(electronic music) >> Live from Toronto, Canada it's The Cube covering Blockchain Futurist Conference 2018. Brought to you by The Cube. >> Hello everyone, welcome back to The Cube live coverage here in Toronto, Canada Ontario for Untraceable presents Blockchain Futurist Conference. Two days we've been here. We're on day two, amazing event here, great community, I'm John Furrier your host. Dave Vellante went back east so he was here yesterday. Our next guest Pablo Gonzales is the Founder and CEO of Genesis Blockchain Technologies, welcome to The Cube thanks for joining me. >> Thank you for having me. >> So I'm glad to have you on. First of all when Bradley Rodder says oh watch out for that guy, you must be smart because we trust Bradley so but you're doing something really cool. The future of trading and exchanges has been a topic that everyone's been talking about but not a lot of people have been actually moving the needle on. You've got some movement here, people doing here but no one's actually had the full package and they're running as fast as they can to do it. You guys have done it. >> We have. >> How? Take a minute, what have you guys done? What is the product? How did you guys do it and what can people use today? >> Thank you. So it's no longer hot air, as you said. A lot of people are saying what they're going to do. We're here to say what we have done which is very different. Yesterday up at the main stage we launched the world's first decentralized exchange on a mobile platform. We're fully licensed by the Costa Rican Commodities Exchange, we have brokerage license, a currency exchange license and a money remittance license. We already possess the licenses, we're not in pursuit of the licenses we have them. What we did obviously we pursued an MNA strategy, we acquired companies that were over a decade in the business and we just transformed them and cryptomized them, as I use the term and launched the exchange with those licenses and platforms. We listed the exchange with over 40 coins. Over four billion dollars of shared market cap and over half a million dollars of daily trading and liquidity. >> So this is right now going on in Costa Rica, mainly if stable. Is it stable? How's the stability there? >> So Costa Rica is extremely stable, they haven't had an army for over 50 years, it's considered a world-class country for banking, for international businesses so much so. Amazon, HP, Intel, all these humongous companies have large operations in the country. >> And their posture to crypto is they've come out formally. >> Yes. >> To state well what's the posture from Costa Rica? >> So they consider cryptocurrencies a commodity and not a security and that's why went on to pursue a commodities exchange license. >> So that opens up doors for you to do this. >> Of course it opens up the doors, think about it. So you can now trade Bitcoin with gold. In our exchange, not as of today we're going to launch that in January, so now you can trade cryptocurrencies with commodities and cryptocurrencies with fiat currencies. >> So I'm just kind of speculating here in terms of my mind where I'm going with this. Almost imagine the shakeup that's coming. It's like a blender, we trading gold and Bitcoin it's just like who would have thought that was possible a year ago? >> That's correct. >> They've been compared, people compare Bitcoin to new digital gold but actually comparing them this is going to shakeup like a blender. >> That's correct. >> Blend up the commodities market. >> Disrupt it. >> What's your vision? What do you see happening? >> I just think that a lot of people are focusing on they say on one of the interviews earlier today, one of the interviewers was asking me is that Bitcoin to the moon? I'm like guys we need to stop. If we want this industry to really grow and develop stop using those analogies. We need to create a community that's larger, we need mass adoption and I think by including the commodities into the equation you're catering to the traditional investors that are a little bit uncomfortable with cryptocurrencies because they don't know about them but they know about gold and then all of a sudden now you compare gold with Bitcoin. >> It brings retail into it. >> Yes. >> It brings a real retail market. >> That's correct. >> You know I just want to say something. I agree with you 100%. These news outlets out there, these other people they tend to focus on the price of Bitcoin and it's almost like okay can we get over that? Yes it's going to go up and down, if you're in the long game it should be 20,000. Okay we can buy that but let's talk about what people are doing. Who's building something? >> Yes. >> That's the focus. So if I ask you now that question, hey Pablo what have you built and what you you going to continue to build if this is a foundational product, what are you guys going to do on top of it? What's the build plan? >> Thank you. So yesterday we launched the decentralized exchange with 40 coins. We're going to add probably between now and December another 110 different tokens. We're doing 20 for now and in January we're launching a centralized exchange so that's where we're going to add the fiat currencies and the commodities. >> What date again? >> End of January. >> Okay got it. >> Then we're going to make an announcement in November at one of the conferences in Malta and so we're reserving the date and everything else for that but in May of next year we're launching over the counter trading desk with full KYC AML you know counter terrorism financing, all of the world class policies and by this time next year we're going to be launching our institutional platform. So we want to be a one stop shop via the currency exchange that we own. We already have the ability from the Central Bank of Costa Rica which is amazing to issue Visa cards. So now our users, besides trading, they can take their crypto with them from their mobile phone, convert it to fiat and pay, you know, for gasoline, buy groceries. >> So I'm an entrepreneur, I got my own cube coin coming out, cube token, security token or utility, what's in it for me? If I asked you Pablo what's in it for me? What do I get out of it as a business? Are people going to start trading my coins? Am I instantly going to have an over the counter so as a business what do I have to worry about? What's the benefit? What matters to me? What's the impact? >> So if you were to be a coin to list on our exchange you mean? Well first of all we all know exchanges now to list on them you know they're changing, some of them I'm not going to say the name. >> They're charging a lot of money. >> Yeah 400 BTC and crazy amounts like this. We are going to charge. It's a business at the end of the day but what we're looking for with the coins that we're going to list is partnerships and seeing what ways we can do more entrepreneurial projects to change the landscape of the industry together as an exchange and a coin because potentially what a coin is is a company. You know what's behind the coin is what's important to us and not the coin itself. As the company develops and progresses so will the coin's price appreciated value or depreciated value and so yes, besides facilitating trading fees and lowering that, up listing and so forth what we're bringing to the table wants to be much more dynamic. >> You got to balance you know business that you got to do with infrastructure build out. It's like the old telecom days you got to build some cell towers before you roll out mobile. You got to build this entire retail global fabric. >> Yes. How does community play in for it? Obviously community is very important. I agree with you that's big time. How are you guys building your community? Tapping into anything else? Obviously Untraceable has got a great community. How are you going to grow your community. >> So as an exchange there could be a conflict of interest we have to be really careful how we get involved in the community but what we want to do is by selected partnerships with projects and coins. The coins are already doing their work. They are appealing to a community. They are raising the money from that community what we want to do is we want to partner up with those coins, the coins that are worth partnering up with and that way our reach automatically will multiply. On top of that of course we want to work with government and banks and institutions. We believe, it may not be popular what I'm about to say, you know the good old honor kids that came to the hardcore crypto, forget about central banks and centralization, I don't think that that's ever going to happen. I think the more we cooperate with government, that the more we work with them, we together can shape the industry and the landscape for good. I do believe in that. It's a collaboration and cooperation with governments and banks to us is pivotal. >> I mean you can be a coach to the regulatory. >> Absolutely. >> You can be an advocate and partner. >> We are being. >> And not an enemy. >> In Costa Rica, so before they considered and they took a position on whether is was a commodity or not you know they approached us and we were teaching them so much so that a congressman that was going to be at the conference and couldn't make it, he's the founder of the Libertarian movement in Costa Rica he created a think tank of crypto because of us that now has Latin America reach. Think about it, there are 1.3 billion people in Latin America. >> They have mobile phones. >> Exactly. That can now learn about crypto and so we're going to capitalize on this. >> It's a real democratization, what you do is change a society. If you continue to get this right this is really key. Congratulations. Now I want to ask you personal questions so I love the hat, you look great. >> Thank you. >> How did you get here? Were you scratching an itch that was around this? Was it, how did you get to the point where you said hey I'm going to go out and build the first exchange. I'm going to roll up the companies, wire them together, cryptotize them and go nuts and build an exchange. I mean how did you get here? What's the story? >> Thank you well, it's a story. I began entrepreneurial projects over 10 years ago, been in the private sector, because Costa Rica is a services company we put together a call center. Took it from like four people to 4000 people in four years. I went on to like building my own sports brand in over 10 countries but then about two years ago a few companies from Canada they called me from here, they called me to help them go public in the Canadian Securities Exchange. I took two companies public last year and after that I was saying to myself and the crew guys what do we do next? How can we really disrupt the industry? And one of the things we were talking about was man, we're in a decentralized community that brags about decentralization, trading and centralized exchanges. How ironic is that? >> Yeah it's got to change. >> So we said you know what let's be the pioneers, let's head out on a quest to build the world's first mobile decentralized exchange and we achieved that. It's unbelievable. Now you hear all the big guys, the whales talking about we're going to come up with a decentralized exchange because that's what people want at the end of the day and we were able to be the first ones ever to give that. >> And stability is critical. I mean I was just at a bank starting up a new account for a new startup that we're doing and they're like is this a blockchain company? I'm like no, no God no, no, no we're a media business. >> Those are bad guys. >> So you can't even open a bank account some places. So this has really got to get fixed and I got liquid, I got fiat currency, I got to make movements around. The retail market, whether it's trading, investing, it's got to be converted over to the new world. >> Yes, yes. >> I mean it's almost like a full changeover. >> That's correct. Obviously I think that it'll be a transition process. It'll take some time. There are some banks that already getting more involved into the process. What's interesting in our case is we even got the Costa Rican Central Bank to be our bank. Think about it, we're not banking with any private bank or public bank but the Costa Rican Central Bank and I think that more and more banks will follow suit as they see good use cases. The ICO craze of last year, I don't think that it did any good to the greater good of the community. If anything it brought a lot of prejudice. >> It's a black eye. They'll be a hangover on that but that's like the dotcom bubble. All those things on the dotcom bubble actually happened so I think you're going to just see get that jested out of the system. >> Inevitable. >> And focus on quality. That's what happening now. >> Inevitable. >> Pablo thanks for coming on. Pablo Gonzales who is the Founder and CEO of Genesis Blockchain Technologies. First ever exchange bringing all new magic to the marketplace. This is The Cube bringing you the content magic here in Toronto, Canada. I'll be right back with more. Stay with us. Live coverage after this short break. (electronic music)

(electronic music) >> Live from Toronto, Canada. It's the Cube. Covering Blockchain Futurist Conference 2018. Brought to you by the Cube. >> Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the Cube coverage here in Toronto, Canada. We're in Ontario to the Untraceable Blockchain Futurist Conference. This is day two of two days of coverage. I'm John Furrier, your host. Our next guest is serial entrepreneur, Chris Harper, the CEO of Jereki and Mapogo Ventures. Welcome. >> And ZippedScript. >> And ZippedScript. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Hey, lot of balls in the air, a lot of irons in the fire. Welcome to the Cube. >> Hey, good to have me, man. I'm excited to be here. This is awesome. >> So before we get into, you're a serial entrepreneur, what are you working on now? Take a quick minute, explain. >> Yeah. >> Where the names came from, what do they mean, what are you doing? >> So, first things first, we'll start with Jereki. Jereki is a Japanese proverb which means to achieve enlightenment through one's own efforts. So Jereki is a shell company and we currently run this company, it's called Chase your Drink. It basically is replacing pop and juice as a mix for any hard liquor. No sugar, no calories, nothing artificial and the kicker, we got 90 vitamins in these to combat your hangover the next day. So if you're not drinking with Chase, you're drinking wrong. (laughs) >> It's a chaser. >> Chaser, exactly. >> Yeah. >> And these are in stores like, it'll be in Sobeys, Farm Boy in Canada, GNC soon. And it's going really well. >> Okay, how 'about the venture firm? >> Yes, so the next company is Mapogo Ventures. Mapogo is actually, it comes from a group of lions in the African Savanna that were only six lions, but they dominated the savanna for their whole life span, which is super rare, and they took down animals like giraffes, rhinos, and became legend. It was a folk legend about these Mapogo lions. So Mapogo is a venture firm. We specialize in food and beverage companies. If you're doing something epic, we want to talk to you. And then we also specialize in blockchain cryptocurrency and anything that's on the forefront of what's going on in the tech space. So if anybody's interested, they think they have a great idea, you can reach out to us wherever you guys put contact information, I don't know. >> We'll put it up there. >> Yeah, yeah, definitely. >> What's the website? >> Mapogoventures.com >> Okay, got it. >> Yeah, Mapogoventures.com. >> And how much are you guys investing? What's the kind of round size you guys do? >> So it totally depends. We almost don't have a limit or a minimum. It's all about the team, the idea, where you're going, and what you need. We'll get you what you need. >> Is it a new firm, are you making business? >> It's a new firm, it's a new firm. So we have two companies that we're looking at right now, but we don't have any companies in the portfolio, we're looking to add. >> Great, awesome. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Well any great ideas, check it out. How about crypto? What's your seeing, what's your thing, what are you seeing on crypto? What kind of deals? Obviously the flight to quality right now is starting to see the ICOs kind of burning out here and there, but the ones that are solid are standing and growing in a build-out mode. >> I mean, the whole space right now, everybody's worried about it, right? If you're an outsider, you're looking at it like it's all down. But one thing I did want to say during this interview was this is a great event. Untraceable, they sent up an incredible event and even if you're not into cryptocurrency, if you're a business person, crypto's only been around for, you know, six, seven years. So everybody in this room did something before crypto. Right? So they're all multi-faceted individuals and if you're not in crypto, if you're scared of crypto, if you're hesitant about crypto, if you don't understand it, you should be here. You should be at these events because it's priceless networking and who knows where you can go. >> Plus, starting companies on a down, on down the bottom of the market-- >> Yeah. >> Is when the best companies get built. >> 1000%, you know. What did Warren Buffet say? Be fearful when others are greedy, be greedy when others are fearful. Looks to me that the market-- >> Yeah. >> Is incredibly fearful. So maybe you should consider being greedy right now. >> For the people that aren't here, what's the vibe of the show? What's your take, what's the hallway conversations like? >> Yeah, I mean, the vibe of the show. This is actually one of the best conferences I've been to. I've been to a few in New York. This one is incredible. Everyone's so friendly. You can come here, don't know anyone. >> Yeah. >> People will say hi to you. They'll introduce themselves to you. Next thing you know, you had an idea, now you have funding. But it's up to you to make this situation a great situation. >> What's interesting is this sector, blockchain and crypto. >> Yeah. >> Attracts alpha entrepreneurs, alpha engineers. >> Okay. >> You mentioned-- >> Mapogo. >> Smart people are in this world. They've done things before, so this is really interesting. >> Yeah, like people always forget that. They see crypto and they get nervous 'cause like I don't know anything about it. Remember guys, this is a new industry. And we're only in, you know, the first couple innings. This is going to be huge. So come, learn, and surround yourself with killers. >> Alright, what's the coolest thing you've seen so far here? >> The coolest thing I've seen so far. You know, I'm going to be completely honest with you. Larry King. I was so happy to see Larry King and it's awesome that a guy like that is supporting the community, you know. >> Yeah. >> Because this is really a revolutionary technology, the blockchain technology. >> You've done a lot entrepreneurial things since you were 10, you were talking before we came on. >> Yeah. >> How does that help you right now navigate this scene and looking at deals and your own deals and you're building out, you're investing. Other entrepreneurs are coming in, sometimes first time entrepreneurs, how does that help you and what advice would you give other entrepreneurs? >> So I started really young, not knowing where I was going to go. It was kind of just like in my blood. But, you know, you got to get out, you got to talk to people, you know. I always say no deal happens on your couch. You got to jump off the porch. You got to go out, you got to network, you got to meet people. And I started doing that at a young age which got my conversation skills a lot more advanced, so now I can go in and close a deal in 10 minutes where, you know, back in the day, it might take me two hours and I probably wouldn't even close it. So what I would say. >> 10 minutes is a good metric. >> It is. >> That's hey. >> Hey, I don't need to say more or less. If it's an interesting idea, let's go. You should be able to tell me what it is. >> Yeah. >> We should be able to hammer something out. Yeah, yeah, that's pretty much what's going on. >> Awesome. And what's some of the plans that you have for your ventures? Let's go back, the zip line, what's that one? >> Oh, yeah, ZippedScript. >> ZippedScript, I'm sorry. >> So I can't talk too much about ZippedScript. It's launching in fall of 2018. ZippedScript is basically going, it is revolutionizing the higher education industry and the transcript section in that industry. And all I can say is we may or may not be using blockchain technology to do it. >> Got it, okay. >> Yeah. >> And how about the chaser, that sounds very cool. >> Yeah, it is really cool. And, I mean, you guys can go to chase your drink.com, check it out. You can head over to our Instagram, Chase Your Drink. It's taken over. You know, this cola flavor I've got here and tropical thunder is pineapple mango, but cola tastes just like Coca-Cola. >> Yeah. >> Without any of the bad ingredients. And it's really taken over. You know, our biggest problem is supply. >> Yeah. >> We just can't produce enough, but we're fixing that problem. >> That's a good problem to have. >> It's a very good problem to have, right. >> How did you get into the venture side? Just you're scratching an itch, you wanted to put some of your money to work, did you raise unlimited partners, how's that, how'd that develop? >> Totally. >> And what's the current situation? >> Yeah, so it was a group of fellow entrepreneurs and we're all working on our own companies, but we're all ADD, right? And we're like I'm doing this, I'm doing that, but we have all these contacts, all these different skill sets, and we're all great friends. So that's another very important thing that most people talk about. Surround yourself with like minded people, but you want them to have different skill sets. >> Awesome. >> I don't want a clone. I have a clone, we're not going to work well together. >> You want added value, you don't want to subtract value. >> Yeah, exactly. So we came together and we're like we have so much value in so many different spaces, we can walk companies through, you know, a proven concept in any industry, food and beverage, cryptocurrency, and basically you won't make mistakes that we made. That's the bottom line. So you'll accelerate your success by working with us. >> Well, Chris, great to have you on. >> Yeah. >> Congratulations on your success. >> It was amazing, man. >> Check out Chase, check out the fund if you've got a great idea, contact Chris, go the cube.net, you can find his information there. I'm John Furrier here in Toronto with all the action here at the Blockchain Futurist Conference where the future's being created, robust industry, people looking at the long term, this is where the action is. Thanks for watching. Stay with us for day two coverage after this short break. (electronic music)

