Customer Stories / Software & Internet

Numbers Protocol Builds a Photo Network to Drive the Web3 Creator Economy with AWS
Numbers Protocol transformed how it scaled its trusted network of digital images using Amazon EC2, Amazon CloudFront, and Amazon Aurora, offering customers a low-latency, highly flexible service while controlling costs.
8 million
Scaled to support over 8 million API calls within hours
30,000
Supported peak in photo access requests with low latency
72%
lower latency, increasing user access speed for digital assets
80%
Reduced administrative time to focus on development
60%
lesser operational expenses while ensuring growth
Overview
Numbers Protocol is creating a network that assures the provenance of digital media to protect copyright and authenticity. To support data growth, Numbers migrated from an on-premises infrastructure to AWS.
The company runs on Amazon EC2 with Amazon S3 for image storage, and uses Amazon CloudFront as a high-speed content delivery network and Amazon Aurora for high availability. With AWS, the company can better manage costs while meeting the growing demand to register and access traceable, verifiable digital media.
Opportunity | Supporting an Increase in Provenance Data for Digital Images
With the rapid growth of digital media, tracking and verifying the ownership of images has become a critical issue for content creators. Approximately 2.5 billion images are used commercially each day without their creators being compensated. Taiwan-based Numbers Protocol (Numbers), a company specializing in digital media traceability, believes that verifying ownership could offer creators a chance at compensation.
To facilitate this, Numbers developed a platform to make digital media traceable and verifiable. The company built a decentralized network of photos, each with its own provenance, and tools for registering and retrieving media. It also created software-as-a-service (SaaS) products, including a blockchain-based mobile app called Capture App to secure photo provenance and a Numbers Search Engine to track down images with digital identifiers, such as non-fungible tokens (NFTs), attached.
Initially, tasks like ingesting, storing, analyzing, and serving data for the network, tools, and SaaS products ran from an on-premises data center. However, within 20 months of launching, its platform registered over 83 million assets—including photos, videos, music, and documents—on the Numbers network, leading to a surge in data volume and variety. This growth led to significant increases in the cost and complexity of scaling and maintaining its infrastructure.

With AWS, we can prioritize establishing a transparent, fair, and authentic ecosystem for digital media that ensures accountability and the safe and secure use of data and artificial intelligence.
Sofia Yan
Cofounder and Chief Growth Officer, Numbers Protocol
Solution | Delivering High Volumes of Authenticated Media
Numbers decided to move to Amazon Web Services (AWS). To manage growing data volumes and control costs, the company migrated its Linux-based servers to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for storing images.
By adopting Amazon CloudFront as a high-speed content delivery network, Numbers reduced latency by 72 percent, increasing the speed of user access for digital assets in Capture App by 65 percent. Sofia Yan, cofounder and chief growth officer at Numbers Protocol, says, “Prior to using AWS, we could only handle less than 3,000 access requests per day. However, with Amazon CloudFront, we've been able to serve an average of 13,000 daily access requests with low latency, even peaking at over 30,000.”
Numbers also leveraged Amazon Aurora to support its Numbers API, which is used to register media and access content on the Numbers Protocol photo network. Comments Yan, “It was remarkable to witness our AWS-based platform handle over eight million API calls within hours during a global campaign launch.” By adopting AWS, Numbers achieved an 80 percent reduction in administrative time, shifting more focus towards development, and experienced a 60 percent decrease in operating costs.
Outcome | Supporting the Evolution of the Web3 Creator Economy
As Numbers manages an ever-expanding data set, running on AWS helps it empower a diverse range of industries—from music to automotive—to embed crucial information into digital assets. Additionally, it supports the Web3 creator economy by helping creators protect their intellectual property and encouraging them to publish their work independently. Numbers’ commitment to innovation was recently recognized at the 15th South by Southwest (SXSW) Pitch—a competition which showcases innovative new technology to industry experts, high-profile media professionals, venture capital investors, and angel investors—where Numbers emerged as the first-place winner in the Metaverse and Web3 category.
However, Numbers’ technology extends beyond these areas. The company also offers the creative industry a means to settle disputes over the authorship of artificial intelligence (AI)-produced content. “Using the blockchain system, we can authenticate AI-generated content, ensuring clear records of creation and recognition for those training AI models,” says Yan. Furthermore, Numbers is currently playing a vital role in preserving history and supporting important causes, such as cataloguing and preserving evidence of war crimes. “With AWS, we can prioritize establishing a transparent, fair, and authentic ecosystem for digital media that ensures accountability and the safe and secure use of data and artificial intelligence,” Yan concludes.
About Numbers Protocol
Headquartered in Taipei, Numbers Protocol is designing solutions to help prove the ownership, copyright, and verifiability of digital assets. The company is helping establish an authentic, secure, and decentralized photo network for Web3.
AWS Services Used
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
Secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload.
Amazon Simple Storage Service
Object storage built to retrieve any amount of data from anywhere.
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Amazon CloudFront
Securely deliver content with low latency and high transfer speeds.
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Amazon Aurora
Performance and availability of commercial databases with cost-effectiveness of open-source databases.
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