>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering AWS re:Invent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and Intel along with its eco-system partners. >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent '19. This is our third day in Vegas. That's a lot of Vegas. I am joined by my co-host Justin Warren, the founder and chief analyst at PivotNine, and Justin and I are welcoming back one of our CUBE alum. Joining us next from MongoDB is Sahir Azam, its chief product officer. Welcome back! >> Thank you so much, I'm happy to be here. >> So talk to us about what's going on at MongoDB, I know we've had you on the program before, we've had MongoDB, but what's sort of the latest and greatest? >> Yeah, so we're continuing to grow very fast, and especially our cloud product Atlas. We've got two million developers using the platform today, 13,000 customers, many of which are on the amazing AWS platform, and I think people are really embracing the idea of a multicloud database service and a data platform they can have the flexibility to work with no matter where they are. >> Talk about, sorry, Justin, about multicloud a little bit more because it is a symptom as one of our CEOs, Dave Vellante, calls it. A lot of companies have inherited it, it's more by whether it's organically, or it's by acquisition, or developer preference. It's a state in which a lot of businesses are operating, but it's challenging. >> Yes. >> What are some of the things that you're hearing with respect to customers? How can you help them deal better in that world? >> Sure. So, yeah we definitely see some of those exact trends, so, you know for large enterprises, many times, they have different use cases in different business units, where developers or application owners prefer different cloud providers. Oftentimes it's acquisition, but also at a strategic level, at the CTO, CIO, or even CEO level, you know, there is a forethought strategy that it's going to be a multicloud platform world, and now what we see is many customers are still very much focused on a single cloud provider to build-up the skills on, but with a close eye to a second or third tier provider in the architecture that they will scale and balance over time. So, I think it's early days, but the trend is definitely rising in what we're seeing. Now, one of the things that makes a multicloud strategy really hard to implement is the data. You know, especially transactional data that runs live applications that are serving real customers, that makes an application and a development team really stuck on a certain platform. So, what we're focused on at MongoDB is really de-coupling that data layer from the underlying cloud infrastructure providers such that if you want to leverage the benefits of the different services AWS has in their rich ecosystem, but then maybe plumb in something from another provider, we make that extremely easy to do with the click of a button, and move your data across those cloud providers. >> Yeah, so talk about the mechanism for doing that a little bit more, because that's really tricky to do, and that's one thing I think people have been concerned about the idea of multicloud, is that, well, are you actually running in multiple clouds simultaneously, or is it more that, well actually sometimes we just want to move a bit from here to there that we'll use for different applications? >> There's sort of three trends that we see you know, and we're a data platform player, so our use cases are sort of bounded around database technology, data analytics. So, the first is for customers who want high availability across multiple regions within a certain geography, so let's say you're dealing with personal information of German citizens in Germany, Amazon has a region in Germany, only one, and maybe you want Azure or GCP to be a second region for high availability, and you need to rely on a secondary provider, because there's only one from a particular cloud of choice in that geo, so that's sort of one high availability kind of use case. The second is leveraging the benefits of all these different services that the cloud providers themselves are releasing, so we hear a lot of customers that say, you know, Amazon's my preferred partner for operationalizing my app. We use their services, our database runs there, however, we may want to take some of that data, even if it's for a week, even for a few days, a month, and perhaps move it over to another provider to leverage some new analytic service or machine learning, or AI algorithm that they might have. Today, that's really challenging to do. It's the idea that you can click a button, and create that replica, and move that data over very easily is something that people are asking from us. And then the third is geographic reach. So, our database platform, Atlas runs in 70 global regions worldwide, across AWS, Azure, and GCP which makes it the most widely available databases service on the planet. And one of the interesting use cases for that is, let's say somebody is using a single cloud provider for 99% of their work load, but suddenly they see their app take off in Taiwan, you know, maybe another cloud provider has a region in Taiwan, just mix and match and add that region into the architecture very seamlessly. So, those