>> Announcer: Live from Nassau in the Bahamas. It's the Cube! Covering Polycon 18. Brought to you by Polymath. >> Hello everyone. Welcome to a special exclusive cube conversation here in the Bahamas for Polycon 18. It's a cryptography, cryptocurrency I should say, show with blockchain. It's a great event. It's brought securities tokens and token economics, the value economy that's changing the world is certainly in play. It's the beginning of a massive wave that's coming. We've reported on the Cube and SiliconANGLE before. We're here with the co-founder of Ethereum and the CEO of Decentral and also maker of Jaxx. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having me. >> So we've been covering a lot of emerging waves and I got to say that I've seen some waves in my days but this one's a tsunami. You can see the water pulling out and you see the exposed clams and crabs out there. A complete shift of value, data, users, decentralized impacts of business models to industries. I mean it's just mind-blowing and it's intoxicating. But a new community is evolving. I mean it reminds me of the early days of the personal computer combined with all the inter-networking and the internet kind of rolled up into one massive shift. How do you see it from your perspective being on the inner core of this community? What's your take? >> Definitely the biggest thing of those things that you mentioned is yeah the tsunami. We started with information, when the internet was started, ways to be able to move information globally. Disrupting everything to do with publishing companies, with postal service, anything to do with information transfer. And I've been around since the BBS days, way back there before the internet even came about. So when the internet came about it was my first instinct and I'm like, "Wow. This is going to just change the way information moves." And then when I got into this in 2012 into the crypto-space, into bitcoin at the time, I'm like, "Wow this is beyond the internet. This is value transfer now without needing intermediaries and the disruption that's going to happen is going to just completely change finance, the way that currencies are handled." It's going to touch every single sector. So this is much bigger and it's bigger because the everyday person can get involved with it. >> You know one of the things that we were just commenting this show, Polycon 18 put on by Polymath which makes a securities token model for companies to use, sets up kind of a growth and funding model. We're going to talk more about that in our live feed. But I noticed a lot of Canadians are here. Besides having ice hockey, one of my favorite sports being from the east coast in the U.S., I remember in the 80s a lot of PKI stuff being done in Canada. A lot of really important cryptography work was done in Canada. There's a lot of amazing computer science programs in Canada. There's a lot of progressive things going on in Canada. Can you share your thoughts on that? >> Sure. >> Because I think you're starting to see that wave coming down. I won't call it a cold spell, I'll call it like innovation spell coming from the north and into the U.S. and then all around the world. >> Yeah it's a real disproportionate amount of Canadians in this whole scene which is really interesting. I was at an event called the Satoshi Roundtable about a month ago in Cancun. And it was about 20% were actually from Canada and this was a global event. And what I think it is is a community basis. In 2012 I showed the Toronto Bitcoin Meetup Group. And that was like what are we like six years ago. And the amount of people that have come through Decentral and come through the meetup group that we started, started just sparking so many different things. That's where Ethereum came from. Polymath from Toronto here. Trevor and I go back, way back to 2012. So I think it's a matter of the community being built that really early on in Toronto and Canada that have led to the spark of what's going on. And now with things like the public markets and the way Canada is is kind of being a good fertile ground for companies actually going live on different-- the TSX in Canada. And that's helping to facilitate things. So ton of talent, ton of amazing things that I think hopefully Canada can prove itself to be the global headquarters. However, there's also regulatory things. Since you have a lot of Canadian companies that are saying we're going to set up offshore because we don't know how Canada is treating things. That's also a counterbalance. But in general there's tons of good things coming out from Canada and from Toronto. >> You know we were early on the cloud wave going back to 2000, you know late 2000s. And now you're starting to see with cloud computing some visibility. I'll see Amazon web services kicking ass and they're just blowing away their numbers. But you're seeing kind of a clear visibility between infrastructure as a service and sass. And just to kind of use a metaphor for kind of what's going on here is the whole platform as a service never happened. So you got infrastructure and you got application. So this community is emerging. It's still small, it's growing, it's dynamic, it's robust. Very intimate. But there's some things going on at the infrastructure level that are super important. And there's certainly a tsunami of new kinds of software developers coming in. So comment on those two things because you know it's kind of moving train is happening in parallel at the same time. >> Definitely. >> Can you share some color on the dynamics between the infrastructure progress and innovation and speed scale, tech, and then the tsunami of these decentralized application developers which are coming in from 13-year-olds to 65 and older. I mean across the gamut. >> We're building infrastructure. That's what it's about. I've always had a very long-term thing with everything whether I invest in things or-- I'm super long-term in the whole space. So 2012 everything was bitcoin for me. 2013, started developing wallets. I realized that the wallets is the browser for value transfer. You got the internet browser, that's what moves information. Now we're in the age of value and then the wallets is what enables people to manage and move digital assets. So I started building wallets for bitcoin. When we started Ethereum I'm like, "Okay there's beyond bitcoin now." Started Ethereum. Did that for about a year and then went back to building the interface, the actual platform for all these technologies to be able to utilize to manage and move digital assets. So that's what I focus on is the infrastructure play of connecting to all these blockchains and providing the user experience to be able that the masses like my dad to be able to actually have the browser moment. Like, "Oh, now I know what I can do with this." And that's what's been missing and that's what I've been focusing on. And then in there is where you have the apps start getting built on to stuff. So that's always been my play is to build the single interface for every blockchain, support the entire ecosystem, not focus on one technology because who know what's going to actually live now for a long time. And that's what I'm doing is building that single interface that my dad can use to understand how to move and manage his digital assets, and then partner with companies projects. The Polymaths, the Eons, all these companies from the space that are offering value in different areas and we want to be that single interface that brings it all together. So definitely infrastructure play, but also applications that can be built on top of that infrastructure. >> Yeah I mean infrastructure needs to be enable and you think about the browser, right? I mean the browser created the internet to be usable. And the web was born because of it. And of course HTP protocol. But interesting on the infrastructure side. I fought the wars back in the days you know SNA, Decknet, TCPIP was emerging into the OSI models. I remember you know TCPIP was one those moments-- and people use that as an example. I hear it all the time and you know I even use it here and there. But that created a galvanizing moment where hey we can inter-operate together with the standard stack and not fill all seven layers. But you know it made things happen. The question that people are asking is it's kind of a TCPIP moment in this industry but is there 40 versions of it? Is that an issue? Is that reality? >> I think it's actually-- I always equate it to there being websites. And what I'm doing is I'm building the browser so that actually the websites can actually interact with the technology. So they're focusing on different sectors and they're making different plays in all these different areas that are going to touch with value transfers. And value transfer is amazing. That's what's going to disrupt things beyond information. And then with smart contracts and this thing we did with Ethereum it's like okay this all coming together to touch law, insurance, gaming, all the different sectors are going to be actually changed. I don't want to say disrupted, I don't like that word. But changed and evolved into great amazing things. But these protocols that are being developed are choice and the ones that actually are the ones that are going to create the most amount of value and great user experience were the ones that actually we're going to carry on. So it's amazing to see the amount of competition, the amount of new projects. And the