(upbeat electronic music) >> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation! >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, your host for Cloud Native Insight. When we launched this series, one of the things we wanted to talk about was that we're not just using cloud as a destination, but really enabling new ways of thinking, being able to use the innovations underneath the cloud, and that if you use services in the cloud, that you're not necessarily locked into a solution or can't move forward. And that's why I'm really excited to help welcome to the program, I have the co-founders of Vendia. First we have Dr. Tim Wagner, he is the co-founder and CEO of the company, as well as generally known in the industry as the father of Serverless from the AWS Lambda, and his co-founder, Shruthi Rao, she is the chief business officer at Vendia, also came from AWS where she worked on blockchain solutions. Tim, Shruthi, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having us in here, Stu. Great to join the show. >> All right, so Shruthi, actually if we could start with you because before we get into Vendia, coming out of stealth, you know, really interesting technology space, you and Tim both learned a lot from working with customers in your previous jobs, why don't we start from you. Block chain of course had a lot of learnings, a lot of things that people don't understand about what it is and what it isn't, so give us a little bit about what you've learned and how that lead towards what you and Tim and the team are doing with Vendia. >> Yeah, absolutely, Stu! One, the most important thing that we've all heard of was this great gravitational pull towards blockchain in 2018 and 2019. Well, I was one of the founders and early adopters of blockchain from Bitcoin and Ethereum space, all the way back from 2011 and onwards. And at AWS I started the Amazon Managed Blockchain and launched Quantum Ledger Database, two services in the block chain category. What I learned there was, no surprise, there was a gold rush to blockchain from many customers. We, I personally talked to over 1,092 customers when I ran Amazon Managed Blockchain for the last two years. And I found that customers were looking at solving this dispersed data problem. Most of my customers had invested in IoT and edge devices, and these devices were gathering massive amounts of data, and on the flip side they also had invested quite a bit of effort in AI and ML and analytics to crunch this data, give them intelligence. But guess what, this data existed in multiple parties, in multiple clouds, in multiple technology stacks, and they needed a mechanism to get this data from wherever they were into one place so they could the AI, ML, analytics investment, and they wanted all of this to be done in real time, and to gravitated towards blockchain. But blockchain had quite a bit of limitations, it was not scalable, it didn't work with the existing stack that you had. It forced enterprises to adopt this new technology and entirely new type of infrastructure. It didn't work cross-cloud unless you hired expensive consultants or did it yourself, and required these specialized developers. For all of these reasons, we've seen many POCs, majority of POCs just dying on the vine and not ever reaching the production potential. So, that is when I realized that what the problem to be solved was not a trust problem, the problem was dispersed data in multiple clouds and multiple stacks problem. Sometimes multiple parties, even, problem. And that's when Tim and I started talking about, about how can we bring all of the nascent qualities of Lambda and Serverless and use all of the features of blockchain and build something together? And he has an interesting story on his own, right. >> Yeah. Yeah, Shruthi, if I could, I'd like to get a little bit of that. So, first of all for our audience, if you're watching this on the minute, probably want to hit pause, you know, go search Tim, go watch a video, read his Medium post, about the past, present, and future of Serverless. But Tim, I'm excited. You and I have talked in the past, but finally getting you on theCUBE program. >> Yeah! >> You know, I've looked through my career, and my background is infrastructure, and the role of infrastructure we know is always just to support the applications and the data that run business, that's what is important! Even when you talk about cloud, it is the applications, you know, the code, and the data that are important. So, it's not that, you know, okay I've got near infinite compute capacity, it's the new things that I can do with it. That's a comment I heard in one of your sessions. You talked about one of the most fascinating things about Serverless was just the new creativity that it inspired people to do, and I loved it wasn't just unlocking developers to say, okay I have new ways to write things, but even people that weren't traditional coders, like lots of people in marketing that were like, "I can start with this and build something new." So, I guess the question I have for you is, you know we had this idea of Platform as a Service, or even when things like containers launched, it was, we were trying to get close to that atomic unit of the application, and often it was talked about, well, do I want it for portability? Is it for ease of use? So, you've been wrangling and looking at this (Tim laughing) from a lot of different ways. So, is that as a starting point, you know, what did you see the last few years with Lambda, and you know, help connect this up to where Shruthi just left off her bit of the story. >> Absolutely. You know, the great story, the great success of the cloud is this elimination of undifferentiated heavy lifting, you know, from getting rid of having to build out a data center, to all the complexity of managing hardware. And that first wave of cloud adoption was just phenomenally successful at that. But as you say, the real thing businesses wrestle with are applications, right? It's ultimately about the business solution, not the hardware and software on which it runs. So, the very first time I sat down with Andy Jassy to talk about what eventually become Lambda, you know, one of the things I said was, look, if we want to get 10x the number of people to come and, you know, and be in the cloud and be successful it has to be 10 times simpler than it is today. You know, if step one is hire an amazing team of distributed engineers to turn a server into a full tolerance, scalable, reliable business solution, now that's going to be fundamentally limiting. We have to find a way to put that in a box, give that capability, you know, to people, without having them go hire that and build that out in the first place. And so that kind of started this journey for, for compute, we're trying to solve the problem of making compute as easy to use as possible. You know, take some code, as you said, even if you're not a diehard programmer or backend engineer, maybe you're just a full-stack engineer who loves working on the front-end, but the backend isn't your focus, turn that into something that is as scalable, as robust, as secure as somebody who has spent their entire career working on that. And that was the promise of Serverless, you know, outside of the specifics of any one cloud. Now, the challenge of course when you talk to customers, you know, is that you always heard the same two considerations. One is, I love the idea of Lamdba, but it's AWS, maybe I have multiple departments or business partners, or need to kind of work on multiple clouds. The other challenge is fantastic for compute, what about data? You know, you've kind of left me with, you're giving me sort of half the solution, you've made my compute super easy to use, can you make my data equally easy to use? And so you know, obviously the part of the genesis of Vendia is going and tackling those pieces of this, giving all that promise and ease of use of Serverless, now with a model for replicated state and data, and one that can cross accounts, machines, departments, clouds, companies, as easily as it scales on a single cloud today. >> Okay, so you covered quite a bit of ground there Tim, if you could just unpack that a little bit, because you're talking about state, cutting across environments. What is it that Vendia is bringing, how does that tie into solutions like, you know, Lamdba as you mentioned, but other clouds or even potentially on premises solutions? So, what is, you know, the IP, the code, the solution that Vendia's offering? >> Happy to! So, let's start with the customer problem here. The thing that every enterprise, every company, frankly, wrestles with is in the modern world they're producing more data than ever, IMT, digital journeys, you know, mobile, edge devices. More data coming in than ever before, at the same time, more data getting consumed than ever before with deep analytics, supply chain optimization, AI, ML. So, even more consumers of ever more data. The challenge, of course, is that data isn't always inside a company's four walls. In fact, we've heard 80% or more of that data actually lives outside of a company's control. So, step one to doing something like AI, ML, isn't even just picking a product or selecting a technology, it's getting all of your data back together again, so that's the problem that we set out to solve with Vendia, and we realized that, you know, and kind of part of the genesis for the name here, you know, Vendia comes from Venn Diagram. So, part of that need to bring code and data together across companies, across tech stacks, means the ability to solve some of these long-standing challenges. And we looked at the two sort of big movements out there. Two of them, you know, we've obviously both been involved in, one of them was Serverless, which amazing ability to scale, but single account, single cloud, single company. The other one is blockchain and distributed ledgers, manages to run more across parties, across clouds, across tech stacks, but doesn't have a great mechanism for scalability, it's really a single box deployment model, and obviously there are a lot of limitations with that. So, our technology, and kind of our insight and breakthrough here was bringing those two things together by solving the problems in each of them with the best parts of the other. So, reimagine the blockchain as a cloud data implementation built entirely out of Serverless components that have all of the scale, the cost efficiencies, the high utilization, like all of the ease of deployment that something like Lambda has today, and at the same time, you know, bring state to Serverless. Give things like Lambda and the equivalent of other clouds a simple, easy, built-in model so that applications can have multicloud, multi-account state at all times, rather than turning that into a complicated DIY project. So, that was our insight here, you know and frankly where a lot of the interesting technology for us is in turning those centralized services, a centralized version of Serverless Compute or Serverless Database into a multi-account, multicloud experience. And so that's where we spent a lot of time and energy trying to build something that gives customers a great experience. >> Yeah, so I've got plenty of background in customers that, you know, have the "information silos", if you will, so we know, when the unstructured data, you know so much of it is not searchable, I can't leverage it. Shruthi, but maybe it might make sense, you know, what is, would you say some of the top things some of your early customers are saying? You know, I have this pain point, that's pointing me in your direction, what was leading them to you? And how does the solution help them solve that problem? >> Yeah, absolutely! One of our design partners, our lead design partners is this automotive company, they're a premier automotive company, they want, their end goal is to track car parts for warranty recall issues. So, they want to track every single part that goes into a particular car, so they're about 30 to 35,000 parts in each of these cars, and then all the way from manufacturing floor to when the car is sold, and when that particular part is replaced eventually, towards the end of the lifecycle of that part. So for this, they have put together a small test group of their partners, a couple of the parts manufacturers, they're second care partners, National Highway Safety Administration is part of this group, also a couple of dealers and service centers. Now, if you just look at this group of partners, you will see some of these parties have high technology, technology backgrounds, just like the auto manufacturers themselves or the part manufacturers. Low modality or low IT-competency partners such as the service centers, for them desktop PCs are literally the IT competency, and so does the service centers. Now, most of, majority of these are on multiple clouds. This particular auto customer is on AWS and manufactures on Azure, another one is on GCP. Now, they all have to share these large files between each other, making sure that there are some transparency and business rules applicable. For example, two partners who make the same parts or similar parts cannot see each other's data. Most of the participants cannot see the PII data that are not applicable, only the service center can see that. National Highway Safety Administration has read access, not write access. A lot of that needed to be done, and their alternatives before they started using Vendia was either use point-to-point APIs, which was very expensive, very cumbersome, it works for a finite small set of parties, it does not scale, as in when you add more participants into this particular network. And the second option for them was blockchain, which they did use, and used Hyperledger Fabric, they used Ethereum Private to see how this works, but the scalability, with Ethereum Private, it's about 14 to 15 transactions per second, with Hyperledger Fabric it taps out at 100, or 150 on a good day, transaction through, but it's not just useful. All of these are always-on systems, they're not Serverless, so just provisioning capacity, our customers said it took them two to three weeks per participant. So, it's just not a scalable solution. With Vendia, what we delivered to them was this virtual data lake, where the sources of this data are on multiple clouds, are on multiple accounts owned by multiple parties, but all of that data is shared on a virtual data lake with all of the permissions, with all of the logging, with all of the security, PII, and compliance. Now, this particular auto manufacturer and the National Highway Safety Administration can run their ML algorithms to gain intelligence off of it, and start to understand patterns, so when certain parts go bad, or what's the propensity of a certain manufacturing unit producing faulty parts, and so on, and so forth. This really shows you this concept of unstructured data being shared between parties that are not, you know, connected with each other, when there are data silos. But I'd love to follow this up with another example of, you know, the democratization, democratization is very important to Vendia. When Tim launched Lambda and founded the AWS Serverless movement as a whole, and at AWS, one thing, very important thing happened, it lowered the barrier to entry for a new wave of businesses that could just experiment, try out new things, if it failed, they scrap it, if it worked, they could scale it out. And that was possible because of the entry point, because of the paper used, and the architecture itself, and we are, our vision and mission for Vendia is that Vendia fuels the next generation of multi-party connected distributed applications. My second design partner is actually a non-profit that, in the animal welfare industry. Their mission is to maintain a no-kill for dogs and cats in the United States. And the number one reason for over populations of dogs and cats in the shelters is dogs lost, dogs and cats lost during natural disasters, like the hurricane season. And when that happens, and when, let's say your dogs get lost, and you want to find a dog, the ID or the chip-reading is not reliable, they want to search this through pictures. But we also know that if you look at a picture of a dog, four people can come up with four different breed names, and this particular non-profit has 2,500 plus partners across the U.S., and they're all low to no IT modalities, some of them have higher IT competency, and a huge turnover because of volunteer employees. So, what we did for them was came up with a mechanism where they could connect with all 2,500 of these participants very easily in a very cost-effective way and get all of the pictures of all of the dogs in all these repositories into one data lake so they can run some kind of a dog facial recognition algorithm on it and identify where my lost dog is in minutes as opposed to days it used to take before. So, you see a very large customer with very sophisticated IT competency use this, also a non-profit being able to use this. And they were both able to get to this outcome in days, not months or years, as, blockchain, but just under a few days, so we're very excited about that. >> Thank you so much for the examples. All right, Tim, before we get to the end, I wonder if you could take us under the hood a little bit here. My understanding, the solution that you talk about, it's universal apps, or what you call "unis" -- >> Tim: Unis? (laughs) >> I believe, so if I saw that right, give me a little bit of compare and contrast, if you will. Obviously there's been a lot of interest in what Kubernetes has been doing. We've been watching closely, you know there's connections between what Kubernetes is doing and Serverless with the Knative project. When I saw the first video talking about Vendia, you said, "We're serverless, and we're containerless underneath." So, help us understand, because at, you know, a super high level, some of the multicloud and making things very flexible sound very similar. So you know, how is Vendia different, and why do you feel your architecture helps solve this really challenging problem? >> Sure, sure, awesome! You know, look, one of the tenets that we had here was that things have to be as easy as possible for customers, and if you think about the way somebody walks up today to an existing database system, right? They say, "Look, I've got a schema, I know the shape of my data." And a few minutes later I can get a production database, now it's single user, single cloud, single consumer there, but it's a very fast, simple process that doesn't require having code, hiring a team, et cetera, and we wanted Vendia to work the same way. Somebody can walk up with a JSON schema, hand it to us, five minutes later they have a database, only now it's a multiparty database that's decentralized, so runs across multiple platforms, multiple clouds, you know, multiple technology stacks instead of being single user. So, that's kind of goal one, is like make that as easy to use as possible. The other key tenet though is we don't want to be the least common denominator of the cloud. One of the challenges with saying everyone's going to deploy their own servers, they're going to run all their own software, they're going to build, you know, they're all going to co-deploy a Kubernetes cluster, one of the challenges with that is that, as Shruthi was saying, first, anyone for whom that's a challenge, if you don't have a whole IT department wrapped around you that's a difficult proposition to get started on no matter how amazing that technology might be. The other challenge with it though is that it locks you out, sort of the universe of a lock-in process, right, is the lock-out process. It locks you out of some of the best and brightest things the public cloud providers have come up with, and we wanted to empower customers, you know, to pick the best degree. Maybe they want to go use IBM Watson, maybe they want to use a database on Google, and at the same time they want to ingest IoT on AWS, and they wanted all to work together, and want all of that to be seamless, not something where they have to recreate an experience over, and over, and over again on three different clouds. So, that was our goal here in producing this. What we designed as an architecture was decentralized data storage at the core of it. So, think about all the precepts you hear with blockchain, they're all there, they all just look different. So, we use a no SQL database to store data so that we can scale that easily. We still have a consensus algorithm, only now it's a high speed serverless and cloud function based mechanism. You know, instead of smart contracts, you write things in a cloud function like Lambda instead, so no more learning Solidity, now you can use any language you want. So, we changed how we think about that architecture, but many of those ideas