kind of three categories, high availability within geos, the ability to leverage, you know, the rich service offerings and mix and match, and then the geographic reach, are the three things we see for multi plat at a strategic level, beyond the reactive angle of acquiring a company and learning how to have to manage multiple clouds that way. >> That does sound like it's a bit of a trend that we're hearing and particularly today, I think, Lisa, where enterprises want choice, and that customer choice, of being able to choose things that actually suit me, rather than necessarily which vendor I'm buying my infrastructure from. That sounds like something that we're hearing a lot. >> Yeah, and we've invested a lot of time, engineering effort, working with Amazon, working with Google, working with Microsoft, to unify that data layer across the three cloud providers, and I think that's something unique that Mongo's really focused on. >> But there were so many announcements that came out, in Andy Jassy's keynote a couple of days ago. I think I read 23 announcements just in the first 20 minutes, or something of his keynote. So much information, but I'm curious, did anything that they announced surprise you in terms of, hey, customers are living in this multicloud world, there's use cases, there's reasons for it? Any shift that Amazon is making or announced this week that you thought, yes, some of these things are becoming a reality? We have to go where the data is, and we have to deliver what's best for our customers. >> I mean, I think Amazon is a very customer-centric company. I don't think I heard any announcement that particularly acknowledged the fact that it's going to be a multicloud world, you know, I think they're still the market share leader, they have a rich set of offerings, and they're going to continue building on that which I think makes a lot of sense from the position that they're in. I think some of the announcements that are interesting to us, definitely the idea of having lower cost, higher performance ARM hardware and chips for our database vendor. If we can lower the price performance curve for customers on top of that infrastructure, that's exciting for us, and we always think it's interesting, in a AWS keynote that's two or three hours long that about a third or half of it is talk about data. We love data, so the more rich sets of services we can surround and integrate Mongo into, the better, so, exciting for us. >> Data seems to be like the next generation of cloud, data can become a huge asset for any business in any industry, whereas, there are companies and times where data was a risk, a vunerability. What is a great example, in your opinion, of a MongoDB customer who has done a great job of transforming to where data is now a huge asset, and a driver of business differentiation? >> So, one interesting customer example I really like is Axiom. They're a marketing data provider, data has been the heart of their business for a long time, but traditionally their business would be packaging up and shipping data sets to their end customers, in a very custom bespoke manner. What we worked with them on is leveraging our cloud platform Atlas, along with some API technologies that we have, and a product called Stitch, to make it very easy for them to create custom APIs to allow their end customers to access that data programmatically. And since we manage and run that on their behalf, their development team, their operations team don't have to worry about the plumbing and managing of all these API layers and all that, they just stamp out these custom APIs, we auto-scale them on top of the rich Mongo database on the back end, and so we've allowed them to really take the data business they were in, but really modernize it by exposing it directly to developers programmatically instead of just shipping data around which is expensive and cumbersome. So I think that's a really interesting example of a data company transforming itself, and kind of innovating in the cloud with some of the technologies we provide, obviously, on top of the Amazon platform. >> So, you mentioned transforming, that's definitely been a theme of the show. So MongoDB is a different way of actually managing data, so compared to traditional methods. A lot of enterprises still have a lot of investment in RDBMSs, more traditional kind of databases. What are you seeing when customers come to MongoDB and start using this different way of storing and managing data? What is that transition for them like? >> Sure, so I think the thing that MongoDB's inception 11 years ago through now, what drives our adoption, I should say, is really the fact that developers love our platform. The document model, the MongoDB API is just a much more flexible and natural way for developers to think about writing applications, so, you know, you're building an application, you might be managing a customer object, a product, an account. These are all sort of business objects that get represented in a developer's mind and then in an application, but then if you put that in a relational database, you're chopping that up into rows and tables, and then having to rejoin that back together just to make sense of the underlying information you're trying to represent. Mongo