(techy music) >> Live from Toronto, Canada, it's theCUBE covering Blockchain Futurist Conference 2018, brought to you by theCUBE. (techy music) >> Hello, everyone, and welcome back. This is the live CUBE coverage here in Toronto, Ontario here in Canada for the Untraceable Blockchain Futurist Conference. This is day two of wall-to-wall CUBE coverage. We've got great presentations going on, live content here on theCUBE as well as in the sessions, great networking, but more important all the thought leaders in the industry around the world are coming together to try to set the standards and set up a great future for cryptocurrency and blockchain in general. Our next two guests are very special guests for theCUBE and we're excited to have them on, the Honorable Wayne Caines, Minister of National Security for the government of Bermuda, and Kevin Richards, concierge on the Fintech business development manager, part of the Bermuda Business Development Agency. Thank you guys for coming on, really appreciate the time. >> Thanks very much. >> Thank you for having us. >> Why this is so important is that we heard your presentation onstage, for the folks, they can catch it online when they film it and record it, but the Bermuda opportunity has really emerged as a shining light around the world, specifically in the United States. In California, where I live, Silicon Valley, you guys are now having great progress in hosting companies and being crypto-friendly. Take a minute to explain what's happening, what's the current situation, why Bermuda, why now, what's developing? >> This has all happened over the last eight months. We were looking in November of 2017 to go in the space. In January we went to the World Economic Forum in Davos in Switzerland. When we went to Davos in Switzerland something very interesting happened. People kept coming up to us, I was like the Hound of the Baskerville, or the Pied Piper if you please, and so, so many people were coming up to us finding out more information about Bermuda. We realized that our plan that we thought we could phase in over 18 months, that it had to be accelerated. So, whilst we were at the World Economic Forum in Davos we said to people, "Listen, if you want to change the world, "if you want to help Bermuda to grow, if you're serious," this is a Thursday, "Meet us in Bermuda on the Monday morning." On the Monday morning there are 14 different people in the room. We sat in the room, we talked about what we wanted the world to be, how could Bermuda be in place, what are the needs in this industry, and by the Wednesday we had a complete and total framework, and so we split up into industries. Number one was ICOs, we wanted to look at how to regulate the ICO market. Number two, we wanted to look at digital asset exchanges or cryptocurrencies or how do we regulate security tokens and utility tokens and what do exchanges look like, how do we do exchanges in Bermuda, and then we wanted to talk about education and setting up incubators. And so, come fast forward to July, August, we have an ICO bill in place that allows us to look at setting up ICOs in Bermuda. We wanted to focus on the legal and the regulatory framework, so this is a nascent space. A number of people are concerned about the dark actors, and so we wanted to set up a jurisdiction that traded on our international reputation. Now, remember for the last 60 years reinsurance, finance, captives, hedge funds, people in the financial services market have been coming to Bermuda because that's what we do well. We were trading on the reputation of our country, and so we couldn't do anything to jeopardize that. And so, when we put in place the ICO legislation we had consultants from all over the world, people that were bastions and beasts in industry, in the ICO industry and in the crypto world came to Bermuda and helped us to develop the legislation around setting up an ICO. So, we passed the ICO legislation. The next phase was regulating cryptocurrencies, regulating digital assets, and we set up a piece of legislation called the Digital Asset Business Act, and that just regulates the digital asset space exchanges, and the last piece we wanted to do was a banking piece, and this is the last and we believe the most significant piece. We were talking to people and they were not able to open up bank accounts and they were not able to do, so we said, "Listen, "the Bermuda banking environment is very strong." Our banking partners were like, "Listen, "we love what you guys are doing, "but based on our corresponding banking relationships "we don't want to do anything to jeopardize that space," but how could we tell people to come to Bermuda, set up your company, and they can't open bank accounts? And so, we looked at, we just recently passed creating a new banking license that allows people to set up their business in Bermuda and set up banking relationships and set up bank accounts. That simply has to receive the governor's Royal Assent. As you know, Bermuda's still a British pan-territory, and financial matters have to get the okay of the Queen, and so that is in the final stages, but we're excited, we're seeing an influx, excuse me, a deluge of people coming to Bermuda to set up their companies in Bermuda. >> So, the first two pieces are in place, you have the legislation... >> Mm-hm. >> Mm-hm. >> You have the crypto piece, and now the banking's not yet, almost approved, right? >> It's there, it simply has to get the final sign-off, and we believe that it should take place within the next two weeks. So, by the time this goes to air and people see it we believe that piece will be in place. >> So, this is great news, so the historical perspective is you guys had a good reputation, you have things going on, now you added on a new piece not to compromise your existing relationships and build it on. What have you guys learned in the process, what did you discover, was it easy, was it hard, what are some of the learnings? >> What we've learnt is that KYC, know your customers, and the AML, anti-money laundering, and terrorist financing pieces, those are the critical pieces. People are looking in this space now for regulatory certainty, so when you're talking about people that are in the space that are doing ICOs of $500 million or exchanges that are becoming unicorns, a billion dollar entity in three months, they want a jurisdiction that has regulatory certainty. Not only do they want a jurisdiction with regulatory certainty, they want to open up the kimono. What has this country done in the past, what do they have to trade on? We're saying you can go to a number of countries in the world, but look at our reputation, what we're trading on, and so we wanted to create a space with regulatory certainty, and so we have a regulatory body in Bermuda called the Bermuda Monetary Authority, and they are an independent regulator that they penned the Digital Asset Business Act, and so the opportunity simply for people around the world saying, "Listen, we want to do an ICO, "we want to set up an exchange. "Where's a country that we can go to that has a solid reputation? Hold on, how many countries have law surrounding"-- >> Yeah. >> "The Digital Asset Business Act, how many ICO countries have laws. Guess what, Bermuda becomes a standout jurisdiction in that regard. >> Having a regulation signaling is really important, stability or comfort is one, but the one concern that we hear from entrepreneurs, including, you know, ourselves when we look at the market is service providers. You want to have enough service providers around the table so when I come in and domicile, say, in Bermuda you want to have the banking relationships, you want to have the fiduciary-- >> Yes. >> You want to have service providers, law firms and other people. >> Yes. >> How are you guys talking about that, is that already in place? How does that fit into the overall roadmap for your vision? >> I don't want to beat a horse (laughs) or beat a drum too much, that is what we do as a country. So, we have set up, whether it's a group of law firms and the Bermuda, excuse me, the Bermuda Monetary Authority, the Bermuda that's the register of companies that sets up the companies. We have Kevin, and Kevin will tell you about it, he leads our concierge team. So, it's one throat to choke, one person that needs, so when you come to really understand that the ease of business, a county that's business-friendly with a small country and with a small government it's about ease of reference. Kevin, tell us a little about the concierge team. >> It's like the Delaware of the glove, right? >> Absolutely. >> Come in, domicile, go and tell us how it works. >> I'll give you a little bit of background on what we do on the concierge side. So, one thing that we identified is that we want to make sure that we've got a structure and a very clearly defined roadmap for companies to follow so that process from when they first connect with the BDA in Bermuda to when they're incorporated and set up and moved to Bermuda to start running their business is a seamless process that has very clearly identifiable road marks of different criteria to get through. So, what I do as a concierge manager is I will identify who that company needs to connect with when they're on the ground in Bermuda, get those meetings set up for when they come down so that they have a very clearly mapped out day for their trip to Bermuda. So, they meet with the regulator, they meet with the government leaders, they meet with the folks who've put together legislation that, obviously you mentioned the service providers, so identifying who's the right law firm, corporate service provider, advisory firm on the ground in Bermuda, compliance company, and then making sure that depending on what that company wants to achieve out of their operation in Bermuda they've got an opportunity to connect with those partners on their first trip so that they can put that road map together for-- >> So, making it easy... >> Making it very easy to set up in Bermuda. >> So, walk me through, I want to come down, I want to do business-- >> Yeah. >> Like what I hear, what do I do? >> So, you send me an email and you say, "Listen, Wayne, we're looking at "doing an ICO launch in Bermuda. "I would like to meet with the regulator. "Can you put a couple law firms in place," in an email. I zip that over to Kevin or you go on our Fintech.bm website-- >> Yeah, I was going to say... >> Fintech.bm website, and Kevin literally organizes a meeting. So, when you come to Bermuda for your meeting you have a boardroom and all the key players will be in the boardroom. >> Got it. >> If you need somebody to pick you up at the airport, if you need a hotel, whatever you need from soup to nuts our team actually makes that available to you, so you're not running around trying to find different people to meet, everyone's there in the room. >> And the beauty of Bermuda is that, you know, the city of Hamilton's two square kilometers, so your ability to get a lot done in one day is, I think, second to nowhere else on the planet, and working with the BDA concierge team you're, you know, we connect with the client before they come down and make sure we identify what their needs are. >> The number one question I have to ask, and this is probably the most important for everyone, is do they have to wear Bermuda shorts? (laughs) >> When you come you tell us your size, you tell us what size and what color you want and we'll make sure, so the... I tell this story about the Bermuda shorts. The Bermuda shorts, Bermuda's always had to adapt and overcome. Bermuda, we have something called the Bermuda sloop and it's a sailing rig, and so we... The closest port to Bermuda is Cape Hatteras in North Carolina and we wanted to cut down the time of their voyage, so we created a sailing rig called the Bermuda rig or the Bermuda sloop. Over the years that has become the number one adopted rig on sailing boats. We've always had to adapt and become innovative. The Bermuda shorts were a way to adapt and to get through our very hot climate, and so if you look at just keep that in mind, the innovation of the Bermuda sloop and the Bermuda shorts. Now, this Fintech evolution is another step in that innovation and a way that we take what's going on in the world and adapt it to make it palatable for everyone. >> What's the brand promise for you guys when you look at when entrepreneurs out there and other major institutions, especially in the United States, again, Silicon Valley's one of the hottest issues around-- >> Yes. >> Startups for expansion, right now people are stalled, they don't know what to do, they hear Malta, they hear other things going on. What's the promise that you guys are making to the law firms and the people, entrepreneurs out there trying to establish and grow? >> The business proposition is this, you want a jurisdiction that is trading on years of solid regulation, a country and a government that understands business, how to be efficacious in business. When you come to Bermuda you are trading on a country that this is what we've done for a living. So, you don't have to worry about ethical government, is your money going to be safe. We have strong banking relationships, strong law firms, top tier law firms in Bermuda, but more importantly, we have legislation that is in place that allow you to have a secure environment with a clear regulatory framework. >> What should people look for as potentially might be gimmicks for other countries to promote that, you know, being the Delaware for the globe and domiciling, and what are some of the requirements? I mean, some have you've got to live there, you know, what are some of the things that are false promises that you hear from other potential areas that you guys see and don't have to require and put the pressure on someone? >> When you hear the people say, "We can turn your company around in the next day." That we don't require significant KYC and AML. Red flags immediately go up with the global regulatory bodies. We want when a person comes to Bermuda to know that we have set what we believe is called the Bermuda Standard. When you come to Bermuda you're going to have to jump through some legal and regulatory hoops. You can see regulation, the ICO regulation and the Digital Asset Business Act on BermudaLaws.bm. BermudaLaws.bm, and you can go through the legislation clause by clause to see if this meets your needs, how it will affect your business. It sets up clearly what the requirements are to be in Bermuda. >> What's the feedback from business, because you know, when you hear about certain things, that's why Delaware's so easy, easy to set up, source price all know how to do in a corporation, let's say in the United States-- >> We don't have the SEC handicaps that they have in America, going from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. You're dealing with a colony that allows you to be in a domicile that all of the key players finances... We have a number of the key elements that are Bermuda. We're creating a biosphere that allows a person to be in a key space, and this is, you have first move as advantage in Bermuda. We have a number of things that we're working on, like the Estonia model of e-residency, which we will call EID, that creates a space that you are in Bermuda in a space that is, it's protected, it's governed. We believe that when companies set up in Bermuda they are getting the most secure, the strongest business reputation that a country could have. >> The other thing I would add, I'll just say, you know, quality, certainty, and community is what that brand represents. So, you know, you've got that historical quality of what Bermuda brings as a business jurisdiction, you have the certainty of the regulation and that pathway to setting your company up and incorporating in Bermuda, and then the community piece is something that we've been working on to make sure that any of the players that are coming to Bermuda and connecting with Bermuda and setting up there, they feel like they're really integrated into that whole community in Bermuda, whether it be from the government side, the private sector side. You can see it with the companies that have set up that are here today, you know, they really have embraced that Bermuda culture, the Bermuda shorts, and what we're really trying to do as a jurisdiction in the tech space. >> What can I expect if I domicile in Bermuda from a company perspective, what do I have to forecast? What's the budget, what do I got to do, what's my expectation? Allocate resources, what's going to be reporting, can you just give us some color commentary? >> So, with reference, it depends what you're trying to do, and so there will be different requirements for the ICO legislation. For the ICO legislation a key piece of the document actually is the whitepaper. Within the whitepaper you will settle what your scope of business is, what do you want to do, what you know, everything, everything that you require will be settled in your whitepaper. After the whitepaper is approved and if it is indeed successful, you go to the Bermuda Monetary Authority and they will outline what they require of you, and very shortly thereafter you will able to set up and do business in Bermuda. With reference to the digital asset exchanges, the Digital Asset Business Act, such a clear guideline, so you're going to need to have a key man in Bermuda, a key woman in Bermuda. >> Yeah. >> You're going to need to have a place of presence in Bermuda, so there are normal requirements-- >> There's levels of requirements based upon the scope. >> Absolutely. >> So, if you run an exchange it has to be like ghosting there. >> Yeah, yeah, you need boots on the ground. >> And that's why the AML and the KYC piece is so important. >> Yeah. Well, I'm super excited, I think this is a great progress and this has been a big uncertainty, you know, what does this signal. People have, you know, cognitive dissonance around some-- >> Yes. >> Of the decisions they're making, and I've seen entrepreneurs flip flop between Liechtenstein, Malta, Caymans. >> Right. >> You know, so this is a real concern and you guys want to be that place. >> Not only, we will say this, Bermuda is open for business, but remember, when you see the requirements that we have some companies won't meet the standard. We're not going to alter the standard to accommodate a business that might not be what we believe is best for Bermuda, and we believe that once people see the standard, the Bermuda Standard, it'll cascade down and we believe that high tides raises all boats. >> Yeah. >> We have a global standard, and if a company meets it we will be happy for them to set up and do business in Bermuda. >> Well, I got to say, it's looking certainly that leaders like Grant Fondo in Silicon Valley and others have heard good things. >> Yeah. >> How's been the reaction for some of the folks on the East Coast, in New York and around the United States and around the world? What has been some of the commentary, what's been the anecdotal feedback that you've heard? >> We're meeting three and four companies every day of the week. Our runway is full of Fintech companies coming to Bermuda, from... We have insurtech companies that are coming in Bermuda, people are coming to Bermuda for think tanks, to set up incubators and to do exploratory meetings, and so we're seeing a huge interest in Bermuda the likes have not been seen in the last 20 years in Bermuda. >> Well, it's been a pleasure chatting with you and thanks for sharing the update and congratulations. We'll keep in touch, we're following your progress from California, we'll follow up again. The Honorable Wayne Caines, the Minister of National Security of the government of Bermuda, and Kevin Richards, concierge taking care of business, making it easy for people. >> Oh, yeah, oh, yeah. >> We'll see, I'm going to come down, give me the demo. >> We're open for business and we're looking forward to seeing everybody. (laughs) >> Thank you for the opportunity. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you. >> Major developments happening in the blockchain, crypto space. We're starting to see formation clarity around, standards around traditional structures but not so traditional. It's not your grandfather's traditional model. This is what's great about blockchain and crypto. CUBE coverage here, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching, stay with us. More day two coverage after this short break. (techy music)

>> Hi from Toronto, Canada. It's the CUBE covering Blockchain Futurist Conference 2018 brought to you by the CUBE. >> Welcome back to the live coverage. Day Two of the CUBE here in Toronto, Ontario in Canada for the untraceable Blockchain Futurist Conference wall-to-wall coverage Day Two. A lot of action going on. Tons of great content, tons of great after-hour networking. Just overall great vibe. In light of the market crashing, bitcoin stabilizing, some old coins getting crushed. We got it all covered for here. I'm John Furrier, your host for the CUBE, and our next guest is Nithin Eapen, who's the chief investment officer of Arcadia Crypto Ventures. Arcadia Crypto Ventures, welcome to the CUBE, good to see you. >> Hey good to see you too John. Thank you for having me here. >> Keep alumni in the know. Okay. So first of all, you're an investor in crypto. Everyone's running for the hills. A dip is happening, a crash, or some will say. Your perspective, what's happening in the market? >> See, happening in the market. So typically just like in any asset class, there was a huge run-up that happened very quickly. It didn't go up slow, alright? And the geeks were in early, the libertarians came in after that, then there were speculators. And the retail market also came in, and they all came in together for let's say the December after the November Thanksgiving week and everybody learnt about cryptos, they came in. Alright, the next set of guys haven't come in. Alright? So there's nothing for them there. Nobody's holding them there. And there were expecting the institutional investors to come in and that hasn't happened due to custody problems, ETF problems and all that stuff. Alright, it started going down. The weak hands are falling. The weak hands are keeping on falling and as with any technology, any bubble of people have come in, now they feel that okay the world is coming to an end and they are selling all their stuff. All the ICOs that have raised money in Ether, selling the Ether. All this together is pushing it down, and everybody's waiting for that next set of investors, or the, every 10 X, I mean, an asset goes up, there's a new set of guys who are supposed to come in, and this time it hasn't come in and we're waiting for that. >> You're on the panel here at the event. A lot of different panels, but one panel I watched you were on, you talked about the token model, people were holding Ether. It's kind of a debate, you know, and Bradley Rotter, another investor was saying, hey, there are too many tokens out there. You had different perspective, but one of the things I wanted to get your reaction to is that people who held on to the Ether lost their runway and it creates a harder road to hold. So people were converting to Fiat. This is a big issue. How are we going to get by this? This whole lot of Ether, more people are going to come in. The dynamics of investing in this token model, has it changed? How are you looking at it, and I'd say, how do you help startups? >> So regarding a lot of tokens, first thing is there are a lot of tokens out there. See that is going to happen. It's just like in the 1999, okay, a lot of websites and a lot of Internet companies, pet.com, everybody's an Internet company. Same way, everybody is a token. 