about people, really excited about blockchain and its capabilities and the vision for the future are still alive and well, they've just been implemented in a way that's far more practical and effective for the enterprise. >> All right, so what environments can I use today for your solution, Shruthi talked about customers spanning across some of the cloud, so what's available kind of today, what's on the roadmap in the future? Will this include beyond, you know, maybe the top five or six hyper scalers? Can I do, does it just require Serverless underneath? So, will things that are in a customer's own data center eventually support that. >> Absolutely. So, what we're doing right now is having people sign up for our preview release, so in the next few weeks, we're going to start turning that on for early access to developers. That'll be, the early access program, will be multi-account, focused on AWS, and then end of summer, well be doing our GA release, which will be multicloud, so we'll actually be able to operate across multiple clouds, multiple cloud services, on different platforms. But even from day one, we'll have API support in there. So, if you got a service, could even be running on a mainframe, could be on-prem, if it's API based you can still interact with the data, and still get the benefits of the system. So, developers, please start signing up, you can go find more information on vendia.net, and we're really looking forward to getting some of that early feedback and hear more from the people that we're the most excited to have start building these projects. >> Excellent, what a great call to action to get the developers and users in there. Shruthi, if you could just give us the last bit, you know, the thing that's been fascinating, Tim, when I look at the Serverless movement, you know, I've talked to some amazing companies that were two or three people (Tim laughing) and out of their basement, and they created a business, and they're like, "Oh my gosh, I got VC funding, and it's usually sub $10,000,000. So, I look at your team, I'd heard, Tim, you're the primary coder on the team. (Tim laughing) And when it comes to the seed funding it's, you know, compared to many startups, it's a small number. So, Shruthi, give us a little bit if you could the speeds and feeds of the company, your funding, and any places that you're hiring. Yeah, we are definitely hiring, lets me start from there! (Tim laughing) We're hiring for developers, and we are also hiring for solution architects, so please go to vendia.net, we have all the roles listed there, we would love to hear from you! And the second one, funding, yes. Tim is our main developer and solutions architect here, and look, the Serverless movement really helped quite a few companies, including us, to build this, bring this to market in record speeds, and we're very thankful that Tim and AWS started taking the stands, you know back in 2014, 2013, to bring this to market and democratize this. I think when we brought this new concept to our investors, they saw what this could be. It's not an easy concept to understand in the first wave, but when you understand the problem space, you see that the opportunity is pretty endless. And I'll say this for our investors, on behalf of our investors, that they saw a real founder market-fit between us. We're literally the two people who have launched and ran businesses for both Serverless and blockchain at scale, so that's what they thought was very attractive to them, and then look, it's Tim and I, and we're looking to hire 8 to 10 folks, and I think we have gotten to a space where we're making a meaningful difference to the world, and we would love for more people to join us, join this movement and democratize this big dispersed data problem and solve for this. And help us create more meanings to the data that our customers and companies worldwide are creating. We're very excited, and we're very thankful for all of our investors to be deeply committed to us and having conviction on us. >> Well, Shruthi and Tim, first of all, congratulations -- >> Thank you, thank you. >> Absolutely looking forward to, you know, watching the progress going forward. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you, Stu, thank you. >> Thanks, Stu! >> All right, and definitely tune in to our regular conversations on Cloud Native Insights. I'm your host Stu Miniman, and looking forward to hearing more about your Cloud Native Insights! (upbeat electronic music)

(futuristic electronic music) >> Live from Las Vegas, its theCUBE covering AWS re:Invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. >> Hey welcome back everyone. Live here in Las Vegas with AWS, Amazon Web Services, re:Invent 2018's CUBE coverage. Two sets, wall-to-wall coverage here on the ground floor. I'm here with Dave Vellante. Dave, six years we've been coming to re:Invent. Every year except for the first year. What a progression. We got great news. Always raising the bar, as they say at Amazon. This year, big announcements. One of them is blockchain. Really kind of laying out early formation of how they're going to roll out, thinking about blockchain. We're here to talk about here, with Rahul Pathak, who's the GM of analytics, and data lakes, and blockchain. Managing that. And Shawn Bice who's the vice president of non-relational databases. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, it's great to be here. >> I wish my voice was a little bit stronger. I love this segment. You know, we've been doing blockchain. We've been following one of the big events in the industry. If you separate out the whole token ICO scam situation, token economics is actually a great business model opportunity. Blockchain is an infrastructure, a decentralized infrastructure, that's great. But it's early. Day one really for you guys in a literal sense. How are you guys doing blockchain? Take a minute to explain the announcement because there are use cases, low-hanging use cases, that look a lot like IoT and supply chain that people are interested in. So take a minute to explain the announcements and what it means. >> Absolutely, so when we began looking at blockchain and blockchain use cases, we really realized there are two things that customers are trying to do. One case is really keep an immutable record of transactions and in a scenario where centralized trust is okay. And for that we have Amazon QLDB, which is an immutable cryptographically verifiable ledger. And then in scenarios where customers really wanted the decentralized trust and the smart contracts, that's where blockchain frameworks like Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum play a role. But they're just super complicated to use and that's why we built Managed Blockchain, to make it easy to stand up, scale, and monitor these networks, so customers can focus on building applications. And in terms of use cases on the decentralized side, it's really quite diverse. I mean, we've got a customer, Guardian Life Insurance, so they're looking at Managed Blockchain 'cause they have this distributed network of partners, providers, patients, and customers, and they want to provide decentralized verifiable records of what's taking place. And it's just a broad set of use cases. >> And then we saw in the video this morning, I think it was Indonesian farmers, right? Wasn't that before the keynote? Did you see that? It was good. >> I missed that one. >> Yeah, so they don't have bank accounts. >> Oh, got it. >> And they got a reward system, so they're using the blockchain to reward farmers to participate. >> So a lot of people ask the question is, why do I need blockchain? Why don't you just put in database? So there are unique, which is true by the way, 'cause latency's an issue. (chuckles) Certainly, you might want to avoid blockchain in the short term, until that gets fixed. Assume that every one will get fixed over time, but what are some of the use cases where blockchain actually is relevant? Can you be specific because that's really people starting to make their selection criteria on. Look, I still use a database. I'm going to have all kinds of token and models around, but in a database. Where is the blockchain specifically resonating right now? >> I'll take a shot at this or we can do it together, but when you think of QLDB, it's not that customers are asking us for a ledger database. What they were really saying is, hey, we'd like to have this complete immutable, cryptographically verifiable trail of data. And it wasn't necessarily a blockchain conversation, wasn't necessarily a database conversation, it was like, I really would like to have this complete cyrptographic verifiable trail of data. And it turns out, as you sort of look at the use cases, in particular, the centralized trust scenario, QLDB does exactly that. It's not about decentralized trust. It's really about simply being able to have a database that when you write to that database, you write a transaction to the database, you can't change it. You know, a typical database people are like, well, hey, wait a second, what does immutable really mean? And once you get people to understand that once that transaction is written to a journal, it cannot be changed at all and attached, then all of a sudden there's that breakthrough moment of it being immutable and having that cryptographic trail. >> And the advantage relative to a distributive blockchain is performance, scale, and all the challenges that people always say. >> Yeah, exactly. Like with QLDB, you can find it's going to be two to three times faster cause you're not doing that distributing consensus. >> How about data lakes? Let's talk about data lakes. What problem were you guys trying to solve with the data lakes? There's a lot of them, but. (chuckles) >> That's a great question. So, essentially it's been hard for customers to set up data lakes 'cause you have to figure out where to get data from, you have to land it in S3, you've got to secure it, you've then got to secure every analytic service that you've got, you might have to clean your data. So with lake formation, what we're trying to do is make it super easy to set up data lakes. So we have blueprints for common databases and data sources. We bring that data into an S3 data lake and we've created a central catalog for that data where customers can define granular access policies with the table, and the column, and the row level. We've also got ML-based data cleansing and data deduplication. And so now customers can just use lake formation, set up data lakes, curate their data, protect it in a single place, and have those policies that enforce across all of the analytic services that they might use. >> So does it help solve the data swamp problem, get more value out of the data lake? And if so, how? >> Absolutely, so the way it does that is by automatically cataloging all datas that comes in. So we can recognize what the data is and then we allow customers to add business metadata to that so they can tag this as customer data, or PII data, or this is my table of sales history. And that then becomes searchable. So we automatically generate a catalog as data comes in and that addresses the, what do I have in my data lake problem. >> Okay, so-- >> Go ahead. >> So, Rahul, you're the general manager. Shawn, what's your job, what do you do? >> So our team builds all the non-relational databases at Amazon. So DynamoDB, Neptune, ElastiCache, Timestream, which you'll hear about today, QLDB, et cetera. So all those things-- >> Beanstalk too, Elastic Beanstalk? >> No we do not build Beanstalk. >> Okay, we're a customer of DynamoDB, by the way. >> Great! >> We're happy customers. >> That's great! >> And we use ElastiCache, right? >> Yup, the elastic >> There you go! >> surge still has it. >> So-- >> Haven't used Neptune yet. >> What's the biggest problem stigmas that you guys are trying to raise the bar on? What's the key focus as you get this new worlds and use cases coming together? These are new use cases. How are you guys evaluating it? How are you guys raising the bar? >> You know, that's a really good question you ask. What I've found in my experience is developers that have been building apps for a long time, most people are familiar with relational databases. For years we've been building apps in that context, but when you kind of look at how people are building apps today, it's very different than how they did in the past. Today developer do what they do best. They take an application, a big application, break it down into smaller parts, and they pick the right tool for the right job. >> I think the game developer mark is going to be a canary in the coal mine for developers, and it's a good spot for data formation in these kind of unstructured, non-relational scenarios. Okay, now all this engagement data, could be first person shooter, whatever it is, just throw it, I need to throw it somewhere, and I'll get to it and let it be ready to be worked on by analytics. >> Well, yeah, if you think about that gamer scenario, think about if you and I are building a game, who knows if there's going to be one user, ten players, or 10 million, or 100 million. And if we had 100 million, it's all about the performance being steady. At 100 million or ten. >> You need a fleet of servers. (John laughing) >> And a fleet of servers! >> Have you guys played Fortnite? Or do you have kids that play? >> I look over my kid's shoulder. I might play it. >> I've played, but-- >> They run all their analytics on us. They've got about 14 petabytes in S3 using S3 as their data lake, with EMR and Athena for analytics. >> We got a season-- >> I mean, think about that F1 example on keynotes today. Great example of insights. We apply that kind of concept to Fortnite, by the way, Fortnite has theCUBE in there. It's always a popular term. We noticed that, the hastag, #wherestheCUBEtoday. (Rahul chuckling) I couldn't resist. But the analytics you could get out of all that data, every interaction, all that gesture data. I mean, what are some of the things they're doing? Can you share how they're using the new tech to scale up and get these insights? >> Yeah, absolutely. So they're doing a bunch of things. I mean, one is just the health of the systems when you've got hundreds of millions of players. You need to know if you're up and it's working. The second is around engagement. What games, what collection of people work well together. And then it's what incentives they create in the game, what power ups people buy that lead to continued engagement, 'cause that defines success over the long term. What gets people coming back? And then they have an offline analytics process where they're looking at reporting, and history, and telemetry, so it's very comprehensive. So you're exactly right about gaming and analytics being a huge consumer of databases. >> Now, Shawn, didn't you guys have hard news today on DynamoDB, or? >> Yeah today we announce DynamoDB On-Demand, so customers that basically have workloads that could spike up and then all of a sudden drop off, a lot of these customers basically don't even want to think about capacity planning. They don't want to guess. They just want to basically pay only for what they're using. So we announced DynamoDB On-Demand. The developer experience is simple. You create a table and you putyour read/write capacity in the on-demand mode, and you literally only pay for the request that your workload puts through system. >> It's a great service actually. Again, making life easier for customers. Lower the bill, manage capacity, make things go better, faster, enables value. >> It's all about improving the customer experience. >> Alright, guys, I really appreciate you coming in. I'm really interested in following what you guys do in the future. I'm sure a lot of people watching will be as well, as analytics and AI become a real part of, as you guys move the stack and create that API model for, what you did for infrastructure, for apps. A total game changer, we believe. We're interested in following you guys, I'm sure others are. Where are you going to be this year? What's your focus? Where can people find out more besides going to Amazon site? Is there certain events you're going to be at? How do people get more information and what's the plans? >> There's actually some sessions on lake formation, blockchain that we're doing here. We'll have a continuous stream of summits, so as the AWS Summit calendar for 2019 gets published that's a great place to go for more information. And then just engage with us either on social media or through the web and we'll be happy to follow up. >> Alright, well, we'll do a good job on amplifying. A lot of people are interested, certainly blockchain, super hot. But people want better, stronger, more stable, but they want the decentralized immutable database model. >> Cryptographically verifiable! >> And see as everyone knows. >> Scalable! >> Anyone who wants to keep those, they talk about CUBE coins but I haven't said CUBE coin once on this episode. Wait for those tokens to be released soon. More coverage after this short break, stay with us. I'm John Furrier, and Dave Vellante, we'll be right back. (futuristic buzzing) (futuristic electronic music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Boomi World 2018, brought to you by Dell Boomi. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin Live at Boomi World 2018 at The Encore in Las Vegas. Been here all day, had a lot of great chats. We're excited to welcome to theCUBE for the first time a couple of gents from Hathority Implementation Partner of Dell Boomi, Philip Bernick, PhD, Principal, and Human-Centered Technologist, aka Technology Wonk. >> I go by both. >> It does say on your card, I think that's fantastic. And Vishwan Annam, MBA and principal technology architect at Hathority. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. >> Yes, thank you. >> Thank you for having us Lisa. >> So Hathority has been an implementation partner with Dell Boomi for several years now, congratulations yesterday on winning the Innovation Partner of the Year. Philip, you had an opportunity to talk yesterday at the partner summit with CTO Michael Morton, talk to us a little bit about that and about this Innovation Partner of the Year award, that's a big title. >> It is, and we're really excited to be able to do really interesting things with Boomi. It's more than just an integration platform, it really let's us do a lot of things with devices. IOT is coming to the mainstream because now we have infrastructure that will support it. It's a lot of data, it needs a big, fat pipe. We need gigabit networks in order to move it all around, to get it to the people who need to make decisions or to get it to systems who are making decisions for us, the Dell Boomi atom let's us do that and we've got it running on little tiny devices like Raspberry Pies and we can put it on other Edge devices and routers so we've done some micro services for cities that are interested in improving their smartness. >> Excellent. >> So yeah, we're excited. >> Vishwam, tell us about, for those of our viewers who haven't heard of Hathority, tell us a little bit about what you guys do, who you are, where you're located. >> Sure, so we're a data integration company so we work with Dell Boomi in automating a lot of the data integration practices, so a lot of our customers, they're in all across the world and they're serving their different (mumbles). Just as there's airlines and the healthcare and smart cities, and some are like, you know, the gaming industry. So what we are doing is we are automating all of their work flows and connecting all of their systems in one place so that's where we are liberating. We're based in the greater Phoenix area so, and our employees are, some are here in the U.S., some are India, some are in U.K., so based on what the customers needs are like in Dell Boomi our, our consultants would work there so we are 35 in strength so far, our company. >> So about three or four years you've been in business, Dell Boomi, a number of things that came out this morning, I was up to hear numbers and statistics during the general session and Chris McNabb, CEO, talked about their adding five new customers every single day, they also were, I was reading this over the weekend, fifth year in a row strong leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for iPads, but they've come out today and said we are redefining the I in iPads. This is more than integration, it's more than integrating applications, you got to integrate data, news sources, existing sources, you got to integrate people and processings and trading networks with this new reimagination of the I to the intelligence. Philip, I'm curious, what does that signify to you about your partnership with Dell Boomi and what opportunities are you excited that this is going to open up for you? >> Well it says to me that they're excited about the same kinds of things that we're excited about so one of the things that we demonstrated, we have customers who are interested in lots of different technologies, yesterday they talked about three years ago IOT was the eyeroll, right, don't get a headache. This year it's Blockchain. But one of the demos we brought to Boomi World is a demo where we actually use Dell Boomi to integrate with Hyperledger, a Blockchain application, and on top of that we used Flow to produce the front end and so we can integrate across a variety of platforms and now we integrated into the Blockchain and our customers want these kinds of things. The Blockchain is interesting because it's immutable, it's auditable, and it's validated by all of the participants in a particular set of nodes in the Blockchain so, you know, it's an exciting technology. It's exciting because, not because of the tokenization, things like Bitcoin, but because it's a database that you can share, a ledger that we can share. >> Because one of the challenges that a lot of our customers run into is managing the data integrity when somebody sends the data, how reliable it is and whether there, is there any place in the middle that somebody's monitoring the data so those are the challenges that Blockchain would solve in guaranteeing the data delivery and the quality of it so those are kind of I that he was mentioning, you know, as part of integration, innovation and more of a, you know, new parts and transformation. >> We're really transforming. >> The data transformation in the digital world these days. >> So Blockchain, I often hear companies that might be integration companies that talk a lot about Blockchain and I kind of sit back and go I don't understand what your story is there. Talk to us about, cause it's a, you know, crypto Blockchain, huge buzzwords, talk to us exactly about what you guys do and what Dell Boomi is doing, I think they announced support for hyperledger fabric as well as Ethereum but-- >> Right. >> Help unpack that myth around Blockchain and what integrations role is in it. >> A lot of the confusion around Blockchain comes from things like Bitcoin so the interesting thing around Bitcoin is it was the first Blockchain and it's built around this idea of a token, the Bitcoin, right? And so what this ledger is keeping track of are these Bitcoin, but you can keep track of any sort of data on a Blockchain. You can contribute data of any sort to a, not the Bitcoin Blockchain, but Ethereum, for example, we can include software, we can include other sorts of data, you can include a healthcare record that is your healthcare record that you share only with individuals with whom you share part of your private key, right, but you own it and it's yours and it's always yours and you control it. But it's validated by all of the people who are participating in producing that Blockchain so it's decentralized but it's imutable and it's auditable so it guarantees integrity because unless all of the participants agree that a transaction took place, it didn't. So we ensure data integrity through the Blockchain. That's the interesting thing about it, for us. >> That's a major part of integration companies, because a lot of the technologies that we hear, Solaris is one of the messaging queuing systems that they presentate, so they're guaranteeing the delivery at the same time relabel messaging transmissions, streaming the data, and it's faster, reliable, and managing the full data usage. >> Here's a great use case, today is voting day. Many polling places no longer have paper ballots, so you cast your vote but you have no way to actually see the vote that you cast. If it were on a Blockchain, you could inspect your vote, but no body else could know how you voted. You could insure the fact your vote was entered into the Blockchain and count it in the way that you wanted it to be. >> That's a great example and relatable, so thanks for sharing that. So guys, Dell Boomi has, I think they said this morning, Chris McNabb, over 350 partners, you guys are one of them. They have a broad ecosystem. Embedded partners, implementation, GSIs. Talk to us about your partnership and how, as Boomi says, we want to be the transformation partner, and it is all about transformation, right? Especially in an enterprise that wasn't born in the cloud. It can't survive without, as the customer expectation drives, I want to be able to buy something from your physical store, maybe a partner store, online, Amazon, Zappos, whatnot and I expect as a customer to have a seamless experience. That's hard to do for a company that's maybe 20, 30 years old to transform. I'm thinking of omni-channel retailers as the example. How is your integration, pun intended, will Dell Boomi really helping customers transform their digital, IT, security, workforce, what goes through with that opportunity to transform? >> You know, the relationship between Dell Boomi and it's partners is really synergistic. I mean they provide a lot of support. There's really excellent training, there's excellent communication. There's marketing support, we share on projects in a variety of ways, we do jump starts. So we help teach people how to use Boomi in addition to helping Boomi folks teaching us how to use the new tools. There's a great community for providing feedback, for getting resources if there's something that we need to do that we don't know how to do. There's a huge community that shares, we all share connectors, right? We're building integration and a connector doesn't exist and we create a new connector, not the configuration of the connector itself, we share it. So that collaborative approach to doing business is really important to us and it reflects our companies ethos as we hope is also reflects Dell Boomi's ethos. >> We've been working in Boomi since 2012, so over the years like even though we were certified partners since 2015, we have been contributing to various channels, like the support or, like, the community channel, and contributing to the release planning as well, because we are the first line of defense from the customers, we know what the customers are expecting. So say they got Salesforce to implement it. So we as a system integrator, we come in and see what are the data points for the Salesforce. And say like user data, they want to build their contacts in there or any activities or sales data. So there are multiple systems that are feeding into Salesforce in this case. So we are the ones who are contributing to Dell Boomi. Okay, these are the features that we could consider. So because Salesforce a-walled in, just like Boomi, they launched a different watch list as well So as in Boomi, there is a different connector for Salesforce and Service Cloud and multiple layers in that so those are the unique cases that we are contributing to Dell, and obviously there, I mean, they take the feedback so from the partners like us where they see it as they work towards delivering with this. So one use case that we are working with some of out customers who have innovated, we have been asking Dell to build it, like, you know, and they were able to deliver it. There are, like, they want some reporting of it, so you transmit the data to one system to other, and they wanted to see okay how the data system was the source and the system was the destination and how this data was transmitted. So Boomi gave the real time visibility into those. So those are some kind of partnering opportunities like all the way from customer to the product so we are happy to be in the middle and contributing our part of it. >> That's one of the things that I've heard a lot today is that Boomi is listening, one of the great examples of that on stage this morning was Chris McNabb talking about the Dell Boomi employee onboarding solution. They actually did an internal survey earlier this year and found, whoa, this is really not an optimal process, and in implementing an onboarding solution to make that more streamline, to obviously, you know, you hire someone who's brilliant, you want to be able to get them up and running and innovating as fast as possible. I like they shared the feedback they got from their own employees and created a solution that they're now being able to deliver to the market. >> And there was another piece to that that was really interesting which is that they utilized their partner network in order to build solution, right? They didn't build all of it in house. >> You're right, they did talk about that. >> They reach out and partners, they work with partners in a variety of ways and we really, really appreciate that. >> Yeah, that listening, that synergy that you've both talked about was really apparent. So when we look at certain business initiatives, like onboarding or customer 360 or e-commerce, any favorite joint customer example that you've helped to integrate that has approached one of those daunting business initiatives, and worked with Hathority, and you're laughing, to really transform. >> They're all like that. >> Really interesting, yeah. Do you want to talk about it here? >> Give me one of your favorite examples. >> Share, well, share. >> Okay, so with some of our customers, and especially with some of our enterprise scale, so there are a lot of systems that are at stake for them because, you know, they want to have the digital transformation journey so the major one Dell Boomi contributes to is connecting all of the system, giving them their visibility so with, not only the point to point integrations, they also pull the real time integrations capability. So we're like, with this case, where the customer go into retail store and say they want to do something at the point of sale transaction, they want to purchase something, so there and you have the credit card transaction. I mean, those need to encrypt, I mean, we cannot wait for 10 minutes to get the data so that's where, you know, like Dell Boomi is scalable and it's robust in the sense that their response time is pretty quick. So it's on a real time basis. So a lot of these cases like, you know, with the Boomi that we are able to deliver it. You know, on the the integration side, APA side, and now with the EMB hedge, which is a master data hub, a new product from them within the last two years. We have been working with our customers implementing a master data hub as well as ManyWho, which is a Dell Boomi Flow which is amazing. Some of our customers, you know, with the APAs, like can you see the data? But with the Flow, you can visualize, these are the exact UI that you are seeing. How your data is getting in on the back end and then you can throw it out so, because these enterprise customers, especially on the business side if they're working with something, so they want to try it out, but you know, they don't want to learn, you know, programming to do that so that's when, like, Flow will, is already helping, we are already seeing the value of it with our customers. >> We've heard a little bit about that today as well, Flow and terms of the automation, but also how that will enable customers, there was a cute little video on their website that I saw recently which showed an example of Flow. Somebody bangs their car into a tree, gets out, and takes a photograph of the incident, uploads it to their insurance carrier app who then actually initiates the entire claim into process, and that's was to me a clear example of you have to go where the data is. Michael Dell says frequently there's a big boom at the edge, but if I'm in that scenario as a customer, I want to know, I don't care what's on the back end, I want to be able to get this initiated quickly and I thought that was a nice, kind of, example of how they're able to abstract that so that the customer experience can be superior than the competition. >> Absolutely, so that's where Boomi has something called run time engine, which is scalable, like you could install, like, you know, a smaller device like Raspberry Pie which is like, you know, just a mini computer. Or you you could install on the big switchboard itself, so this is a scalable so earlier, as Michael Dell was mentioning, the edge of computing. So you could install on a Gateway, which sits on the-- >> On a tree >> On a tree. (laughs) So you don't have to send all the data to cloud for processing so it's an amazing leap into the next distribution computing because, as you mentioned, the fast, the fastness of response time, you know. We don't have to wait for the cloud to respond so all the combinations and real time navigation's are happening within the Edge network itself so, we are all on the same, we have implemented the same solution so, which was one of the reason why we're the winner of Innovation Partner of the Year award. >> Well congratulations again for that gentlemen. Thank you so much for stopping by. >> Thank you. >> And sharing with our viewers a little bit about Hathority and what you guys are, how you really symbiotically innovating with Dell Boomi. Philip, Vishwam, thanks so much for your time today. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you, thank you for having us. >> My pleasure, we want to thank you for watching theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin live from Boomi World 2018 in Las Vegas. Stick around, I'll be back with John Frayer and our next guest after a short break. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering Boomi World 2018. Brought to you by Dell Boomi. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, we are continuing our coverage of Boomi World 2018. I'm Lisa Martin in Las Vegas with John Furrier and we're welcoming to theCUBE, Pragnya Paramita, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Dell Boomi. Pragnya, welcome. >> Hi, nice to meet you guys. >> So second annual Dell Boomi World, we had Mandy Dhaliwal, your CMO, on shortly, ago who said doubled from last year. Some of the really cool stats that caught my ears and eyes this morning during the general session are 7500 plus customers globally that Dell Boomi has now. You're adding five new customers everyday. There are about close to 70 different customers speaking at this event. The customers are coming together to share how Dell Boomi is helping them on this nebulous, daunting transformation journey. Talk to us about some of the news coming out in the last couple of days, and as a product marketing manager, what are some of the things that excite you? >> I think, after the last few weeks, what we've been able to put out in the market with our partnership with the Blockchain consortium has been really exciting. To be working for a company that's always been at the cutting edge and looking to do things at the cutting edge, just as an employee, that's like a really cool thing to be a part of. But what I'm really excited about is tomorrow's Keynote. And I know we've probably been teasing everybody through the day about tomorrow's Keynote but I'm really excited to unveil what we are going to be showing you guys tomorrow. >> So one of the things that's exciting about you guys is that the product market fit is clear with customer traction. As you guys look at, say, Blockchain smart contracts, this is about business, so you're messaging around, connecting businesses with developer integration as a starting point with low code is a productivity question, it's a foundational question. As you have this platform, what's some of the product positionings that you guys are looking to expand on? Obviously we heard Michael Dell today say, data tsunami, scaling AI. These are questions that people want to have answers. Is that how you guys see the positioning when you go to market? >> So, at first positioning I think the true value that we do provide our customers is fast time to market, so I think speed and the ability to do things efficiently and being the first to market is what our customers really value and we want to be able to power that so that's goal to our positioning in the market. The other one is flexibility. I think with each vendor and consolidation happening around in the market, people are marking their turfs and territory and in this day and event, at Boomi, we really want to be an open ecosystem. You bring your data, you bring your application, you bring your cloud. You could have a hybrid environment as you operate your business, Boomi will connect to everything, and I think that is a cool part of our messaging that we want to make sure customers understand, we want to make sure the market understand that we'll be true to that. >> As you got the cool technology with the Cloud-Native, you guys are born in the cloud, still operating at cloud scale, as you sit at the product marketing meetings and think about the customers, you're solving a lot of problems, there's a lot of check boxes on the solving customer problems but you also want a position for the future. So I got to ask you, when you look at your customer base holistically, what's the core problem that you guys solve for your customers? >> I think unlocking the value of the data, customer data. So it resides in siloed application, it resides in parts of business that some... So if you're not the American business, your ability to interact with your Australian counterparts is not only restricted by time zones but it's also restricted by laws and data protection and all of those things which governments are waking up to. And to be able to do that securely, to be able to do that at a scale, is something that we want to be able to deliver to our customers. And I think our ability to be a Cloud-Native platform allows us that flexibility to do it in a way that customers feel comfortable and again, are able to get some value back from their data. >> So about six months ago, the Gartner Magic Quadrant for IPAAS came out and once again I think, John, we've heard today for the fifth year in a row Dell Boomi is a strong leader. I'm curious, six months later, now, today, you guys said we are re-imagining the I in iPaaS. From a market that's well established, highly competitive, that now customers, it's not just about integrating applications, it's integrating data from new sources, from existing sources, to be able to identify new revenue streams, new products, new services. What is it about this re-imagining the I to be intelligence, that, in your opinion, is going to further really kind of elevate Dell Boomi's competitive differentiation. >> So, the true differentiation is that in the market, we were the first who were a Native-Cloud application. So the value of that single instance multi-tenant cloud application is what we are really leveraging as part of our intelligence in the platform. So many of our competitors and other vendors in the market have probably caught on to this whole cloud thing in the last couple of years. But at the end of the day, we have 10 years of a lead with them, that would be hard for them to match. And again, it is value from what customers have been doing on our platform, so our ability to look at that enormous amount of data anonymously and then provide value back to them has been really critical to our success in how our customers have found value and I guess with the ability for us to leverage AI and machine learning capabilities within the platform, we want to be able to make it much more easier for our customers. >> So in terms of business initiatives, some of the key ones that Dell Boomi targets are e-commerce, order to cash, Customer 360, as well as onboarding. Talk to us, I really like that Chris McNabb, in the general session this morning kind of opened the kimono and said, "Hey, we found, "through the voice of our own employees, "we weren't so great in this particular area." Talk to us about the Dell Boomi employee onboarding solution and how it was really born based on your own internal needs for improvement. >> So I joined a year ago, I was employee number 300 something, and this year we are at employee number 700 plus, maybe going onto 800 at the last we heard, so you can imagine the scale that the company is growing at and for us and I guess what Chris articulated this morning, employee onboarding was becoming a choke point, not only in making sure employees are productive faster, but are also enjoying this new company that they've decided to, you know, become a part of. We, at Boomi, as Boomers ourselves, do really value our culture a lot, but that didn't quite reflect in the employee onboarding experience that we were providing, and I think that was a big stimulus, Chris shared the numbers of our NPS scores that he saw, for him to say that hey, we are running at a really fast pace but this is critical issue. >> Pretty big negative number a year ago or six months ago on that end. >> And as a CEO, he decided this is a priority, but then as we went through this exercise, what we were able to find out that it's not only a challenge that we are facing, but our customers, both large and