gets rid of all of that cognitive dissonance, and that's what really unlocks that developer productivity. Now, the interesting thing about MongoDB is as a non-relational database, we have looked at the legacy RDBMS providers and said, what are the things that are really strong about those platforms that we can bring forth and apply to this much more agile and natural data model? So things like data governance and schema, strong transactional guarantees, enterprise management functionality, enterprise security and encryption at a very deep level. These are things that large mission critical application developers and operators really need. And they don't typically find them in fast databases, scalable databases, like MongoDB. So what we've done is really merge the best of the legacy traditional databases, the things people expect in a rock-solid mission critical database, but brought it forward in a model that's much faster for developers to move quickly on, and so the way that represents itself in our business, roughly about a third of our business any given quarter, tends to come from legacy migrations off of some traditional relational database, and the driver for that is modernization. People want to move those apps to the cloud, they don't just want to lift and shift from one relational database to another necessarily, that might have certain cost benefits from one provider to another, but it doesn't unlock that developer agility, and that's why they're choosing MongoDB. >> So all in the spirit of transformation, the ability for MongoDB to unlock the developer productivity, one of the things Andy Jassy talked about on Tuesday was, one of the four essential pillars of transformation. It's got to come from the top down, it's got to come from that senior executive level, they've got to drive it down aggressively. As chief product officer, where are your conversations? Are you still, in terms of feedback and, you know, customer advisory information, are you still talking mostly to the developer folks who were the primary users, or are you also having those higher level-- >> Sahir: Both. >> Both, tell us a little bit about that. >> Now what's interesting about a data technology like Mongo is, it's not a top down sort of sell. No CIO, CTO, line-of-business executive is going to dictate down to their developers, thou shalt use this particular database technology, or what not. Every development team is going to choose a technology that allows them to move fast and meets their requirements. So, what we've really done is we've focused on engaging with our customers, our sales organization, our marketing organization, our developer relations organization, is merging a strategic top-down sort of model with those CIOs and business leaders about how MongoDB can transform their business as a data platform. Get that sponsorship, get that executive alignment, to be a strategic provider, but then at the same time, really fostering that community that MongoDB's always been known for bottoms up to make sure that more and more of these applications see the power and value of MongoDB. So we have to merge both those motions. If we were just bottoms up, then I think we wouldn't be as strategic as we are in many of these organizations in terms of how transformative as a vendor and a technology provider and partner we are. But at the same time, if we lost our roots with the developers, databases don't get chosen from the top down, they get introduced and put on the list, maybe, and sponsored into the account, but we've got to build and earn that trust with developers directly. >> Yeah, so you've had incredible success, incredible growth so far. >> Sahir: Thank you. >> What's next for Mongo? >> So, I think a big part of our journey for the last three or four years has been really, adding a second major growth engine to the company by building out our cloud business. So that was our MongoDB Atlas platform built on top of AWS, Azure, and GCP, and that is the fastest growing part of our business, and will clearly be, you know, the majority of our business in the future. The next year to two years, is really about transitioning from a single data product company to a data platform company. So earlier this year, we announced not just the core foundational database features we're always building on top of, but also a big step into analytics, with our Atlas Data Lake product, which allows development teams and analysts to run queries using the Mongo query language they love, but on top of S3, where they have mountains and mountains of data stored from all these different sources. And at the same time we've also added things like full text indexing, so instead of standing up a, search cluster next to your Mongo database, having to worry about copying data just to get full text search in your application, we merge that capability directly into the Atlas platform. So, a big part of our journey is saying, once we have so many customers on the platform, how can we add more value, and yet still merge that all in a very expressive developer experience with our query language? So they're not dealing with 13 different databases and four copies of their data and integrating and shuttling that all around, but is a very prescriptive experience for them. >> Wow, Sahir, thank you for sharing all the innovations that are going on at MongoDB with Justin and me on the program today. A lot going on. >> Yeah, thank you for having me. I really enjoyed the show and coming on theCUBE. >> Lisa: Good, we appreciate your time. >> Great. >> For my co-host Justin Warren, I'm Lisa Martin, and you've been watching theCUBE from Vegas, baby. AWS re:Invent '19. Thanks for watching. (electronic music)

