immutable, and cryptographically verifiable transaction log. ZEW will use Amazon QLDB to record all financial transactions in virtual wallets and maintain a sequenced history of every change in application data.

ZEW also uses AWS Fargate, a serverless, pay-as-you-go compute engine, to build applications without managing servers and run its microservices architecture in a containerized way. Using the pay-as-you-go pricing model, ZEW optimizes its costs, and the company received credits from AWS to have the necessary resources to build its solution. ZEW estimates that building on the cloud will result in 40 percent lower infrastructure costs.

ZEW plans to launch its solution and begin supporting global projects by 2024. It also plans to use AWS services that employ artificial intelligence and business information so that donors can better see the impact of their donations and the donation experience can be more personalized. ZEW also intends to use AWS for video-streaming solutions in the field to create an immersive experience for donors during missions.

“Going forward, we know that AWS has a variety of services that will be must-haves for our solution,” says Hugo Ortiz, founder of ZEW. “We want to use our business information to help donors see the impact that they are making.”