95 to 99 percent of them are going to go away and the good ones will rise from those ashes, okay. Now regarding runway, a lot of these projects have pretty much raised enough money for 50 years of runway. So it has crashed one-fifth, okay, they have 10 years worth of runway. Typically, in the olden days, a small company with an idea or a MVP was max going to raise one million to two or three million, alright? And all of them anyway have that even after Ether has crashed. I'm saying, just don't panic okay? You still have 10 years worth of runway. Utilize that, build upon it because the high period may be over where you can just raise money on a white paper. You've got the money, build yourself. You promised your real investors I'm going to build this great thing. So this is where we're going to see the great founders to the average and the bad ones where they've hit a wall, they don't know what to do, they'll fold their hands and walk away. Really good founders, they're resilient. They will, no matter how hard they're pushed to the wall, they're going to come up with the product, you see, and they're going to try to meet customer demands. They're going to get through the feedback loop, check what the customer wants and start delivering it. >> So basically what you're saying is there's so much money being raised, and I agree with you by the way. If you go the classic venture capital route, if you had a Powerpoint or prototype or even a working product with recurring revenue, your serious preferred stock financing will be anywhere from three to 15 million. >> Oh my god. And that's high end. >> That's a high end. >> 15 million will be on the high end. Some cases are raising 50 million, some cases 70 plus million, so even if you cut that in half, it's still a better outcome on the first round. I agree at that, so I think that's interesting. The other one that you mentioned is that things are dynamic, that we're seeing here at the show is in the hallways, everybody's talking about flight-to-quality. And I was talking yesterday on the wrap-up of Day One that you can tell the good deals from the bad deals by is the venture architecture working for the coin, or is the coin working for the venture architecture. And so this flight-to-quality combined with how people are optimizing their build up is critical. >> Yes. >> Talk about some things that you're seeing with this flight-to-quality. Is there anything in particular? Is it blockchain? Is it token economics? Where's the quality deals from your perspective? >> I feel quality lies in the founder of this. The founding team, because the idea, if you really ask me what is an idea here? An idea is just like mental masturbation. Guys who sit there can come up with so many ideas. That's what ideas are, okay? Now taking these ideas to fruition, like building it. There's a capital raising part, okay? Now a lot of people are good at capital raising. They're raising money and a lot of capital coming in. That's awesome because you need capital to attract talent to the space because a lot of talent who are maybe in astrophysics or in mechanical engineering, you want that talent to come here and come with ideas and build the stuff. Okay, the capital has come in. Now once the capital has come in, you really have to build the stuff. Even after you build the stuff, you have to go find the customer right? You have to go and acquire customers and all these three things coming together are so hard in reality. And that's why the venture capital always give a little bit of money to make sure that these guys are not wasting the whole thing away, right? >> Well, the other thing I want to get in touch, get on to you is here is that, in the old days, Silicon Valley, you got to move there, the VCs were there. Now, talking about the global phenomenon, the capital formation is both inside the United States and outside the United States. Certainly inside the United States, you're starting to see the formation around traditional structures, security token, which is more like, it feels like a security, a more preferred financing model. Equity's now involved. Outside United States, a booming utility token market. Your thoughts on how that's progressing, still open, still crazy? What's your thoughts? >> So the capital model, the beauty that has happened today is, earlier, you had to pitch to two hundred VCs or three hundred VCs to get one guy to put money into it. Most of the time, they'll be wasting your time, alright? So you had to go to them to get a million. And you didn't have any other option. You couldn't get it from a small enthusiast of your project to give you five hundred bucks or a thousand bucks. So now, you have that option, okay. Now that option is being cut by regulation, by the STC and people like that coming in saying, oh you can't do that, it has to be a security token. Alright, let's make it a security token. The moment you make it a security token, my question is, can you raise money from outside? Are you stopping that? Then again it doesn't really make sense. You're cutting the small investor, the chance for him to buy into a good, okay? It was only the VCs like Sequoia, or somebody like that, who could access a deal like Google. Now we have a chance for something like Google to come up with the common man whose putting five hundred, like Ethereum. There was no venture capitalist or Wall Street who got involved in Ethereum. The real money was made by very common people who supported a decentralized world computer. >> All CVCs get it now, market entries or whoever's getting involved, starting to see VCs dabble in there. Has that changed the investment dynamic at all? >> It has because the VCs, they have this feeling they've missed out, right? So now they're putting in five and 10 million dollars into a project, valuing a project to three hundred million. It changes the dynamics because now all these guys, like, there are so many projects that are raising like a hundred million because the VCs, all these private investors, are giving 10, 15, 20 million. Like recently for example, they've raised a 300 million dollar fund. They can't invest 10 thousand to 50 thousand to 100 thousand, right? They have to push 10 million to manage the money. That is skewing stuff, and I personally am not very interested in those kinds of projects, because it's without a community power at that time, so I don't know how the token economics is going to be fruitful for the second investor, the third investor. >> And Block Tower, we found out yesterday, is also investing in putting a fund together, a venture fund. It's interesting. We'll see how that shakes out. One thing that is going to change is the dynamics. You mentioned community, obviously, a big part of that. Big community here at the Futurist event, Toronto. So they've got a Canadian culture, a lot of Ethereum DNA in this area. What are you hearing at this event? What are some of the things that you're hearing in the hallways? You've obviously been on some panels at this event, and you're highly networked. What are you hearing? What's, with your ears to the ground, what's it telling you? >> You were talking about Block Tower, yes, they're doing a venture fund. It's great. He's a very very smart investor and they're going to do very well. On the ground, so most of the questions right now are coming, so we've reached the point that okay, we have built up the blockchains or the bit coins. We want it to be faster, alright? Everybody's looking for scalability. Who can bring scalability? The EOS guys are out there. They are saying they can do, you know what, five thousand or 10 thousand or 100 thousand transactions per second. So scalability is a very very big thing. I personally consider something like interoperability, bigger. Interoperability in the sense, alright, so now you have these multiple chains. It's just like multiple types of phones. Now imagine you had an AT&T phone and you couldn't call the Verizon phone customer, alright? We're at that point. We have all these chains, there's Ethereum, there's One Chain, there's EOS. Okay, I've built, let's say, a distributor app, let's say it's a poker app on Ethereum. But I can't play with the guy who's on EOS right? What if he also wants to play poker in this poker app? Is there somewhere we can make this integrate and interoperable? Now to make it interoperable, now we have, if we go into details, there are assets, there are tokens on both sides. How can we transfer tokens from one chain to the other chain making sure there's no double-spend happening? >> I mean there's two things. That was the consumability, making it easy to use, one. And two, I think you're right on. Interoperability's huge. You got to have that. >> Interface, as you said. Interface is big. To make it simple, it's still the geeks. In geeks, a lot of people are using command lang prompts. You can't expect the common man sitting at home. It's just like email. Email was there from 1978. It's only when all these tools like, beginning '94, and the browser came in, that people started using it. So those things have to come in. >> A lot of work's got to get done. So many on the blockchain side. Well, great to have you on. Good to see you. Congratulations on your panels and this afternoon, you're doing a good job. Thanks for coming on. I appreciate it. >> Thank you so much, John. >> Any predictions by the way? >> Predictions, I don't know, I'm not a predictions guy. I just go with the market. >> Price of bitcoin 20 thousand? >> Oh I never get into those predictions. I never want to get it. I think that it's possible that the bear market can continue for a longer time based on the fact that the newer money cannot come in. It has happened before. Bitcoin has fallen so many times at the 70, 80 percent range and then it stayed stagnant for a year before the next round up came. >> And certainly we got work (inaudible). Thanks for coming on. Keep coverage here live in Toronto, Ontario. Keep coverage here with the untraceable Blockchain Futurist Conference here of two days. Day Two, keep coverage. We're back after this short break. Thanks for watching. (electronic music)

>> Live from Toronto, Canada, it's theCUBE, covering Blockchain Futurist Conference 2018. Brought to you by theCUBE. >> Hello everyone and welcome back to theCUBE's exclusive coverage here in Toronto, Canada, in Ontario. We are here live breaking down what's going on in the Blockchain world. It's the Untraceables event here, Tracy and team doing a great job of Untraceable. They're putting on the Blockchain Futurist conference. This is about the future, bringing the industry together. All the luminaries are here; Bounds of Ethereum, Ackerson Ecosystem influencers, original gangsters- OGs-are here, of course theCube, we got 2018 coverage breaking it down, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Wrapping up day one Dave, I know you got to take off and head back on a flight home, let's break down and analyze what's going on in the industry. Yesterday we had the first annual ever, first inaugural Cloud and Blockchain summit, global Blockchain and Cloud summit, two worlds coming together. Here it's a little bit different this is all about cryptocurrency, it's all about blockchain. Big movements, speculators versus builders is my theme and everyone's recognizing the trend of price shifts billions lost in market gap that were gained last year but still some are up. But the focus is about entrepreneurship on a global scale, this is the focus here, right? It's a lot of VIPs, a lot of players coming together. I don't see people crying in their wine about the prices- although you can see it on Anthony Di Iorio's face, probably a setback or the Ethereum community on the price but still, the long game is what they're going after. Your thoughts and analysis? >> Well you definitely seeing a lot of talk about the boom and bust cycles. And we're hearing a lot from people -but by the way, there are a couple of guys who went big, maybe hedge fund guys or other fund guys that are taking a bath, maybe they got in big in January, December, not the best time to get in. So you are seeing some long faces there, but generally the sentiment is: hey, these boom and bust cycles they come and they go we've seen them before, now's the time to hunker down and innovate, execute, and figure out how to add substance and value. Now, first of all, I would say a couple things. One is those guys probably have... a store of fiat currency that they cashed out, number one, so they're feeling pretty good. Two is, the big difference to me John, is in 2018, crypto is much more in the mainstream news. You see it on CNBC, you see it in every medium po- every day you get a medium post, everybody's blogging about it, whereas obviously we've been blogging about bitcoin for five, six years but the mainstream media has picked up on it. >> Seven years. >> Seven years, there you go. So the mainstream media has picked up on it so it's much more front and center than it ever has been in the past. So I think that's a different dynamic. There seems to be still a lot of opportunistic sentiment, people are sanguine about the future and I think that's because we're seeing some real hardcore innovation going on in real use cases. Now, having said all that, the other scenario is there's just a lot of competition for quality projects, we're hearing too many coins out there, you're seeing all these ICOs tied to Ethereum in an oversupply right now, and you're clearly seeing that affect the price of Ethereum, which has dropped, on a percentage basis, much more than bitcoin. It's down considerably this year, whereas bitcoin actually is still up. Ethereum's trading about where it was last September, Bitcoin's up considerably since last September. So you know, a lot of cycles, a lot of instability still, but a lot of optimism. >> The bottom line for me is that the big question that's coming out of this event and this whole week here in Toronto is why do cryptocurrencies matter, the mass influence and adoption of Blockchain technology, where is that on the progress bar? This is the topic, and again, a lot of people that are "poo pooing" this revolution and I'm seeing on my Facebook feed all the time, "bitcoin's at zero," there's a lot of nonbelievers. Here's what I would say, here's my analysis. I think that the comparisons to the dot-com bubble with all the irrational exuberance that was part of that phase, this ICO phase, is crashing. No doubt about them. The ICOs in the United States are down, almost to nill. Certainly a lot of action going outside the United States, still unregulated, still wild, wild, east- or west depending how you call it. So yeah, that's happening and a lot of the bad stuff's being filtered out there's an emphasis on build which you mentioned. But here's the thing that no one might not see in the mainstream. During the dot-com bubble, there was all this companies that were started to it public and that was because the market wanted it. That's what happened with the cryptocurrency ICOs, the market wanted more products, then just manufactured it and then they realized, oh shit too many tokens. But if you look at the internet revolution, and I think this is the comparison with blockchain and crypto. You got blockchain technology, cryptocurrency, which is token economics are absolute gamechangers and the demand for that is very high and there are more people coming on every day in a mass adoption basis. The internet actually never stopped, if you looked at internet penetration rates, Mary Meeker would point out at Morgan Stanley, now she's at Kleiner Perkins, that the internet adoption rate of the internet during the bubble and then post-bubble continued to accelerate. That means more people got on the internet. So therefore the population of users became larger and larger every day. That really level-setted the reality that this was not a fad, not going away. I see blockchain and token economics having the same trajectory where there'll be more people adopting the technology then putting it into use than ever before. That's the tell sign. If that trend line continues to grow, the corrections will all take place, cycles will happen, but the entrepreneurs will follow the money, they're going to follow the user experience, they're going to follow the demand for opportunity. That to me is going to be the major tell sign. I think that's the general sentiment that I'm feeling here is screw the price of the tokens, yes there's too many tokens, clear out the dead wood, get back down to building companies, that's validated by the fact that there are more deals being done from a financing standpoint that are starting to look like traditional funding structures. Security tokens, equities, starting to see people talk and fundraising, lower rounds, not the big mega rounds. Money that's going to be around 7 to 30 million, 30 to 50, 50 to 100, 100 plus. This is going to be traditional structures, not the land grab utility token which gets you into the tailspin of basically managing coins distribution, managing all these things. There'll be a balance, but that's really kind of what's happening. >> So that's great analysis John, I would add to that that the fundamentals are still in place, blockchain attacks inefficiencies. Where there's a middle man and there's inefficiencies and there are waste, blockchain is being applied to attack those inefficiencies. I think the second thing is that new capital-raising vehicles have catalyzed massive investments and are catalyzing innovation and a whole new breed of developers. The third point is a global phenomemon. You don't have to be in Silicon Valley, or New York City, or Boston, or Austin, in the United states, or from an Ivy League school, it's happening around the world, you're seeing non-US countries and island countries invite developers in, giving them tax havens, and as a result, it's becoming much more of a global phenomenon than a lot of the internet startups were. There are a lot of adoption barriers. I mean you have the cyclicality and the volatility, you've got industries that are essentially entrenched: financial services, healthcare, lots of defense and aerospace industries, very much entrenched, it's going to take a long time for that collaboration to come together. And you also have a lot of scams. >> Yeah >> There's going to be a shake out, we predicted that I think in February in the Bahamas, we predicted the flight to quality, people are trying to figure out where that quality is right now. And to your point, you're also seeing more hybrid models, more traditional equity models combined with token models, and that's not a surprise. You're going to see more and more of that as a hedge. The token model still gives people the potential for liquidity, and as long as that fundamental remains in place, I think that dynamic will- is here to stay. >> And also, you and I have seen many cycles of innovation you talk about in the industry, many waves. The people that we talked to that have been through multiple waves like Brailey Rodder, (mumbles) and others, experience, they all know what's going on. The difference here that I think is interesting is that the smart contrast, the flight to quality, the companies that have buildable products, are going to get the attention. Now the difference now in this community that I think is interesting that makes the funding dynamic different is you have now community dynamics. You've got open source software, Cloud computing, and new technology with new capital formation dynamics. I think those three things are the perfect storm of innovation that's being overlooked. and the interplay between that is going to give us a look and feel of an industry that we've never seen before. So we can compare and contrast waves "oh, BC, Client-Server, blah blah blah," I don't think this is going to look like any of those waves, it's going to look different. And that's going to be really the shake out between the pundits who claim they know what's going on, or... predictions whatnot. Talking to the people, putting the ear to the ground in the communities, that's key. And for the companies, the ones that are going to win are the ones that can build community, tap into communities, and grow communities because they're now part of the ecosystem. It's not just selling products to them, they got to be a bidirectional, symbiotic relationship between communities at large, in this ecosystem. I think these are going to be new dynamics they're going to be- impact valuation, it's going to impact time to market, time to value, and ultimately give the entrepreneurs and the investors what they need, which is good outcomes in the process. >> You know it's interesting you were saying about the waves. And the waves in the past, and certainly looking back, were quite easy to identify, they tended to be architectural, you know centralized mainframe, and they went to client server, then you went to the sort of public internet, and then this cloud of remote services. The next wave is maybe not ... blatantly architectural, but it's this blending of digital services that's ubiquitous across all industries. And I think the key is, there's an automation layer on top of these digital services, which is powered by AI and machine intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning, and blockchain is part of that automation layer. And people are building new businesses on top of that and disrupting existing industries. I think there's no industry that's safe from disruption as I put it before, there are some entrenched, high-risk industries like financial services, healthcare, defense, aerospace, education, that are going to take longer but ultimately there's waste in all of those businesses and I will say I think a lot of the incumbents are going to hop on this trend and do very well picking up blockchain and defending against the disruptors. Not all will make it, but a lot of the big guys are going to put some serious resources into this and they're going to lead in to blockchain in a big way. >> Yeah and just to kind of wrap up, I think you're the fact that what we're seeing here is that engineering-led dynamics are happening, blockchain's going to lay down the plumbing, it's got to be stable, desensualized applications over the top with token economics is the business model of innovation. We got technology theater booming with innovation with engineering-led initiatives, that's got to accelerate, that's infrastructure, that's got to be more cloud-like, that's got to be much more stable, that's got to get laid down, got to put the roads down if you will, and then the business model innovation coming from the software this is the game changer so you're looking at all the smart money, smart money is saying okay, we see guys building product, let's see some unique IP, let's see some token economics that are nobel and different for what's happening, that to me is going to be the new investor algorithm if you will, for vetting. And it's been that way in a way, the smart money follows the smart engineers, what are you building? And then they vet that with other stands so again, big engineering-led focus. >> So what would you do now- okay, soyou were hearing this week, too many damn tokens, everything's tied to Ethereum, most ICOs, what would you do now if you're an entrepreneur, you have an idea, you have a potential to build a community, where would you focus, would you just try to float another token? Would you go overseas? What would you do in that situation? >> I would look at the regulatory frameworks as a way, as a guidepost to risk management, right. I think you're going to see some regulatory regimes try to manage the bridge between slow changing, old guard, to new fast, and loose. Crypto-'Cause look at it. It's fast and loose, but there's real people that are working on it. I would focus on the real people that have builders, I'd look at the mechanisms where they're domiciling, and what they do with the economics or the tokens. One thing I will tell you that is that, as an entrepreneur, this is like, a golden rule, your focus is everything: focus, focus, focus. If you're focused on managing distribution of coins, and the arbitrage of coin pricing, that takes away form the focus of engineering and building. I think that's going to be an easy binary test for an investor to say, "what are these guys working on?" Is the token working for the venture, or is the venture working for the token? That is a fundamental mindset, if that is... Not in the right position, it should be: the token works for the venture, not the venture working for the token. That to me, I would run for the hills, if I see someone working for the token, I'd say, "I don't want to fly at all at that deal." Because you could maybe pass up some money right in the short term, but you're going to miss the long game. That's the way I look at it. >> And again, I would add to that, I mean, yeah, okay, so there are a bunch of crypto-billionaires that got minted, and they got in early and good for them, but that doesn't mean there's not more opportunities. And when I think of a company like Dell Michael Dell wasn't the first in PC's, you know? Compact was the first, you know, Rod Canion, the back of the napkin, that urban legend. But what Michael Dell did is he improved on the system. He took inefficiencies out of the supply chain, and became the dominant player! So first move advantage, yes, okay, great, you missed being a billionaire potentially. But the wave tends to get bigger after the market matures. And as a result, I think my focus would be on building, to your theme, building that community, demonstrating value, and then, eventually, I think you're going to be able to use Block Chain, Crypto currencies, tokenization, crypto economics to power your business. But figure out a way to actually execute today and prove value; that's what I would do. >> Again, all great stuff, great analysis, Dave, Good to see you here, where again: this is theCUBE's coverage in Toronto for Block Chain Futurist Conference. Again, this is part of our 2018 initiating coverage of the Block Chain Industry with our video presence. Engaging the community is an upstream content project sharing the data with you, so you can make your decisions, and understand who to connect with. That's our model, we're going to do it. We've been covering BitCoin and Block Chain since 2011, on siliconangle.com, that's our journalism site. Go to theCUBE.net, that's where we have all the videos, and soon to be our CUBE token coming out, be part of our network. Join our community if you wannna get engaged, we're happy to have you. Thanks for watching Day 1 of the Futurist Conference here in Toronto, Ontario. Thanks for watching.