ones that are creating the value is what's going to actually survive. >> And that dog will hunt, basically. >> Yeah. >> Okay the wallet question. Love this simplicity model. What's your vision on the wallet because you could say okay there's multiple wallets, there's a diversity of wallets. I could have a brown wallet, black wallet, leather wallet, all kinds of different wallets. Are you looking at it as a technology enabler that you're doing or is it an actual wallet? Because again what we learned in open source is why build something when someone else already has it? So that's the ethos of most developers. So are you looking at the wallet as saying I'm going to provide a wallet capability end to end or is it base code? >> It's interface. The wallet's the engine. The wallet is what's needed in order to connect with all the different block chains. That's what we've been building over the last two years is actually the infrastructure to connect to all the different blockchains. It's the interface that we built on eight platforms. So you can have a single interface on all the platforms that ties yourself in a with a 12 word key that enables you to derive keys for all the blockchains. So the key system that we offer, the interface to all the connections which is the browser, and then the back end AWS almost like structures to all the different blockchains is our value add to all of our partners. And we're all about driving partner interaction. >> So simplicity's a big part of it. >> Super-- yeah definitely. >> And ease of use. Ease of integration. >> Yeah we need the interface. You can't be using 10 different wallets for all the different things you're trying to manage. So we're trying to create that single interface across all the things it supports and drives the whole community forward. >> Dave Alanta who you just met and I always talk about this all the time. You know it's like you built-- if people want to sell a certain technology a certain way but it reminds me of the gaming industry. There became a market for game engines but that only because someone built a successful game and someone said, "Hey I want a game engine!" You have an engine and I don't want to have to build an engine I'll just use a game engine because someone did it and that became an industry. You can't sell a game engine if there's no gaming. So you have to have an application that might have some core technology. Is that what's happening in the wallet world right now? Are you kind of doing that? >> So for us that's exactly the same way. We build the infrastructure and now we have partners that create apps and tap into our back end. So they don't have to worry about all that stuff. An example is Coinbase. So Coinbase and us came to an agreement last year where we'll start helping them to-- they have a service where you can use your credit card to buy litecoin, bitcoin, and Ethereum. Well inside of Jaxx you'll be able to add that integration, connect them to all the chains. So their users can actually still buy that, but we can flip it using another partner and give them Polymath. That's the thing. It's about creating value with the different apps and we want to be the store that connects all these different apps to the blockchain so they don't have to worry about that. Bitpay is another example. They enable you to pay invoices in bitcoin. But they only want to deal with bitcoin. Well in Jaxx you can pay with any currency. We flip the bitcoin with one of our partners, send them bitcoin, they don't have to worry about all the back end. >> So you're creating inter-operability of money and value. >> And value. Yeah definitely. >> Or-- buy yeah money. Well bit-- you know. Crypto money. >> And the experience that my dad's going to use to understand this whole space. >> They don't have to write code to integrate. The user can just use it. Alright talk about the developer community. What's your advise to developers that are onboard and looking for guidance in navigating through. And people are learning really fast. You're seeing people come into the industry literally with some background that might not be related to tech but have natural math skills, natural coding skills. They're coming in and actually making a difference joining communities. What's your advice to these developers who want to build decentralized applications? >> So there's two separate kind of devs. There's ones that can be really good devs that can be onboarded into the space. They're not working on protocol level stuff. And then there's the devs that actually are working on the protocol stuff. And they're hard to find. They're hard to secure because you need the experience of number of years in order to do that. For us we actually look for good devs that we can bring in and onboard into what we do which not necessarily solving major problems. It's working with protocols that are solving it and integrating those protocols in. So the protocol level is very difficult to find developers right now. So I would suggest as much experience on that is going to be what you can do to get ahead. But in general if you're a good dev don't be scared of the space. And if you're going to align yourself with a company that can help teach you how to get in, that's what we want. We don't actually target blockchain devs. We target good devs, and we let them know-- we don't even advertise blockchain. Because sometimes they go, "Blockchain? I don't have that." But if you get good devs, we can actually teach them on our end. So it's actually-- we did a job fair about a week ago. We had 100 devs come out, pre-qualified devs, that we spent about a month trying to pre-qualify them. They came in, already had the experience. And we had 100 of them come in because they're interested in the space and we marketed as you don't need to know blockchain. Good devs, we'll get you into it. >> You know we was talking last night, we were having some cocktails with some crypto guys and gals and it was funny we talked about two things. And I want to get your thoughts and reaction to both of them. One was latency kills and the other one was women in the ecosystem. This event here has a lot of women on the agenda and so you're seeing a lot of great diversity going on. So what's your reaction? Latency kills and the roll of latency is something to watch and design against. And then the diversity angle. >> Can you first clarify what you mean about latency kills? I'm not sure what you mean by that. >> Yeah in terms of networking. So like for round-trip times, where you have a decentralized network. You're writing to the blockchain. >> Oh you just mean the slowness with decentralized network and how that's been impacting? >> Yeah decentralized networks and people throwing-- >> That's definitely a major issue with just scalability. There's a major issue which will be solved. And that will be solved. I don't really think too much about it except the problem solvers are dealing with that and they will get past to the point where we can use it and scale these technologies globally. And because of the competition with the systems-- >> You're not worried about it. You see it as just a problem space. >> No I try not to worry about anything. This will happen. It's coming. The second thing, I like to look at individuals. So I don't really look at the gender thing with it. It's more about individuals. I don't want to say I'm going to start now focus on encouraging women in the space. It's hopefully they will start taking initiative just like everybody else does. So I tend not to look at the two types of the things. >> Well I bring it up because The New York Times wrote a really negative story about women not being in the space. And I was just pilot lighting that this event, Polycon, that Polymath-- >> But it's just the way it is. And why even think about it. It's just it is what it is. >> I hope we won't have to have these conversations anymore. >> We want the best of the best people and I've got a number of girls that work for me and they're fantastic. But I don't necessarily head a job and say, "Well we got to bring in more women to do this." That doesn't make any sense. >> And that conversation should be just assumed. Alright so I want to get your thoughts on what you're working on. What are you working on right now? You got your company, you've done some great things. We know the Ethereum story and that's continued to evolve in a great way. Attractive to developers. And I saw Charlie up on a panel in with Bill Tye in Dubai and really commenting on he's long on Ethereum. He thinks he said it's going to be more valuable than bitcoin. Little haymaker for the young gun there on stage. Really important for developers. And you're pioneering with the wallet. What's the key things that you're working on both on the technical product side and on the business front for Decentral. >> So the technical side has been for the last year and a half building the back end infrastructure to be able to support 10 million, 50 million users. We haven't been advertising. We haven't been marketing what we've been doing because we think it's the wrong approach to actually go and try to just look for user growth when your infrastructure's not ready to grow. So our focus has been fully on being able to support 15, 20 million users. We're at about one million right now. All organic without advertising. So if you can't support that why do you want to be advertising? So we've been focusing the last year and a half to ensure