>>Oh, welcome to this cube unstoppable domain showcase. I'm John for your host of the cube and showcasing all the great content about web three. And what's around the corner for web. For of course, stoppable domains is one of the big growth stories in the business bread. Can the co-founders here with me have ensembles mains break. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on the showcase. >>So you have a lot of history in the, in the web three, they're calling it net, but it's basically crypto and blockchain. You know, the white paper came out and then, you know how it developed was organically. We saw how that happened. Now, the co-founder was titled domains. You seeing the mainstream, I would say main street scene, super bowl commercials. Okay. You're seeing it everywhere. So it is, it is here. Stadiums are named after cryptos companies. It's here. Hey, it's no longer a fringe. It is reality. You guys are in the middle of it. What's what's going on with the trend. And where does unstoppable fit in? Where do you guys tie in here? >>I mean, I think that what's been happening in general, this whole revolution around cryptocurrencies and then in FTEs and what unstoppable domains is doing, it's all around creating this idea that people can own something that's digital. And this hasn't really been possible before Bitcoin Bitcoin was the first case. You could own money. You don't need a bank. No one else. You can completely control it. No one else can turn you off. Then there was this next phase of the revolution, which is assets beyond just currencies. So, and if T is digital art, what we're working on is like a decentralized identity, like a username for web three and each individual domain name is a is an NFT. But yeah, it's a, it's been a, it's been a, it's been a crazy ride over the past. >>It's fun because you on siliconangle.com, which we founded, we were covering early days of crypto. In fact, our first website, the developer want to be paid in crypto is interesting price of Bitcoin. I won't say that how low it was, but then you saw, you saw the, you know, the ICO way, the token started coming in, you started seeing much more engineering, focused, a lot of white papers coming out, a lot of cool ideas. And then now you got this mainstream of it. So I had to ask you, what are the coolest things you guys are working on because ensemble has a solution that solves a problem today, and that people are facing at the same time. It is part of this new architecture. What problem do you guys solve right now? That's in market that you're seeing the most traction on. >>Yeah. So it's really about, so whenever you inter interact with a blockchain, you wind up having to deal with one of these really, really crazy public keys, public addresses. And they're like anywhere from 20 to 40 characters, long they're random, they're impossible to memorize. And going back to even early days in crypto, I think if people knew that this tech was not going to go mainstream, if you have to copy and paste these things around, if I'm getting to send you like a million dollars, I'm going to copy and paste some random string of numbers and letters. I'm going to have no confirmations about who I'm sending it to. And I'm going to hope that it works out. It's just not practical people. Who've kind of always known there was going to be a solution. And one of the more popular ideas was doing kind of like what DNS did, which is instead of having to deal with these crazy IP addresses this long, random string of numbers to find a website, you have a name, like a keyword, something that's easy to remember, you know, like a hotels.com or something like that. And so what NFT domains are, is basically the same thing, but for blockchain addresses and yeah, it's just, it's just better and easier. There's this joke that everybody, if you want to send me money, you're going to send me a test transaction of, you know, like a dollar first, just to make sure that I get it, call me up and make sure that I get it before you go and send the big amount. I'm just not the way moving, you know, billions of dollars of value is going to work in the future. >>Yeah. And I think one of the things you just pointed out, make it easier. One of these, when you have these new waves, these shifts we saw with the web web pages, more and more web pages were coming on more online users, they call the online population is growing here, the same thing's happening. And the focus is on ease of use, making things simple, to understand and reducing the step it takes to do things, right. This is kind of, kind of what is going on and with the developer community and what a theory has done really well is brought in the developers. So that's the, that's the convergence of all the action. And so when you, so that's where you're at right now, how do you go forward from here? Obviously see this business development deals to do. You guys are partnering a lot. What's the strategy? What are some of the things that you can share about some of your business activity that points to how mainstream it is and where it's going? Okay. >>So I think the, the, the, the way to, the way to think about, and, and T domain name is that it's meant to be like your identity on web three. So it's gonna have a lot of different contexts. It's kind of like your, your Venmo account, where you could send me money to Brad dot crypto can be your decentralized