>> Live from Toronto, Canada, it's theCUBE! Covering Blockchain Futurist Conference 2018. Brought to you by theCUBE! >> Hey, welcome back, everyone, we're live here in Toronto for the Blockchain Futurist Conference put on by Untraceable, Tracy and her team doing a fantastic job, so shout out to the team at Untraceable for another great event. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, my cohost's Dave Vellante, and we're here with CUBE's friend, CUBE alumni, from the CryptoChicks, Nataliya Hearn, director, good to see you, great to have you back. >> Thank you. (laughs) >> Okay, good to see you, we're laughing, we've got some great funny stories we've been telling, since PolyCon, but really, some great things going on, so give us the update, you had a hackathon recently, you got new things happening here in your organization, take a quick minute to explain what it is for the folks that don't know, what do you guys do, and what's going on? >> Good, well, CryptoChicks is a organization focused on educating women in blockchain and cryptospace. We started because at meetups there would be one or two women out of hundreds of men, who would be afraid to ask stupid questions, so we said, Oh, okay, there's no stupid questions, come and join us, and we'll show you how to open a wallet, what blockchain is all about, so we've been doing that. We've actually grew quite a bit, we are now have chapters in all over the world, in Pakistan, in Bahamas, in Moscow, we just teamed up with She Codes in Israel, which is 50,000 women, so, we're doing really well. >> Congratulations, a great mission, we totally support it, and, you know, I'm proud to say that I love my shirt that says, Satoshi is Female, thanks to Nyla Rodgers, who gave it to me, at Consensus in Blockchain Week in New York, but this is really beyond women in tech, it's beyond that, it's a really, you're doing some innovative things around onboarding, new talent and education, this is a really important, because the Internet is bounded on discovery, learning. >> Absolutely. >> What's the new thing? >> Well, you know when you hear, when you go to the blockchain conference and events, and we hear again and again about the chasm. How do we bridge the chasm, right? That's just the, like, big word that you hear like every third presentation, because the blockchain community needs it. But I think globally, blockchain represents something that's quite unique, and it's an opportunity not just to make money and speculate, or to develop new technology, it's technology that can liberate. But how do we get that message across? And I think we have to start with kids. Kids are our future, but they're also the ones who spend most of their time on social media, so that's a good thing, but if you ask their parents, that's not such a good thing necessarily. So how do we convert them, some of their time from social media to learning? So we've put, we're putting together this program that focuses on children to earn to learn. >> Earn to learn, like they earn coins or money, or? >> That's right, basically they can earn swag, so basically we're creating the marketplace that rewards children for learning. >> All kids, right? >> All kids, well we're focusing on -- >> On girls. >> No, not on girls, we're going to high schools, so immediate next generation. >> So girls, boys, everybody's welcome? >> Absolutely. Yep. >> Awesome. >> Next generation, and they're the next generation that has to solve the problems that we, and opportunities that can be captured, that's coming right to their front door. >> Absolutely, we have a lot of question marks in the blockchain community. Which blockchain, how do we do it, there is going to be multi-chain tokens, we're talking about, next generation is the one who's going to provide solutions for us. So we got to open their minds, and to show that blockchain is a tool like potentially calculus is a tool. To create something that hasn't been there before. >> You know, I have a lot of conversations in Silicon Valley and Nataliya, recently at the Google Cloud event, Google's been very much a great change agent, especially with women in tech and underrepresented minorities, but Aparna Sinha, who's one of the senior people there, dual degrees from Stanford, she's got a PhD, she said we're losing the girls early, and what came out of it was a conversation that, when you have these new market movements like blockchain, AI, these are new skills that you can level up, so the ability to come from behind and level up is an opportunity for people who have traditionally been behind, whether it's women or other minorities, to level up. So it's a huge opportunity now to put the naysayers down to rest, and saying, Screw you, we're going to level up and learn. >> Absolutely, and it's global, the thing is -- >> There's nothing stopping anyone from learning. >> Absolutely, and trust, and the borderless system that blockchain potentially can provide is at a global advantage. As long as you have a cell phone, you can be in a village, an old village, like at our last hackathon, we actually were streaming women hackers from Zimbabwe. So there you go, it's doable. >> So how are you, how are you scaling your message globally? >> So we're starting, one thing is that education today, is basically the bill is being paid either by the government or by parents. The reason I would call that a marketplace, I would like companies to be involved. And it could be local companies, or it could be global. What about creating ARVR classrooms, and providing the information to kids, via a completely new way that they would actually move away from swiping or just looking on some random YouTube videos, to something that they can get a phone, some shoes, mascara, focusing on girls, right? And to understand what that borderless economy really means by experiencing, what does it mean to have tokens that you can trade globally? You are used to your parents giving you some dollars, you go to a corner store. What about if you learn something, you go to a bakery, in Kenya, and for the work that you've done, you get a bun, right, or a meal? >> So this democratizing access, it's bringing education to the masses? >> And it's also uniting the blockchain community, 'cause we would be building this governance platform on blockchain, we would tokenize it, and there will be many elements of it, reward programs, smart contracts that reward content, some level of AI in terms of analysis of what we're doing, so I think this is why I was looking at multi-chain tokens. Maybe that would be a solution to kind of, to deal with -- >> Explain that, what does that mean? >> Well, we've got different chains right now, right? You've got Hyperledger, you've got Ethereum, and all this good stuff. How do you bridge all this, right, instead of having to choose one, you're now saying, I can work in all of them, because each one potentially can offer something unique. Maybe you don't have to choose one. We don't know. Only time will tell, as this, this is such a young industry, and this is why it's so exciting. >> Well, Nataliya -- >> It -- >> Oh, go ahead. >> No, I was going to say, and you're giving the kids examples, so a lot of times kids ask me, Well, what's the difference between crypto and Venmo? I'm like, okay, you know, let's talk about the different things you can do with crypto that you can't do, but they're closer than the older generations are to transferring, you know, money, at least, so now you're applying different use cases and expanding their minds in ways that, perhaps -- >> Absolutely, and I'll give you my example. I mean, I got into blockchain early before Ethereum was launched, and partly I was into public markets, and then I kind of stopped because that project ended, or I stopped and I actually reentered it, because my fifteen-year-old who started mining. But he started mining because I was in that field already, so there you go, it kind of, you know, what comes around. >> Good job. I hope he gets all his Bitcoin. >> Yeah, he did. (laughs) >> So, I want you to tell a story, of what you've seen that's been high impact from your work you've done. You had, again, that whole Pakistan thing going on, you've got all these hackathons, what is a good story you could share? >> You know, the good story we can share, I think the part that we were able to do, the hackathons that we are doing are local, but they're also global, it really is, there's this sense of empowerment, and you know what I think the best story, this is the best story: best story was, at the hackathon that we ran, it was women, over 100 women, that participated. But all our mentors were young, geeky programming guys. Sorry guys. But you really knew they really knew their stuff, so there was technology transfer, and we had a 48 hour hackathon, these guys stayed 48 hours, they didn't go to sleep, they didn't have to as mentors, and there was this amazing technology transfer that happened, and I think some relationships were formed too. >> Yeah, some serious bonding went on, right? >> Yeah, absolutely. >> It's actually a good thing that you're including people. It's not just a certain thing, you got this inclusion. >> Absolutely, and actually all it is is about inclusion, all it is is we are giving a platform for women not to be afraid, I mean, I'm an engineer, so I've been working with men all my life, so for me to ask difficult questions, or stupid questions, it's like natural now, because it's been what my life, but for women, for many, it isn't. So we just wanted to kind of cross that divide, it's not a chasm, it's just a little divide that we're bridged. >> So when you say stupid questions, do you mean like, Why do you do it that way? (laughs) Why don't you do it this way? >> Or, what's a wallet? Like, what's a private key? What's a public key? And asking that not once, but twenty times until you got it. That's okay too. >> That's called learning. >> Yeah. >> Last question, okay I got to ask you, the most important question is, how do someone get a CryptoChicks shirt? >> I think you can order it on our website, sizes are a problem, I know we've discussed this, so we need to -- >> Extra-large. >> Well, CryptoChicks is a not-for-profit organization so there are, we'll have to order this in bunches, so I'll figure this out, but what I wanted to say is that we have another hackathon that's coming up. And the hackathon is in New York, October 5th to 8th, and we have three streams, so if you're a developer, and this is for women, so if you're a developer, we have a stream. If you're not a developer, or you've never coded in your life, but you have a business mind, and you think you have a really good idea that you can put on blockchain, you're welcome to join as well, and now with all the news and regulations, we also have a regulatory stream. >> So for entrepreneurs and for business-minded people, that want to get involved, that they can come too? >> Absolutely. >> Okay, and their website is cryptochicks.ca, that's where you can get access to the information, that's great. >> October 5th to 8th, you said, right? >> That's right. >> And anybody can go? >> Anybody can register. >> And where in New York? >> It's going to be at University of New York, and at their School of Law. >> Great. >> Blockchain Educational Fun Hub. That's what it says on the website, love your website. Looking forward to getting some shirts, and putting it out there, and promoting your mission. Great job, good to see you again. >> You guys are awesome. Thank you so much. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, Nataliya. >> Thank you. >> This is crypto for good, a lot of education, and this opportunity, and our role is to share that, as a community, and I think this is a great example of the kind of community that crypto is. Education people can level up and move fast through and get proficiency, and change their lives. This is what this is all about, glad to bring us this CUBE coverage live, stay with us! Day One continues, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, we'll be right back from Toronto Blockchain Futurist Summit. Thank you. (techno music)

(techy music) >> Live from Toronto, Canada, it's theCUBE covering Blockchain Futurist Conference 2018, brought to you by theCUBE. (techy music) >> Well, welcome back to theCUBE, we're live here in Toronto for the Untraceable Blockchain Futurist Conference for two days of wall-to-wall coverage. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante, who had to take a step away and our next guest is David Johnston, who's the chairman of the board at Factom, industry legend, he's done a lot of great work from startups, he funds it in early days, really was involved in the original decentralized application framework and part of that community. Great to have you on theCUBE, thanks for spending the time with us. >> It's good to be here. >> So, first of all we are believers, theCUBE, our team, we're pretty biased. We think that decentralized applications is going to be the next really renaissance in software and startups because it's not your grandfather's venture capital or app SAS model, there's a real change going on. Capital formation, entrepreneurial activity-- >> Yep. >> So, congratulations for putting that together. What's going on, what's the status of this? I mean, obviously put all the price crashes on the side, there's real building going on. >> Well, it's really actually an exciting time. A lot of of good projects have started the last few years and I think what we're going to see is those projects come to fruition later this year, early next. I think about what's happening with groups like PolyMath and what they're doing on tokenizing securities. It really started that wave last year, and now we've got Bank to the Future, and what's going on in Malta with the legislation. A lot of jurisdictions are looking to basically embrace that model of okay, if you have a company, now we can turn that equity into a record on the blockchain and really give people global ledger where we can then trade it on multiple exchanges. It gets you global access, global liquidity, and all of these advantages, so I see a stampede of projects headed towards that model, but thinking about decentralized applications, what I want to preserve is still the permission-less nature of this ecosystem. I mean, I wasn't a rich investor when I got into bitcoin in 2012, all right. I was lucky to be an economics nerd and already wanted to get rid of my Fiat and opt into non-government currency, and so, you know, the timing was great for me but there weren't any barriers. I could download a node-- >> Yeah. >> I could access the ecosystem, I could jump right in and get involved, and so as we see the ecosystem mature what I hope we see is preserving that permission-less nature and recently I proposed Smartdrops as a means of distributing tokens and utilities or currencies-- >> Yeah. >> As a way of bootstrapping the network. So, that's what I really see coming next. >> Love the Smartdrop concept because you know, with Smart contracts and Airdrops kind of being wishy-washy, you know what goes on there, I think one of the things I want to get your thoughts on, because we were at the cloud blockchain event yesterday. Cloud computing and cloud-native chain, SAS applications, you start to see operators now be involved in cloud as that matures, what decentralized applications bring kind of changes the game a bit. How do you see software development changing, because what cloud did was create devops culture, it certainly leverages opensource. >> Right. >> And there's a big community around that. Now with decentralized application you've got community as an active part of it, so is opensource, how is it going to change the software development frameworks? >> Well, I think you can cut out a lot of the middle steps and go directly to developers that you want to work with. I mean, I think Ethereum really still set the gold standard when they set aside a chunk of ether for developers that contributed code to their GitHub before launch, and people will forget now it was a heavy lift to get Ethereum launched. It took a good year and a half, two years, to go from a whitepaper to production net deployments and in that time they needed to align people, the smartest people in the world to try to build that platform, and so I think people can still draw from that lesson and say, "Okay, I'm going to enroll developers directly, "I'm going to reward the people that download "the alpha, download the beta," right. Bootstrap this community to my first 1,000, first 10,000 users. I think PolyMath did that really well recently with their Airdrop where they got 50,000 people into a telegram channel and fill out a survey and do the KYC because they didn't make it a rounding error, they made it a meaningful Airdrop of hundreds of dollars worth of Poly at the time, and that really motivated people to get involved, so-- >> Yeah, and I like the slogan, "Let the stampede begin." (laughs) Actually, we covered PolyMath at their PolyCon event-- >> Sure. >> That Tracy and Untraceable did, and this is, again, the new dynamic. So, I want to get your thoughts on economics, right. So, you've got crypto, which is token economics, which is a business concept when you think about a new way. Blockchain's certainly becoming an infrastructure. >> Right. >> Token economics is changing the business landscape, so you saw it as an economics nerd and now people are realizing, "Holy shit, "I can actually do things with it differently. "I can change the equation"-- >> Right. >> "And still get the outcomes I want "faster, cheaper, smarter, of something "that's not efficient," this is a new dynamic. How do you see the token economics evolving, you know, aside all the liquidity nonsense we're seeing in the market, certainly fluctuations are happening. >> Sure. >> But from a build-out standpoint, from a business model innovation, where is the action on token economics? >> Well, I loved when the Vitala coined the term token economics, and you know, crypto-economics, and basically what he was describing is we're using math to screw the past and we're aligning people's economic incentives to secure the future. So, that idea that we can rely on encryption to give us a stable, immutable, transparent ledger is really powerful because it takes away, in a cloud context, the need to create a bunch of infrastructure. Right, before the cloud people had their own servers. >> Yeah, provision them. >> Dot com days, right, they spent millions of dollars provisioning their own hardware-- >> Before they could roll out their app. >> Right, and so we take it for granted today. >> Yeah. >> You can jump on AWS or Rockspace-- >> Yeah. >> And get going in a few minutes. So, I think blockchain is going to do something similar for all the features of Smart contracts, financial integrations around transfer of money, all of these things are now a toolkit that as soon as I hook into Ethereum or Bitcoin Cash or one of these protocols I have this large, established infrastructure, thousands of people running nodes that I don't have to pay for-- >> Yeah. >> As a user, and that's amazing for innovation because it just lowers the barrier-- >> Yeah. >> For the average guy to get involved. >> And accelerates time to value big time. >> Yeah. >> All right, so what was your talk here at the show, what were you speaking about, you had a discussion, what was the speech about? >> Really focused on this idea of Smartdrops because I think, you know, this can be a primer-- >> Explain Smartdrops real quick. >> Sure, sure, so most people are probably familiar with Airdrops. >> Yep. >> Been around for years, hey, you want to give 100,000 users of bitcoin some of your new token. We're going to send it out to all their addresses. It's sort of like a spray and pray strategy, very broad, right? >> Yeah. >> And so what I think we need to move to now that we have 50 million people with cryptowallets is we can much more intelligently target who we're dropping to, hence Smartdrop. Right, really focus in on the people that the app needs. If you're at the development stage you want to develop, you want to Airdrop to 1,000 Ethereum developers-- >> Yeah. >> To test out your app, if you're going into your alpha you need those early adopters to try it out, give you feedback. So, it's a thing that I think we could leverage but people have treated it as sort of an afterthought. Right, oh, I'll take one percent of my tokens and do one of these Airdrops. I think we could actually be distributing 20%, 40%, 60% of tokens via Smartdrops if you're properly targeting them and traunching it out based on the maturity of the projects. >> Yeah, and I think Smart contracts, Smartdrops really add value because it brings intelligence-- >> Right. >> To and targeting and more value you can distribute. It's like policy-based distribution. >> Right. >> All right, final question for you, state of the union, obviously people seeing these fluctuations, Ethereum lost its one-year value, it's back down to where it was a year ago. Largest developer community, people get nervous when you have these short term fluctuations that really aren't based on anything from a build-out standpoint. >> Sure. >> It's really more of market dynamics, Asia, wherever, whatever-- >> Right. >> But this real build is in the developer community going on that are building long term, trying to build long term ventures. >> Right. >> What do you say to that community at Ethereum and others, stay the course, don't waver, don't check the price, head down, grind it, what do you say? >> What I say is think long term. We've been through this like four times already. I remember when bitcoin went from almost nothing to $30 and crashed to $2, right, and it took almost a year-- >> Yeah. >> To recover, 2012, get back to 10 bucks, and then it made it's big run 2013 to $250, and proceeded to crash to $50. >> Yeah. >> Right, and then make a big run thereafter to the thousands-- >> Yeah. >> And crash to $200, and here we've made enormous runs and $19,000, you know, on the bitcoin price and it's crashed to $6,000 or $5,000, whatever it is today, and so you got to keep in mind the long term perspective. We have come so far. >> (laughs) Yeah. >> Like when I got into bitcoin in 2012 it was $10 a bitcoin, there were 10 million bitcoins in circulation, meaning $100 million was the entire digital currency universe, and now today there are hundreds of billions of dollars-- >> Yeah. >> Of assets in this space, and it's only been five or six years. Like it's orders of magnitude, so I keep my eye on usage, on real utility. You look at Ethereum, I mean, they're doing seven, eight, 900,000 transactions a day. People are using-- >> Yeah. >> The platform and I think at this point they've got more usage than all of their blockchains combined. >> Yeah. >> And so, you know, that's really exciting and I think keep your head down, keep building, these are the times when sort of like the fluff falls away-- >> Yep. >> And the projects that didn't make sense, all that gets flushed out of the ecosystem and the real projects come to the forefront. >> Well, David you're having a great career so far. Congratulations on getting in early when it was 10 bucks, and we had our first website developer was so good but he wanted to be paid in bitcoin in 2011, it was 22 cents-- >> Wow. >> At the time, I remember buying it, it was like, "What's bitcoin, what is this craziness?" (laughs) We started covering it then, just started doing videos, so we're going to do more interviews. We'll hopefully get you on again. Real quick, final plug for you, what are you working on right now? Share with the community some of the projects and your interests right now and what's going on. >> Well, Factom is a big focus for me because this solves data on the blockchain and lets you do recordkeeping, documentation, all that sort of stuff, and so that's really hit a chord with enterprise, so we need to get the mainstream into the ecosystem and that's really what Factom is focused on. >> Yeah. >> So, really excited, they've delivered their third version of their software, which is now fully decentralized recently. >> Yeah. >> It's a huge milestone for them. >> So, harden it, make it reliable, stable, and make it easy to consume and use. >> That's right, that's the key. >> That's the goal. >> And let people put millions, billions, or trillions of records on, and what Factom does with Merkle trees, basically you only need one transaction every 10 minutes to anchor all of that data. So, what we've created is scalability, and that's what we need for this to go mainstream. >> All right, David Johnston, chairman of the board at Factom here on theCUBE, industry insider, pioneer, also leader, inspiration. theCUBE bringing you all the live action, all the data here not yet on the blockchain, soon to be. I'm John Furrier, live coverage here in Untraceable's event Futurist event here in Toronto, be back with more. Stay with us, be right back with more content after this short break. (techy music)