small, continue facing that issue. So the approach that we took was while we were solving our own employee onboarding challenge, we were able to productize that entire solution and create an accelerator. And the value of that accelerator, it's a common problem, we know it is a problem that happens at scale, and at a certain scale it becomes really detrimental to your business. But then your business is really unique so we cannot give you a one-size-fit-all solution that you can go and turn on on day one and it'll work. What we are giving you here is a framework, we leveraged it, we had great results, we are more than happy to share that back, that something that took like 92 days for an employee to get access to 27 applications now takes minutes, like literally five minutes. What took about 19 admins across the organizations who were doing this as a second job almost, because we're a small company, the guy who bought the license for this new software that he wanted his team to use, became the admin for that product, and now his team is, from seven people, it's now 52 people. But he's still the admin of that product, along with managing that solution, so all of that effort was consolidated from 19 people to like two people, that's real gain there in just employee productivity that we have been able to standardize. And what we are doing now is taking the solution and the accelerator package to our customers and we are having some great conversation with many of our customers who had initially looked at Boomi and said like, hey, you guys provide us an integration solution to our problem. But at the end of the day, onboarding, as within an organization, is a cross-functional issue. It ties together workflows from your finance team, from your benefits team, from your recruiting team who is getting the candidate to your HR, who is going to make sure-- >> Facilities where you sit, all kinds of data. >> All kinds of things, and making sure you have your laptop and your badges and all of those things on day one. So a lot of people in the organizations are like these silent heroes who are making sure that every employee who shows up on day one has a good experience but there's only so far that a manual process can go, and being able to automate that process, and a good reason why we are now able to do this is because of Boomi Flow. The ManyWho acquisition that we did last year, it has opened doors for us to have conversations with our customers where we are like, you have cross-functional processes, you need to be able to automate them as much as possible and let your employees actually do more value added work instead of being, you know, sending emails and then collating emails with data from every place, putting it in a spreadsheet, adding that to your SAP, or your workday system and-- >> So that sounds like that's the consequence of two problems, I hear this right, one, data silos and manual or purpose-built applications that are dependent upon data silos. No data silos allows for automation, and then everything kind of goes away and solves the problem. Is that right? >> Yeah, absolutely. So cross-functional workflows are something that when people try to solve, they end up causing the integration problem at the end of the day. So you try to solve for one thing but then integration is always at the core of it. With Boomi, because we are coming integration up, we sort of automatically solve for that, but then with Boomi Flow, what we are able to do is we are able to abstract that away from users who don't really care about how you're going to get two applications to work together, so if you are in the HR team, you just want to make sure that here is the value proposition for the organization that I hired these employees for, they get to see that. I don't really care if your 15 applications need to work together at the backend. (cross talking) >> American Airlines example's a good one, they've hundreds of integrations, some will ship it and forget it. They won't have to remember it, hey, number 52, what was that again? Solved the problem but broke this over there. That's kind of the problem that is the core issue, right? >> It's a core issue. So we have a session later today with American Airlines, and MOD Pizza. So, both of them are a study in contrast. MOD Pizza is an organization that was founded a couple of years ago, around the same time that American Airlines and US Airways merges was happening. So the session is very interesting because you get a perspective from a company that started in 2011 or 2013, and took an approach of being a Cloud-Native infrastructure. So they make choices where all of their applications are in the Cloud but then when they grew at a certain scale, employee onboarding became an issue, they came to Boomi and how they are solving it, and on the flip side of it, you have a perspective from a large organization that around the same time relogged that their employee onboarding issues and then looked at Boomi and then said that, hey, how can we solve this? And as they said in the Keynote, good is not good enough, you need to have a great experience. >> Well you've also raised your NPS score 168 points, and now you've got an opportunity to reach customers in a different way, like you said to be able to integrate these functions and have to work together, that abstraction layer is critical for the business being more efficient and more productive. Finding new revenue streams faster, being more competitive, and really unlocking the value of that data so it can be used across multiple business units within organizations at the same time. Pragnya, thanks so much for stopping by and joining John and me on theCUBE today. >> Yeah, it was great talking to you guys. >> We appreciate it and have a great time at-- >> Hope you have a great Boomi World. >> Absolutely, off to a great start. Thanks so much for your time. For John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE, Live from Boomi World 18 in Vegas, stick around, John and I will be back with our next guest. (light music)

>> From the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas, It's theCUBE, covering HoshoCon 2018. Brought to you by Hosho. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We're here for CUBE's live coverage here in Las Vegas for HoshoCon. This is the first industry conference where the smartest people in security are together talking about blockchain security. That's all they're talking about here. It's a bridge between multiple diverse communities from developers, white hat hackers, technologist, the business people all kind of coming together. This is theCUBE's coverage, I'm John, for our next guest Anand Prakash, who's the founder for AppSecure. He's also the number one bounty hunter in the world. He's hacked everything you could think of; exchanges, crypto exchanges, Facebook, Twitter, Uber. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for joining me. >> Uh, thank you John. >> So, you've hacked a lot of people, so let's, before we get started, who have you hacked? You've hacked an exchange. >> Yeah. >> Exchanges plural? >> Most of the exchanges. >> Mostly the exchanges? >> Yeah, ICOs. >> ICOs? >> Yeah, and bunch of other MNCs. >> Twitter, Facebook? >> Twitter, Uber, Facebook, and then Tinder. Yeah. >> A lot. >> Yeah, a lot. I cannot say the name. >> You're the number one bounty hunter. Just to clarify you're a white hat hacker, which means you go out and you do a service for companies. And it's well known that Facebook has put bounties out there. So, you take them up on their offer, or-- >> Yeah, so basically companies say us, hack us, and we'll pay you. So, we go and try to hack their systems, and say this is how we are able to discover a vulnerability, and this is how it can be exploited against your users to steal data, to hack your systems. And then they basically say, this is how much we are going to pay you for this exploit. How did you get into this, how did you get started? >> So, it started with a simple Phishing hack in 2008. It was an Orkut phishing hack, and one of my friend telling me to hack his Orkut account. And I Googled, how to hack Orkut account, and I wasn't having any technical knowledge at that point of time. No coding, no knowledge, nothing. I just Googled it and found ten steps, and I followed that ten steps. Created a fake page, I sent it to my friend, and he basically clicked on it, and there it is, username and password. (laughs) >> He fell for the trap >> Definitely, >> right away. >> Yeah. >> So, quick Google kiddie script kind of thing going on there, which is cool. Okay, now you're doing it full-time, and it's interesting here, this is the top security conference. Those are big names up there, Andreas was giving keynote. But I was fascinated by your two discussion panels, or sessions. Yesterday you talked about hacking an exchange, and today it was about how to hack Facebook, Twitter, these guys as part of the bounties. This is fascinating because everyone's getting hacked. I mean you see the numbers. >> Yeah. >> I mean, half a billion dollars, 60 million here, 10 million. So, people are vulnerable and it's pretty easy. So, first question for you is how easy is it these days and how hard is it to protect yourself? >> So, the attacks, the technologies, and then attacks are getting more sophisticated, and hackers are trying newer and newer exploits. So, it's good for companies and descryptpexion just to employ ethical hackers, white hat hackers, and moodapentas, and bunch of other stuff to secure their assets. So, it's, you wouldn't say for companies not doing security, then it's very easy for someone like us to hack their systems, but there were companies doing Golden Security. They are already have an internal security team, external folks securing their systems, then it's difficult. But, it's not that difficult. Let's talk about your talk yesterday about the exchange. Take us through what you talked about there that got some rave reviews. How did you attack the exchange? What did you learn? Take us through some of the exchanges you hacked and how, and why the outcome? >> Yeah, so, we have been auditing bunch of ISOs and exchanges from past two months, and quite a good number. So, what we see is most of them, don't have security, basic security text in place. So I can log into anyone's account. They have a password screen on the UA, but I can simply type it in without, without no indication or alteration, I can just log into anyone's account, and then I can get fund's out of their system. Very similar to, one issue which we found in talk in sale, was we were able to see PIA information of all the users. All the passwords details and everything, who has done KYC. So, there are lot of information disclosures in the API. And the main thing which we hackers do is we try to test this systems manually instead of going more into an automated kind of approach, running some scanner to figure out sets of hues. So, scanners are, sorry. Scanners are obviously good, but they're not that much good in finding out all the logical loopholes. >> So, you manually go in there, brute force, kind of thing? >> Yeah, not exactly, not that brute forcing, >> Not brute force. >> but of our own ways of doing things, and there are lot of good bounty hunters or white hat hackers, who are better than me and who are doing things. So, it becomes more and more sophisticated. We don't know when you get hacked. >> So, when the bounties are out there, does Facebook just say, hey, go to town? Or they give you specific guidance, so, you just, they say go at us? What do you do? >> Yeah, so basically the publicist sends some kind of legal documentation around it, and some kind of scoping on the top targets to hack. And then, they basically publish their reward size, and everything, and the policy and everything around. And then we just go through it. We try to hack it and then we report it to their team, via channel, and then they fix it, and then they come back to us saying, this is how we fixed it and this is what the impact was, and this is how much we're going to pay you. >> And then they just they pay you. >> Yeah, my yesterday's talk was mainly focused on hacking these ICOs, and descryptpexion in the past. Some of the case studies which we have done in the past, and obviously we can't disclose customer names, but we directed some of the information, and showed them how we helped them. >> What should ICO's learn, what should exchanges learn from your experience? What's the walkaway for them? Besides being focused on security. What specifically do you share? >> Yeah, so to be very frank, I know few of the companies and bunch of companies who don't appreciate white hat hackers at all. So, these are ICOs and crypexinges. So, the first and foremost thing they should do is, if they are not having any internal, external, if they are having any internal security team right now, then they should go further back down the program to make sure people like us, or people like other white hat hackers, go and hack their systems and tell them ethically. >> How does a bounty, how does someone set that up? >> So, uh-- >> Have you helped people do that? >> Yeah, so, our company does that. We help them setting up a bug bounty program from scratch, and we manage it by our typewriting platforms, and we invite private, and we do it privately, and we invite ethical hackers to hack into their systems ethically. And then we do have arguments with bunch of them, and that's how they're going to secure. >> So, how does that work, they call you up on the phone? Or they send you an email? They send you a telegram? How do they get in touch with, the website? They do face-to-face with you? They have to do it electronically? What's the process? >> For the bounty hunting? >> Yeah, for setting up a bounty program. >> Yeah, for setting up a bounty program with our company, we basically get on Skype call with them, we explain them what is going to be their budget and everything. How good their security team is, and if they are not having any internal security team, what I know, then we never suggest them going for the bounty program because they may end up paying huge amount of money. (John laughs) So, then we basically sell our pen testing services to them, and say, this is, you should go out for a pen testing service first, and then you should go for a bounty program. >> Because they could be paying way too much in bounties. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Yeah, 'cause they don't know what their exposure is. So, you do some advisory, consulting, get them set up, help them scale up their security practice basically. >> Yes, yes, yes. Their entire security team. >> So what was the questions at the sessions? What were some of the things the audience was asking you? Did any good questions come out that you were surprised by, or you expected? >> No, so, all of, so, for the very first talk, about the hacking the crypexion and all, all of them were surprised. They thought putting up a two-factor authentication, or something like that, makes their account secure. But it's not like that. (both laughing) We hack on the APIs. So, it's very, very, very super easy for us most of the time. >> So, the APIs are where the vulnerabilities are? >> Yeah. >> Mainly. >> The APIs, the URLs. >> Yeah. So, you guys use cloud computing at all? Do you use extra resource? I saw a bunch of stories out there about quantum computers, and that makes things better on the encryption side. What's your thoughts on all that, and hubbub? >> Yeah, so mainly we use anomaly intercepting proxy to intercept these calls, which are going on a straight to PS outputting, out of our own SSLP, 'cause the safety we get, and then trusting it. So, we try to plane to the APIs and them doing stuff. We don't need a big, high-end machine to hack into services. >> Gotcha, so you're dealing with them in the wire transmission. So, what do you, tell me about the conference here, what of some of the hallway conversations you've had? What's your observation? The folks that could not make it here, what's it like? What's the vibe like? What's it like here? >> So, they missed lot of things. (both laughing) And um, it was first Blockchain Security Conference, and I've been flying from all over doing the art, to just attend this conference. I was here one month back for Defcon and Black Hat, and for some other hacking event. >> So, you wanted to come here? >> Yeah. >> Yeah, I meet a lot of cool people here. I met so many great people. >> I planned it out even before Defcon Black Hat. (laughs) >> Okay, go 'head. >> I had to go to Hosho. (giggles) >> I think this is an important event 'cause I think it's like a new kind of black hat. Because it's a new culture, new architecture. Blockchain's super important, there's a lot of interest. And there's a lot of immature companies out there that are building fast, and they need to ramp up. And they're getting ICO money, which is like going public, so, it's like being grown-up before you're grown-up. And you got to get there faster. And I mean, that seems to be, do you agree with that? >> Um, yeah, definitely so. A lot of people love putting money into ICOs then what if they go tag, then people don't know about security that much, so, it's a big-- >> So, what are you excited about? Stepping back from the bounty hunter that you are, as you look at the tech industry, security, and blockchain in general, what are you most excited about? What are you working on? >> So, frankly saying, so, I'm looking forward to hack, articulately hack more and more exchanges, and uh, I believe none of them should die the legal tag, but, that's where most of the money is going to be in the future. So, that's the most interesting thing. Blockchain security is the most-- >> Yeah, that's where the money is. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> The modern day bank robbery. It's happening. Global, modern, bank robbery. (Anand laughs) Andreas is right, by the way. (Anand giggles) He talked about that today. It's not like the old machine gun, give me the teller way. Give me your cash drawer, on, it's-- >> That was a very nice talk. >> It's other people from other banks with licenses. >> Yup. >> The new bank robbers. Well, thanks for coming on theCUBE, sharing your story, appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Great to have you on. >> Thank you for inviting me. >> You're a real big celebrity in the space, and your work's awesome, and love the fact that you're ethically hacking. >> Yeah, by the way, I'm not the world's number one bounty hunter. I'm just-- >> Number two. >> Not number two, maybe, there are lot people out there. >> You're up there. >> I'm just learning and-- >> We could do a whole special or a Netflix series on the bounty hunting. >> Yeah, yeah. (laughs) >> And follow you around. (both laughing) And now, thanks for coming out, appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Good to see you. >> Good to see-- >> All right. More CUBE coverage after this short break, stay with us. Here, live, in HoshoCon. First security conference around Blockchain. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)