website, where you can check out my content at Brad dot crypto. It can also be my like login kind of like a decentralized Facebook OAuth, where I can log into ADAPs and share information about myself and bring my data along with me. So it's got all of these, all of these different, all these different things that it can do, but where it's starting is inside of crypto wallets and crypto apps, and they are adopting it for this identity, this identity idea. And it's the same identity across all your apps. >>That's the thing that's kinda, that's new here. So, so yeah, that's the, that's the really, that's the really big and profound shift that's happening. And the reason why this is going to be maybe even more important, a lot of, you know, your, your listeners thing is that everyone's going to have a crypto wallet. Every person in the world is going to have a crypto wallet. Every app, every consumer app that you use is going to build one in Twitter, just launched, just built one. Reddit is building one. You're seeing it across all the consumer finance apps. So it's not just the crypto companies that you're thinking of. Every app is going to have a wallet, and it's going to really, it's going to really change the way that we use the internet. >>I think there's a couple of things you pointed. I want to get your reaction to and thoughts more on this constant adapts or decentralized applications or dimension when you call it, this is applications and that take advantage of, of the architecture and then this idea of users owning their own data. And this absolutely reverses the script today. Today, you see Facebook, you see LinkedIn, all these silos, they own the data. The, you are the product here. The users are in control. They have their data, but the apps are being built for it for the paradigm shift here. Right. That's what's happening. Is that right now? >>Totally, totally. And, and so it all starts, I mean, DAP is just this crazy term. It feels like it's this like really foreign, weird thing. All it means is that you sign in with your wallet instead of signing in with a username and password where the data is stored inside of that app, like inside of Facebook. So that's, that's the only real, like core underneath difference to keep in mind signing in with a wallet. But that is like a complete sea change in the way the internet works, because I have this, this key, this private key it's on my phone or my device or whatever. And I'm the only one that has it. So if somebody wanted to hack me, they need to go get access to my device. Two years ago, when Twitter got hacked, Barack Obama and Elon Musk were tweeting the same stuff. >>That's because Twitter had all the data. And so you needed to hack Twitter instead of each individual person, it's a completely different security model. It's, it's way better for users to have that. But if you're thinking from the user perspective what's going to happen is, is that instead of Facebook storing all of my data, and then me being trapped inside of Facebook, I'm going to store it. And I'm gonna move around on the internet, logging in with my web three username, my, my, my NFT domain name. And I'm going to have all my data with me. And then I could use a hundred different Facebooks all in one day. And it would be effortless for me to go and move from one to the other. So the monopoly situation that we exist in as a society is because of the way data storage works. >>So that's the huge point. So let's just, let's double down on that for one more. Second, this is huge point. I want to get your thoughts. I think people don't understand that in the mainstream having that horizontal traversal or, or, or the ability to move around with your identity in this case, your unstoppable domain and your data allows the user to take it from place to place. It's like going to other apps that could be Facebook where the user's in charge. And they're either deciding whether to share their data or not, or are certainly continually their data. And this allows for more of a horizontal scalability for the user, not for a company. >>Yeah. And what's going to happen is, is users are building up their reputation. They're building up their identity in web three. So you have your username and you have your, your profile and you have certain badges of, you know, activities that you've done. And you're building up this reputation. And now apps are looking at that and they're starting to create social networks and other things to provide me services because I, it started with the user as, or the user is starting to collect all this valuable data. And then apps are saying, well, Hey, let me give you a special experience based on that, but the real thing, and this is like, this is like the core mean, this is just like a core capitalist idea. In general, you have more competition, you get a better experience for users. We have not had competition on, on, in web two for decades because these companies have become monopolies. And what web three is really allowing is this wide open competition. And, and that is what, that's the core thing. Like, it's not like, you know, it's going to take time for, for, for web three to get better than web two. You know, it's very, very early days, but the reason why it's going to work is because of the competitive aspect here. Like you can just, it's just so much better for consumers when this happened. >>I would also add to that, first