(dramatic music) >> Hey everyone, welcome to the special CUBEConversations here in Palo Alto, CA theCUBE Studios. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, founder of SiliconANGLE Media. We are here for some exclusive news around security audits, blockchain smart contracts, and a hot new startup Amber Data we have the Chief Operating Officer Tongtong Gong who's here, Chief Operating Officer of Amber Data, great to see you! You guys, I've interviewed Shawn Douglass, the CEO, founder, before and he was really getting the technology going. Amazing progress, we have some exclusive discoveries here, welcome to theCUBE! >> Thank you, thank you, thanks for having me here. It's awesome, we've done so much in the past couple weeks, and really excited to announce that we have taken security audits, automated that to be able to provide automated at scale security audits for all the smart contracts, Ethereum, through our platform. >> This has been a huge problem, we've been covering it for the past year, with video but also in the blogs, Ethereum specifically has been the developer chain of choice, people are using Ethereum, programming on it, and that's where a lot of the DApps, decentralized apps, which we think there's going to be a tsunami of, we're a bit bullish on it, but the problem is that everyone went in and rushed with these ICO's, and they didn't think about, "Hey we better make sure our token generating event works" because they've got to do a smart contract on that, and then ultimately these marketplaces that will be emerging from these apps through the communities will be a lot of smart contracts, as the transaction of choice. This is what is the benefit of token economics. The problem is, security. The security audits have been a pain in the butt, they've been expensive, and there's been a time lag in getting it done. So you've got a time factor, too slow, too expensive, and it was last minute. >> Right. >> This has been a huge problem. Are you saying that you solved that problem? >> Yeah, kind of! So give you some stats. There are about 7.8 million to 8 million smart contracts on the chain today. On average, there's about 500-600 smart contracts get deployed every day into Mainnet Ethereum. What we've done, we talked to a lot of security teams that's in this space, and at the end of the day everybody use the same tools, set of tools, to preform security audits. What we have done, is we have programatically did that so we can run security audits on every smart contract on the chain. So we launched this feature last Friday, what we did is we picked the top 2000 smart contracts, based on transaction values-- >> On the Mainnet? >> On the Mainnet. And we preformed the audits on those, and last night, yeah three days later, we preformed all 8000 smart contracts that's been created and deployed in the past 90 days. So the top 2000 active ones, and the 8000 recently deployed ones, we preformed security audits on those. >> So this is pretty incredible, so I want to make sure I get this right. If this is the case, this is the first ever automation, or devOPS like approach to smart contract audits and security. So let me just kind of slow down if you don't mind. Today, most people will go in and manually look at code reviews or use some tooling to do that, and then they get a report. Businesses have been doing that, OSHO does that, many more do it, and they're bringing tools to the market, they are too, but I don't think anyone's actually automated at volume. So you're saying, you're automating, ingesting data from the chain-- >> Mhm. We analyze the bytecode as well as the source code to identify vulnerabilities and issues, things like integer overflow into the code, and we actually assign custom, we have our own scoring system to score basically the vulnerability exposure of the smart contract. >> Okay so I want to kind of push back on that because I'm skeptical. So, you do byte review-- >> Bytecode >> Bytecode and source code review, and then it's a black box and you type up a report, or you actually flag the code itself? Do you service it automatically? Does that happen automatically? Take me through what you do manually, and what happens with the computers. What is automated? >> Everything's automated. So we integrated the tools that every expert uses in this space today, to run the security audits on the smart contract and the bytecode and then we flag the particular source code and function calls that's flagged with the issue-- >> That's in the code itself? >> That's in the code itself, in that service, through our website, through our console, and you can actually see it. You can search on any smart contract and the console dashboard will show you the real time live streaming events of your smart contract function calls, as well as the vulnerability-- >> This is amazing. So this means that