from the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas it's the cube recovering no joke on 2018 brought to you by Osho okay welcome back everyone we're here live here at hosts show con in Las Vegas the first security conference for blockchain its inaugural event and we're here with Gabriel Shepherd VP of strategy at Global Strike for host show they're the hosts of the event although it's an industry conference for the entire community all coming together Gabriel thanks for coming on and spend the time yeah thanks for having me thanks for you know supporting the event and we appreciate your team coming out and covering what we're trying to build here well we think it's super important now so you guys are doing a great service for the industry and stepping up and put in the event together and so props to you guys thank you this is not a hosts show sales like conference you guys aren't selling anything you're doing the service for the community so props to you guys in the team great stuff and we know this is a kernel of all the smartest people and its really an industry event so it shows in the session so appreciate that yes we think it's important because you know we see a lot of trends the queue has a unique advantage in how we cover hundreds of events and yeah so we get to go we see a horizontal observation space from the industry and when you have formation like this with the community this is important you guys have up leveled the conversation focused the conversation around blockchain where security is the top-level conversation that's it no I feel pitches right so for the folks watch and this is really one of those events where it's not a huge number of people here like the thousands and thousands of other blockchain shows that make money off events this is about community and around getting the conversations and having substantive conversations so great job so for the folks watching the content agenda is super awesome host show con-com you go browse it but give us some color commentary on some of the types of speakers here the diversity yeah I think I think the first thing that we wanted to accomplish was with Hojo Khan was we we wanted to put front and center the conversations that were not taking place at other events there are plenty of platforms and opportunities for companies early-stage companies to go pitch there are other great conference organizers that do events and have their own wheelhouse but what we wanted to do was put together a conference that was focused around a type of conference that we ourselves would want to attend as a cybersecurity firm and you know after traveling the world I mean you know you you and artesia spoke many times and hosho has sponsored quite a few events around the world after attending by the end of 2018 will attended something like a hundred plus events in some capacity and so it was clear to us early on that companies weren't our conferences weren't going to focus on security or at least put them on the main stage where I believed that they should be at least with all the hacks happening so what we wanted to do was bring together thought leadership with respect to security technical leadership with respect to developers and security engineers and we wanted to bridge those two what I mean by that is we wanted thought leadership that could get executives to start the non-technical people so start thinking about security in the larger format and how it's applicable to their company but what we also wanted to do is we wanted to connect these non-technical people with the technical people in an intimate setting where they could learn think about the brain power that we have in this hotel for hosho Khan you've got the minds of Andre Assante innopolis Diego's LDR of RSK Michael berkland of shape-shift josub Kuan of hosho we've got Ron stone from c4 you've got an on Prakash a world-class white hat bug bounty hunter consider what he's top-5 bug bounty hunter for our top top bug bounty hunter for Facebook five years in a row the the level of the calibre of technical talent in this building has the potential to solve problems that Enterprise has been trying to solve individually for years but those conversations don't take place in earnest with the non-technical people and so the idea behind hoshikawa was to bridge those to provide education that's what we're doing things like workshops sure we have keynotes and panels but we also have the ability to teach non-technical people how to enable two-factor authentication how to set up PGP for your email how to set up your hardware wallet these things aren't these conversations are not the bridge is a clearly established we interview people from on the compliance side all the way down to custodial services which again the diversity is not a group think events just giving them more props here because I think you guys did a great job worthy of promotion because you not only bridge the communities together you're bringing people in cross functionally colonizing and the asset test for me is simple the groupthink event is when everyone's kind of rah rah each other I know this conditions we got Andre is saying hey if you put database substitute database for blockchain and it reads well it's not a real revolutionary thing and oh all you custodian services you're screwed I mean so you have perspectives on both side that's right and there's contentious conversation that's right and that to me proves it and as well as the sessions are highly attended or we don't want it we don't want a panel of everybody in agreeance because we know that's not reality i mean that you you bring up the issue of curse of custody a prime example is we had a great talk a four-person panel led by Joe Kelly who's the CEO of Unchained Capital he had a panel with traditional equities custodian Paul pooi from edge wallet Joseph Kwon is the CEO of hosho and there was clear differences of opinion with respect to custody and it got a little contentious but isn't that the point yeah it's to have these conversations in earnest and let's put them out in the public on what's right and what's wrong for the community and let the community to decide the best way forward that's the best is exactly what you want to do I gotta ask you what are the big surprises for you what have you learned what's the big reveal for you that you've super surprised you or are things you expected what were some of the things that went on here yeah I think the biggest surprise to me was the positive feedback that we received you know I understand that we know people maybe looked at how shock on year one and said hosho like they're a cybersecurity firm what are they doing running a conference right but my background is a you know I've produced conferences I have a former employee of South by Southwest I believe a big an experience and so when we started to put this together we thought we knew we would make mistakes and we certainly made mistakes with respect to programming and schedule and just things that we had didn't think about attention to detail but we had plans far in that the mistakes were mitigated that they weren't exposed to the public right there behind the scenes fires that kind like a wedding or a party but no one actually really notices sure we put them out behind the scenes nobody that the our guests don't notice and that was my biggest concern I'm pleasantly surprised at the positive feedback we've yet to get any negative feedback publicly on Twitter telegram anecdotally individually people now they made just being nice to my face but I feel good about what the response that we've got it's been good vibes here so I gotta ask you well sure the DJ's were great last night good experience yeah experience and knowledge and and networking has been a theme to correct I lost him the networking dynamics I saw a lot of people I had I had ran to some people I met for the first time we've had great outreach that with the queue was integrated in people very friendly talked about the networking and that's been going on here yeah I mean this panels are great I'd love to hear from from panels and solo presentations but a lot of work gets done in the hallways and we have a saying in the conference business hallway hustlers right the ones that are hustling in the hallways are those early stage entrepreneurs or trying to close deals trying to figure out how to get in front of the right person serendipitously are at the bar at the same time as somebody they want to meet that is to me conference 101 that is the stuff I grew up on and so we wanted to make sure that we were encouraging those interactions through traffic flow so you'll notice that they're strategically the content rooms are strategically placed so that when you're changing rooms people are forced to cross interact with each other because they're forced to bump into each other and if you look at the programming we purposefully to our demise to be honest year one put a lot of programming that was conflicted with each other we made people make a decision about what talk they wanted to go to because there were two really compelling people at the same time or 10 minutes off yeah and so you had to make a decision vote with your feet you got to vote with your feet and and and from a conference perspective we call that FOMO right we want our guests to FOMO not because we want them to miss a particular talk but because we want them to be so overwhelmed with content and opportunity with networking that they when they walk away they've had a good experience they're fulfilled but they they think I got to go back here too because that thing I missed I'm not gonna miss this yeah we will point out to you guys made a good call on film all the session everything so everything's gonna be online we'll help guys do that yep so the video is gonna be available for everyone to look on demand you also had some good broadcast here we had a couple shows the cubes been here your mobile mention the DJs yeah yeah so good stuff so okay hallway conversations our lobby con as we call it when people hang up a lot on it's always good hallway con so what Gabriel in your mind as you walked around what was some of the hallway culture that you overheard and and that you thought were interesting and what hall would cartridges were you personally involved in the personal conversations I was involved with is why isn't somebody not this station why someone not Gardens but I will tell you i from what I heard from from conference attendees the conversations that I heard taking place were and I hope Jonathan doesn't mind but Jonathan Nelson from hack fund spoke on our main stage and I hope he doesn't mind me speaking out of turn but he came to me said this is one of the best run blockchain conferences I've ever been to and to have somebody like Jonathan say that who has done hundreds of talks and thousands was really meaningful but but what was more important is to talk to him and him feel comfortable enough to sit down with me and just talk generally that's the vibe we want for every attendant we want you to feel comfortable meeting with people in the hallway who you've never met and be vulnerable from a security perspective you know Michael Turpin for example sitting down and talking proactively about being the AT&T hack great these are opportunities for people to really talk about what's happened and be vulnerable and have the opportunity to educate us all how to get better as an industry you know the other thing I want to get your thoughts on is obviously the program's been phenomenal in the content side thank you but community is really important to us we're of a community model to q you guys care about the community aspect of this and as a real event you want to have an ongoing year after year and hopefully it'll get bigger I think it will basically our results we're seeing talk about the community impact because what you're really talking about there is community that's right well I mean Vegas we talk about there's multiple communities right regionally post-show is a Vegas based company we're born here we close I think forty some employees all based here in Las Vegas which is our home so the first thing that we did with respect to community as we created a local local price if you're a Nevada resident we didn't want you to have to invest a significant amount of money to come to something in your own town the second thing we did is we've invited the local Vegas Bitcoin meet up in aetherium meet ups to come and partake and not only participate but contribute to the content and opening day in fact there was so much influx of people from those meetups it wasn't official it wasn't like a program where we had actually a VTEC set up I thought I was gonna be like a meet-up there were so many people that attended we had to on the fly provide AV because we were overwhelmed with the amount of people that showed up so that's a regional community but with respect to the community from blockchain community what we wanted to do is make sure we brought people of all ethnicities all countries we have 26 countries represented in the first blockchain security conference and you had some big-name celebrities here yeah Neil Kittleson Max Keiser you go mama Anan Prakash Yakov Prensky a layer from your side pop popcorn kochenko has some big names yeah I'll see andreas yes here keynoting yeah I'm Michel parkland andreas Diego Zaldivar I mean these lena katina Viren OVA I mean these are big names yeah these big names okay what so so what's your takeaway of you as you know my takeaway is that there's a there's a yearning for this type of event my takeaway is that we're doing something right we have the luxury as hosho and that we're not an events company people think that might be a disadvantage to run a confident you're not a cotton vent company I think it's an advantage yeah because it holds my feet to the fire yeah much closer than an event organiser who doesn't have a company reputation and brand to protect hosho as you know has a good brand in the cybersecurity world with respect to blockchain we don't have the luxury of throwing a poor event giving you a bad experience because that would tarnish house of but also your in the community so you're gonna have direct feedback that's right the other thing too I will say I'm gonna go to a lot of events and there are people who are in the business of doing events and they have a profit motive that's right so they'll know lanyards are all monetize everything is monetized yeah and that sometimes takes away from the community aspect correct and I think you guys did a good job of you know not being profligate on the events you want to yeah a little bit of cash but you didn't / yeah / focus on money-making finding people right for the cash you really needed about the content yeah and the experience for and with the community and I think that's a formula that people want yeah I would like to see the model I would like to see the model changed over time if I'm being honest a majority of crypto conferences today are paid to play so a lot of the content you're getting this sponsored so I'm okay with that but I think it should be delineated between con disclose your disclosure you don't want water down the country but but the conference circuit and crypto is not ready for that it hasn't rest in my opinion hasn't reached that level of maturation yet like I told you I I'm a former South by Southwest guy that like my belief is you create the content and the sponsors will come I don't I don't begrudge conference organizers for for for sponsoring out events because they're really really expensive a cost per attend to manage demand to this hype out there yeah hundreds of dollars per attendee I get it I understand why they do it but what I would like to see is the model change over time whereas as we get more sophisticated as a technology space we should also grow as a vent and conference circuit as well what I mean by that is let's change the model that eventually someday it's free for all attendees to come and those conferences and the costs associated with them are subsidized by companies that want access to the people that are tending them it sounds like an upstream open source project sure how open source became so popular you don't screw with the upstream yep but you have downstream opportunities so if you create a nice upstream model yep that's the cube philosophy as well we totally agree with you and I think you guys are onto something pioneering with the event I think you're motivated to do it the community needs it yeah I think that's ultimately the self governing aspect of it I think you're off to something really good co-creation yeah I'll see we believe in that and the results speak for themselves congratulations thank you so much I appreciate you guys coming here and investing your time and I hope that all our staff has been accommodated and the hard rock is treated you well you guys been great very friendly but I think again you know outside of you guys is a great company and great brand and you guys and speaks for itself and the results this is an important event I agreed because of the timing because of this focus its crypto its crypto revolution its cybersecurity and FinTech all kind of coming together through huge global demand I mean we haven't gotten into IOT and supply chain yeah all the hacks going on with China and these things being reported this is serious business is a lot on the line a lot and you guys having a clear focus on that is really a service business Thank You staff doing it alright our cube coverage here in Las Vegas for host Joe Kahn this is the first conference of its kind where security is front and center it is the conference for security and blockchain bringing the worlds together building the bridges and building the community bridges as well we love that that's our belief as well as the cube coverage here in Vegas tigress more after this short break

>> From the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas, It's theCUBE, covering HoshoCon 2018. Brought to you by Hosho. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We're here live in Las Vegas for theCUBE's exclusive coverage of HoshoCon. This is the first inaugural event of its kind. It's the first security blockchain conference, where all the top minds in the security blockchain decentralized world come together to try to work on, solve, and enhance the security profile of how the world's running. As we know blockchains run the infrastructure, and we need security. I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE. I'm here with David Johnson, the CEO of Latium. Welcome to theCUBE thanks for joining me. >> Thanks for having me John. >> So, you're one of the brain trusts in the industry here at this event, trying to solve the security problems. Let's get into it, but first take a minute to explain what you guys do. What does your company do? What's your purpose to exist? Why are you in business? >> Well our main goal is trying to help get the message of crypto out and increase adoption in the space. We do a lot of things, we're a multifunctional platform. We're trying to make it easy by putting everything in one place. We believe that there's a lot of complexity, there's a lot of technical knowledge required. I mean, I've been in technology for 30 years, and it's really complex to use crypto. And we just think everyday people probably will not learn that. It's like they don't know why their car moves when they press the gas pedal, but they know that it does, and we're trying to solve that for crypto. >> It's like a car, imagine having to open the hood up, throw a switch, put the screwdriver on this, get a charge, go back in, run in, I mean just turn the key, come on. >> It's asking a bit much, at least that's our philosophy. >> Okay, so when you say moving a lot of complexity into the platform, are you talking about custody, are you talking about tech stack? What specifically are you guys doing? Is it technology stack, is it a framework, is it software, is it? >> It's a platform, it's a platform as far, it is a community where they can come in. It's a multicurrency wallet, it's an exchange. They can work for crypto, they can hire for crypto. So, again we're taking it from the client side, anything they would want to do with crypto, we'll try to put that in one place. >> So, you're trying to build a multipurpose platform where someone can run turn key. >> Exactly. >> A full end to end life cycle of crypto. >> That's correct. >> And why would they do that, build an app, marketplaces, is it business model driven? So what's your target customer looking to do? Are they developers, are they big businesses? >> Well, our target market is the everyday person who wants access to crypto, they're hearing about crypto, but they don't know how to participate. So, it starts off easy for them. They can come into the platform and they can perform a task on our platform, and now they're immediately a crypto holder, right? So, we just want to expose that space and make that access point as easy as possible. >> That's where they get people into crypto, is give the crypto away. >> And that's kind of what we're doing, we're giving them crypto for their production. >> All right, so give me an example. We're into crypto, we're doing a little CUBE crypto. How do we get involved? What do we do, how do we use you? >> Well one way you could use it, is you could use us if you were trying to, say promote something. That would be one way to do it. You want the community to get behind something? You want feedback. Say you have a website and you want feedback. You need Beta testers, right? You could list a task on our platform, our community base would see that listing, they could decide, I want to perform this task, and be paid in crypto. >> So you guys are looking at the, the Upwork-like crypto model. >> Similar, similar. >> So WorkCoin is another, is they competitive to you guys? >> I don't really feel like anybody in the space is a true competitor. There's crossover in some functionality, but because we're approaching the whole solution, as a wallet, an exchange, and a tasking platform, I don't really see anybody as direct competition. >> That's good, I like the platform approach. So having platforms that are open versus closed is what people are concerned about these days. How are you handling the open versus closed question? You guys let people own their own data. How is that working on the platform? >> Well, as it stands right now, we're a hybrid between blockchain and centralization and the reason for that is for scalability purposes. Blockchain tech is just not there. I know we