of all, great point, great insight. I would also add that the web presence technology based upon DNS specifically is first of all, it's asking, so it's not foreign characters. It's not union code for, for the geeks out there, but that's limiting to its limits you to be on a site. And so I think the combination of kind of inadequate or antiquated DNS has limitations. So if, and that doesn't help communities, right? So when you're in the communities, you have potentially marketplaces, that could be anywhere. So if you have a ID and just kind of thinking it forward here, but if you have your own data and your own ID, you can jump into a marketplace two-sided marketplace anywhere. And app can provide that if the community is robust, this is kind of where I see the use case going. How do you guys, do you guys agree with that statement and how do you see that ability for the user to take advantage of other competitive or new emerging communities or marketplace? >>So I think it all comes down. So I identity is just this huge problem in web two. And part of the reason why it's very, very hard for new marketplaces and new communities to emerge is because you need all kinds of trust and reputation. And it's very hard to get, to get real information about the users that you're interacting with. If you're, if you're in the web three paradigm, then what happens is, is you can go and check certain things on the blockchain to see if they're true. And you can know that they're true. A hundred percent. You can know that I have used unit swab in the past 30 days and open, see in the past 30 days, you can know for sure that this wallet is mine. The same owner of this wallet also owns this other wallet, owns this certain asset. So all of having the ability to know certain things about a stranger is really what's going to change behavior. >>And one of the things that we're really excited about is being able to prove information about yourself without sharing it. So I can tell you, Hey, I'm a unique person. I'm an American, I'm not an American, but I don't have to tell you who I am. And, and you can still know that it's true. And, and that is that concept is going to be what enables, what you're talking about. I'm going to be able to show up in some new community that was created two hours ago, and we can all trust each other that a certain set of facts are true. And that's possible because of >>Exchange and exchange value with smart contracts and other no middlemen involved activities, which is the promise of the new decentralized web. All right. So let me ask you a question on that, because I think this is key. The anonymous point is huge. If you look at any kind of abstraction layers or any evolution in technology over the years, it's always been about cleaning up the mess or the, or extending capabilities of something that was inadequate. We mentioned DNS. Now you got this, there's a lot of problems with web two, 2.0, social bots. You mentioned bots, bots are anonymous and they don't have a lot of time in market. So it's easy to start bots and everyone who does either scraping bots, everyone knows this. What you just pointed out was an ops environment that was user choice, but has all the data that could be verified. So it's almost like a blue check mark on Twitter without your name, >>Kind of, it's good. It's going to be hundreds of check marks, but exactly, because there's so many different things that you're going to want to be, you're going to want to communicate to strangers, but that's exactly the right. That's exactly the right mental model. It's going to be these check marks for all kinds of different contexts. And that's, what's going to enable people to trust that they're, you know, you're talking to a real person or you're talking to the type of person you thought you were talking to, et cetera. But yeah, it's, it's, you know, I, I think that the issues that we have with bots today are because a web tool has failed at solving identity. I think Facebook at one point was deleting half a billion fake accounts per quarter. Something like the entire number of user profiles. They were deleting per you know, per year. So it's just a total. >>They spring up like mushrooms. They just pop up the thing. This is the problem. I mean, the data that you acquire in new siloed platforms is used by them, the company. So you don't own the data. So you become the product as the cliche goes. But what you're saying is if you have an identity and you pop around to multiple sites, you also have your digital footprints and your exhaust that you own. Okay. That's time. That's reputation data. I mean, you can cut it any way you want, but the point is, it's your stuff over time, that's yours and that's immutable. It's on the blockchain. You can store it and make that permanent and add to it. Exactly. That's, that's a time-based thing versus today, bots that are spreading misinformation can, can get popped up when they get killed. They just start another one. So time actually is a metric for quality here. >>Absolutely. And people already use it in the crypto world to say like, Hey, this wallet was created greater than two years ago. This wallet has had, you know, head has had transactions for at least three or four years. Like this is probably a real, you know, this is probably a legit legitimate user and anybody can look that up. I mean, we could go look it up together right now on, on ether