you can save a lot of time, love this feature, this is exciting. This is actually the first news I've ever hear of this, so I want to make sure I get it right. How many contracts can you do? How fast does it take? So you mentioned you've ingested last week, stuff off the chain, how many contracts was that? >> We did last week, 2000 and then up to last night, we finished 8000 smart contract scans. We're continuing to do that for every smart contract on the chain. >> How fast is this, because I remember back when I was learning how to code for the first time, back in the old days, you had to press a button, you'd have a compiler, and you'd get a bug in the line, syntax error, there it is. That's the normal kind of old school computer science. Syntax, compiler, interpreter, whatever you want to call it. It sounds like you're doing something similar, the same kind of speed. It's code review, analysis to the contracts, security through the tools... How fast is it? I mean, how long does it take to do a review of one smart contract, for instance? >> Actually, I don't know that. I would say minutes. >> Not days? >> Not days. No. Minutes. >> So it's not like it goes out, hourglass... Check your email it'll be there? It happens pretty much on the fly? >> It happens pretty much on the fly, real time. >> So how many contracts can you guys do in a day? >> We've done 8000 in three days, so... A lot! (both laughing) And we have ten machines running right now as we're speaking-- >> So you throw some clout at it, scale up-- >> Exactly, scale up. >> Scaling out is easy to do, you just go... >> Our goal is to basically make it very easy for developers to understand the state and health of their smart contract and then they can go find consultants, experts to fix those vulnerabilities and issues. >> Yeah, this is going to be a rising tide. I think, rising tide floats all boats when you have these emerging markets. You move to the next problem, and you do. Jeff Frick always says that in theCUBE and he's right! You take away security, you're now enabling this tool for these consultants to actually add more value. >> Exactly. >> Is that the focus? Do you guys even know who's going to use this tool yet? Obviously, this is a game changer. I mean, if I'm a data scientist I love this. Also I'm a trader, I might want the data, I'm a risk management, audit compliance person? I mean...you guys-- >> Yeah! At Amber Data our mission has always been providing, enabling infrastructure, enabling tool sets to allow developers, to allow operators, to allow the industry, to allow businesses to adopt blockchain, that's always been our mission and we have built the splunk, you know like search, a feature for blockchain, we have built APM, we have built dissimilar Mixpanel... It's all about providing access to data and to information, to allow everyone to have a better understanding, better transparency into the state and health of the blockchain, the state and health of their smart contracts. So that's you know, in line with-- >> So talk about the scoring thing, because okay, I love this automation I think that that's a game changer. So congratulations, this is the first I've heard of it, and I think this might be the first news in the industry out there. How does it work beyond that? What else do you guys do? Are you ingesting, are you adding overlays to it? What is the focus next? I mean, you're ingesting it, you're doing some security audits... Where does it go from there? >> So, we're actually working with the Web3 Data Foundation. So the Web3 Data Foundation is building a decentralized data marketplace to allow everyone in the ecosystem to list, subscribe, consume, distribute, monetize data assets that's generated by the blockchain and data that's on blockchain. >> So what's the URL for that? Web3... >> Web3data.org >> Three the number or three... >> Three the number, yeah. >> So web3 number data dot org? >> Yeah. >> Okay and is that an open community? Is it a foundation? >> Yes it's a nonprofit foundation, and I believe they're launching a token, Web3 Data token, and Amber Data's working with the Web3 Data foundation as a launch partner to utilize the data ingestion pipeline we have built and to serve up all the data for everyone to have access to it. >> Okay so what's your business model at Amber Data? Are you going to have your own token? Are you going to use the foundation as the token holding place? Can you just take us through the relationship of Amber Data with the foundation? I mean, I get the foundation but what you're doing here is essentially you're building IT operations into the blockchain and scaling things with automation, which certainly is only going to get better with more compute and A.I and other cool things, so I love that. How do you make money? Is it a token model? Is it just, classic, you get paid? What's the relationship? Is the foundation issuing tokens, do you have your own token? Take us through that. >> So the Web3 Data Foundation is the one issuing the token. We are the launch partner, so we are using the bulk diagnostic data ingestion pipeline that we can ingest all the data, and we're building together, building the data marketplace using smart contracts, to enable everyone to list, curate, consume, distribute, monetize the