all want it to be there. >> That's true, that's fair. >> But if we're honest, we're not there. So we're trying to build an enterprise application and we know that if that's 100% pure blockchain right now that you're going to run into scale issues. >> And for liability, many issues, we all know that. >> Yes, and data ownership is definitely a sensitive topic. As far as our approach on that, we're pretty open on what we're storing. Our biggest data point is really a TrustScore and you have full control over that by how you participate within the system. You know, good actors get the benefits of being a good actor and there's consequences if you're a bad actor in the system. And the way that we do that is, we have a verification system that's using biometric data, off of your face, and we're creating a unique digital profile tied back to the user. So unlike other platforms where they could just make a new account, become a bad actor, you can't do that on our system. So that's one space that's very unique. >> I think crypto's got a lot of opportunities to manage bad actors, if you can make the incentive costly, that's an interesting dynamic. Is that kind of what you guys are thinking too? Bad actors, always the problem is in web it's easy to be anonymous. >> That's it. >> You start a bot and get killed, you create a new one, respawn. >> I always say that the internet gave us this amazing platform for communication and networking and opened up a whole new world, but it removed trust, totally removed trust. There is no concept of trust. >> Yeah, reputation and trust. Reputation and trust are scattered. >> It's a big issue. >> A lot of people in crypto are struggling with two things. I want to get your thoughts and reaction to. One is community. >> Yes >> And the other is marketplaces. You're a classic marketplace. If you're doing tasks, gig economy, >> Yes. >> We know what that means, you share, you're open you're publishing. >> Sure. >> It's open, so check on the marketplace. Community is another one, how do you build a community? >> Sure. >> People raise these big ICOs and they say, hey I need a community. >> Yes. >> You can't buy a community. >> No, no you have to have something people want. And so that's the question, I mean in any business model you got to define what it is that you're building that someone wants. If you can't define that, then you don't have a business. >> All right so here's a pressure question for you. What's the hallway conversations like that you're overhearing and also you're participating in here at HoshoCon? A lot of smart people, I've overheard a bunch of conversations I just want to bust in and listen. >> Yeah >> I feel rude, but I'm just leaning in. Interesting people here, great dynamics. What are some of the hallway conversations that you're overhearing, and some that you're participating in? >> Well I think there's a lot of focus on the security levels of the contracts. There's been quite a few hacks just in the last couple days so that's been a buzz, and I think it's kind of interesting that we're at a security conference and then we have hacks going on. So there's been a lot of buzz around that. >> 'Cause people have been traveling on a plane, they attack when all the security guys are traveling. (laughing) >> Absolutely. >> Social engineering at it's best. >> Yeah, that might be the case, yeah. >> All right anything else, sessions you've been to? >> As far as the sessions go, I mean I think that Max put on a great session today. He's always an eloquent speaker. And so that was a great speech as far as I was concerned. You know, I think that it's nice to see that we're moving in the direction of acknowledging that security is a big deal in the space and I think it's great that Hosho's bringing that out. >> What's the biggest surprise this week for you here? >> I would say that the biggest surprise for me is just how well organized the event is. You know, I've been to quite a few events and the Hosho team has done a great job organizing this event. >> Yeah, and it's not too crowded either. It's the right mix of people. Of course, you know, they're video taping all the sessions so just lettin' everyone know, we'll put those videos up in theCUBE cloud and make them searchable for HoshoCon. So we're going to help get those videos out as well. Cool, so what's new at the business? How's things going? Give us the update, funding status? Employees? >> Things are going really well, we've actually seen exponential growth this month. We're registering between a 1,000, 3,000 registrations a day now. We've got about 22,000 verified members in our system and when I say verified, it again means that they've actually gone through a verification process so they can't duplicate accounts. >> And they've got a wallet, they're downloading. >> Exactly. >> They've got the wallet. >> Exactly, it's all in one. You register, you get multicurrency wallet off the bat. So we've seen a lot of growth and a lot of attention so far in this month. >> And which blockchain are you using? >> Again, we're a multicurrency, so we're tied-- >> You don't care. >> Well, our token is a ERC-20, but as far as how we deal with other blockchains, right now we have Bitcoin integration, Tether integration, Ethereum integration, and we're going to be adding ERC-20s. >> So you're using the ERC-20 mainly for smart contract on the transaction? >> Yeah, we're using the ERC-20 for our own tokens, yes. >> Okay got it, and the tokens for the gigs, the work, utility tokens? >> Yes, that's our token. >> That's your token, okay got it. >> That's correct, so they're getting, but they can take that immediately and they can change it out for Bitcoin if they like or they can hold our token. >> That's the exchange piece. >> Correct, it's all there. >> So multipurpose, yeah that's interesting. Great, well hey congratulations, David Johnson, he's the CEO of Latium, check him out. End to end exchange, getting work done, tasks. We certainly could use some UI on our project so can we put that in there? >> There you go, there you go. (laughing) >> Get some business down here, theCUBE, bringing you live coverage here at HoshoCon. Stay with us, we've got two days of wall to wall coverage. We'll be back with more after this short break. (techno music)

>> From the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering HoshoCon 2018! Brought to you by Hosho. >> Okay, welcome back everyone, we're here live in Las Vegas for the first security blockchain conference's inaugural event, HoshoCon, and it's all about the top brains in the industry coming together, with experience and tech chops to figure out the future in security. I'm John Furrier, the host of theCUBE. Our next guest, Andre McGregor, who's the partner and head of global security for TLDR. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for joining me. >> Thank you for having me. >> So you have a background, we were just talking off-camera, FBI, you've been doing the cyber for a long time, cyber-security, mostly enterprise-grade, large-scale. Now we're in crypto, where you have small set of teams, running massive scale, with money involved. >> Correct. So guess what, money attracts. >> Right. People who want it, want that money. Lot of hacks, $400 million in Japan, plus 60 million over here, you add it all up, there's a billion so far this year, who knows what really the number is, it's pretty big. >> It is, and what's concerning and the reason why I came over in this space was the number of hacks that were happening. My company, we get probably a call a week, whether it's high net worth individuals, CEO, exchanges, we've helped a couple, some that you'd know of if I told you who they were, trying to get out of a very bad situation. And interim response has been big, but what we've learned is that it's the same old fraud, the same old security tactics that are being used against some of these crypto-companies. >> And we've seen it all the time, everyone's had fraud alerts on their credit card, this is like classic blocking and tackling, at a whole 'nother level. >> It is, because if you think about it from, like a traditional start-up, you have a company that's small, they have time to develop their MVP, they go out and do maybe a seed round, friends and family, they're sort of ramping up over time, whereas we basically flipped the model upside-down, the same six founders now have $10 million worth of crypto, and they're not protecting it in the ways they think they should, because they're in hyper-growth mode. So the bad guys have determined that as a great place to target, and now as we see in the news, it's actually happening. >> Yeah, and Hartej, the co-founder of Hosho, was just one talking about physical security, in the sense of you got to watch out where you go too now, it's not just online security, it's physical security. So start-ups have that kind of fast and loose kind of culture. >> Well, if you think about it, traditional security in corporations, I can put everyone in a building, I have this similar or same network egress points, I can protect those, I can do the gates, guards, guns, perimeters around, but I got people working from home now in the crypto space, everyone's got their own setup. If someone's in an audience, they say oh, I've been in the blockchain space since 2010 or 11, I can make assumptions about them, about their financial worth, and other people are doing the same, but having nefarious reasons. >> Yeah, you connected the dots okay, it was $0.22 in 2011, so therefore, if they had kept a little bit of Bitcoin-- >> They would be doing very well. >> They're a target. >> Therefore, they're a target now. So when you think about it, you put all those scams together, it becomes sort of a hot topic for-- >> I just got into crypto. (laughs) >> Good answer, good answer. >> Alright, so let's talk about this security hack. Because obviously, in the enterprise tech, we cover a lot of those events across the year. IoT Edge is a huge topic, cloud computing booming, so now you have a lot of compute, which is good, and for bad actors too. So you have now a service area that's now, no perimeter, there's no egress points to manage. Is there a digital way to kind of map this out, and does blockchain give us any advantages or is there anything on the horizon that you see, where we can, in digital form? >> Well, I mean the true reason I came to the blockchain space, having worked hundreds of victim notifications and several dozen actual intrusions, from large intrusions at banks that are top five in the world, all the way down to small core defense contractors, you realize it's always a server you didn't know about, credentials that had more access than they should, obviously gaining access to a centralized server, that then gets exposed and allows that data to be leaked out. So the idea of blockchain and being able to decentralize, distribute that data, own it, and keep it cryptographically pure, and also being able to essentially remove the single source of failure that we saw in a lot of these hacks is exciting. Obviously, blockchain is also not the answer to everything. So in some ways, the spread sheet is still a spread sheet, and the MongoDB will still be the MongoDB, but-- >> The post-it next to your computer, your private key on it. >> But at the same point in time, it all comes down to cyber-hygiene, right? I mean, the stuff that we're looking at, the hacks that we're seeing, the hacks that I'm dealing with and my company dealing with, day in and day out, are not sophisticated. They may be sophisticated actors, but they're using insophisticated means, and of course, I hate to harp on it, but e-mail is still the number one intrusion vector, we all have it, we all use it. You could take stats from the FBI that says 92%, you could take stats from Verizon that says 93%, but that will be the number one way in. >> And phishing is the classic attack point. >> It will always be, because-- >> It's easy. >> I can manipulate people, I find the right opportunity, I always say even I've been phished. It happens, the way your mind is, it's just how you react, is what we need to teach people. >> It's really clicking on that one thing, that just takes one time. >> Yep. >> A PDF that you think is a document from work, or potentially a job opportunity, a new thing, sports scores, your favorite team, girlfriend, boyfriend, whatever, I mean, you don't know! >> But, I'm going to challenge you on this, you get, you click on that bad link, or you feel like your computer has been hacked, who do you call? Do you actually have someone that you can call? There's no cyber 911. Unless you are a high net worth individual, or being targeted by a nation-state, you're not calling the FBI. So who do you call? And that's a problem that we have in our industry right now. I mean, I guess I've been the person that people have been calling, which is fine, I want to help them. 12 years as a firefighter on top of my FBI career, I'm used to helping people in time of need. But really, in the grand scheme of things, there's not enough Mandiants or Verizons are too big. So for these smaller, six-person companies, that don't have $500,000 to spend on instant response, they actually have no one to call when they actually do click something bad. >> And the people they punch in a call, the ones that aren't actually there to help them. Sometimes they get honey-potted into another vector. >> Sure. >> Which is hey, how can I help you? >> Or I even challenge it a bit further. You call any of these companies when your phone has been hacked, you SIM-swap, whatever it is, and you need to sign a master services agreement, you need to go through all the legalese, while you're actively being hacked. Like, it's happening hour after hour, and you're seeing it, your accounts are being compromised and being taken over, and you're trying to find outside counsel to do redline. So in emergency services, we say, don't exchange business cards at the disaster site. It's not the time that you should be saying hi, I'm introducing myself, we should figure out all the retainers, inter-response, legal questions beforehand, so that at 2:00 in the morning, someone calls, and you have someone pick up the phone. >> Yeah, and you know what the costs are going to be, 'cause it's solve the problem at hand, put out that fire, if you will. Okay, so I got to ask you a question on how do people protect themselves? 'Cause we know Michael Terpin's doing a fireside chat, it's well known that he sued AT&T, he had his phone SIM swapped out, this is a known vector in the crypto community. Most people maybe in the mainstream might not know it. But you know, your phone can be hacked. >> Yes. >> Simple two-factor authentication's not enough. >> Correct. >> What is the state-of-the-art solution for people who want to hold crypto, any meaningful amount, could be casual money, to high net worth individual wants to have a lot of crypto. >> I mean, I spent a good amount of my time talking about custody. We've sort of pivoted off to a new part of our business line, that deals specifically around institutional custody solutions, and helping people get through this particular process. But we all know, especially from that particular case, that SMS compromises, after account takeover of a phone, is high. Hardware tokens are always going to be something that I'm going to, Harp or YubiKey, or something like that, where I'm still having the ability to keep a remote adversary away from being able to attack my system that has my private keys, or whatever high-value data I have on it. But if I think about it at the end of the day, I'm going to need to transfer that risk. I would like to say that we can transfer all risk, but instead for the people that have a lot of crypto, you're going to need to look for a good custody solution, you're going to need to look and trust the team, you're going to need to look and trust the technology they have, and you're going to have to get insurance. Because there are so many vectors, in a certain point in time, we can't go back to the wild west, where we're actually >> The insider job is, is really popular now too. >> It is, but there are ways around the collusion, counterparty, third party risk of ensuring that not one person can take the billion dollars worth of crypto and run away off to Venezuela and never appear again. But again, it comes down to basic hygiene. I ask people, I've surveyed hundreds of people in the crypto space, and I ask simple questions like VPNs, and I'm still getting a third to a half of people are using VPNS. Very simple things that people are not doing. When you looks at password for example, if anyone still has a password under 12 characters, then game over. I mean, there are a variety of ways of hacking them. I can use GPU servers to do them very quickly. I won't go into all the different options that are there. People still-- >> So 12 characters, alphanumeric obviously, with-- >> With special characters as well. >> Special characters. >> But the assumption, let's just make the assumption, that either those passwords have been cracked already, because they've already been dumped, people share passwords, they get used again, and then the entropy is exponentially higher with every single character after 12. So my password's 22 characters, sure it's a pain to type it in, but when you think about it, at the end of the day, when I combine that with a password manager that also has a YubiKey that's a hardware token, and I require that access all the time, then I don't run into the problem that someone's going to compromise a single system to get into multiple systems. >> And then also, I know there's a lot of Google people as well, they're looking at security at the hardware level, down to the firmware. >> Sure, sure. >> There's all kinds of-- >> I mean, obviously, you could use the TPM chip as well, and that's something that we should be better at, as a society. >> So while I got you here, I might as well ask you about the China super micro modchip baseboard management controller, BMC, that was reported in Bloomberg, debunked, Apple and Amazon both came out and said no, that's been confirmed. They shift their story a little bit too, the reality probably there is some mods going on, it's manufactured in China. I mean, it's a zero-margin business going to zero, why not just let the Chinese continue to develop, and have a higher-value security solution somewhere else, that's what some people are discussing, like okay, like the DRAM market was. >> Yep. >> Let the Japanese own that, they did, and then Intel makes the Pentium. Wall Street Journal reported that, Andy Kessler. So the shifts in the industry, certainly China's manufacturing the devices. There's no surprise when you go to China, and if you turn on your iPhone, it says Apple would like to push an update, but that's not Apple, it's a forged certificate, pretty much public knowledge. The DNS is controlled by China, and a certificate, these are things that they can control, that's, this is the new normal. >> It, it-- >> If you know the hardware, you can exploit it. >> We've been dealing with supply-chain issues since Maxtor hard drives in Indonesia. So was I shocked when I hear stories about that? No, I'm sort of scared myself into a corner, working in skiffs over the years and reading the various reports that come out about supply chain poisoning. >> Certainly possible. >> It's happening. I mean, it's just to what extent is still something that may or may not be known to its full extent, but it's something that will happen, always happens, and will continue to happen. And so at a certain point in time, capitalism does step in and says alright, well, guess what, China, the way I see it is, China wants to be a super-power. At a certain point, they know that people are looking at them, and saying we can't trust you. So they're going to clean up their house, just like anyone else. >> It's inevitable for them. >> It is inevitable. Because they need to show that they can be a trusting force, in the world economy. And at the same time, we're going to have competition out there that's essentially going to say, alright, we can actually prove to have a much better, stronger, validated supply chain that you'll use. >> I mean, IoT and blockchain, great solutions for supply chain. >> 100%. >> I mean, so this is where-- >> I mean, we're talking, I mean, I was actually on a plane flying from Phoenix, to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and I was sitting next to a guy, who was just like, I just want to use a blockchain to be able to deal with a supply chain around compromised food. So in the sense that if you think about it, fish for example, there's a lot of fake fish, fake type of tuna and other stuff that's out there, that people don't know the difference. But the restaurants are paying double, triple the amount of money for it. You start taking things