(electronic music) >> Live from Toronto, Canada it's the Cube! Covering Blockchain Futurist Conference 2018. Brought to you by The Cube! >> Hello, welcome back. Cube exclusive coverage here in Toronto for the untraceable Blockchain Futurist Conference. Two days of wall-to-wall with the Cube. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Valante, we're initiating this Blockchain coverage to all 2018 Cube events all around the world. You'll see us more and more talking to the most important people. Excited to have, here at The Cube, San Kim, CEO of Lucidity. on the front page of siliconangle.com, our journalism team, with news. Also doing the really interesting Blockchain advertising, if you can believe what that could be. We know about Brave and the attention token, a lot of activity going around on what is the benefit to the user around advertising. Certainly having having immutability and data might be interesting. Sam, welcome to The Cube >> Thank you. >> So, first of all, big news today on Silicon Angle. We covered you guys, you guys announced a strategic investor. >> Yes. >> What's the hard news? >> Yeah, well, thank you for covering us today. Today we announced our initial funding and our strategic investor is Pythia. Pythia represents the hard chain foundation, and so we're really excited about this opportunity, We believe our chain represents an incredible advancement of base protocol layers and so, we're looking, we'll be supporting them as we go forward, as we work closely with Pythia, our chain, and that community. >> Tell me about what you guys offer taken specific context, folks may or may not be familiar with what you do. What's the basic premise of your opportunity, technology and problems that you solve, and how do you use Blockchain for that? Yeah, so, we started, we were a digital advertising protocol. Effectively, we are a shared ledger for the digital advertising ecosystem, and if you know digital advertising, it operates at a tremendous scale. And so we have to build this Layer 2 technology that sits on top of the traditional, the base layer protocols, like Ethereum and Archain. In order to address the three challenges. The three challenges, one being scalability, the second is difficulty in sharing privacy, and the third is the high overhead cost of decentralizing a network. And so we've built this Layer 2 technology that uses a plasma sidechain, and we use something called a time series database, that solves those three problems. And, we're looking to support additional chains, in addition to Ethereum, and so obviously our chain is a natural extension for us. >> Yeah, and you guys obviously get, we cover you guys from a broad perspective, that's a big problem in advertising. >> But are you guys charting the user value proposition, or the digital marketer or agency proposition, or both? >> Yeah, so we're not trying to tokenize digital advertising. Our token is basically used internally as a proof of stake token. So, the advertiser, we're asking them to pay in fiat, and we convert that into a stable coin. And on our current instincts, it's the Dai token by MakerDAO. And so, what we are trying to solve is the transparency issue, that's rampant in the supply chain. So for example, when you run a digital ad today, you use anywhere from seven to 15 vendors, and those vendors, each of them have their own database, and they never communicate that data across to each other, and so there's discrepancies, and it also opens itself up to a lot of fraud. And so the industry is a 225 billion dollar industry, and the industry itself estimates that there's, like, 30% of that money is wasted. And a lot of that is because there's no reconciliation of that data, there's no transparency, and so we've created this protocol layer, for all 15 vendors to submit their data. And, in real time, we can understand, which impressions were valid, which ones were fraudulent, and, well, not just transparency, but now that we as industry participants don't have to argue with one another, we'll start to trust one another, and then we can move the industry forward. >> In the market it'll adjust the pricing as a result of that as well, right? >> Oh, absolutely, absolutely, and it's just about identifying where is the value created, right? So if you're a value creator in the supply chain, you could probably estimate that, the advertiser's going to eliminate the less valuable ones, and focus on the valuable and the adding ones. So basically, if you're fraudulent, like yeah, you might get hurt, but the real adders will benefit from it. >> Just to clarify a question, you talked about the overheads of decentralizing advertising. I infer from that that an advertising supply chain, by its inherent nature is decentralized? Or are you talking about more of a disruptive model? Can you explain? >> Yeah, so we're not re-creating a whole ecosystem, >> Right >> We're interoperable with the existing architecture. >> Which, is decentralized by its very nature, you're saying, or...? >> No, no, no, it's not decentralized >> Okay >> It's very centralized, like all the metrics are controlled by a few players. >> So it's no seven people in the supply chain, that form that central entity... >> Yes, it's all central entities, and we're asking them to submit their data, into this shared ledger, that works across all of the different industry structures. >> So it is disrupting that... >> Oh, it's highly disruptive in terms of that, but we're not trying to re-create the infrastructure like a lot of other blockchain architect companies. >> Oh, I see, so you're tapping into the existing, and you're providing good auditing, I imagine with this, right, so the benefit might be auditing. So give an example of how that would render itself. >> Yeah, so, one of the areas that we're focused on today, is just looking at the impressions, in a programmatic ad buying. And so, let's say, let's just focus, instead of talking about the 15 vendors, let's just talk about the four. The four is the advertiser, is the DSP, which is basically the buying platform, the SSP, which also represents the exchange, and then the publisher. Now there is, we were asked that all four submit their data into the smart contract, and we verify whether that impression was valid. If you think of a fraudulent example, like a bot, they will not be able to mimic the data across the whole supply chain. And so because we're looking at the data wholistically, rather than just the slices of it, we can identify those fraudulent behaviors. >> This is the benefit of horizontally scalable, integrated systems. Cloud can help you, Blockchain helps you. How's the uptake been? Give us an update on who's involved, what's been the successes, and how's your success going? >> So we've been really excited to work with the IAB, and the IAB stands for the Interactive Advertisement Bureau. They're the bodies that set standards in digital advertising and we're working very closely with them. We launched our pilot, the first official pilot with the IAB, and we have great advertisers that are working with us, we're working with a lot of the agencies, we're actually even working closely with the publishers, and the ad networks, and the exchangers. AppNexus is one of the major partners with us, and the reception's been really positive because I think everybody wants that transparency. >> Well, some of the status quo might not want that transparency, I mean, let's face it, right? >> The fraud is rampant, it really is. >> A 220 billion dollar industry, I betcha there's a lot of people in it that are like, oh boy, here comes lucidity! I mean, come on, what about that? >> I'm sure that exists, but we haven't really come across it because the advertiser, at the end of the day, has become really aware that there is this rampant fraud, there is this waste. And I don't want to attribute everything to fraud, I think some of it is just wasted, because of the quality of the data. And so, the advertiser is demanding and at the end of the day, we're here to serve the advertiser, right? We're here to deliver value to the advertiser, and I think the industry is mature enough now, to where we recognize that. And so we don't think of transparency as a threat to the business anymore. We think of it as a value enhancement to our customer, the advertiser. >> Yeah, and I would personally totally agree with that, because as I said, the market will correct itself. Higher quality advertising is going to deliver more revenue, ultimately, alone, because there's going to be better outcomes. Right, so if you can increase your hit rate, you'd be happy to lower the clicks, you know? >> Is there any benefit for publishers? >> Yeah, I mean, publishers today have to basically trust what their partners are paying them. There's no way for them to verify and validate it. And so, with our system, we enable publishers to look into, it's our sidechain, right? And so, they are able to look at the events, but we obscure the data, we hash the data that's there so that we make it anonymous. But then they're able to see, like, okay, these are the impressions I've manned, here are the ones that were considered valid and verified, and here's what I should get paid. So the publishers now get the transparency, that which they lack today. >> So much of that industry is a black box, you might have a big media buyer, who's got voodoo, you know, that sprinkles magic dust, sends you a big bill, and you're like whoa! Is this really worth it? >> Bots, fake traffic.. >> You can automate a lot of that... >> And you've been doing this for 20 years! This has been the status quo for 20 years! >> We need a change. So, talk about the company, how big, how much funding did you actually owe? Is it privately funded, what's the funding mechanism? How big are you guys, what's the story? >> So today we announced that we raised five million dollars, we did it in traditional means. We did not do an ICO. >> Venture capital? >> It's a mix of venture capital, and obviously Pythia is the fund for our chain, so, but it was an equity deal. And that's the brow we're going to continue with. We do have an internal token, but we are not looking at doing a public sale. >> So not a security token, preferred stock, classic funding. >> So wait, so you did a security token? >> No no, no, preffered stock, classic venture capital. Well, great! Yeah, that's awesome, congratulations. We'll keep in touch, it's great to have you come on. >> Thank you very much >> Thanks very much, appreciate the time. >> And thank you for covering us! >> Of course! We love innovative things, in advertising specifically because it's freaking broken, big time! We have no advertising on our site, because we want to get the best content possible. Of course, the Cube is supported by sponsors, we appreciate that. Thanks for coming on. Cube coverage here in Toronto for watching futurists, we'll be right back, stay with us, as we start to wind down day one. Be right back with more great interviews after this break. (light-hearted techno music)

Probably Toronto, Canada. It's the cube covering blockchain futurist conference 2018, brought to you by the queue. Hello and welcome back to you keep live covers here in Toronto for the untraceable blockchain uterus conference two days a wall to wall coverage. We were just seeing it here on the coupon shopper host Dave Vellante, Tony Lane, Cuba last night with culture and we have James Mcdonald, head of strategy of Sentinel. He's also a PGA professional golf professional and a boxer. Extraordinary. Welcome to the cube. Thanks. You ever had in my notes. Funny before camera came on. Super exciting. Even though the market's kind of in a downward trough and by the, you know, do its normal cycle and Crypto, tons of energy. The culture is changing. There's a real energy around focusing on high quality builders, high quality individuals. This is a real dynamic projects for good projects for profit is great engineering going on. What could be better for sure, and we've been through the trod so many times. We've gotten to the point that now I just kind of like. I'm like, well, I mean we're here again. You know what I mean? And now it's time for, we figure out right now who's really in it to win it and who's just playing the game. Tell you know what I love about. You've got great energy, great. Already got great culture. You've been around, you've seen it early, you've been involved in a lot of the iterations of the industry that's just now growing to be a baby and his growing up into it's elementary school years. What are you, what's your take? I mean you look at this, I know you do a lot of retreats and self reflection. What's the industry? Where's it come from? Where is it now? How do you feel about what's happening? So I did in blockchain since 2011 and from a price perspective, there's actually a science fiction story that came out on Reddit in 2014 or 13 by someone named, got underscore Nada and it's called I am from the future. And I am here to stop you from what you were doing in this science fiction story. He outlines this pricing curve that basically shows the first five years of bitcoins existence. If no other market factors happen, no outside influence, no qualitative influenced the first five years, 10 x every year, second five years, every other year, 10 x every other year. And what's crazy is that if we wouldn't have had Mt. Gox and some of these other events like bitcoin was only supposed to go to 10 k last year, which is double. So if we wouldn't have had those external events, that pattern would have actually been it. So what's really easy and simple to remember about bitcoin is that it has a scarce supply. That's, I think that's the easiest way to put any of this. And so this is just a period of time. The market over extended itself and it shouldn't have gone realistically past 10 K it doubled. So yeah, I mean that's a if that's to be expected, right? No, no. In my opinion, I looked at either an exercise about six months with my friend. We look at the Nasdaq during the pre bubble days and we'll exchange of the Nasdaq and that's just a small scale relative to global care crypto. It's actually in line with some of the expansion we've seen in other financial market, so I kinda think it's good to have to do curation going on and calling out some of the dead wood, bring it into the better projects. This is kind of the reality now. Rip Good Times. Well, you know Bradley or yesterday at the cloud and blockchain conference posited that wasn't talking about Bitcoin, he was talking about ether. He said there's just too many damn coins and every ICO is most ics anyway. Tied to the theory. Yes, buy it. Well, I mean you can take this one too, but what I see is a decoupling at some point that has to be some sort of decoupling at the moment. Everything is very correlated and I think as time goes on you will see it's like survival of the fittest. Right? So you've got, you've got a lot of blockchains and you've got a lot of tokens on ethereum that want to come off to theory and it's survival of the fittest. I feel like. Yeah, the best ones will prevail and the ones that aren't trusted or secure. Yeah. So talk about who's in it to win it. What do you look for in the contenders versus the pretenders? What are the attributes that you as deep experts in this field look toward the winters? Well, I see as right now we're kind of like a candy that you love coming out with a new flavor. It's like everyone's like, oh yeah, like remember this candy gotta buy it now, but at the end of the day it's pretty much the same candy and she was like a little different sweetener and so we will experience obviously a sharp correction. Yeah, for sure. But I think what's really beautiful about this is it's actually enabling creative potential jobs of the future are not going to be, oh, I know how to do c plus plus now I have a job forever. It's going to be about reinvention at that is the real economy of the future and chains and huge enabler for that new markets are opening up to. So it's not just the reinvention, which I agree, reimagined the reinvention and new markets. Our change was on earlier saying eight and 80 day tour of 10 countries. New markets are exploding. That's just a new markets is rechanging system, not your grandfather's venture capital model, silicon valley or New York or London. It's with the globe. There are many, many reasons to tokenize the world. The thing that, the thing that stands out to me is, you know, when you look at tokenizing securities, the fact that this opens up the free market to everyone, you know, these things can be traded 24 slash seven, three, six, five from anywhere in the world. Traditionally if you want to buy stocks, will streets open for less time than it's been. It's closed and so it. It just opens up the free market to everyone all over the world and to me that's that journalists, you're a professional golfer. Someone use a golf analogy too, because I'd love Golf Golfer, so excellent Golfer. Not a pro, but he could be. I don't keep score with them many times and he never played. She played like, well, why don't you twice a year consistently shoots. There's a little bit hockey and a happy Gilmore going on golf metaphor, so the world that we know that's the centralized governed world banks, big corporations that are being essential. I consider them like a wooden shaft and the old clubs. Now all of a sudden graphite shafts, youth club heads, new technology. The game doesn't really change fundamental APP, but it changes the performance you by that is that a good analogy? Needed to. Perfect analogy. When you go to the golf clubs, then you've got the older members and they don't buy it. They say that the performance doesn't increase with the new technology, but really we know that old stodgy members, it comes down to that people are naturally averse to change. People don't change something that they don't quite understand. They'd naturally dismissed if they don't want to delve in, felt dismiss that and everyone here today is going down this rabbit hole, but there's a hell of a lot of people out there that I didn't really get it. I don't want to get it. So. And they'll dismiss that and they'll even. They'll even talk it down if it threatens them. At the game changes. No, I mean come on. If you look at the current distribution, over time we've moved from tribalized kings and Queens to nation states. Let's hope that we actually enable a redistribution of wealth. I want to see blockchain create the garden of Eden. We're experiencing now is basically same incentives, slightly less bad people, and I feel that if we really use new technology is an opportunity for change. Change is gonna happen and if we make the integration of new technology about experiencing compassion in action as humanity, we changed human perception, human behavior, your understanding of your own limitations. When we enabled real freedom, not just the illusion of freedom as money on Amazon yesterday, which he's with, he's done an amazing work what he's doing to transform the Caribbean islands with exchange changing a society there digitally connected almost 100 percent penetration of mobile. It's incredible. They can't access some basic services society. A new game changer. You're taking an integrative approach to how you interact with people and it's part of your persona. Maybe I'm pushing the golf analogy to bring it, bring it, watching the end of the PGA this week and they were interviewed. Tiger Woods is back and he's comes in and they were interviewing him and he wants to be on the Ryder Cup team. Now, if you've observed him in the Ryder Cup, not great. This is a team sport. The euro's always killed the Americans when the superstar is right and it's sort of the same thing that you're saying. It's the get the haves and have nots. It's a team sport and it's community driven. Increases viewings like you wouldn't need tigers pain. Everyone tunes in, which is great for the sport, for the Americans because they always lose when he plays. I think it would be, you know, why not put him in the team because it's good for the game. It gets people more engaged. He goes and he's been humbled. You know that your thing is there a lock if you the back, you want them involved but you don't want to dominate it. Alright, so guys, let's take it back to reality. You guys are working together on a project we talking, talking you guys, what are you guys working on know about the projects you guys are involved in right now. What James and I do together is we take these skills, we've learned through my life, you a performing artist in his previous life as a professional athlete and we've really taken what we've learned through our knowledge and our network to help entrepreneurs who are driven with integrity and appear to be a success. So it's really, well we do together is we just really, um, and that's, that's what we do both for fun and for enjoyment. And what I'm working on personally, James is the head of strategy at a company and I'll let him get into that when I'm working on personally is global citizenship and my company culture is actually focused on something really integral to the block chain which is capitalizing the market share on the tradition, the transition out of nation states and into oriented and governance models. So we have one layer that's open source for free for the world, for ever to own your agreements and to own your identity as a self sovereign individual stewarded by your community to give everyone more context on each other. And then our for profit businesses basically facebook connects people to their friends, culture connects people to communities and connects communities to dapps that are services and economists basically. And we build that whole ecosystem. So that's really what I'm up to at culture. And then James and I have our own adventure together and James is also had a strategy at center. Yup. Okay. So sentinel is an interoperable network layer for distributed resources. So let me break that down. What block chain technology allows is for you to monetize access resources like access bandwidth, access, GPU or CPU power. And so our first working product is a decentralized vpn. So you know what a vpn is. Sure. So the sentinel, the VPN is distributed. So what that allows you to do for example, is you could access, you can monetize your excess bandwidth by hosting a note that people can connect to it. And the beauty of the decentralized vpn is that it's probable, so all the code is open source and there's proof that the data is actually being kept private, it's encrypted, um, and there's no, there's no centralized or a body or a company that can be shut down or, or forced to give up data or paid for paid for data. It's distributed. So it's fast and it's secure. So yeah, there's a lot of big companies in the crypto space that are very concerned with data privacy and they didn't, may not trump central vpn, traditional centralized vpn paid. So you host your own node, you get paid. It's a marketplace. So anyone in the world can set up their own node, run their own node, help other people obscure their traffic if they don't want. Like for example, Gdpr, if you don't want every website that you visit to monitor literally everything you do, you might want to consider using a vpn for the sake of preserving your own personal privacy and the integrity of your data which you own and rightfully should actually own the monetization value of. So in the world you can have a few node and you guys can pay, people can pay $5 your whole network and use it. So I can sell my xx compute capacity, network bandwidth, the storage sewer. No touching that. A storage, I mean down the line. So it's for, for, for distributed resources. That sentinel. The first product is the dvps yes. Down the line. Yeah. We're going to come up with much more so others could actually plug into that platform like a live stream in China. I can pop on a vpn. There it is. Run Google apps in China because you can run google. Yes. You know, she'd even China. Let's you. Cool. All right guys. Well thanks so much for coming on. Appreciate it. Thanks. Very inspirational. I think there's a lot of mission driven cultural change coming very fast. This next generation coming up is going to be the stewards of making the change happen. It's our job to set the table and get these services out there. Congratulations. Okay. Cube coverage here live in Toronto at the untraceable blockchain futures conference. Two days is the cube wall to wall coverage. I'm John Furrier, stay with us Dave ones continuing the best gas, the most important people. Bring in the great blockchain crypto world together here in Toronto. We'll be right back.