that we are scalable and that we can grow when we hit the go button. So this year is all about hitting that go button. It's infrastructure's now in place. We are set to support 10 million users. And now it's the announcement which we did just recently about Jaxx Liberty, which is our new platform Jaxx 2.0. Which is everything you need for the blockchain space. It's your explorer, it's your charts, your graphs, your portfolio, your news directed on what your portfolio is. It's the one browser. You won't be using 10 different browsers to go to different websites. We've always had the goal to create the engine which is the wallet, and then the interface which is the single thing that the masses can use to understand the technology. So our focus is on partnerships into the app store of our products that connects to all the back ends. And basically supporting every company, creating wins for everybody, helping to push every product that actually has value, incentivizing people to create better valuable projects because then you'll get more support from us, and creating wins for everybody. I'm not about Ethereum, I'm not about bitcoin, I'm about the whole ecosystem. >> Yeah. You're about the growth. Rising tide floats all boats. But what's the value proposition that you're offering to partners on the integration? Is it speed to deployment, speed to value, all those things? >> So getting your token inside of Jaxx now gets you on eight platforms. And you don't want to worry about having a wallet for your separate platform. It doesn't make any sense. So what we do is we charge for integrations to come inside of our product, and then we have separate things. That's integration partners, or token partners. Then we have service partners. That's the Bitpays, the Coinbase, the-- all those guys that have apps or have integrations inside where we can expose our users to their services and they pay us. So our proposition to them is more users and more service on a single interface so that we can direct their users. And we don't charge users any more. We get paid through our integration. So think about us being paid for every website visit. >> Yeah. That's good value Okay so now you're going to give a keynote on stage here at the Polymath event called "Polycon 18." What are you going to be talking about? What's the vibe? What's the script? Are you going to wing it? Do you have an agenda? You're laid back, you're cool. Is there a talk format? What are you going to do? >> I never plan anything before I walk up on stage. Literally I like to look at the audience. Any preparation stuff for me doesn't make any sense. So I literally go up on stage and I always wing it from there. So it could be a little bit about just people working together. There's a lot of this versus that mentality. There's the whole thing of if you're not this then you're that. >> It's the if you're not Trump then you're-- I don't like that. I think there's a lot of in between. There's a lot of things that-- it's about working together. It's creating great synergies. Creating things that help the whole thing grow. And we've seen that. Especially a lot of companies in Toronto. There's so many synergistic relationships of gaps being filled in from companies just in Toronto that add value. So Polymath, securities tokens. It was needed. It was something I talked with Trevor about a year ago and he's taken it and flown with it. We support Polymath. But I also invest in other securities platforms as well. tZERO is something that I'm looking to get in. I've got about 45 different projects right now. It's spreading the love. It's saying let's all work together. As long as there's no scamming going on, I'm good. Let's work together, let's all come together. >> You know Anthony I did some checking around on you before the interview and I got to say, you know community. You know open source. You've been around and you've seen the formulas that work. I mean you talk about an open source ethos that's now going totally mainstream. It's not a second (mumbles) by a long shot. That's an old story. This cryptocurrency and blockchain and this new decentralized community has a mission. I've noticed a pattern, right. And you're seeing folks like yourself doing amazing work and pioneering and also the hard work. You're putting the work in. There's a mission. Take a minute to explain what the mission is. Because there are a lot of people that are aligning with this mission globally. Not just on the technical front. You mentioned this diversity and that's a good thing. What is the mission that really brings everyone together? Because that seems to be the magic that's going on here. >> Well I can't speak for other people but for me the mission is to improve life, reduce suffering, create value, create wealth in both knowledge and other things that can enable you to carry out those things. So my end game is improving life. Haven't fully baked out what that's going to be but my step now is to create wealth of value, wealth of knowledge, wealth of resources to be able to then tackle that afterwards. So it's all about-- I don't accept money. I don't take people's money. It's all self-funded. We're about creating value. The fact that I don't have any partners, I can move really quickly and I don't like to take people's money or hold people's money. I want to empower people with a tool. Or at least give them the tools so they can decide whether they want to be empowered or not. And I want to be able to just create stuff that's just going to create amazing value, user experiences, mind-blowing experiences, and just help improve things and drive technology forward. >> You know we align with that. We love that culture. We believe it's a pay it forward world. We've made our business at the Cube on paying it forward. Really appreciate you taking the time to pay it forward with us and share your content here. And I want to say congratulations for all the amazing work you've done. You've worked hard. You've made a great dent in the universe. And it's just getting started so congratulations. >> One of the best interviews I've ever done. Thank you so much. >> Thanks. Appreciate it. Take care. >> Appreciate it.

>> Announcer: Live from Nassau in the Bahamas. It's the Cube, covering Polycon 18. Brought to you by Polymath. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. We're here, live in the Bahamas for Polycon 18. It's the Cube's exclusive coverage for day one, wrapping up the segment here. I'm John Furrier with my coach Dave Vellante, co-founder with me at SiliconANGLE media at the Cube. Our guest wrap-up, old co-host. Anthony Di Iorio, co-founder of Ethereum also CEO of Jaxx and Decentral. We had a great chat yesterday. Welcome to joining our wrap-up for day one. >> Thanks for having me on again. >> Yeah, we do live this time. >> Alright that's a lot better. >> Kay, got it, genies out of the bottle on everything so we had bloopers on the last segment, little water break but on serious note, Dave and I want to wrap up the show. We do this every time. Day one, a lot of excitement from the panels. People in the hallway were buzzing, people doing deals. A lot of intimate conversations, Dave we see this early on at these shows. Anthony you've been out hallways, in sessions, talking to people in meetings, getting things done. What's the day one wrap-up for you like? What's happened here? >> So I'm a little bit different at events, I don't attend many of the sessions, I never have. This is more of a way for me to connect with people that I haven't seen for a while. I try not to do too many conferences anymore. I've been doing this for six years now, in the Blockchain space and I realized a couple years ago, it's really about focusing on what I need to do. So this was a little bit different. I did the keynote here yesterday and I'd asked if I could send my hologram instead but they're like, no, you got to come. We can't do that. So generally at my conferences, I don't really do many of the sessions. I'm, you know, just chilling out and kind of use them as vacation times too but it has been pretty busy. It has been good, I've had a number of meetings and yeah it's quite a good buzz. >> What are some of the things you're talking with your friends and colleagues and partners in the business and the industry? Is it tech? You talking tech, you talking personal? What are some of the things going on here? Because these events have a mishmash of all that. >> Yeah, I try to keep them both ways. There's business and personal stuff. I think, business I'm just going to get drained too much and it's nice to make things a little bit lighter. A lot of my meetings have been with people that are, they're looking to know what's going on. People, you know think about security tokens now and it's a change from the traditional utility tokens and it's a lot of just trying to pick my brain about what's happening, what am I seeing, what am I investigating, what are the different things that I'm looking for. It's that. Meeting people that I haven't been able to connect with for a while which is always good. Aligning other events and things coming up and then also spending quite a bit of day by the pool and catching up on emails. You got to make sure you do that stuff. >> Good, I wish I could have been there. We're doing interviews all day but we're doing whatever it takes get the videos out there. We had some interesting guests on, We'll get your reaction to. We had Hartej Sawhney