like elephant tusks, you take things like just being able to track things that no one's really thinking about, and you're just like huh, I never thought of it that way. So at the end of the day, I still get surprised with what people are thinking about, that they can do with the blockchain. >> So Andre, question for you here, this event, what's the impact of this event and for the industry, in your opinion? Obviously, a lot of smart people here talking, candidly, sometimes maybe a little bit contentious about philosophies, regulation, no regulation, self-governance, lot of different things being discussed as exploration, to a new proficiency level that we need to get to. What are some of the hallway conversations you're hearing, and involved in? >> A lot of mine are obviously around custody. That is the topic of the moment. And for me, I'm in learning mode. I recognize that I've spent a lot of time in cyber-security. However, whereas it relates to blockchain and digital asset custody, whether it's utility tokens or security tokens, I'm on the CFTC Technology Advisory Committee, specifically, with cyber-security and custody, and so I want to take in as much information as I can, bring it back to the committee, bring it back to the commissioners, and help them create the proper regulations and standards, whether it's through an SRO, or it's through the government itself. >> For the folks that may watch this video later, that are new to the area, what does custody actually mean? Obviously, holding crypto, but define custody in context of these conversations, what is it, what's the threshold issues that are being discussed? >> Sure. I mean, to break it down, custody is very similar to a bank. So you are, you're saying I have a lot of X. It could be baseball cards, it could be gold bars, it could be fiat cash. And I want to have someone hold it, and I'm going to trust them with that. Of course, I'm transferring that risk, and with that, I have an expectation to have a qualified custodian, that has rules and regulations of how they're going to actually manage it, how they're going to control it, ensure that the risk, that people aren't going to take it. It could be, again, the Monet, it could be the Johnny Bench Ricky card, it could be 100 million blocks of gold. But I also want to have a level of insurance. That insurance could come from the insurance industry themselves, and allowing me to protect it in case something does happen to that, or the government. The FDIC, $250,000 for your bank account is a type of insurance that people are using. By the end of the day, from an institutional perspective, you want a pure custodian that takes all the risk. The government wants to say a certain point, that that custodian can allow for margin call, so that the client can't come in and say, well I'm not going to pay out $100 million worth of crypto, and I'm going to seize, or seizure of funds as well. And that's what's being set up right now. Traditional banks are not ready to handle that. Traditional auditing firms, like PWC or Ernst & Young, are still trying to figure out how they'd even be given a qualified opinion, as it relates to how-- >> So it's not so much that they are not have the appetite to do it, they don't have systems, they don't have expertise, >> They don't have systems, they don't have expertise, >> They don't have workflows. >> And right now, things are so new and so volatile, that they're sort of almost putting their toe in the water, but really not sure what the temperature is yet of the water to hop in. >> If someone wants to go to court, you say hey, prove it. Well, it's encrypted, I don't know who did it. >> Well, and the thing is is that when you have 53 states and territories with different money-transmitting laws, on top of the countless federal agencies and departments that are managing that, it is hard to come to consensus. It is much easier in a place like Bermuda, where the government is small enough where everyone can get together pretty quickly, have consensus on an opinion of how they want to deal with the crypto market, deal with custody, pass a regulation, and what's nice about Bermuda is it has crown ascendancy, so the UK government still approves it. >> And they move fast on the regulation side. They literally just passed-- >> They are the only jurisdiction that has a fully complete law surrounding cryptocurrency. >> You're bullish on Bermuda. >> I am, because I saw the efficiency there. And I expressed my same opinion with the CFTC, when I was doing my hearing last week, that it's nice to see the speed, but it's also a small island that allows for that speed. >> And they have legitimate practices that have been going on for years in other industries. >> Right, so there's no dirty money, there's no anything that people are sort of concerned with, they have the same AML, KYC, anti-money laundering and know your customer regulations that you would expect if you had your money in the United States. >> Yeah, we had a chance to interview the honorable charge there. >> Premier Burt, oh very nice. >> Yeah, he's great, and Toronto, so it's awesome. >> Nice. >> Alright, so final takeaway, for this show here, what's your takeaway about this event, the impact to the industry? >> This is a very important event, because I think people are still trying to get their footing around blockchain, they're still trying to get their footing around digital asset protections. And if we can get the smart people in one room, and they can share knowledge, and then we can come together as a community, and create some standards that make sense, then we're protecting the world. >> Well Andre, I'm glad you're in the industry, 'cause your expertise and background on the commercial side and government side certainly lend well to the needs. (laughs) So to speak. We need you, we need more of you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, really appreciate your commentary and your insight. It's theCUBE, bringing the insights here, we are live in Las Vegas for HoshoCon, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, we'll be back with more coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> From the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering HOSHO CON 2018. Brought to you by HOSHO. >> Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE special live coverage here in Las Vegas for the first ever, Blockchain Security Conference. Really discussing security as an industry, it's called HOSHO CON, put on by HOSHO. We're here with the Co-Founder and CEO of HOSHO and main supporters of sponsoring this project or event HOSHO CON. We have Yo Sub Kwon, who is the CEO and Co-Founder. Good to see you. >> Good to see you, good to be here. Hey thanks for putting this on. I've interviewed Hartej, your Co-founder, in Toronto the Futures conference. We've had many great conversations on theCUBE. But when we talked about HOSHO CON, this conference, he really wanted to do it as an industry conference. Not as just a HOSHO event. >> (Yo agrees) >> This is really key to you guys culture here at HOSHO your company. >> Yeah. >> Take a minute and explain the event. Why this event? Why the format? And that it is open? >> I mean basically, you know, like we've been to just so many events over the, like I think we've done like 80 events this year, and the topic of conversation is, you know, around investing, it's around ICO's, it's around all these things and security touches all of those and I just feel like, and we all felt it and like the other security companies felt it too, that it just wasn't a topic that was discussed in great enough depth especially given the increasing amounts of hacks and theft and all these problems that relate directly to security. And I just feel like it's really important for us as an industry to discuss, you know, what security practices are good? What should be done? How you should do them? What resources are available to companies to learn more about security? And what resources don't exist and need to be developed? And that needs to be done in a collaborative way. Well congratulations and props to you guys for really sponsoring this and taking the leadership role in the industry but again you guys are humble and it's a good way to do it. Is to have these conversations. So thank you for doing that, appreciate it and thanks for having theCUBE here. We really appreciate it. The question I want to ask you is: I've noticed a trend here, first of all a lot of smart people here, so it's like, it's not a massive, no IPO, ICO pitch competitions, this is really down and dirty security. >> Yeah. >> Okay, black hat, white hat but it's kind of a intercultural vibe it's the community. >> Yeah. >> Coming together. But also two kind of tracks are developing there's the crypto security and then there's cyber security threats coming up. Because you said it's touching on all these points. And you're hearing, even hearing a little bit of IOT and hardware, we had Rivetz on earlier the CEO Steven Sprague so a lot of different solutions and a lot of different opportunities, a lot of different vulnerabilities. Can you explain the landscape of how the players are here, where are they coming from? >> Okay, yeah. >> What's their backgrounds? >> Absolutely I mean there are definitely, a lot of brilliant minds here and that was one of the goals of HOSHO CON is to bring people that are of all different, you know, parts of the industry whether they're, they're layers or they're information security experts or they're, you now, regulators or they're it just, developers bring them all into the same room and to kind of discuss these problems that you know, plague all of us and you know a developer's going to have a much different perspective and solution than a lawyer and but those thing can work together and the problems might still be the same. And so we've been in the industry for just like, even though HOSHO's a young company, the people that are on our team, myself, I've been in, I got into Bitcoin eight years ago, like we just have this network of people that are in the industry, have seen the kind of like cyclic nature of, you know, like a gigantic influx of people come in, these problems arise where, you know, entrepreneurs are like really focused on like growing, getting traction and then they focus less on their security, it goes to the wayside and then these big hacks happen and then the industry kind of smartens up and everything you know starts getting a little bit closer to what seems you know maybe safe or like approachable for a growth trajectory and then another gigantic influx happens and then the same thing. And so what we really need to do is like when that next big influx happens is to have standards in place to have things that an entrepreneur can just turn to and be like: "Okay, this is what I need to do "if I want to be considered credible in this industry "and I want to protect my users and my investors." >> Can you talk about some of the top conversations that are going on here, because I think that's a great point? People want you know legitimacy, they want solutions that work, that are credible and then maintain kind of, I won't say enterprise grade, but commercial grade reliable so that people can focus on building up their companies and or preparing for the growth. What is some of the top conversations? >> A lot of it's just learning about what other people do, like even with like Rivetz, we're putting, they're using the trust executions based on like what's already on billions of devices and you know basically letting people know that that space exists on this hardware and that they can be used for all these different purposes to validate you know data going in. And, you know, there's been conversations around custody. I was on a panel earlier today about custody and basically the way I felt like it left off and the conclusion was that there is a long way to go on custody but it is incredibly crucial. Big institutional players that want to enter the markets and want to put their money into a regulated custodian they're, it's difficult to do so even with registered custodian's existing because the limitations that they have in understanding the technology and being able to provide support for all the different digital assets that exist. >> So we're reporting this morning the SEC herein the US has tightened the noose on the ICO-funded startups. I think the story originated out of Decrypt Media but essentially the SEC, Securities and Exchange Commission, is cracking down and they're going back and saying: "You got to refund some of that money." >> Yeah. >> Because of violations. That's one regulatory thing but there's also, there's software that writes these smart contracts. You guys are in that business. The software is software money, security is critical. How stable is this becoming in your mind? What's the to do items? How should a company who want's to either use the ICO process or and or use token economics to fuel their business model they got to be secure on the business front? >> Yeah. So basically smart contracts were so new when we first got in to it that people just didn't know how to develop securely in them and so there were just critical mistakes being made all over the place. We've seen over the last year a lot of improvement on that front, more libraries are being developed and people are writing consistently more secure contracts. But now what we're seeing is contracts are getting increasingly complex and with additional complexity, because it's software there's room for, you know more problems and I think that it's going to, it's going to be an interesting challenge going forward, there's thing like formal verification I think that has a huge place in the future regarding smart contracts but it's there's a lot of tools that need to be developed that's one of the things that we worked on and we're really excited about is Meadow Suite because that's software that let's you develop smart contracts. We built it intentionally with security analysis in mind and then we made it more full featured to become a development tool for writing smart contracts and developing a protocols. And so I think the more of those type of things that you see come out that bring it more to feature parity to what software developers are used to if they're say building a web application it makes it a lot easier to adhere to good practices and write secure code. >> And also kind a not have to do manual audits? >> Yeah. >> I mean at the end of the day you want to get to some sort of automation. >> Absolutely. >> Framework. >> I mean we've already automated a lot of the things that we do. But and there's still a lot left to do but we know that there is a lot left that can be automated and we hope that eventually the tools are just put into developers hands were they can do most of that work themselves. >> Yo Sub take your CEO hat off from HOSHO for a minute put your industry hat on. >> Okay. >> What are some of the names here that, and conversations, topics that you find interesting personally? >> Okay, I mean. >> (John laughs) >> A lot of people that we brought here are like our friends, we know them right? And so like I was talking to. >> Your kind of celebrities. >> I was talking with like TokenMarket earlier and like, you know, we're partners with them and they really, they're really great guys and like some of the stuff that they are trying to do and you know just listening to what other companies are trying to do with like security tokens that seem to be the thing that really moving forward. And I'm kind of fascinated like, we try to stay agnostic you know like when we're like looking at all these different technologies. But then like someone explains something to you and you're awe man that's really cool. >> Yeah. (both laughs) >> And there's some good minds here. What's the coolest thing you've seen so far? >> Well I've been locked in, I've been locked behind doors in a lot of meetings so far but the, let's see, I think what Unchained Capital is working on is really sweet. They basically, I mean like I think their business model makes a lot of sense. Like basically they hold your crypto's so you maintain exposure to it and then they'll issue you a loan. They can like turn around a loan like in 24 hous, you just hand then a bunch of Bitcoin and then they'll just give you cash and then you can you know you have that cash and then you still maintain exposure through crypto if you pay it all back you get your crypto back. (laughs) >> So it's collateralized crypto? >> Exactly I mean like that makes perfect sense to me. Like you know it's just like as long as you can liquidate that crypto and Bitcoin or Ethereum like those are big enough markets now where you can easily liquidate. Well that's awesome. Thanks for putting on this event and I want to get back to HOSHO. How's business going? You're the CEO, Commander in Chief, what's going on with the company? How's things going? >> Yeah. >> Quick update. >> Well everything's crazy right, like we're moving quickly and the next steps are Asia. We really want to basically penetrate those markets. Only, we don't have as much coverage there as we would like but having spent some time there earlier this year doing some reconnaissance it's a crazy, crazy space over there. There's a lot of action happening, there's a lot of adoption. People are really enthusiastic about it but security almost seems like six months to a year behind North America and Europe as far as what exchanges are requiring, what investors are demanding of their portfolio companies. And so I think that now that they've had such major hacks happen over the last six months they're starting to realize. >> Major hacks talking about 60 Million. I mean I heard numbers up to 300 plus million. >> Yeah. >> I mean these are it's not like five dollars out of your wallet. >> Yeah. >> This is massive. >> Like over a billion dollars has been stolen in some capacity and like it's been pretty crazy yeah, so. >> Where's the big vulnerability? Exchanges, is it the DApps, where's the holes? >> They're all over the place but the biggest numbers definitely come from exchanges. Exchanges just need to be far more responsible and just, I feel like a lot of it is just negligence. They're growing so quickly that they don't pay attention to, you know, putting resources into educating their staff on really simple security practices. You know things like phishing and social engineering, like things that were good security practices still are good security practices. And a lot of those attacks are not even anything like some new exploit of a new technology it's the same kind of thing of like phishing, social engineering, sims swapping, you know, poor user access control, bad passwords. >> I mean the basics. >> Yeah. >> But this is what growth does to you you've point earlier. As more people start feeling growth there's more exposure service area wise. >> Yeah. >> New dynamics are kicking in. >> Well I'm starting to see new exchanges that are popping up that are you know taking security very seriously and the way they're treating it is that is their differentiator but in my mind like security shouldn't be a differentiator. Everybody should. >> (John laughs) >> If you're an exchange and you're holding massive amounts of other people's assets you should take security very seriously. That should just be a default, a standard. >> You have to be differentiating strategy with security it's not, it doesn't make sense. >> Marketing 101 you shouldn't be different, it should be standard. (both laughs) >> I mean if that's the state of the art, this is the problem. This highlights the problem. >> It does yeah. >> Alright so what's, what's the future for this event? How do you guys see this unfolding? Obviously this is the first inaugural event here HOSHO CON, How do you see it evolving? >> I think a lot of conversations should hopefully spur from this and we want to make this a yearly event. So we're definitely going to take a lot of the feedback from people that attended and see what they want, what they really enjoyed, what they really want to talk about. And even I think, a lot, since we're recoding all of the talks we'll be putting them up online at some point and I think it'd be really good to see like what the transition is like next year from like, where we were in some of these problems and addressing those problems you know a year from now. Like I think that will be really exciting. >> You guys are expanding in Europe, HOSHO good job with that. Who's the kind of clientele that you guys have? Is it ICO's? Is it companies? It is enterprise? Who are your target customers? >> So we have a lot of companies that are ICO's for sure. We have more exchanges and protocols joining those ranks. And then we are trying to move into enterprise as well. We made a partnership with Telefónica and developed a partnership with them to be able to sell to more enterprise clients and what they need. >> And what's your value proposition that you guys are offering? >> We are, well, we do smart contract audits, we do penetration testing. Those are things that a lot of companies in this space need. And then also we've been helping with security architecture and cryptocurrency assessments. >> And tooling, tools for development. >> And tooling, yeah we're trying to do our part. I mean we can't and won't do it alone but we try to develop things that, if we develop anything that's useful from a security perspective, we try and make it available for everyone. >> Yo Sub thanks for coming on theCUBE, appreciate your time and congratulations, it's a great event. >> Thank you. >> HOSHO CON sponsored by HOSHO and other's in the industry, it's an industry event, it's not just their company, it's their friends all coming together to solve the major problems with security, making it standard, making it safe and supporting the growth with the community. It's theCUBE covering live here in Vegas. I'm John Furrier stay with us for more CUBE coverage after this short break. (upbeat electronic music)