>> Live from Toronto, Canada, it's theCUBE. Covering Blockchain Futurist Conference 2018. Brought to you by theCUBE. >> Hello, everyone. Welcome back. This is theCUBE's live coverage here in Toronto, for the Untraceable event. Here in the industry, it's called Blockchain Futurist. It's where all the industry elite are getting together here in Canada, to talk about the future of blockchain, crypto, and everything. It's theCUBE's specific coverage. As we continue 2018, kicking off event coverage with our CUBE brand. But right now we've got two great guests from Start-up, and they're called Quantum EXchange and Bank, QuantEXchange. Manie Eagar, Executive Chairman. And, John Willock, who's the CEO. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> So you guys got some hard news to talk about. >> We do. >> But, you guys are doing an exchange model, bringing something really cool to the market. >> Yep. >> Which, we need to kind of get this figured out. Take a minute to explain what you guys are doing, the problem you're solving, and then we'll get to the news. Absolutely. So, I think the lot of people are doing exchanges. You see them coming all the time, and most of them don't really have any specific differentiation or value add. We are not like that at all. We have spent our careers as part of most of the team, in traditional financial services. And, we're coming from the securities exchange business to bring the learnings from NASDAQ, the learnings from the like of that sort to the Crypto Exchange space. And, to be able to facilitate not only a regulated exchange venue, but also one that is institutional grade in terms of tools and the client experience, as well as the trust factor with the platform itself. So, that's really what we're trying to get done with the Quantum Exchange that we're building right now. >> And how old's the company? How long you been around? When do you guys start? How funded are you? What's happening there? >> So, I'll refrain from discussing funding at this point. But, I will say we've started this year. I left the Toronto Stock Exchange specifically to pursue this in conjunction with Manny. And, we've been batting this idea around for the last couple of years. And, the market reached the stage in maturity and size, that we said now is the time to get going and do it. And, so far, fanfare has been fantastic. Reactions from people in the Crypto Ecosystem, people in the Securities Ecosystem, has been equally positive. >> Yeah. >> There's a strong desire to see something like this come to market. And, we're very excited to be able to launch. >> Before we get to the news, Manie, I want to ask you a question. One of the things that we've seen is two types of behavior. The other guy's got to lose for me to win, and then, or both parties can win. We're seeing trends where people are taking a posture against regulations. Oh, they're evil, they're causing all the problems. They kind of don't know what they're doing, kind of, they're evolving. Maturity levels are different based on countries. But, where the success is happening, like Gabriel with Bit. Okay, there's collaboration. Because the regulars actually want to do a good job most cases. They just can't get there fast enough. This is the new model. This is what people are looking at. This is the kind of solution ... >> Absolutely. >> A bridge between industry, and the slow but, yet want to change regulators. Your thoughts? >> Very, very good point. The good news is we're all talking to each other. I think there's dialogue at the moment, but it's not maybe as open as it should be. Because it's all day one. What I bring to the community, and have for the ... since I got engaged in launching the first Bitcoin ATM in the world, in Vancouver, part of that team. And, I think Anthony Bold from Bit is for an alliance. And, blockchain association in the block forum, which we'll announce tomorrow. 'Cause I worked for Blockhouse. I worked for Vodafone. I was involved in the Empasa project. And, I can see and understand what does it take for people to start using technologies. I think what everybody is hoping for is this golden moment. Like when the first iPhone arrived on the scene. >> Yeah. >> People queued around the block through the night to get ahold of that first device. We haven't had that moment yet. For Blockchain and Crypto. We've had the wild enthusiasm, which is all speculation as far as most of us are concerned. But, maturity is coming, these technology if Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies want to succeed, there needs to be another converging technology with what's already out there. The internet, your financial ecosystem, and so forth. >> Yep. >> In my view, there'll be a coming together. There'll be new models altogether. Incumbents will have to pick up the pace in terms of how they go about it. >> Yeah. >> But, we see the opportunity for ourselves, for Quantex. And the industry as a whole is where the convergence takes place, the dialogue becomes more mature, and open, and transparent. Regulators become aligned. At the moment, we hear of a lot of jurisdictions announcing this, announcing that. But, when you start investigating or assessing, it's different flavors, different cultures, different economies. >> Yeah. >> There's the Commonwealth Block. There's the North American Block. There's the Asian Block. Europe is a whole different ball of wax. >> Yeah, I agree with you and I just want to ... >> So, this is where it gets interesting . That's where we come into the boat. >> Absolutely. >> Well, I agree with you, I just want to make a point. During the dotcom bubble, during that internet wave, there was some over-speculation. But at the end of the day, the forcing function of reality was the growth of the online users was growing every day. >> Yeah, yeah. >> And, the demand and the commerce dollars were still real. Now, certainly there was an exuberance. Irrational, in some cases. But, it all ended up happening. I think here in this market, the forcing function is the reality that there's demand, and there's money, and there's impact. >> There is now, we now know that. >> This is coming. It's not like Doomsday. Well, it was fake. No, not really. >> No, we are still in the first inning of seeing what is actually coming out of all of this. I think last year's price speculation runoff obviously was set to decline at some point. But, there has been a long series of momentum coming out of that, where people have realized that this is something much more important and significant than what it looked like three years ago, perhaps. And, a lot of that talent is now coming to this space. Bringing, the capital, bringing the know-how, us included, to deliver something for the next generation of platform, tools, and ecosystem to really grow this massively. And, bring it much more to the mainstream. >> And, I think the idea of aligning with regulars, help them move faster. You mentioned adopt technology, but, still in the phase of deploying operational infrastructure. You mentioned some of the things, the projects you've worked on. Vodafone, that's cellular, that's towers, that's infrastructure. So, I think we're still in this hybrid model of, in parallel, capital formation, building companies, and then, just, we got to get the roads built. >> Well, and understand the posture that a lot of people are taking on. We need to decentralize, we need to open this thing up. But, at the end of the day, the consumer votes. You and I know if we don't have viewers, we don't have a channel. If we don't have users, people actually using the technology, not only investing, but actually using it. It aint going to happen. Decentralize, centralize to a hybrid. And, that's the part that we need to open ourselves. >> Let me ask you guys a question before we get to the news. This exciting news you get to share. How do you standardize something? Because, one common thread of all these major deflection points, at least, with the major cycles I've lived through, has been standards. >> Absolutely. But, it's not going to be your grandfather's standards.So, TCPIP was different. The OSI model is a different generation. The internet was different. Web social is different. What may happen may be different. So, but, standards play an important role. But, no one has clear visibility yet what will be standardized, what should be standardized. Do you guys have any thoughts on that? >> Well last year John comes in, and he's learned the world of standards at NASDAQ, and TMX, and elsewhere. >> That's true. >> Now, we need to bring it to this world. >> How do we scale operational lead to get a cohesive exchange that can scale and demure value? Where do the standards focus need to be? What should the emphasis ... where does the light get shined on, and where's the energy go to? >> I think, you know, you want to look at standards, think about something like this ETF debate that's been going on. Huge speculation about whether or not that's coming. I think a lot of people who are looking at that ETF debate, specifically, don't actually understand some of the economics and the mechanisms behind the scenes. So, for example, what is a fork? When you think about traditional securities, you got corporate actions like a stock split or dividend. A fork is an entirely different concept with entirely different results. Those are the sorts of things that need to be discussed, standardized, and brought to an industry cohesion to be able to successfully deal with some of these events as the market progresses. And, to bring some normalcy to some of this as well, especially if you want to bring institutions to the plate. And, I think that comes to one of the other initiatives that we're working on ... Which is the industry body, called block forum, which we're going to be discussing in a moment. That can really help be that joining voice >> Hold on, hold on a second. This is the news. >> behind everything. >> This is the news. You guys are announcing, let's get to the news. >> Okay. >> You're announcing a couple things. Start with what you were just talking about. You guys are announcing a forum. Can you explain? >> Correct, correct. So, we're launching, officially, to the remainder of the crowd here tomorrow, block forum. Which is an industry association that will be especially behind driving adult thinking behind all this, putting regulation into place, discussing commonalities around policy, around how to standardize, and how to really make all of this interoperable. And, I think that's the key word. If you have individual pillars of, islands of activity, that's not going to be the same as having a cohesive global solution. And, that's what we really want to drive. >> An exchange solution? >> Well, in our case in Quantex, absolutely. But, an exchange in the services we can offer is one part of the whole puzzle. There's a whole series of inter-connected affairs that have to work together. And, that's what block forum is going to drive, is this assembly of different connected parties who are all working for the greater benefit of the Prio ecosystem. >> Who is going to be involved in the forum? Who is the stakeholders? Who can join? Is it a membership? Is it a consortium? >> It is a membership. There will actually be a token that will have very interesting membership related tokenomics attached that we can disclose at a later date. And, that economic alignment between the parties who are staking effectively their interests in the certain topics that they want back or the certain efforts will be a completely unique model compared to what we've seen in the industry today, where generally speaking, it is a committee who drives something on behalf of members. This is really fundamental for all members, democratically from individuals all the way up to institutions, to be able to participate and voice their interests. >> So you will see governments as members. >> Yes, yes, absolutely. >> You will see industry leading stakeholders and practitioners. The whole idea of the body is not to create new policy or reinvent the wheel. We're getting policy, we're receiving regulation. So, how do we put this in practice? Where are the success stories? How can we show the industry as a whole? Governments across jurisdictions to align around their spacing. >> So a melting pot of people to get a conversation going. >> Right. >> To start shaping an agenda or just start talking? >> So, we're talking to governments at premier and cabinet level. We're talking to boardrooms of banks. We're talking to think of your top 40 leaders in blockchain and crypto. We're talking to all of them and engaging with them. >> And, what's the vision of the outcome that you can envision in your mind? What is that outcome for this group? What do you hope to accomplish? What is the end result, if you can kind of assume things go in a good way, what happens? >> I think this is a unifying voice for leadership in the industry to discuss what the outside, outside of crypto world that is, and really bridge that gap between those who are within and understand natively and those who need to be brought in to be able to interact with this and really grow all of this industry. >> And, promote the role models. >> And, exactly that. Exactly that. To bring the best to the front. And, really show that there is actually serious opportunity, serious business. This is not just a series of hackers or whatever nefarious activity these people casually may think the block chain industry is. This is something very serious and very real. And, we want to be a voice for that. >> Awesome. And, you guys had some other news on the fundraising front. >> Industry first. >> You guys are raising some money, you're doing a private sale, and new gear as much as you can, it's pretty invested, so, I think you can promote it. >> I will say with a caveat as you say, it's pertinent to investors only, and we have not completed our discussions with our legal counsel. Having said that, we are taking the model of a traditional securities exchange membership, seats on an exchange, which can be purchased, which have rights attached, which are a titled asset separately from equity of the exchange, for example, separately from a utility token as you would have seen with many other exchanges. This is something that we feel is a very unique model. We are very excited to be able to launch this, and come to market first with this concept. Which again, is blending the best of the old and new. We're taking tokenization, we're taking a concept that have existed in the previous markets and previous worlds, and blending them together for something that is somewhat unique and wholly new in this application. >> Well, I hope you guys raise a lot of money. We need more harmony between regulating and government entities to bring the whole world together. And, certainly from the money-making standpoint, what the liquidity and exchanges can provide as the world starts to understand where the groove swing is and where those swim lanes are, especially with security tokens. >> You bet, you bet. And, the success is going to be measured in ability to scale sustainably. And, we want to demonstrate that with this model. >> We need some leadership there. So, good luck. Best of luck. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you, thank you. >> We are here live in Toronto, Canada for the Blockchain Futurists Conference. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Describing the single millers, talking to the most important people, the hottest stories. Here are the most colorful people, people traveling around the world sharing that insights with you. Stay with us for more day coverage here. The first day of two day coverage of Blockchain Futurists. We'll be right back after this short break.