who's, Oshi.io, co-founder, they do audits on smart contracts. >> Yeah. >> And some other folks. But the general observation, I don't think he said this but he was kind of validating and other things that Ethereum is by far the most developer-oriented chain. It has a lot more traction and smart contracts are getting better and better. We've been trying to get, kind of an answer, just kind of order-of-magnitude relevant to developer communities, what is a ballpark order-of-magnitude percentage in your mind of developers on the platforms? Is it is the Ethereum the largest? >> Yeah I'd say so, it was really interesting. We were really good at setting up the communities and we really were focused on devs. There was a lot of setup in the initial structures that was more business oriented but after the crowd sale, everything was down to developers building up communities because that's what we needed. People to actually develop on the platform. >> John: Yeah, of course. >> And Ethereum just had a way, I think it's mostly because of Italic, because of Gavin. They just was a developer project and I think that's what attracted a lot of the people to start building smart contracts, building things on it. And yeah, it's tough to raise the community with developers and I think a Ethereum has done a super job of that and it really is is that developer focus. I mean their event is DevCon right? Or the event is for developers. That's what they're focused on, on their massive conferences that they do. It's all for the developers. So that's definitely been the focus for them. >> It's still tons of upside right? I mean, you said yesterday, that you really don't look for Blockchain developers, you look for good devs >> Mm-hmm and I said to you afterwards, it's probably 'cause there aren't enough of Blockchain devs. >> That's not it really, for us it's that, I didn't... We've already solved a lot of our problems. We've created a platform that goes across many platforms. It syncs very easily, it integrates many platforms in. We don't work on the protocol level of the platforms. Like we're not actually trying to solve problems and create those, creating a platform from scratch that maybe will be valuable a few years. We're letting all of our partners and platforms do that. We're an app that is a... It's something that's not necessarily requiring Blockchain devs to integrate. We do connect to Blockchains, that's fine but we're looking for more traditional stuff that we're doing that actually going to monetize right now and it's based on stuff and technology that doesn't have to be created yet. So we're not looking for those massive problem solvers to develop protocols that need to solve major problems. So we can have good JavaScript developers that's what we require and we need and we can teach them internally what the skills they need on Blockchain. So actually we don't necessarily need Blockchain or we'd be looking for Blockchain devs. We're looking for good JavaScript developers. >> So guys like in traditional enterprise is that right? >> Yeah that's right. That's why it's easy for us to get those in but if you're looking to solve a problem, you're looking to do this core stuff, working on protocol level stuff then you need someone who's been in the Blockchain space for a number of years that can actually help you with that stuff and they're very hard to find right now. >> Yeah and they're also full-stack developers. It's really a unique skill set. New language, full-stack, they've got jobs. >> Yeah they're working tons of projects. They're demanding tons of money. Guys that have been developing on protocol stuff for five years. There's very, very few. There's so much more and they're so high in demand and also they want a lot more, you know, a lot more freedom in the work they're doing because they're so high in demand and I have one guy that's that's it that's a rock star. He works just a few hours a week and when we do have critical issues or critical problems, he's our like consultant that can help us 'cause he's been in the space for a while. He teaches, he's got an Ethereum developer meetup that he runs in Toronto. So he's our go-to guy but we're also just not about Ethereum. We develop, we work with 75 different projects. It's a wide range of things and we can also tap their communities, when we have problems. We go directly to you know the Dash community, hey, there's something going on here. Can you make sure that we're in the loop with this and we'll go right with them and find the >> You should run your, Dave's got a, we always talked about digital transformation. Dave talks about a unique perspective. Share your digital transformation, the role of the developer because that in the impact and get his reaction because we think that the developer on the district line applications is probably the most important trend that I don't think mainstream is talking about. Because it also doesn't really conflict with any other developer movement. It just adds more headroom but we see it from a transformation standpoint. >> Our scenario is that you know, you talk with Cloud, SAS, big data, mobile, social, Web 2.0. That stuff's yesterday's news right and in Blockchain and the developments going on in conferences like these really underscore that momentum and we see that organizations that are succeeding today and taking advantage of that momentum, they have data as their foundational, it's at their core. And there's so many traditional companies where human expertise is the core and data sort of bolted on and that's a big gap so we see Blockchain and this digital transformation converging and developers building this, new web, whatever you want to call it but this matrix of digital services which they tap to build new companies and so the role of the developer is, it's always been critical but now it's >> They got to build it up. >> Their stakeholders and in ways that we've never seen before globally. >> Yeah and they're also, I look at it as these technologies are still very new. They're going to take a long time to displace and disrupt other sectors and I think some people are thinking that they're doing, you know we're going to go from A to Z right away. I've taken the approach that we're going to use a lot of traditional stuff right now and we're going to build and make sure that we can monetize and make sure it's growing. We're going to slowly be adding things in. Where I think if you take a too long approach, you're not be able to actually last. So a lot of stuff is doing what, you're actually building traditional stuff right now too. That's what we do, like we use AWS quite a bit in the stuff that we do. We're not going to centralized storage for how we're storing it's just not proven yet, it's not scalable yet. It's good take a long time to let stuff is and until then you have to make sure that you're actually staying in business, you make sure you doing well. So it's a using a mixture of both things and not going right to the end game. >> You have to de-risk that yeah and take advantage of cloud economics that are that are there today. >> Yeah I mean, if you think about in the space right now. What sector has been disrupted by Blockchain? What has been made faster, better, cheaper? Right now in Blockchain. I can't think of anything. >> Crypto kitties (laughs) >> Yes that's a really important point. >> There hasn't been much value. >> But that's why I bring it back to digital transformation because you think about what's been transformed by you know, digital. Obviously you know publishing, books, you know, ads and I thought well is it bits versus atoms? >> Well is it digital or is it information transfer? >> Well its information transfer that has disrupted that. Now it's value transfer, that's what is coming right? >> Yes and so, but then you'd assume that Blockchain, banking but banking hasn't been disrupted yet? >> Not yet, it's going to take a lot of time. >> And so insurance, healthcare and these industries. >> Well I would say VCs have been disrupted. >> But that's >> I get it. >> Here's my premise, is that risk is the factor that will determine disruption. Maybe it's a little bit of bits versus atoms but it's the risk factors associated with banking, healthcare, insurance, defense, government stuff. The high risk, highly entrenched businesses, organizations but eventually they will be disruptive. >> There'll be signals. >> Yeah but it' a lot of, when we first started Ethereum, there was, we had shirts, at the back would say, Dropbox in five lines and that's just not true. You know at the time this was the goal but when you realize when you try to do it, this isn't scalable this, isn't going to be a done-it, it's going to be too expensive to actually do it if you're actually paying for Ether' to do it. It doesn't make any sense, so that was actually, even I was thinking that's what we're going to be able to do. We're a ways off for that. A problem need to be solved, scalability, biggest problem. Interoperability between all the different chains and how they're all going to work together that needs to be solved. How you going to stop these forking operations that happen at split communities when it went actually a coin forked or something happens you get these battles. Those are problems need to be solved now. So we solved the problem with smart contracts. Now that's the second generation. Now we're looking for other things like Cardan says they're looking at the third generation stuff. It's solving those problems and we're a ways off. So that's why until then you got to still do things with tradition and don't be afraid to use things that are that are proven and work right now in order to get there, yeah. Aright Anthony, well great to have you on the wrap-up. That's day one,we're seeing a lot of great stuff. We had Halsey Minor on, another industry pro. You seeing pros come into this business, you see you know the old dogs, the new dogs, the young guns. I mean, it's a really an amazing community. I got to say reminds me of a lot of trends kind of coming together and that's awesome work that you guys have done. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you of having me on again. >> We appreciate it. That's the wrap-up a day one, here at the Polycon 18. Token Economics, Cryptocurrency, Blockchain. All the players are here, doing deals, making making it all happen. It's the Cube, it's a wrap up. Thanks for watching. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube covering IBM Think 2018. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hello and welcome to The Cube here in IBM Think 2018, I'm John Furrier. It's The Cube, our flagship program, we go out to the events and extract the signal in the noise. We're the number one live event coverage. We're here with The Cube with IBM Think 2018. Our next guess is Jesse Lund who's the vice president of IBM Blockchain. He's in the financial services side. Into blockchain, into crypto, into token economics, seeing the future, how money flows, Jesse great to have you on The Cube, thanks for joining me. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. It's great to be here. >> We were talking before on camera about blockchain, and we love blockchain, IBM certainly put it out there as part of the innovation sandwich. Blockchain, data, AI, kind of making that innovation, but it's really what it enables, and I want to talk to you about. You are involved in payments. We've been saying on The Cube that the killer app is money in this market. >> I agree, yeah. >> You agree, and you talk about it. This is a new market, so a stack is kind of developing. You got blockchain, then you got crypto which as protocols and you got infrastructure, then you got decentralized applications which you could call ICOs up top, certainly a little bit scammy and bubbly, but that's as arbitraging and optimizing the capital markets, you could argue that. But so this is a really big dynamic. Your thoughts on this trend. >> Sure, well so I joined IBM from 18 years at Wells Fargo. I spent really the majority of my career in financial services and when blockchain came along, I sort of immediately saw the impact, the potential for, I'll call it positive disruption, disruption in the positive sense. Transformational paradigm shift kind of stuff in terms of how money moves around the world and how we classify assets and how we transfer ownership of assets, I mean that's just, it's, the possibilities are limitless. And you're right, IBM is the place where I think blockchain has started as a mainstream focus for enterprises around building private networks, but that's really just the beginning. What we talked about earlier was it gets really interesting when data and money are connected together and they move at high velocities together. >> Let's get into that. I mean first let's just address the IBM thing. They got to put a stake in the ground, blockchain, it's a safe harbor to say supply chain stuff because that's their business, they've been building technologies for supply chains for companies, that's what enterprises do, that's IBM. But the game is where the money is and that's where the businesses are going to be transformed. We're talking about disrupting structural industries. This is where the money power comes in. Money's flowing, I mean if you want to move money from China, go to bitcoin. If you want to move it from anywhere, this is what's happening. >> Yeah, so think about bitcoin. It's kind of what started it all. It's a little bit of a bad word in banks and in regulated financial circles, but let's face it, the only real mainstream blockchain application today is still bitcoin, but you know we're only three years in to the blockchain industry, right? I mean think about when we were three years in to the internet industry, where we were still talking about which browser is going to win and then it went on to which application server's going to win, and it wasn't til a decade later we were really focused on what are the applications, the killer apps that are enabled by an interconnected world and that's exactly what's happening now. Other industries have already been completely disrupted. Look at retail, it's just, it's banking's turn. It's financial services turn. >> One of the founders, the co-founders of Ethereum, Anthony Diiorio, who I interviewed a couple weeks ago at the Bahamas, he said "While it is the new browser," to your points, browser wars, if you think about the payment, wallets are now becoming part of the mechanism for money transfer. If you don't have a wallet, if you want to send me some Ripple, you want to send me some Ethereum, I need a wallet. This is a no brainer, right? I mean if you want to leverage any money, that's one thing. The second thing I want to get your thoughts on besides the wallets, the fiat conversion, right? These are two threshold conversations that are going on. Your thoughts, wallet and conversion to fiat. >> Well I mean I think wallets are really important because this whole thing is based on key management, this whole concept is based on cryptography. It only works on a public, private key notion and you got to keep that private key private, but you got to keep it, right? You got to keep it safe and you got to keep it, it's like your wallet. You've got a wallet, you've got cash in your wallet, you lose your wallet, you lose your cash. It's the same kind of analogy, so wallets are really important and you're going to want to turn to providers who have made their business in encryption, who have made their business in security, I mean-- >> And cold storage, old school is kind of coming back, people are taking their keys and they're spreading them across multiple lock boxes, multiple states. People are getting broken into their house or their PCs are getting broken into. >> Right, yeah. >> I mean security, going old school. >> And why not? I mean, it works. >> Because if someone knows you got 100 million dollars in your house, they're going to get it if you don't lock it. Okay back to the reality of the money transfer. We were talking before you came on, I've been saying on The Cube, token economics really is where the action is, at least in my opinion. I want to get your thoughts because really the business model innovation is on the table because whoever can innovate the business model has more of a chance to disrupt an existing industry. This is where tokenization becomes part of the money piece of it, so how do you convert that value into capture? Is that token? Is that where you see it? What's your thoughts? >> Yeah so well first of all, I mean if you think of tokens as another form of currency, and by the way, I think we have to be careful about what we say, cryptocurrencies, the industry talks about thousands of cryptocurrencies out there where there's really not. There's maybe dozens and they're all derivatives of just a few models, bitcoin being one prominent model and there's a lot of offshoots off of that. But the rest of what we call cryptocurrencies are really tokens that represent primarily securities, which is why the SCC's getting involved. But the really interesting thing about this is these tokens move at high velocity because they're digital and so, but these digital things represent a claim on real world value, and that's where it becomes really interesting. IBM's built and launched as kind of its first foray into the solution space of financial services where IBM is an investor in this technology, a cross-border payment solution that inherently re-engineers this whole correspondent banking, this international wire process, and where FX, foreign exchange, becomes a real time capability in a series of operations that execute as an atomic unit. That's novel today. When you want to send money from here to somewhere else in the world, you go to your bank, your bank sends an instruction to another bank, and they respond and say "Yeah you know it's okay "because the person you're sending it to is not a terrorist, "is not on a some sort of sanctions list," great, now the bank has to actually go settle and it settles through another network, so the novelty is why can't the messages and the data and the value itself, the digital asset, why can't they exist and move together at the same time? That's what we've really built. But as we've built and deployed that and are getting banks and non-bank financial institutions to sign up for it because the cost of moving money goes way, way, way down and the user experience goes way, way, way up because instead of taking two or three days and you don't know how much it's going to cost until it gets there, it takes 10 or 15 seconds and you know before you even press send how much it's going to cost to get there. It all boils down to this notion of digital assets, that's what it all comes down to, is the way to settle value with finality in real time is for one party to exchange a digital asset with another party. Today, initially, the only form of