data. You think about it, right? Data on blockchain is just a fraction of the data out there. And as staff development, going on, as a trading application going on, there's a lot of data that's going to be generated by blockchain as well, and those datas aren't getting captured, analyzed, and utilized today. I think today, as a trader, investor, or as a developer, people don't have access to this data, to have data driven decisions, to help them continuously improve. Whether it's application or investment decisions. So the data marketplace will enable everyone to be able to have that access. >> And also it might enable more faster solution of decentralized applications-- >> Exactly. >> Which, Fred Kruger and I were talking on Twitter, I mean Facebook, about this, that we think that's the killer app, it's going to be the tsunami of apps coming. But all these chain problems are out there, so it's a little bit of a resetting going on in the industry. Obviously you see that with some of the pricing and funding and everything, but for the most part we see a big market coming. So I've got to ask you, the obvious question from there is, which chains are you supporting? You mentioned Mainnet which is great for Ethereum-- >> Yeah today we're supporting Ethereum Mainnet, and Rinkeby, the test net. We also support Aion's Mainnet and test net. We also support Stellar, we're working on EOS and TRON as well, so we have open sourced our data collector to allow community to contribute to that and we'll use Web3 Data Token to incentivize the community to contribute, to verify, to enrich the data. >> So I've got to ask you the security question, maybe this might be for more the nerds and the geeks, delving down in the product level, but maybe you can get it. Security is huge, so I'm skeptical. You're doing scoring, can you be hacked? What's the security answer to that? Like, whoa if she's controlling the score, I might want to spoof the code and take over and say it's okay, ya know? >> The code we get is actually on the chain, it's the code that you put on the chain, so good luck spoofing the data on the blockchain. >> That's the whole point of block chain, that's already answered. That's a dumb question, I got that. I always ask dumb questions. Alright, so what's next for you guys? How big are you guys, what's the story? I've been following you guys on Twitter and Telegram, you've been traveling a lot. What's the update on the company, what's the status? >> So we are, as a launch partner for Web3 Data Foundation, right now there's a token sale, we're in the middle of closing our presale. It's a soft offering, and we're building and expanding the team as we're speaking. >> How much are you raising on the staff, can you talk about that? >> No. >> No? Okay you don't have to say the number. Just be careful, it gets hard to raise too much. So the foundation, and you guys. Okay, I want to ask you a personal question, we love women in blockchain, I wear the "Satoshi is female" shirt as much as I can... How did you get into this? Because there's a lot of women coming into blockchain, more than people are advertising. I'm seeing a lot more women in tech, certainly a lot more women in crypto. Blockchain and crypto, you guys are doing almost a cloud devOPs serious venture here. How did you get into this, what's your story? >> I've always been a cloud girl. I started my career building Yatuzi computing, enterprise grid computing. I was 23 years old and working for Axiom in a data center in Arkansas, and I'm the only one that wears high heel6s in data center, and get stuck in a vent you know? That's my background, so it's not a far stretch to understand blockchain and the usefulness of it if you talk about distribute computing, distribute storage. So it's very natural for me, from a technology perspective, get into this space. On a personal note, I really believe in decentralization, and I believe the change it's going to make to our lives and to our offspring's lives in the future. >> It's real, you think? >> It's real. It's here to stay. >> So what's your vision of blockchain? What are people not getting? Obviously there's a lot of scams out there that have kind of tainted on the ICO side, but what are people missing? When you talk to people, you have kind of like, "Oh I get it" and people kind of of like "I don't really see that" ? What's the main thing that they're missing, what's missing? >> I think it's missing that killer Dapp to get people to realize "Oh it's actually easy to use". I don't have to think about the inner workings, and it just works. My mom still lives in Beijing, I talk to her on Skype all the time, she's not worrying about TCPIP, she's not worrying about, how is this phone call getting encrypted or not encrypted? What's my network bandwidth? She just use the phone and call me, like I'm right next to her. I think as we develop building the apps, people don't think about that they're using blockchain, they just use it. >> It's like explaining it to a parent or someone who's not technical.. "Hey how does the internet work? Can't I just "type a keyword in to the browser or a search engine?" Instead today, it's more like "Hey, you know how BGP works?" and "You know how packets move around?" It's so hard to explain, so it's got to be