(theCUBE theme music) >> Live from Toronto, Canada, it's theCUBE covering Blockchain Futurist Conference 2018. Brought to you by theCUBE. >> Hello everyone, welcome to the live coverage here in Toronto, this is theCUBE's coverage of Blockchain Futurist Event put on by Untraceable and the community here in Canada and around the world. I'm John Furrier with my cohost Dave Vellante, co founders of theCUBE, we're here with CUBE alumni, Anthony Di Iorio, who's the founder and CEO of Decentral and Jaxx, the really cool product we're going to get in to but also the co founder of Ethereum. Anthony, great to see you, thanks for coming back on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me again. >> Great keynote, in typical Anthony Di Iorio fashion no slides, you decide what you're going to talk about before you get up on stage but you really kind of brought it- >> When I get on stage. >> When you get on stage, you come on, you do it. >> Yeah. >> But it's a nice theme, you're talking about the history, you're bringing in the community value. You talk about the key milestones. You're really recognizing what the community's done. But more importantly you're giving a roadmap of where you think the future's going and combined with the fact that you're also running Decentral and you got the Jaxx wallet so really cool. I want to ask you, where is it going and what's going on in the community from your perspective, as of today? >> So where is this entire space going? I think it's going to be revolutionary. I think the infrastructure is being built out now, it's been built out for the last number of years. I think we're seeing more and more the interfaces and the ways that the masses are going to start connecting with these technologies. We're still being hindered by some problems with scalability, some other problems that are stopping these technologies, these decentralized techs from really spreading globally and being able to be utilized in a way that's going to make things faster, better, and cheaper. But those problems will be solved and it's going to lead to revolutionary changes in every sector that you could imagine, every sector that relies on third parties and intermediaries to facilitate things, technology is going to emerge that's going to be able to make things better, make things faster. >> I want to ask you something because I'm seeing a trend happen. Obviously we've seen the cycle of prices drop and crypto prices and a lot of people are focused on the mechanics of coin price and so on and so forth. Also the international growth is pretty massive, but you're starting to see two types of swim lanes. One is get this thing, get this coin out there, get it trading, get token economics going and then you've got builders, building real products and durable companies, you're starting to see a trend now where people are starting to highlight the builders. People really looking at the longer term gain, trying to bring a token economics model but trying to get it right on building and this is kind of a critical kind of inflection point in the industry where it's not just, hey, I want to make some cash, there's actually economic benefits of this revolution. >> Yeah. >> But there's now a focus on the builders, people actually building technology, building companies. This is now the focus, this is what's becoming a legit deal, legit alpha entrepreneurs, real communities are galvanizing around that. Your reaction to that dynamic happening right now? >> It's what we've always tried to to. With my company, with Decentral, we're not banking on a token. There's no raising and taking people's money or token to grow and be the main focus of what we're doing. We may add a loyalty system in what we're doing down the road, but it would never be something that we're collecting money for, to actually make that as a main business. It's all about creating value and our goal is to create the interface for all projects to be able to have that ability to manage and move value in their different platforms. Our goal has always been to not rely on a token based system in order to create value and we're seeing more and more, that, I think, companies are realizing that you can have maybe some part of a token based system but you really have to create value with it and there's way too much idea of a token being the be all and end all and that's how we're going to base things and it's just there's too many of them out there right now and I think that creating a real value and not banking just on that token being where you're going to make money is probably, that's the building step that needs to get done. >> Well it's definitely a theme we've been hearing, "Too many damn tokens" and not enough value being created by those individual tokens. What's your take on the current sentiment? I mean obviously people have seen the crypto prices. Your thoughts on what's going on? >> There's just too much going on right now and that's a good thing. And there's a lot of competition but it's also very difficult to wade through al of the noise and wade through what's actually going to create value. Most of the stuff out there is not going to be valuable, it's not going to really radically- These companies and these projects that are emerging, not all of them are going to be successful and only a very few are actually going to create value so I find it very difficult as the time is passing to identify what is going to be actually good and there's just too much out there and it becomes very difficult to actually identify those things. >> Well somebody made the comment, we were doing a show yesterday here in Toronto and they said, "You know back then "there was really only one Vitalik Buterin "and now there's like zillions of him "and they're all creating amazing ideas "but there's a huge supply of those ideas." And to your point not all are going to succeed. >> It's ideas but it's about execution, too. >> Right. >> And really, can you carry that out? That's the hardest part, is execution and it's very difficult and there's a lot of people out there that struggle with that part. They have an idea, they've got a paper, they build a team and it's like, well how do we actually get it to create value? And then they're backing on their token value and they're not really creating something of substance that's going to be that value but it's also due to limitations that the space has right now and mostly with scalability. >> A big part of your effort is try to reduce some of that friction, right? I mean is that kind of the play? >> Yeah, our goal is to, when you build wallets or a project has to build their own wallet, it takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of effort and it's really not what their focus should be on. That's what our goal is, is to be that interface that projects can use to move and manage their digital currencies and connect them with other projects and other services that their user base needs. What's missing is those interfaces now and that's what has always been my focus. >> You said this, but when we interviewed you in the Bahamas we had a one on one, and also had a CUBE interview, but on the one on one you were basically saying the wallet's the new browser, which we like by the way, thought that was very relevant and we see the wallet dynamic being central. The other thing that we heard yesterday, and this has been a recurring them in the industry, is got to be easier to use. This whole system, it's like the internet. It's hard at first but then there's a chasm that's crossed on ease of use, that really will drive more adoption so the notion of the centrality of why the wallet is critical and also the ease of use because, like you said, entrepreneurs want to optimize their behavior, time to build value, not worry about prices of their coin and their velocity and float and stock prices when the reality is, there's work to be done. >> That's right, yeah. >> This is a real problem and there's opportunity, how is that wallet evolution going to emerge? How do you see it visa-vis potentially competition? What's your view now? Will there be a browser for every webpage or wallet for every- >> Well that's what I, I mean our goal is to be the single interface for all those projects and that's our goal. We want to be able to have and expedite the way that we can bring new projects on board. It's difficult right now because you have a lot of different technologies in the background that we have to integrate and connect with. Things with Ethereum are pretty simple, Bitcoin we've got, ones like Bitcoin but then there's all these new ones that are emerging, too and they require a lot more effort and resources to do. That is our next goal is how to expedite getting all this product in, because we want to be the single thing and it doesn't make sense that I've got a store or manage 20 different crypto currencies and I can only do some of them in Jaxx, I can do some of them across it, I got to use other systems. It's really not a great user experience and that's what we're trying to perfect. >> Yeah, so you really only want, as a user one or two browsers, you don't want- >> I'd say one browser is what you really want and that's pretty much, you would say Chrome is what people are mostly using now and that's what happens over time. >> Maybe a little bit of Safari for some other stuff, whatever, but you don't want four or five browsers. Nobody uses three or four browsers. So the browser is the metaphor that you've used. Some people have said, "Well, the better metaphor is the app". I got gazillions of apps on my phone. So help me understand why it's more browser than it is app. >> I would say that you have browsers that have apps and integrations in them, so Chrome has extensions, those are apps. The browser itself is basically it's an interface where you can see what's going on and allows you to move information. The wallet is what enables you to manage and move the value, and we have integrations so I consider those the apps that we'll have inside of the wallet that'll connect you to service providers that offer different value, different services. So I see it as the way for you to manage your keys and be able to navigate but the apps will be baked into the wallet, that will enable you to connect and buy and sell and trade and pay bills and all these things will be through apps so that's why I see that interface as the wallet, yeah. >> Talk about the dynamic around developers and one of the things that I've been saying on theCUBE and I'll say it here again, I think when you have volatility in pricing, that scares the market or whether it's people speculate whether it's being manipulated or not, doesn't matter. If there's a scare factor, developers are in it for the long game, right? When they pick a platform like Ethereum to work on, they're in it for the long haul so short term fluctuations shouldn't change behavior but there's now some dynamic where it kind of is and people are questioning that. What do you talk to those developers, saying stay the course, because Ethereum has the most developers, okay? By far. >> Yeah. >> What's the message to the developers? Don't worry, settle down, long game? >> Well they got to make their own decisions on that. I think that with, the industry is very market driven right now. Businesses, that are down to a fifth of what they were worth or what they have, you know just in a few months, really does take a toll. >> Yeah. >> And it really does, when you have a lot of growth plans and things you want to do, it really can put restrictions on that, so that's the world that it is in. As for developers, if they're passionate about what they're doing, especially with developers, they're generally going to do it, regardless of the money, I usually find. Some might leave, some might come in, but it's generally what the individual person's going to do. It's whether they should keep going on it but the markets, I mean the markets do really play a factor in a lot of things. How do you plan your 12 month ahead when the markets take you down to have such massive swing where you're now at 10% what you may have had. They really do play. >> You got to pay attention, their runway gets shortened big time >> So Anthony I was struck by your keynote today and other keynotes where I've seen you. You're incredibly humble, such a successful individual. You talk about your humble beginnings, the grassroots meet ups and I was struck by when you first read Vitaliks' "White Paper" you said it was very comp- after two or three pages you're like, "Eh" your eyes are bleeding so you went to Charles and he kind of explained things. >> Yeah. >> A lot of people feel like, okay you've got to be an alpha geek to succeed in this business. Talk about your particular skillset and maybe share with the audience some of the skillsets that they can tap to succeed in this industry. >> I hire a lot of developers, I am not a developer. I need to interface with them but I don't need to know a lot of the nitty gritty and if you have good people working for you on that end they don't want to be usually the ones that are leading stuff, they want to code and they want to do it so I've always been the person that can bring the team together and build a team that's going to be able to carry that out without me necessarily being the person that's doing that. You can't do everything. I am a generalist in a lot of different things. I am not very good at math. When Vitalik would write articles back in the day for Bitcoin Magazine, I would really read them and then he gets into his formulas and stuff and I'm, it's just not something I can do. I'm a generalist that does a number of different things and I can put the teams together and I can figure out ways to monetize and I can figure out ways to gather the right people together but I'm not a developer, I'm not a coder, and that's fine. I think it's the entrepreneurs that really are the ones that lead the things. I've always found I can hire developers. I think to have developers that are running projects? That's generally not their specialties, to be able to manage the whole operations or whole team and I think that's what Ethereum has suffered from since 2014. I think there was a, you know, we had eight founders split between developers and business people. It lead to a divide that eventually was turned into more of a developer focused project and that's where it's been since. What's that enabled is people such as myself, Joseph Lugen, Charles Hoskinson to do our own things and be able to do great things. And I think that you need a mixture of people with different sets of skills. And I think at the end of the day though, it's the vision of the entrepreneur, of the person that tasks the risks and is able to bring together all facets of something, not just necessarily the technical side or the developer side of things. >> What are the conditions that have made Toronto such an epicenter for blockchain development? >> I think it's mostly community. I think very early on, from the start of the meetups that I did and them growing and continuously doing them from 2012, 2013, 2014 to having people such as Vitalik being from here. Other entrepreneurs, there's just been a culture here blockchain here, that people have recognized and you're starting to see a lot of VCs a lot of people taking their trips up here and you're getting comments like, "Somethings happening "here in Toronto" and what's caused that and I think honestly a lot of it has to do with the meetups. I think be central and creating a physical hub that allowed the community to grow and start thinking about ideas and bringing people together, I think can put a lot of impact in it, has played a lot of that factor. >> A lot of talent, too, in here, too. >> And I think the talent, yeah, there's talent, but it's not just developers though, too. It's entrepreneurs. >> Yeah. >> Developers are one part of this animal and they're an important part but it's the idea that sparks risk taking and it's about putting together many pieces of the puzzle and developers are one aspect of it. I think it's more of the entrepreneurship that has actually created that. >> Yeah, cause there's a lot of talent in a lot of places. You know? >> I mean, I've been living in Silicon Valley for 20 years now, I moved from the east coast and it's a striking difference between the classic venture capital, Silicon Valley was where the action was in venture because of the ecosystem, the money capital formation, risk taking capabilities and people have tried to replicate Silicon Valley. Silicon Beach, Silicon this, Silicon that. But with blockchain and crypto token economics, for the first time the capital formation's different. The teams are forming in a different way where you're starting to see a re imagination of entrepreneurial epicenters and it's not trying to be Silicon Valley but the results still the same but that's what blockchain's all about, is re imagining something that can be done better, more efficiently. So you're starting to see Toronto, you're starting to see outside the United States with a lot of capital formation, lot of entrepreneurial energy, blockchain and crypto certainly has community. >> Yeah. >> Again, that's the perfect storm. This is impacting the entrepreneurial- >> It's also regulatory stuff as well. I think for Toronto, Canada to be doing what's it's done, in unregulatory uncertainty, like we don't know really what's going to happen here and that, I think, has stifled things to where it really could be because you do have a lot of companies here that will set up in a Caribbean country or set in Europe, they're setting up in Switzerland because they don't know the playing field of what they have to deal with here and that's something that's hindered things. It's the countries that figure that part out along with how do they spark and bring the entrepreneurs in and I think the regulatory climate plays a massive factor in that. We've been able to do in Toronto, Canada what we've been able to do, despite having the clarity and certainty in that space. >> That's a red flag I think that people should pay attention to, don't lose the entrepreneurial energy to another domicile, location. Alright, final question, at least for me, Dave might have one. As someone looking out over the landscape, certainly you've been involved on the business end and putting teams together on Ethereum, communities as well as your own company, looking out at the landscape, we spoke in February, at Poly Con, and going forward, what's the state of the union, in decentralization of applications and token economics and blockchain, what's your view of the current situation as the market is what it is now and certainly it's going to continue to evolve, what's the state of the union from Anthony Di Iorio's perspective? >> It's just keep doing what we're doing. Keep building things, keep building out infrastructure. I've toned down a lot of investments, I've toned down a lot of things to focus on that just because, A, it's very, very difficult now to distinguish between projects, it's very hard. B, I have a lot of investments which are going to grow over the next few years and my focus is now on doing my business stuff. I think we are going to weed out a lot of the people that aren't creating value in the space and that aren't going to be along for the ride so when they see the markets go down they're going to disappear but then they come back in and things are going to thrive. We've seen this before, it's not a new thing in this space. Things are going down, then they go higher then they go down, then they do higher again and it's been on generally a pretty good incline. We're just in the down thing right now, and that's okay, let's keep plugging away and keep building out infrastructure. >> Yeah and that's a clear theme you see here and other events, meetups. Unpinning optimism, right? It's still there, the innovation is still there. People are very excited. >> Do you think there's an emphasis on builders? I mean obviously you're just basically saying the value creators are going to be the center of the action. You think that the industry globally recognizes that the legit players creating value are the ones that are going to be rewarded and recognized? Are we not there yet, close enough? >> I don't know, that's an interesting question. I think eventually that's what's going to happen. >> Yeah. >> But I think right now there's a lot of people trying to make a lot of quick money. I think those people will be weeded out and I think it will come down to those value creators, those people that are really building things up that will be the ones that last, just like we saw with the internet, same type of thing, you have the hype, you have it grow, you have it blow up and then you have the slow, steady value added producers will be the ones that actually are going to be able to represent. >> Like you said, we've seen it before, it's jut a lot faster, a lot more compressed. >> All that happens over time, yeah. >> You determine how many cycles you live in this industry, you know we've talked about that before. Dave and I have been through many waves, as have you. Thanks so much for taking the time to come on. Give a quick plug on what's happening with Jaxx. Decentral, you had an amazing New York trip, your exclusive boat party was well talked about. You had the two cars you gave away but you laid out the future, 3.0, there's Jaxx wallet, you got some other projects. What's the status of Jaxx? How's it going and when can people get their hands on it and how are you onboarding customers? Give the update on the Jaxx wallet. >> Sure, so the Jaxx 2.0, called Jaxx Liberty is out in beta right now, you can download it on different platforms. What it is is an interface that does much more than just being a wallet. It's your charts, your graphs, your news, you portfolio, apps, it's gamified with leveling up experience points. We're going to connect you with our partners, all these different services, really to be the center point for that one single interface that you're going to have for everything, for your digital life. That's the goal for that, where you can be in control of your money, your identity, your communications and Liberty is coming out in the next couple weeks, the full release and that's really going to be our flagship product and I think it's going to be the thing that's going to create a single place for people to use in our space. >> Are developers going to be able to tap into this capabilities, as we as developers, will we be able to not only use the wallet will there be APIs and interfaces into the wallet? >> Yeah, so right now when we put integrations in what'll be coming over the next many months, will be us actually integrating with our partners but eventually our goal is to have STKs where you could use our back and infrastructures, our connections to blockchains, that we can give the tools to people, create their own utilities and their own applications inside of Jaxx. >> Well we certainly want to continue the conversation. Great to have you on, of course theCUBE token that we want for our media business, we want Jaxx on the wallet. >> Anthony Di Iorio, industry leader, pioneer, also running a great business, Decentral and Jaxx, here on theCUBE giving us the straight scoop, a shortcut to the truth. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. Live coverage here in Toronto, part of Untraceable's flagship event here with all the best people in the blockchain industry, the Futurist Conference, we'll be right back with more after this short break. (theCUBE theme music)