negotiable digital assets are cryptocurrencies which has banks a little scared, but as we start talking through what we've learned in the enterprise blockchain space, we realized that we can tokenize all sorts of other asset classes, commodities, securities, and even fiat currencies where central banks or commercial banks can issue a token that represents a claim on deposits held at some financial institution and that's, that's a-- >> So you see tokenization as a big deal. >> It's a huge deal. I mean it's everything, I think it's-- >> It's the economic value of the ... >> I think it's the tipping point for blockchain. The irony is it goes back to bitcoin kind of started this all. You know we said "Well we like the idea of the technology "underneath bitcoin, but we want to focus on blockchain," I mean forget for a second blockchain is actually terminology that's invented by the bitcoin primer that was published nine years ago by Satoshi, so yeah it's their, whoever they are, it's their terminology, and it's kind of coming back full circle where you're seeing the convergence of all of these cool optimization capabilities, you know, immutability and workflow optimization, supply chain management-- >> And there's a lot of work to be done on performance and whatnot, but the concept of decentralized immutability data is fine, store the data. Now there's, it's got to get fixed, but I think that what that enables and I think you agree that tokenization's critical. So for a company that wants to token their business or raise money via tokens or get involved in this new economic value creation, innovation trend, how do they do it? And by the way are there tools available? You mentioned banking, and the banking business got to where it was because you had to build the picks and shovels to make it happen, you had to do a swift and you had to have this stuff go on. Now developers don't necessarily have the tools, so there's a picks and shovel market and there's also the real innovation. >> Yeah and that's I think the value contribution that IBM brings. I mean we bring 107 years of credibility in developing and operating mission critical, transactional, and financial systems, and I could do just an ad for a second, that's what the IBM blockchain platform is all about and as the industry evolves, as our platform offering evolves, what we want to be able to bring to small business, medium sized businesses, large businesses is the ability to develop solutions using our toolkit. >> So Jesse I want you to put your financial hat on and at the same time put your payments hat on and your token economics hat on, three hats. Hey I want to tokenize my business, I really want to get in. So we have an innovative team, we're seeing new business model formulas and logic that we want to disrupt, what do I do? I got an existing, growing business that I know has assets and I'm not a startup, but I'm not trying to pivot like Kodak, so I'm not dying, throwing the hail Mary, or I'm not a startup and got to build a whole product. I'm a real business, I'm growing, and I see tokenization as a way for me to be successful. What do I do? What's your advice? >> Well I think you look at it from all potential angles. If you look at any business, they're always looking to improve the bottom line by shrinking costs, right? They're also looking to improve the bottom line by increasing the top side, increasing revenue, and I think as a mid-sized business or a growing business, you have the opportunity to use tokenization, to use blockchain and digital currencies to do both of those things. You have the ability to accelerate the adoption of whatever your good or service or product is by if it's tokenizable, and most things are whether it's a utility, access to some service you provide, or whether it's an asset, some widget that you sell, you enable primary and secondary markets by creating a digital asset that can be bought by anybody anywhere around the world. I mean that's one way to do it and so I think getting people to realize the potential there-- >> You got programs, they call up IBM or get some developers, make it happen. Okay so killer apps money, that's going to be a 30 plus year trend and certainly this highlights that, but the other thing that's happened, it's coming out of either, in the open source community as well as cloud, the notion of marketplaces and communities so marketplaces and communities become a very important role in the token economics piece. What's your thoughts and opinion on that narrative? >> Well again for me, it goes back, I always go back to digital assets. We in the U.S. and around the world, when we start talking about financial instruments, we classify assets differently, but when it comes to an ecosystem and a community that becomes inherently peer to peer and inherently democratic, it's about an asset class agnostic distributed exchange where I can sell you my security token in exchange for your fiat token, or I can sell you my commodity token or utility token for the same. I think the ecosystem gets built automatically by way of new assets coming to a common network or interoperable set of networks, and that's what's missing today by the way, same in capital markets, right? The holy grail in the capital market space today is how do I shrink the time between trade and settlement? There's this whole t plus three and we're spending billions of dollars to go to t plus two, we gain a day, so the trade day and the settlement date are two days apart. I mean you just think about kind of the absurdity of that. If you just say well if the security that you're buying is a digital asset, and the money that you're buying it with is a digital asset, and they both exist on either the same network or an interoperable network, the transfer of ownership and the transfer of value happen together as two operations or a single operation in one atomic transaction, you've solved the problem. >> Speed of light can make it happen. >> Right, delivery versus payment, that's what the capital markets industry is trying to optimize for, right? Because it improves the balance sheet of all sorts of finance-- >> You had a phrase you mentioned before we came on camera, something about money, the future of money. What was that phrase? >> Programmable money? >> Programmable money. >> Yeah, right, right. >> I want you to take a minute to explain. Love this concept, Miko Matsumura, thought leader friend of ours, has a vision called open source money which is more of an open source, this hey money's flowing, it's open, it's out there, but you have a different perspective which I like too which is programmable money. What does that mean? Describe the concept and take a minute to unpack that. >> The concept of programmable money comes out of a paper that I jointly authored with Jed McCaleb who is the founder of Stellar and was the co-founder of Ripple and is a really smart guy so I feel like I have a small brain when I'm around him but we really wrote it in the context of central banking and the ultimate issuer of an asset because central banks are the issuers of currencies. Right now the primary dealers, if you will, for currencies are commercial banks and so that whole commercial, central, fractional reserve banking model has been replicated from the western world to everywhere else in the world and you can't get access to central bank money as they say. But if the central banks were to issue digital currencies which is essentially a token of fiat currency, so you own the token, you own a claim of fiat deposits held on the balance sheet of the central bank, now you have the ability to move that around. You can actually program the movement of money because it's a digital thing, it's a digital asset that's as good as cash and if you are working with a central bank who's issuing it, not only is it electronic money, it's actually legal tender because if the central bank issues it, it becomes legal tender which means everybody who accepts it has to accept that form of payment. That's pretty profound if we can get to that point and we're working with-- >> And software's a big driver in that because you need software to manage digital assets. >> Oh yeah, absolutely. >> The software's driving it. Bill Tai is an investor, I interviewed him, and he had an interesting topic and I made a highlight of it. He said after World War II, we talked about the oil situation when the dala was pegged to OPEC, that was essentially tokenizing oil. Then okay that's good, so that was their ICO. >> Right, right, yeah, essentially. >> That's what you're saying, you can actually put fiat to the digital token and take advantage of the efficiencies of digital. >> Right, yeah, okay-- >> Taking down all the structural inefficiencies that were built prior to digital. Is that ... >> It is. You fast forward a little bit and think where that takes us. It's no secret that the U.S. dollar is the trade currency of the world, and I want to be careful what I say because, you know, I'm an American patriot here but there are other large G20 nations who wouldn't mind dethroning the U.S. dollar as the trade currency of the world and so as you see central banks starting to get involved in the issuance of digital currency, you create a situation where all of a sudden well maybe oil could be traded heresy in other currencies besides the U.S. dollar which is all it's traded in today. Goes back to your ecosystem question. >> This is a great point. We could riff on this