>> From the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering HoshoCon 2018. Brought to you by Hosho. >> Over and welcome back to our live coverage here in Las Vegas for HoshoCon. I'm John Furrier host of theCUBE. The first inaugural conference on security in the blockchain security is obviously not new to the blockchain It's number one concern. Crypto is crypto, decentralized networks is what people want. Security is the only thing that matters, if you haven't been hacked, then you should know we're being hacked. This is theCUBE coverage here in Las Vegas for HoshoCon. I'm John Furrier with Steven Sprague CEO of Rivetz, who's a security and an entrepreneur I've known for almost 20 years now he has been at this all through multiple ways of innovation, multiple security paradigm stacks, not new the problem, great time for you, Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me. >> So I've known you and knowing your father as well for almost 25 plus years, you have been at this in one form or another with security and the waves are different, I mean there's different the web wave there's different architectures I mean people call it internet 3.0 whatever they're just different evolutionary steps, now is the killer time because we're seeing the most action. You got web, internet, mobile, global, new economics, new money the stakes are higher it's not not just like some isolated box, you got cloud. This is the time to harvest the work you've been doing, give us an overview. >> Absolutely you know I've been at this my whole career, I started down this path in 1990. Doing digital rights management micro transactions and video games and was part of the formation that Trusted Computing group in the 2000s and helped shipped 1.4 billion PCs with hardware security on the motherboard of the PC that still out there today. Started with started Rivets in 2013 to really go after, how do we enable the hardware security and mobile devices? And just about instantaneously ran into the blockchain and at my first Bitcoin conference, which was the Miami Bitcoin conference about a half an hour into it, it dawned on me two things. One, we were talking a lot about crypto but nobody was talking about cybersecurity and there's a gap between those just because we talk crypto all the time doesn't mean that we know what we're doing in cyber and the other one that was true as, oh my God, I've been looking for this for the last 10 years, which is how do we enable the user to own their own keys? And I don't mean like single keys on each device. I mean, the root key that controls all the other keys on all their devices. This is a super interesting space, we're just the very beginning of it in some ways the Bitcoin side the sort of value or or money side is the demo, the real opportunity is, this is the infrastructure that's going to replace how we do normal enterprise computing. >> Yeah. >> And the end of PC computing, we're about to have a new paradigm, blockchain-- >> I agree with you as an infrastructure shift over because the efficiencies that are gained and the disruption around what's not efficient, whether it's venture capital or infrastructure, IoT, whatever the supply chain or the decentralized way is the way to make it efficient, so it's an opportunity. Every entrepreneur that I know that is licking their chops going, wow, I can come in here and and create value. The mainstream adoptions around this complexity around use to your point, and then the fear of being hacked the cybersecurity piece whether it's for money, or a a hostile actor. >> But think of it in a different way. Security, nobody cares about security, nobody buys security, nobody wants security, security is UI. So if I asked you what your favorite multi factor authentication experience, you think like fingerprints and all this kind of stuff, it's not true, the send button is your favorite one, dial the number and push then and it just works. It works everywhere in the world works every time you've taught mom how to use it and the kids how to use it. It's simple, so why, so we would never use like, dial the number and we're going to use AI and big data to determine whether your phone is in the right condition to complete the call. And then a message is going to come up and say, would you please breathe deeply and calm down, because you're clearly agitated, I can't complete your call for you at this time. (laughing) Like, you've never used that phone, so why are we going to use that for the rest of our enterprise? >> I just sent you a pin number on your phone that you can't use before you can make the call. Again, I agree, it should be under the wire. It should be transparent security should be native, always on. >> That's right. >> And that's what you're getting at, okay. In your opinion, where are we in the progress because again, I think this connects the dots for your career, what you've worked on the itch you've been scratching in security because you have the perfect storm, you have full mobility penetration, you have commerce on top of it, and you have full global connectedness those three things alone make a-- >> And we have decentralization, so the thing that's important in blockchain is it's important remember, while the data on a chain is immutable, we know we can seal inside a little envelope a message and sign it and we write it to a chain it never changes. What we don't know is whether the data written to the chain was intended so all the information on all the blockchains is fake news. It's important to understand that we, if we take a blockchain to court try and prove something, all we can prove with the data hasn't changed. I have absolutely no idea whether your private key was written on the bathroom wall or stored in Fort Knox. And so if you try and record something on chain, your defense is always ah somebody stole my private key. Or if I'm trying to defend that you didn't do it on chain, somebody stole his private key, so actually the date on the chain is fake. It's real it was signed by a private key, but we have no knowledge to the quality of the private key and if you told the blockchain community that we got to go get your Windows log files to see whether or not your key was compromised at the time and the windows log files are the way we secure all blockchains. We're not going to get there, so the problem is-- >> That's a roadblock for sure, no doubt. >> Yeah, so the problem is that blockchains, are decentralized therefore, they're censorship proof. All of network security is censorship, therefore, blockchain is network security proof. Oops. So everything we spent in the last trillion dollars in cyber security doesn't work on blockchain Unless I run private chains, all a private chain is running inside the enterprise security while using all Juniper firewalls to secure your chain. That's not what we're talking about, We're talking about a decentralized solution. >> So match the security for pro posture for the architecture that you're working on. >> So we are going to have to do for the first time something that's crazy, we're going to have to do security commerce, which is when we form an instruction 'cause blockchains aren't authentication either, this isn't about logging into a node, getting a web page and filling out a form, no this is about sending an instruction. So, a blockchain instruction, a nuclear launch code, an e-commerce transaction, an IoT instruction like turn the lights on to 50% are all the same thing, it's an instruction based paradigm so it's not only about protecting the key but also the protection of the instruction that tells the system what to do and so in order to do that, the device that creates the instruction has to be a known device. Today we run our whole world, all our critical infrastructure, everything on unknown compute. When you turn this machine on, you didn't check to see it wasn't run by the North Koreans and you can't tell. >> Yeah, they could be in there, they probably are. >> Absolutely, more so than you would want to know. >> So what whereas the answer on this so get to the, cut to the chase here in your opinion, as the people figure out okay, we have all this great hardware that was built for a certain generation, now I'm using it as mission critical in my life, it's integrated to my lifestyle with my watch, my computer, my phone, now my in house Siri, portal, Facebook thing. >> So we need to get away from Apple's embracing of the CompuServe model, where you have a mobile phone that is a terminal, when you log into apps and your identity is based on your login to your phone. We don't actually check to see if the phone is really your phone. And we need to move to the concept of mobile, where it's a device identity network where services are delivered, not based on the username and password, but based on the identity of the device and really, ultimately, we need to get to what looks like an IoT network, which is a device identity network with messaging as the primary protocol. So secure messages sent. Fundamentally, we need to demote the importance of user authentication and promote the importance of device identity, so that I have a known device and a known condition with known controls that is producing the instructions that are sent to the chain. Ideally, you'd like in every chain, a second hash. And that second hash represents a manifest of controls that were in place, so I checked to see I was in the building, I checked to see who's still an employee, I checked to see my devices working properly, I check to see the trust infrastructure in the hardware of my devices working properly, and that gives me a hash I can write that to chain with the same immutable transaction, now I can prove that John's device in this condition with these controls wrote this transaction. >> Authentication powered the last architecture blockchain to your point about being you know, you don't know what's on the data needs to have an identity model for the signatures. >> For the robot. >> For the robot. >> For the robot. So some people like oh my god, but what if I lose my phone and the most important thing is you notice. If I steal your private keys you don't notice I still your phone like I just touch your phone. It makes you feel nervous, >> Yeah. (laughing) It's a very, but that's 100,000 years. >> I know when I leave my phone home I turn around soon as am three feet the driveway I'm like, okay, go back, get the phone. >> And so that's cyber security training it starts when you're 18 months old, when somebody gives you an important object you're not supposed to forget places like heaven forbid you remove the fuzzy rabbit from the three year old, you can lose an arm, right. So that model buying device, the good news is the trusted computing standards of the world have given us embedded hardware security in the chip sets as a standard capability in every ARM processor. Now in every Intel processor, we can turn these capabilities that have been deployed in these devices. We turn them on, provide an effective hardware based wallet for all of crypto. >> How does the hardware wallet work in your vision? Because I think most people generally and me included would say, look I love crypto but I'm busy got my four kids, two are in college, two or in high school and running around you're running around, bottom line is I got my key, my cold storage, I get keys everywhere, I forgot where I put my damn keys where's my key anyway I ended up writing and I post it. Who knows? >> I want to believe your keys are your collection of devices. So we've actually just done a recent relationship with Telefonica we showed two weeks ago, a dual Root of Trust handset, so half of your key is protected by the SIM architecture in your phone, half of your key is protected by the manufactured ARM processor in your, in your handset. So I have two separate routes of trust. I'm not trusting the carrier, I'm not trusting the manufacturer, they have to work in cooperation, the owner owns the keys, then I want to backup those keys. So why not, now that I have multiple routes of trust in my device, they can talk to my other devices, So we think of your household of devices as your key, not your single super phone. So every time I make a new wallet, you're right. You're running around, you didn't think about it, You don't want to write down 12 words, you're out at Starbucks, you shouldn't be writing the 12 words down on the surveillance camera at Starbucks. That would be a bad plan, Instead, you want your device to just communicate out to your other devices. So imagine in the future I lose my phone I can shut it off by calling my carrier and then I want to Make a new phone, maybe I've got to go like push a button in my Tesla push a button on my smart refrigerator. And my wife has to push a button or my girlfriend, or whatever the complications we all have. (laughing) And that's what allows me to recreate, not just my blockchain keys, but my Marriott keys, my car keys, my refrigerator keys, my these keys and we're going to have lots of keys for all this stuff. >> And the hardware is key in your opinion, got to have the hardware. >> Right, the reason why you have hardware is because, we can measure that the hardware hasn't changed so we can have a hardware Root of Trust, something that we know is anchored in silicon, in iron and then, or really in copper, and then from that we can build a stack that says we know this hasn't changed because if it's cast in the ground now we can build up from there each step and know that this measured environment is running properly. >> So people want be concerned, obviously Bloomberg had a story this week about China putting a mod chip on super micro boxes that's hardware. How do you talk to that, because I'm now saying, hey, I love the Root of Trust concept you guys are awesome, great job, but what about being hacked by someone else-- >> Well let's assume hacks continue on in time, I think the ultimate disinfectant in this is identity of the device, so give me a list of where 100% of those computers are. And are they in any critical systems that you have? So you're running DHS, and you've got 1.2 million servers across your network? Can you tell me 100% of the machines, that have that capability on them? Now that you know that model 45 had that. So we have an example for this VIN numbers in cars have been a great example of how we've improved the quality of cars, not that we aren't stupid humans and we build stuff that breaks or doesn't work and people die, we just want to know, that if he dies in his car that I don't want to drive the same car he drove without fixing whatever it is they're broken your car. >> So unique ID for the car, an asset. >> Yeah. And so tracking that, yep, we have it for lots of things. We don't have it for PCs, if you ask the average organization, please give me a list of the software that runs your corporation, they have no idea. >> Yeah, and the same thing with data to the GDPR thing, all these regulations, >> Right, because all, so GDPR is a great example of where now I need to prove I had controls in place in order to show that my data is properly-- >> They didn't know they had a server out there. >> I don't want to audit once a year, I want to check every time I do a transaction, was the person and employee did they have data rest in their machine, did they. So we can use the concepts of GDPR regulation to press this idea that I've provable controls at a transactional level for every instruction that's done. I want to know that I have known compute, if you had to write policy for the federal government, it's only known computers connected to sensitive networks and data. That doesn't require rocket science to understand. It's like, don't hook anonymous unknown computers you picked up out in the parking lot and tie them to the nuclear launch codes, that would be a bad plan. Like, let's start with at least machines we know and that are running software we know and that we've tested them so that we know they're running what we expect and they're working correctly, then let's use them for critical systems. So let's talk about the, and want to just finish up this segment on looking at what you're saying, which is a whole new operating model is coming really fast. The old model that's being operate is run by huge companies, Apple, Amazon, IT departments all around the world, governments, so there's going to be some resistance is going to have to be some change, that change is going to be disruptive. How do you see it playing out, you see people waking up going it's inevitable or you see a train wreck or collision. >> Now I think we have to create a transition. I spent a decade trying to create the train wreck and that didn't work very well, we shipped the technology and every PC. What we've done here is we're making it possible for you measure the integrity of a device in a mobile phone, and then you can hold keys in it. But I can apply policies or rules to those keys and those policies can talk to all of my old external systems. So I can ask all my network security stack, Where is this device, is this person an employee? Is my organization feeling good today, before I let you use the key. >> You bring program ability and state into-- >> Right, it's like you drag along the whole network security stack, and all their API controls and their SIEMs and let's hook Watson up and watch the whole network and apply that as a rule to a case. So now I can sit in Starbucks, and my device checks to see my organization's good, and then logs me into Gmail. I didn't have to tell Gmail to ask whether I was an employee, so I can have a mobile phone that says only log on if you're on the nuclear submarine and it'll work and I don't have to tell GitHub that check to see whether he's on a nuclear submarine. They just have to know that this two factor authentication is external, what's making that possible is that two factor authentication and all the services is fundamentally device registration, and as we mature that as the industry matures, those standards it provides the vehicle for all the services to incorporate a device component to the authentication strategy and then we can engage the robot to make that device smarter. >> Robot being the machine. >> Our device. >> Great to have you on, give the quick plug, what's going on Rivets real give us a quick. >> So Rivets is a fun company going after building these tools, we have a great partnership with Telefonica, we're extending it to other carriers as well. And our mission here is to bring the next billion people the blockchain by giving them a hardware based wallet for crypto, for IoT, for cloud in 100% of the mobile devices that are shipped and use the carriers as a mechanism to deliver that to us. >> You bring value that carries you also help the users make that usability peace secure. If you can pull that off, man I'd have a parade on Main Street for you. We need that. >> We desperately need this. We are so ready for our digital life to become simpler and safer for the user, And really for the services, it allows them to have more valuable data. So it's the combination of those two things, it's a win both for the consumer and for the services. >> Well, let's hope it can be a seamless transition rather than a train wreck collision. I'm John Furrier we here at talking security at Hoshocon, the inaugural blockchain secure, the first blockchain security conference am here with Steven Sprague CEO Rivets, hot, hot company in the space with many, many years experience. Time is ripe, right now the time is perfect for you. Congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for coming on, we're back with more 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 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)