Gemini Trust Co. LLC, the cryptocurrency exchange built by the Winklevoss twins, today announced the launch of Superlunar, a Web3 research and design studio that will focus on building decentralized technology applications and enabling the next generation of developers.

Web3, referred to as the decentralized web, is built atop blockchain technology and allows the development of peer-to-peer apps and token economies where financial transactions can happen without the need for centralized governance or intermediaries. It can also be used to oversee supply chains, provide decentralized identity, secure social media, provide provenance for documents and more.

As an industry, Web3 is still in its infancy, which means that developers are still building tools and primitive protocols to solve simple problems that can be mixed and matched together to make services. The objective of Superlunar is to help cut through the jargon and the complexity of the industry and help developers see the bigger picture and begin to carve out the promise of Web3.

“Out of the gate, we want to make sure that there is tooling, infrastructure and services for builders,” Rich Smith, chief technology officer at Superlunar, told SiliconANGLE in an interview. “I think it’s fair to say that there are many promises to Web3, but we’re incredibly early in the space and we’ve still got a long way to go before we can build a lot in terms of user value — for example, experiences that people can have in Web3 that they can’t have in Web2.”

To do this, he said, first there need to be a lot of users of Web3 technology and a lot of developers as well. That bar has already been set by Web 2.0, which already has millions of developers working on projects and is a thriving industry.

Most importantly, Smith said that he doesn’t believe that he thinks that everything will become decentralized. He believes that Superlunar’s benefit for developers as a design studio will be to provide tools and services that will be to Web3 develop tools that iterate on top of Web2. For example, a decentralized identity service could allow people to use Web3 cryptographic keys to control their own identity and authentication without the need for Web 2.0 services such as Google or Facebook for single sign-on for numerous Web 2.0 websites.

“We don’t really believe that Web3 is going to replace Web2,” Smith said. “What we’re calling Web3 is an iteration — it’s an addition. What we’re going to be doing is taking those useful properties of the blockchain, unlocking them and bringing them into people’s everyday technical workstreams and everyday technology lives, which right now is the browser.”

Superlunar means “beyond the moon,” which seems like a tongue-in-cheek reference to a meme from the cryptocurrency community “to the moon!” used to refer to when a currency’s value skyrockets. But Smith explained that it’s more about being “beyond a moonshot.” The goal of Superlunar isn’t just to build great products on its own but to share products and innovations with the entire community and thus boost the value of all Web3 apps.

To make this happen Superlunar will be assisting the industry with its group of researchers who will focus on developing tools, apps, and services and contribute to open-source Web3 technology. The objective will be to expand the current knowledge of the Web3 standards. The company also has a dedicated fund to further that mission that it can use to provide grants and sponsorships to individuals working on projects and programs related to Web3 and blockchain technology.

“Dedicated innovation efforts like Superlunar allow us to see deep into the horizon,” said Superlunar Chief Executive Beth Kurteson. “This will position us to identify, build and respond to opportunities with the speed required in our ever-evolving industry.”

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