stuff, let's riff on this. The UK just signed a deal with Coinbase, this is a major signal. >> Sign, yeah. >> You got a legitimate country saying we're going to give a license to Coinbase, now they have Brexit to deal with so they're looking at it as an opportunity. Outside of the UK coming in and doing that deal with Coinbase, it's on the web, look up Coinbase in the UK, you'll see the deal. You have other companies trying to jockey for who's going to be the Wall Street for crypto? Meaning I want to convert crypto to fiat, where do I go? Do I go to Estonia? Do I go to Dubai? Bahrain? Armenia? China? There is no place yet. Your thoughts, what's going to happen? What shoe will drop first? Is there a domino effect? >> Yeah, well there's a couple things as it relates to the UK and kind of the extension to Coinbase of access to the national payment system which is really what enables them to then convert fiat to crypto and back. That's pretty interesting. Going back to the programmable money thing, though. If you have a central bank issued token, you've essentially extended the real time gross settlement system which has been only accessible by commercial banks to anybody that holds that token, right? It's a trend, I think the UK sees it coming, I think the Federal Reserve sees it coming. It's going to happen. >> Is it winner take all or winner take most? >> I think it creates a much more purely efficient market. It's a democratic system so I don't think there is going to be a new Wall Street, I think it's going to be-- >> John: Decentralized. >> Exactly, I mean that's the beauty of it. It's scary though for establishments like Wall Street to look at this and it-- >> I mean are the banks scared? You're dealing with the banks right now. >> Yes, they're scared. I mean I've actually read a recent article that Bank of America, the headline was "Bank of America's afraid of digital currency." You've seen Jamie Dimon who came out with a kind of a hard stance against bitcoin and has since kind of backed away from that. >> Of course you probably bought in when it dropped and now it's back up again. >> Well I think part of the bank was actually facilitating their clients and trading bitcoin so that might've been it. There's a natural reaction to it, especially if you're part of the mainstream establishment. >> There's no proof of that, I'm just saying we're posting on Reddit and whatnot. >> No we're just joking around. Jamie's a, he's a good guy, right? >> Can I get your thoughts on digital nations? We've been talking about this. Just a few years ago, smart cities, IoT was kind of the narrative, oh be a smart city, control the traffic lights, and instrument the physical goods and services. Now with crypto and blockchain front and center conversation is digital nations with sovereignty around their cash. This is kind of your point earlier. How are you seeing that? What's your view? Are you seeing that trend? Are there dots connecting for you? Because again, people are jockeying for a position on the global digital backbone to be a major part of the money flow, the fiat conversion, what is the goods and services? Who's going to clear the values? All digital, it's a perfect storm. >> Well I think there's always going to be the need for trusted entities to be the issuers of these assets because it all comes down to trust at the end of the day. The thing with bitcoin is that it's purely autonomous and people are a little bit skeptical of it because they're like, "Well who's controlling "the monetary policy?" and the answer is the market, you know, the users of the network are controlling it and that's why you see such volatility, right? Because the traders love it, they can go in and trade the up trends and the down trends. As long as there's volatility, traders are making money. I think there is still going to be a place for central authorities to add value, but that's going to be the pressure, is for them to prove that they're adding value not, you know, bureaucracy masquerading as process. >> I was reading an article that Telegram, which is doing a huge ICO, just got shut down by the Russian government, they went to turn over their keys, their private keys of their users. Say goodbye to the-- >> Jesse: I didn't read that, that's crazy. >> It's really crazy, so that's going to put a damper on their ICO but regulatory and then government issues around countries becomes a big deal. In your experience as Wells Fargo, at a bank, looking forward in the new digital world, is it one of those situations where path of least resistance, the countries that go more friendly get around that in a sovereignty where you domicile, where you start your company, where you do your banking. I mean I could start a company in Gibraltar and bank in Switzerland. >> Well transparency is part of the benefit or the downside of this, right? I think there may be advantages that pop up but I think they will equalize over time. I've been around the world now for IBM talking to 20 plus central banks, and I had a really interesting conversation with one of them recently in Asia. We're in the room with deputy director level people who are responsible for things like the NA money laundering policy and the economics and monetary policy and things like that and one person said, "You know, we're really torn "between two equally unacceptable decisions. "One is to ignore cryptocurrencies altogether, "and the other end of the spectrum is "to make them illegal, to ban them." I thought it was poignant that they see those as unacceptable, they have to do something in the middle. >> Do they weigh or ban? I mean look, the banning's happening. >> But okay so you saw that Trump used the executive order to prevent Americans from using or trading in the Venezuelan crypto that was issued on Ethereum, right? I saw that Venezuelan thing as a publicity stunt more than anything, an active of global defiance. So there's precedent now for, and the Russia thing with Telegram-- >> The United States of America has to step up its game because look at it, we have a lot of, I mean I remember back in the crypto days when I was just getting into the business, late 80s, early 90s, you couldn't even do it in the U.S., you go to Canada, that's why Canada's got a lot of innovation up there. We're risking our country, and I had one guy tell me in Puerto Rico, he's from South Africa, and he shouldn't be throwing any stones either but his point was, he says, "America's becoming Europe. "There's a shrinking middle class "while other emerging markets have a growing middle class," so the global impact of blockchain, cryptocurrency, and these applications are significant and have to be factored into policy decision making for governments. The U.S. can't just think about itself anymore in a vacuum. >> Right, not anymore. >> Because there's implications otherwise the U.S. will turn into Europe, regulated, all these rules, byzantine stuff. It's a real problem. Your thoughts on that. >> It is. It's cliche, but we live and work in a global economy. The flow of information globally in real time has been around now for a while and it's about time it came to money. The internet of money is a term I've heard. It's just, it's unavoidable. >> Jesse Lund here inside The Cube. Great guest, great conversation. >> Yeah, thanks. >> How do people get ahold of you on IBM's, you mentioned you got some great stuff going on, you've written a paper, you've got a lot of content, where does someone go to discover some of the stuff that you're working on they could get involved with you guys? >> Yeah well I mean the best place to go is IBM.com/blockchain, that'll tell you a lot about what we're doing and the different industry-- >> And the programmable money paper you wrote, is that there? >> It's out there as well, there's a link to that. >> On IBM.com? >> You can get me directly on LinkedIn, I try to be pretty responsive with that because I really enjoy the dialogue. This is a revolution of the peoples, man, it's all over the world, so it's great, it's great to be a part of it. >> And people tokenizing their business, there's real opportunities to change the game to bring consensus, data driven, new kind of supply chain whatever to the markets you're in, great opp-, and you need banking. >> Yeah of course. >> You need to have money. Money, marketplaces, and communities, that's my mantra. >> I subscribe to it. >> Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> Jesse Lund. I'm John Furrier here at IBM Think 2018. Cube coverage continues after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Nassau in the Bahamas it's The Cube covering Polycon 18 brought to you Polymath. >> Hello, welcome to The Cube for a special Cube event, our first kick off for our cryptocurrency, Blockchain, decentralized computing world that we know as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Blockchain and all the rest. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. We're here previewing the conference/\. We'll be live tomorrow and Friday but were here down getting ready for the big festivities which is tonight's opening keynotes. We had the co-founder of Ethereum, Anthony Diiorio, and then Brock Pierce coming on. He also is a chairman of the Bitcoin Foundation. Luminaries as well as a bunch of other great guests, Bill Tai from California, a friend of The Cube's. This is a game changing event, Dave. You and I have talked about this on The Cube many times. The waves of innovation come, you know, this big once in a generation, maybe centuries. We're seeing one that I think is not as even big as the other ones, bigger. You combine the PC Revolution. I was just texting Michael Dell earlier today and said, "This feels like the PC Revolution." A bunch of pioneers coming together but it's got a different vibe. It's bigger. It's like the combination of the internet and PC Revolution all rolled into one with a community vibe on it. So, and we're going to have tons of coverage on this. What I want to ask you, Dave, directly is you've seen many waves and we work with and we cover some of the old guard, older companies like Dell EMC, HPE, Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and they're doing really good work pivoting and trying to be ready for this new wave. It's just on Blockchain, it's just how the world works, Cloud, you know, IoT but decentralized cannot be ignored. So, some think this is a blind spot to these legacy and emerging vendors changing vendors like Oracle and IBM and HPE and Dell Technologies. Are they ready? Do you think they're ready? Do you think they even understand what's coming? And people squabble over Cloud market share and it's just funny, right? It's like there's a bigger thing coming over the top. >> Well, first thing I got to say is I got to give you props as my partner because you've been covering, you know, Blockchain, Bitcoin on SiliconANGLE since I don't know -- >> John: 2010. >> 2010, when I first met you, right. And so once again you are sort of ahead of the curve. I feel like we're at our first Hadoop World, you know, back in 2010. And so, props to you and the SiliconeANGLE team. To answer your question, no. No, they're not ready and to me it's not even about just Blockchain. I mean, Blockchain technology they can adopt. The bigger issue is digital disruption. And digital disruption is all about the data at the core of the organization and business models that are built around data. And if you think about the history of companies, it's human expertise and data's bolted on. We've seen this time and time again but if you look at the top five market cap companies, Facebook, Amazon, Google, et cetera, they're data companies. Data is at the center and they take human expertise and wrap it around there. So, the future is going to be about innovation with data, with artificial intelligence and Cloud economics and the old guard doesn't have those things. Blockchain fits in there. To me Blockchain is about building out a new distributed web and on top of the old web and rewarding those who were building it. So, it's a new form open-source where the builders get paid. >> But it's also decentralized and you have a value store, value creation capture model that has all the wrappings of what we traditionally see in a centralized database or even Cloud. You need networks, you need storage, you need databases, you need tokens, which is a form of data. So token economics, I mean, it's a new value economy, Dave. I mean, I just don't, I feel like the, I just, from my perspective, I just don't think those guys are seeing it. >> No and so it's not only those guys. It's the most of the world. I mean, you turn on CNBC and Buffet's on there saying this is going to end badly and there's negative, you know, trade press about, you know, Bitcoin and Silk Road and all that stuff. What most of the world is missing, and that makes people run away, but this is happening, it's real. It's going be the foundation for a next generation internet. It's happening, you see it all the time. Developers built the internet. Developers are going to rebuild the internet on top of this. So, I would suggest that people just try to squint through or squint passed the negative press and try to really understand what this trend is all about and how it's going to fundamentally change the internet and change the world. >> Well, there's negative press that's worthy. There's a lot of scams out there. There's security issues >> Sure >> but these are evolutionary problem spaces that can be solved. One, the scammers are going to be vetted out, the bubble bursting but the real value, creation is going to come from developers and that, to me, is what I hear you saying as your main point. >> No question about it. And I think that that, you know, there's lots of challenges. This stuff is not easy. First of all, who would've ever thought that something like Ethereum could even have been built, this kind of distributed infrastructure? I mean, it's very, very challenging. Of course we know about the scaling problems, the latency issues, all that stuff but these are problems that smart people are going to go attack and solve. And again I emphasize, it's the new form of, remember the old open systems, right? Unix and open systems. Well fast forward passed open-source, which the internet was built on open-source. Think about Linnux, everything's built on Linnux. But today developers who are building these new protocols are actually going to get paid to that. Guys like Anthony, you know, who made hundreds of millions -- >> Anthony Diiorio, co-founder of Ethereum, doing Jaxx wallet as part of Decentral. Great use case. He's paying it forward and I think the community here is a real dynamic and I think what we learned at The Cube, Dave, is the communities matter and now, more than ever they're actually having an input. Look what open-source has done to the software business over the past three decades, okay? Completely revolutionized the world we live in. So if you take the open-source apply those principals to, whether it's content media or decentralized infrastructure and applications, it's going to be a haven of innovation. >> Well and if you think about this, too, folks. Is that, you know, the centralized model has essentially co-opted all this innovation in the last 15 years, right? They've won. Closed won, Facebook won, they killed RSS. >> Well, Facebook's not winning now. They're under a lot of pressure because they screwed the election over and the data that they're using, some will argue, that, when I use Facebook, okay? Facebook's great, I get a free app, I let them have my data 'cause I want to connect with my friends but they're throwing elections off. I didn't bargain for that. The context has changed. So, to me, the shift of user data is going to move into the hands of the users. Do you agree with that statement? >> Yes, no question. And the other thing, just to finish my thought -- >> That's not good for Facebook. >> And we've talked about this, John. Protocol and development has stagnated, you know? Gmail is built on SMTP, you know, HTTP, DNS, these are all protocols that were developed by governments, and academia and the big guys just co-opted them and so, protocol development stagnated. What you need to understand about Blockchain is it bring back innovation -- >> Well, Anthony Diiorio said on my interview with him, one-on-one, that protocol developers are the most in demand role because those big guys take in co-oping those protocols, Dave, as you pointed out, is causing a revolution. It's almost like the 60s for tech. It's like there is a ground swell. I see it, I feel it. Not just a wave of innovation but the actors and the people involved look at this as a liberating opportunity to free the centralized forces that are quite frankly holding the world back. >> And I want to, this is very important and it was really epiphany when it hit me, is if you wanted to invest in TCP/IP, back in the day, how would you do that? You couldn't invest in TCP/IP. You could maybe invest in companies -- >> John: Cisco. (laughs) >> Yeah, can invest in companies. Okay, but you and I couldn't have gotten in early on Cisco, right? It was all the insiders. Today, developers who are building out these protocols, they can own the protocol. That's a form of investment and they got, essentially, equity in that token. >> Dave, we're going to be doing a lot of crypto shows and Blockchain shows because we're talking about the decentralization of the world. This is the future of our globe and work and play. What are you looking for, as we go down and knock down these shows, as The Cube goes out on this new mission? >> Well, I think Anthony kind of hinted at this. Is he's looking at infrastructure. It's like the early days of the internet with, you know, the pickaxe guys, you know, made all the money. It's the infrastructure that's getting built out. So, I want to see how that develops and how that sets the foundation, the platform for distributed applications, number one. Number two is I want to understand some of these challenges and how they're going to be addressed. The scaling issues, the latency problems, some of the, you know, nitty gritty technical challenges, who's working on those? And the third is, what's the right investment profile? How are the investors at this conference and other conferences going about deciding what to invest in? Right? How do they squint through quality and garbage? >> Well, I'm going to be heading to a special investor event. Dave, I'm going to put my ear to the ground and of course The Cube will go wherever it takes to get the story, whether it's the Bahamas. Not a bad gig here but important. We're going to get the most important stories and share that with you. And continue our mission of getting this content out in the open, shining the light on relevance and the right reputable people. Dave, always great. >> Thanks, John. >> And looking forward to a great week. (techno music)