easier. >> Way easier, yeah. >> Totally agree, totally agree. Well Tongtong, thank you for coming on theCUBE, appreciate it, great update, exclusive news. Automation, bringing cloud computing and utility computing, real geeky stuff to the table here. This is theCUBE Conversation and I'm John Furrier. Amber Data COO, Tongtong Gong here, inside theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (dramatic music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live, from Nassau in the Bahamas. It's the Cube, covering Polycon '18, brought to you by Polymath. >> Welcome back to exclusive Cube coverage in the Bahamas, for Polycon '18. This is the show about cryptocurrency, token economics, and the future of work, and the economies and digital nations. And the Cube's here for two days of wall-to-wall coverage. And we're excited to have the CryptoKitties team here. The phenomenon that took over the blockchain, really started to show the value of smart contracts, in a really cool, playful, fun way, really important story. Jody Rebak and Alex Shih, welcome to the Cube. >> Hello, welcome! >> Thanks for having us. >> So, love the shirts, love to get one for myself someday, but you got any extra shirts, I'll take one. >> We do, we do. >> Okay, great. >> We'll give you one. >> Love to have one. Okay, so CryptoKitties, for the folks that living under a rock for the past year, has been a real phenomenon where people were actually, you know, creating--well you describe it. >> Okay so CryptoKitties, the purpose is to bring the first billion people to the blockchain, and CryptoKitties was the first endeavor in order to do that. So it's really a gaming and collectible game on the blockchain. It's kind of straightforward. You buy a kitty, and with your kitty, you can sell it, breed it, there's a whole marketplace. You know, since the initial launch, we've had a bunch of special kitties get released. We recently launched in China, so there's a ton of kitties coming down the pipeline, so breed your kitties. >> So the fun game turned into quite an interesting experiment, because people love fun, around tech, when tech is kind of boring sometimes. You blockchain, you know, what does that actually mean? What happens under the hood? So you guys kind of brought a fun piece of it. Was it by design, the growth? Was it more like, was it what you expected? Take us through some of the inside the ropes, the company, like, was there a moment where you said, "Oh my god, can you believe what's happening? Like, this is really taking off." Or was it planned? Take us through that. >> Sure, so I think inherently, the blockchain technology-- like, blockchain is not something that's inherently easy to explain, so we wanted to do that in a fun, simple way, so that people could learn about smart contracts, and they could learn about all the benefits, about being decentralized, and sort of putting trust on the network. So that was our initial, sort of, goal. We have an amazing team behind us, so the creative team just said, like, "We want to bring kitties to the blockchain." So the group with Axiom Zen and CryptoKitties has been working on blockchain technology since 2014. CryptoKitties was our first public project. And I think, you know, the team came together very quickly. I think we built this in four to six months. You know, I think we were all surprised with the success of it, and bringing down the Ethereum network, slowing it down, so I remember the team launched, and I woke up one morning with hundreds of emails from media outlets just saying, "we want to do a story on you" It was really, really exciting, and the team worked really hard, so we're really proud about it. >> It's one of those, it is kind of a pinch-me moment, because you're like, "oh my god, this is like highly successful." And that's really fun, and I think it's a great example of how you can use this fun technology in a way that people can relate to but it also brought up some technical challenges because, I think, at the time, and even now, it takes a lot, probably the number one use case of Ethereum blockchain. I mean, I don't know. Is there another use case that's actually as pervasive as CryptoKitties? >> You know what? I'm not sure, but I think one of the really interesting things for us was we learned a lot with the scalability and it's been interesting to see, sort of, other teams reach out to us and sort of sharing our learnings, because, I think, in order to continue sort of, building the ecosystem, we really need to share learnings, and you know, not hoard information So, you know, we're definitely looking at scaling, I think you know one way we've addressed it is sort of building a lot off-chain to speed up transactions. But, I think, that there's a lot to learn, and it's going to take, sort of, the ecosystem working together and sharing idea and knowledge to-- >> What have you learned? What are some of the things you guys learned on the experience, both on the kind of, business-side, integration-side, developer-side, to some of the really hard-core, you know tech, infrastructure pieces? What are the learnings? >> I think the reality is neither of us are technical people, so it's probably do a disservice to try and speak to that. >> Is there one, is there a couple things that