Vercel's CEO pose with a criminal on INTERPOL's red notice

Vercel is facing a major controversy after its CEO posted a selfie with Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu. Employee resignations and cancelled contracts have hounded the project ever since.

This firestorm could hamper the company’s fledgling efforts to integrate with the Web3 sector. Its competitors have already gone viral, with strong condemnations and tutorials on abandoning Vercel’s infrastructure.

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Vercel CEO Meets Netanyahu

Vercel, an American AI and cloud services company, is not a huge presence in the Web3 space, but it has made important inroads recently.

For example, it partnered with Ledger to implement new traffic solutions, built wallet managers on Coinbase’s infrastructure, and powered some SUI-based NFT marketplaces in the last year alone.

However, this expansion may stop in its tracks soon, as Vercel is in a firestorm of controversy after its CEO had a meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu.

The meeting, which took place in New York, involved a discussion on AI and a selfie that has since gone viral.

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The Israeli Prime Minister, a wanted man by the International Criminal Court and genocide suspect, has already caused Vercel a lot of problems with this meeting.

Within hours of the CEO’s post, employees began resigning, and numerous projects have vowed to cancel their enterprise contracts.

To be fair, Netanyahu does still have supporters, and the incident may not completely lead to Vercel’s ostracism. For example, one Coinbase engineer praised the gesture, but his views do not reflect the company’s official position.

In any event, this engineer also faced intense backlash afterward.

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As the controversy continues, some competing AI protocols may have the opportunity to capitalize on the moment. A few independent developers have created advice on migrating extant projects away from Vercel infrastructure, but some companies are taking it even further.

New Opportunities and Lessons Learned

Amjad Masad, CEO of Replit, another AI developer and hosting platform, took great offense to the selfie. The leader of this Vercel competitor called Netanyahu “Satan in the depths of hell,” and posted an in-depth tutorial on relocating active projects to Replit:

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This tutorial went viral, with secondhand shares receiving over 300,000 views. In other words, AI competitors like Replit may use this controversy to capture a significant amount of interest in Vercel.

To be fair, Replit is not particularly well-integrated with Web3 either, but the opportunity is wide open. Cloudflare, another hosting competitor, has made crypto/AI partnerships in the last week alone, and some Vercel clients have already switched to it.

This Netanyahu selfie incident could hamstring Vercel’s ability to grow in the Web3 sector.

Moreover, this maelstrom of controversy is very instructive on other levels. Some blockchain firms have expressed interest in collaborating with Israel’s genocide and participating in a shocking Gaza land tokenization plan, but there aren’t any firm commitments yet.

If this incident can show the crypto community anything, there’s a lot of brewing hostility toward this issue. Large-scale partnerships in any side of the political spectrum could significantly damage a company’s reputation and profits.

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