>> Live, from Toronto Canada, it's the CUBE! Covering Blockchain Futurist Conference 2018. Brought to you by the CUBE. >> Hello everyone and welcome back. This is the CUBE's exclusive coverage here in Toronto for the Blockchain Futurist Conference, we're here all week. Yesterday we were at the Global Cloud and Blockchain Summit put on by DigitalBits and the community, here is the big show around thought leadership around the future of blockchain and where it's going. Certainly token economics is the hottest thing with blockchain, although the markets are down the market is not down when it comes to building things. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, here with CUBE alumni and special guest Hartej Sawhney who is the founder of Hosho doing a lot of work on security space and they have a conference coming up that the CUBE will be broadcasting live at, HoshoCon this coming fall, it's in October I believe, welcome to the CUBE. >> Thank you so much for having me. >> Always great to see you man. >> What's the date of the event, real quick, what's the date on your event? >> It's October 9th to the 11th, Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, we rented out the entire property, we want everyone only to bump into the people that we're inviting and they're coming. And the focus is blockchain security. We attend over 130 conferences a year, and there's never enough conversation about blockchain security, so we figured, y'know, Defcon is still pure cybersecurity, Devcon from Ethereum is more for Ethereum developers only, and every other conference is more of a traditional blockchain conference with ICO pitch competitions. We figured we're not going to do that, and we're going to try to combine the worlds, a Defcon meets Devcon vibe, and have hackers welcome, have white hat hackers host a bug bounty, invite bright minds in the space like Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert, the founder of the Trezor wallet, RSA, y'know we've even invited everyone from our competitors to everyone in the media, to everyone that are leading the blockchain whole space. >> That's the way to run an event with community, congratulations. Mark your calendar we've got HoshoCon coming up in October. Hartej, I want to ask you, I know Dave wants to ask you your trip around the world kind of questions, but I want to get your take on something we're seeing emerging, and I know you've been talking about, I want to get your thoughts and reaction and vision on: we're starting to see the world, the losers go out of the market, and certainly prices are down on the coins, and the coins are a lot of tokens out there, >> Too many damn tokens! (laughing) >> The losers are the only ones who borrowed money to buy bitcoin. >> (laughs) Someone shorted bitcoin. >> That's it. >> But there's now an emphasis on builders and there's always been an entrepreneurial market here, alpha entrepreneurs are coming into the space you're starting to see engineers really building great stuff, there's an emphasis on builders, not just the quick hit ponies. >> Yep. >> So your thoughts on that trend. >> It's during the down-market that you can really focus on building real businesses that solve problems, that have some sort of foresight into how they're going to make real money with a product that's built and tested, and maybe even enterprise grade. And I also think that the future of fundraising is going to be security tokens, and we don't really have a viable security exchange available yet, but giving away actual equity in your business through a security token is something very exciting for sophisticated investors to participate in this future tokenized economy. >> But you're talking about real equity, not just percentage of coin. >> Yeah, y'know, actual equity in the business, but in the form of a security token. I think that's the future of fundraising to some extent. >> Is that a dual sort of vector, two vectors there, one is the value of the token itself and the equity that you get, right? >> Correct, I mean you're basically getting equity in the company, securitized in token form, and then maybe a platform like Securitize or Polymath, the security exchanges that are coming out, will list them. And so I think during the down-markets, when prices are down, again I said before the joke but it's also the truth: the only people losing in this market are the ones who borrowed to buy bitcoin. The people who believe in the technology remain to ignore the price more or less. And if you're focused on building a company this is the time to focus on building a real business. A lot of times in an up-market you think you see a business opportunity just because of the amount of money surely available to be thrown at any project, you can ICO just about any idea and get a couple a million dollars to work on it, not as easy during a down-market so you're starting to take a step back, and ask yourself questions like how do we hit $20,000 of monthly recurring revenue? And that shouldn't be such a crazy thing to ask. When you go to Silicon Valley, unless you're two-time exited, or went to Stanford, or you were an early employee at Facebook, you're not getting your first million dollar check for 15 or 20 percent of your business, even, until you make 20, 25K monthly recurring revenue. I say this on stage at a lot of my keynotes, and I feel like some people glaze their eyes over like, "obviously I know that", the majority are running an ICO where they are nowhere close to making 20K monthly recurring and when you say what's your project they go, "well, our latest traction is that we've closed about "1.5 million in our private pre-sale." That's not traction, you don't have a product built. You raised money. >> And that's a dotcom bubble dynamic where the milestone of fundraising was the traction and that really had nothing to do with building a viable business. And the benefit of blockchain is to do things differently, but achieve the same outcome, either more efficient or faster, in a new way, whether it's starting a company or achieving success. >> Yep, but at the same time, blockchain technology is relatively immature for some products to go, at least for the Fortune 500 today, for them to take a blockchain product out of R&D to the mainstream isn't going to happen right now. Right now the Fortune 500 is investing into blockchain tech but it's in R&D, and they're quickly training their employees to understand what is a smart contract?, who is Nick Szabo?, when did he come up with this word smart contracts? I was just privy to seeing some training information for multiple Fortune 500 companies training their employees on what are smart contracts. Stuff that we read four or five years ago from Nick Szabo's essays is now hitting what I would consider the mainstream, which is mid-level talent, VP-level talent at Fortune 500 companies, who know that this is the next wave. And so when we're thinking about fundraising it's the companies who raise enough money are going to be able to survive the storm, right? In this down-market, if you raised enough money in your ICO, for this vision that you have that's going to be revolutionary, a lot of times I read an ICO's white paper and all I can think is well I hope this happens, because if it does that's crazy. But the question is, did they raise enough money to survive? So that's kind of another reason why people are raising more money than they need. Do people need $100 million to do the project? I don't know. >> It's an arm's race. >> But they need to last 10 years to make this vision come true. >> Hey, so, I want to ask you about your whirlwind tour. And I want to ask in the context of something we've talked about before. You've mentioned on the CUBE that Solidity, very complex, there's a lot of bugs and a lot of security flaws as a result in some of the code. A lot of the code. You're seeing people now try to develop tooling to open up blockchain development to Java programmers, for example, which probably exacerbates the problem. So, in that context, what are you seeing around the world, what are you seeing in terms of the awareness of that problem, and how are you helping solve it? >> So, starting with Fortune 500 companies, they have floors on floors around the world full of Java engineers. Full Stack Engineers who, of course, know Java, they know C#, and they're prepared to build in this language. And so this is why I think IBM's Hyperledger went in that direction. This is why even some people have taken the Ethereum virtual machine and tried to completely rebuild it and rewrite it into functional programming languages like Clojure and Scala. Just so it's more accessible and you can do more with the functional programming language. Very few lines of code are equivalent to hundreds of lines of code in linear languages, and in functional programming languages things are concurrent and linear and you're able to build large-scale enterprise-grade solutions with very small lines of code. So I'm personally excited, I think, about seeing different types of blockchains cater more towards Fortune 500 companies being able to take advantage, right off the bat, of rooms full of Java engineers. The turn to teaching of Solidity, it's been difficult, at least from the cybersecurity perspective we're not looking for someone who's a software engineer who can teach themselves Solidity really fast. We're looking for a cybersecurity, QA-minded, quality-assurance mindset, someone who has an OPSEC mindset to learn Solidity and then audit code with the cybersecurity mindset. And we've found that to be easier than an engineer who knows Java to learn Solidity. Education is hard, we have a global shortage of qualified engineers in this space. >> So cybersecurity is a good cross-over bridge to Solidity. Skills matters. >> If you're in cybersecurity and you're a full sec engineer you can learn just about any language like anyone else. >> The key is to start at the core. >> The key is to have a QA mindset, to have the mindset of actually doing quality assurance, on code and finding vulnerabilities. >> Not as an afterthought, but as a fundamental component of the development process. >> I could be a good engineer and make an app like Angry Birds, upload it, and even before uploading it I'll get it audited by some third party professional, and once it's uploaded I can fix the bugs as we go and release another version. Most smart contracts that have money behind them are written to be irreversible. So if they get hacked, money gets stolen. >> Yeah, that's real. >> And so the mindset is shifting because of this space. >> Alright, so on your tour, paint a picture, what did you see? >> First of all, how many cities, how long? Give us the stats. >> I just did about 80 days and I hit 10 countries. Most of it was between Europe and Asia. I'll start with saying that, right now, there's a race amongst smaller nations, like Malta, Bermuda, Belarus, Panama, the island nations, where they're racing to say that "we have clarity on regulation when it comes to "the blockchain cryptocurrency industries," and this is a big deal, I'd say, mainly for cryptocurrency exchanges, that are fleeing and navigating global regulation. Like in India, Unocoin's bank has been shutdown by the RBI. And they're going up against the RBI and the central government of India because, as an exchange, their banks have been shut down. And they're being forced to navigate waters and unique waves around the world globally. You have people like the world's biggest exchange, at least by volume today is Binance. Binance has relocated 100 people to the island of Malta. For a small island nation that's still technically a part of the European Union, they've made significant progress on bringing clarity on what is legal and what is not, eventually they're saying they want to have a crypto-bank, they want to help you go from IPO to ICO from the Maltese stock exchange. Similarly also Gibraltar, and there's a law firm out there, Hassans, which is like the best law firm in Gibraltar, and they have really led the way on helping the regulators in Gibraltar bring clarity. Both Gibraltar and Malta, what's similar between them is they've been home to online gambling companies. So a lot of online casinos have been in both of their markets. >> They understand. >> They've been very innovative, in many different ways. And so even conversations with the regulators in both Malta and Gibraltar, you can hear their maturity, they understand what a smart contract is. They understand how important it is to have a smart contract audited. They already understand that every exchange in their jurisdiction has to go through regular penetration testing. That if this exchange changes its code that the code opens it up to vulnerabilities, and is the exchange going through penetration testing? So the smaller nations are moving fast. >> But they're operationalizing it faster, and it's the opportunity for them is the upside. >> My only fear is that they're still small nations, and maybe not what they want to hear but it's the truth. Operating in larger nations like the United States, Canada, Germany, even Japan, Korea, we need to see clarity in much larger nations and I think that's something that's exciting that's going to happen possibly after we have the blueprint laid out by places like Malta and Gibraltar and Bermuda. >> And what's the Wild West look like, or Wild East if you will in Asia, a lot of activity, it's a free-for-all, but there's so much energy both on the money-making side and on the capital formation side and the entrepreneurial side. Lay that out, what's that look like? >> By far the most exciting thing in Asia was Korea, Seoul, out of all the Asian tiger countries today, in August 2018, Seoul, Korea has a lot of blockchain action going on right now. It feels like you're in the future, there's actually physical buildings that say Blockchain Academy, and Blockchain Building and Bitcoin Labs, you feel like you're in 2028! (laughs) And today it's 2018. You have a lot of syndication going on, some of it illegal, it's illegal if you give a guarantee to the investor you're going to see some sort of return, as a guarantee. It's not illegal if you're putting together accredited investors who are willing to do KYC and AML and be interested in investing a couple of hundred ETH in a project. So, I would say today a lot of ICOs are flocking to Korea to do a quick fundraising round because a lot of successful syndication is happening there. Second to Korea, I would say, is a battle between Singapore and Hong Kong. They're both very interesting, It's the one place where you can find people who speak English, but also all four of the languages of the tiger nations: Japanese, Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, all in one place in Hong Kong and Singapore. But Singapore, you still can't get a bank account as an ICO. So they're bringing clarity on regulation and saying you can come here and you can get a lawyer and you can incorporate, but an ICO still has trouble getting a bank account. Hong Kong is simply closer in proximity to China, and China has a lot of ICOs that cannot raise money from Chinese citizens. So they can raise from anybody that's not Chinese, and they don't even have a white paper, a website, or even anybody in-house that can speak English. So they're lacking English materials, English websites, and people in their company that can communicate with the rest of the world in other languages other than Mandarin or Cantonese. And that's a problem that can be solved and bridges need to be built. People are looking in China for people to build that bridge, there's a lot of action going on in Hong Kong for that reason since even though technically it's a part of China it's still not a part of China, it's a tricky gray line. >> Right, in Japan a lot going on but it's still, it's Japan, it's kind of insulated. >> The Japanese government hasn't provided clarity on regulation yet. Just like in India we're waiting for September 11th for some clarity on regulation, same way in Japan, I don't know the exact date but we don't have enough clarity on regulation. I'm seeing good projects pop up in Korea, we're even doing some audits for some projects out of Japan, but we see them at other conferences outside of Japan as well. Coming up in Singapore is consensus, I'm hoping that Singapore will turn into a better place for quality conferences, but I'm not seeing a lot of quality action out of Singapore itself. Y'know, who's based in Singapore? Lots of family funds, lots of new exchanges, lots of big crypto advisory funds have offices there, but core ICOs, there was still a higher number of them in Korea, even in Japan, even. I'm not sure about the comparison between Japan and Singapore, but there is definitely a lot more in Korea. >> What about Switzerland, do you have any visibility there? Did you visit Switzerland? >> I was Zug, I was in Crypto Valley, visited Crypto Valley labs... >> What feels best for you? >> I don't know, Mother Earth! (laughs) >> All of the above. >> The point of bitcoin is for us to start being able to treat this earth as one, and as you navigate through the crypto circuit one thing as that is becoming more visible is the power of China partnering up with the Middle East and building a One Belt, One Road initiative. I feel like One Belt, One Road ties right into the future of crypto, and it's opening up the power of markets like the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore. >> What Gabriel's doing in the Caribbean with Barbados. >> Gabriel from Bit, yeah. >> Yeah, Bit, he's bringing them all together. >> Yeah, I mean the island nations are open arms to companies, and I think they will attract a lot of American companies for sure. >> So you're seeing certainly more, in some pockets, more advanced regulatory climates, outside of the United States, and the talent pool is substantial. >> So then, when it comes to talent pools, I believe it was in global commits for the language of Python, China is just on the verge of surpassing the United States, and there's a lot of just global breakthroughs happening, there's a large number of Full Stack engineers at a very high level in countries like China, India, Ukraine. These are three countries that I think are outliers in that a Full Stack Engineer, at the highest level in a country like India or Ukraine for example, would cost a company between $2,000 to $5,000 a month, to employ full time, in a country where they likely won't take stock to work for your company. >> Fifteen years ago those countries were outsource, "hey, outsource some cheap labor," no, now they're product teams or engineers, they're really building value. >> They're building their own things, in-house. >> And the power of new markets are opening up as you said, this is huge, huge. OK, Hartej, thanks so much for coming on, I know you got to go, you got your event October 9th to 11th in Las Vegas, Blockchain Security Conference. >> The CUBE will be there. >> I look forward to having you there. >> You guys are the leader in Blockchain security, congratulations, hosho.io, check it out. Hosho.io, October 9th, mark your calendars. The CUBE, we are live here in Toronto, for the Blockchain Futurist Conference, with our good friend, CUBE alumni Hartej. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, be right back with more live coverage from the Untraceable event here in Toronto, after this short break.

(upbeat music) >> Live from Toronto, Canada. It's The Cube, covering Blockchain, futurist conference 2018. Brought to you by, The Cube. >> Hello, everyone, welcome back. The Cube's live coverage here in Toronto, Ontario, for Untraceable's Blockchain futurist conference. Two days, this is day one of two days, of Cube coverage. I'm John Furrier, your host. Our next guest is, Azam Shaghaghi, who is the director of public relations, and strategy for Shivom.io. Really interesting story, raised a bunch of money in 15 seconds in an ICO. Really interesting story, welcome to The Cube. Thanks for coming in. >> Yeah, thank you so much for having me. >> So we were just talking on camera, you studied at NASA in Northern California, where I live, and you've got this really cool venture. Before we get into it, talk about what you guys did with the ICO, then talk about what the company does. >> Sure, the project Shivom is about owning your own DNA. So, we are sequencing DNA, and storing it on the patient-friendly platform on Blockchain. Which actually give the power back to the donors, and the people that have the... I mean, and the users, basically. So basically, you can monetize, manage and... >> Control your data. >> Control your own data. >> How much did you guys raise? You did 15 seconds, give us the numbers. What happened? >> So we raised the 35 million. We reached the hard-cap, our public sell was sold out under 15 seconds. >> 15 seconds? - 15 seconds. >> And what month was that? >> It was, actually, on May, the third. >> So it was post, after, I mean, a lot of these actually just went out last year. Still, that's really a good signal, given the climate at that time. >> Exactly, and I think it's about what your actually, your intention is, in order to disrupt. We're talking about genomic information. We're talking about healthcare. At a very highly regulated industry, right? A lot of things have been untapped in that sector. So, hopefully, with the help of Blockchain, A.I., and advanced technology, we can disrupt. >> Now I...Crystal Rose, who's the CEO of Sensay Token, when I interviewed her, in Puerto Rico, she had a comment, which I love, I still use to this day. She makes kind of like A.I. chat boxes, really cool things, your brain and the Blockchain. Similar concept that you're doing, you're DNA on the Blockchain, that you can own and manage, for your own personal benefit, and/or value. >> Exactly. >> That's kind of the concept, if I get that right? >> That it is. >> Okay, who does the genoming? >> Oh, you mean the sequencing? >> Yeah, the sequencing. >> So, I mean, right now, there are companies out there that they do the, I mean, the... >> So, I've got to get it done, and then I bring it to the platform? How does that work? >> So what we, actually, we do, we have created the marketplace, for the industry players, right? For the donors, for the users, for the governments, hospitals, insurance companies, and research labs. So, basically, after you sequence your DNA, we can, you can give it us and we sequence, we manage it, and secure it, store it on the Blockchain. Obviously, we are doing a lot of partnerships with different companies and different ventures. We have an alliance, with different partners out there, that we do, we're trying to promote that, in terms of also helping to develop the kits. >> So I get this right, so a variety of touchpoints, with stakeholders, service providers would do the service, >> Exactly. >> and the users themselves...so if I get my DNA sequence... >> Why? >> If I get my DNA sequence... >> Right... >> Do I direct the provider to put it on the Blockchain, or do I take it myself and put it on the Blockchain? >> So, when you sequence, well, okay, so you just sign up in our platform, >> Got it. >> and after that you sign up in order to sequence your DNA. The kit will be sent out to you. So, it's all through Spark contract. >> So I use your marketplace and you do all the work? >> We do all the work. >> Got it, and how does the tokens work? >> So, basically... >> The better the DNA, the more tokens you get? I wish. Whoops! >> I wish it was like that. I don't think that there is a discussion of a better... >> Okay, I know I'm kidding. >> like DNA. >> I'm afraid you get my DNA sequence, I've got all of these diseases, who knows what I have. Alzheimers or, you know. >> Well that's maybe why you should figure that out, right? Why don't you just sequence your DNA? But, what was the question again? I'm sorry, I forgot. >> So I use your marketplace, and I instruct the service provider to put the DNA. How does the tokens work? >> Oh yes, so the token is OMX token. So, per transaction there is kind of like the token economics that actually has, is kind of like being managed. For example, you donate your DNA to a research lab, you get a certain amount of OMX, and each OMX is going to be worth, you know, some fraction to a varium. >> So some people might know 23 and me. >> Right. >> And do the mail-order kit, same thing. I think some other folks have, I think Ancestry.com does something similar. How do you guys differ from them? Just, decentralized, or they are centralized, obviously. >> They're very centralized, and there is also, there has been research going on, and that they even don't know what is going on, after they sequence your DNA, where that information is going, how is it being stored, so it is all, kind of like, company's property after it is... then you, kind of like, basically sign an agreement that you will give out all the authority to them, and they can do whatever they want to do with it. So basically you are on chain, and we are creating this economy of precision... so, we are promoting precision medicine, we're promoting advanced healthcare, and how we can tackle rare disease, for example, like cancer. We just kicked off, two projects, one in India, and one in Africa. So, we partner with EMQT, a not-for-profit organization, in Africa, in order to sequence 100 people that has Sickle Cell Disease. >> If I want to team the company, how big are you guys, what are you going to do with the funding, where's the product? Take us to a quick update on where you guys are at. >> Sure, we just actually, we had a shuffle in our management team after the ICO, obviously. Now we are moving towards the product development. So, we are hiring a lot of developers, we are working on product development. We are on our roadmap, and are on track. Obviously, we have initiation, re-initiated some of the partnerships, and some of the projects. We are on our marketing, get innovative, kind of like PR, strategy right now, and with a new team... >> And what's the PR strategy, you're in charge of that, is there an outreach, is it promoting the service provider, does it get the marketplace out there? >> It's everything, literally. So we are at the first thing, that our first pillar is the community. So, we want to have the community, you know, engaged in everything that we do. We keep updating them, we get them involved. That's what matters, you know, with us, and we have an organic, kind of like, community. We've already great support in Asia, in India, I mean all over the world, but we are like, very kind of like, you know, some industries favorite...market's favorite. >> Community's super important, well I love your mission. I'd love to keep in touch. It's getting loud in here, but I'd love to follow up with you guys. >> Yeah, obviously, thank you so much for your time. >> People, it's a great project, I mean, it's one of those things where this is a real example of de-centralization, where you can use your own information, and broker that for value. Be part of studies, I'd imagine. >> Exactly. >> Engage with community. >> And create an impact. >> Great, so thanks so much for coming out, appreciate it. It's The Cube coverage live, here, in Toronto, Ontario, for the Blockchain Futurist conference, John Furrier, day one, coverage. Thanks for watching. (digital music)