jumped out at you, was it performance, was it just--? >> I think because there, you know, we're only starting to see applications built on the blockchain, you don't know what you don't know. And the team behind CryptoKitties and Axiom Zen, we built a number of products, we have a bunch of projects that we've worked, and we have sort of our developer process But when you're working with a new technology, and you don't know what you're dealing with, it's hard to anticipate, and I think, following best practices, leveraging, you know, other teams and working with the community, that's I think what we learned most, is you need to, you know, rely on the community and share learnings. >> Take a minute to talk about what you guys do there, each of you, what your role is at CryptoKitties, what you're focused on, and what's going on in the company--without giving away all of the trade-secrets of course. >> Yeah I know, there's a lot we can't talk about. >> I mean, what's your role? What are you guys overseeing? What are you building? >> Perhaps we should explain a bit about Axiom Zen, first and kind of the set up amongst CryptoKitties, if you want to take a stab at that. >> Sure, so Axiom Zen is a venture studio. We've been around for five years. So, we have a part of the business that's focused on consumer blockchain technologies. We have quite a big enterprise SAAS business. So one of our companies is called ZenHub, if you've ever heard of them, ZenHub, and then we have sort of a joint venture part of the business where we work with companies to build and launch amazing and impactful tech companies. So, CryptoKitties was born out of our consumer blockchain, and specifically, our foundry. So my role with Axiom Zen is, I'm Chief of Staff, and I work with the Executive team on strategy, I work with the Operations team, a lot of special projects and a lot of, you know, with tech companies, there's always things, special initiatives that are coming up, and I really love to focus on that. >> And you've got to be always learning, right? I mean, like you said, you're trying new things. >> Yeah >> So it's kind of like, a studio, meets venture incubator, meets R and D, meets builder culture. >> Everything, yeah, and I think sort of, I'll let Alex speak to his role, but one of the reasons, our team is 80 people. CryptoKitties' team is 30, but everyone who comes and joins the team is an entrepreneur at heart, so I think that's why we've been able to accomplish so much. >> Alex, your role. >> So, I recently joined the company, and I came on as CFO, so-- >> So you run all the numbers, man, those gas prices on less than twenty. So, I mean, you got to keep the trains running, making sure the lights are on >> Sure. >> 80 people total, including the 30 in the CryptoKitties? >> Yeah, inclusive of the 30. >> Okay, so, what's the outlook? What's the objective of the firm? You guys continue to experiment? Do new, more projects? >> Yeah, I think, so one of our, we wrote and published the ERC721 token. We didn't do it, but someone--Dieter Shirley did, within the team, so I think we want to continue to focus on that. You know, we have a number of projects in the pipeline that we're not able to talk about publicly, but definitely exciting this happening. Continuing to build CryptoKitties, I mentioned we did a China launch, so we're continuing to expand and just build, so yeah, we've got a lot of exciting things to do. >> China must be really big. (Alex laughs) >> Yeah. >> Must be huge. >> Yeah, one of-- >> Asia must be hot. >> Yeah, well, I think sort of-- >> Mobile phone usage, just incredible. >> They're leaders in the collectible gaming space, so it naturally made sense for us to go there. >> Great, well, hey, congratulations. What's going to be the outlook for CryptoKitties? You mentioned the marketplace. What are some of the cool things that are going on, that you can point out, that people might not know? >> Do you want to talk about our China launch, and the special kitties, or? >> I think you're doing a great job, keep going. >> (laughs) Okay so you know, we recently launched in China, it's Chinese New Year, so we have a bunch of sort of special kitties being released. We just had a company call earlier today, where we saw a preview of some of the kitties that are being bred. There's some dragon kitty, there's dog kitty, so I guess, look at the cool kitties. Building a story of your kitties. >> I think it's just been great stuff, again, like I said, at Sundance, we saw the VR/AR world starting to really go down this road of some new creative digital, and I think this is a great example of where I see it going which is you know taking this new decentralized infrastructure and creating new experiences, so congratulations, CryptoKitties. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Alright, the Cube bringing new crypto experiences to our footage again we're going to do a lot of blockchain cryptocurrency shows. This is the first one of the year, been covering bitcoin since 2010, so we're proud of that, and look for the cube at events, but here at the Bahamas, we'll be here for a whole nother day tomorrow, keep on watching, got a few more interviews to wrap up day one, got some big guests coming, be right back after this short break. (techno music)