scan. It would take, you know, a minute. >>Yeah. It's awesome. Yeah. I'm a big fan. I can tell, I love this product. I think you guys are gonna do really well. Congratulations. I'm a big fan. I think this is needed. What are some of the deals you've done? blockchain.com has won an opera. Can you take us through those deals and why they're working with you? We'll start with blockchain.com. >>Yeah. So the whole thing here is that this identity standard for web three apps need to choose to support it. So we spent several years as a company working to get as many crypto wallets and browsers and crypto exchanges to support this, to support this identity standard. Some of the, some of the, the, the largest, and probably, you know, most, most popular companies to have done. This are blockchain.com. For example, blockchain.com, one of the largest crypto wallets in the world. And you can use your domain names instead of crypto addresses. And, and, and this is, this is, this is super cool because blockchain.com in particular focuses on onboarding new users. So they're very focused on how we're going to get the next 4 billion internet users to use this tech. And they said, you know, usernames are going to be essential. Like, how can we onboard this next several billion people? If we have to explain to them about all these crazy addresses, and it's not just one, like we want to give you 10 40 character addresses for all these different contexts. Like, it's just, it's just, it's just no way people are gonna be able to do that without, without having a username. So that's why we're really excited about, about what blockchain that comes through. And they, they, they want to train users that this is the way you should use it. >>Yeah. And certainly no one wants to remember. I remember writing down all my writing. I, I'm not, I was never a big wallet fan cause all the hacks, I used to write it down and store it in my safe. But if the house burns down or I, I kick the can I'm, who's going to find it. Right? So again, these are all important things, your key storing it, securing it, super important. Talk about opera. And that's an interesting partnership because it's got a browser and people know what it is, what are they doing? Different almost imagine they're innovating around the identity and what people's experiences with, what they touch. >>So this is, this is one of those things. That's a little bit easier. And I strongly encourage everybody to go and try dApps after this. Cause this is going to be one of those concepts to be a little easier. If you, if you try it, then if you hear about it, but the concept of a wallet and a browser are kind of merging. So it makes sense to have a wallet inside of your browser. Because when you go to a website, the website is going to want you to sign in with your wallet. So having that be in one app is quite convenient for users. And so opera was one of the trailblazers, a traditional browser that added a crypto wallet so that you can store money in there. And then also added support for domain names, for payments and for websites. So you can type in Brad dot crypto and you can send me money or you can type in Brad dot crypto into the browser and you can check out my website. I've got a little NFT gallery. You can see my collection up there right now. So that's the, that's the idea is that browsers have this kind of super power in a web three. And what I think is going to happen opera and brave have been kind of the trailblazers here. But I think is going to happen is that these traditional browsers are going to wake up and they're going to see that integrating a wallet is critical for them to be able to provide services to consumers. >>I mean, it is an app. I mean, why not make it a D app as well? Because why wouldn't I want to just send you crypto, like Venmo, you mentioned earlier, which people can understand that concept. Ben, let me make my cash. Same concept here, but built in to the browser, which is not a browser anymore. It's a, a reader, a D app reader, basically with a wallet. All right. So, so what does this mean for you guys in the marketplace? You've got opera pushing the envelope on browsing, changing the experience, enabling the applications to be discovered and navigated and consumed. You got blockchain.com, blockchain.com with the wallets and being embedded there. Good distribution. How, what, who are you looking for for partners? How do people partner? Let's just say the cube wants to do NFTs and we want to have a login for our communities, which are all open. How do we partner with you? Or do we have to wait? Or is there a, I mean, take us through the partnership strategy. How do we, how do people engage with unstoppable Dwayne's >>Yeah, so, I mean, I think that if you're, you know, if you're a wallet or a crypto exchange, it's super easy, we would love to have you support being able to send money using domains. We also have all sorts of different kind of marketing activities we can do together. We can give out free stuff to, to your communities. We have a bunch of education that we do. We're really trying to be this onboarding point to web three. So there's, I think a lot of, a lot of cool stuff we can do together on the commercial side and on the, the, the marketing side. And then the other category that we didn't talk about was dabs. And we now have this login with unstoppable domains, which you kind of alluded to there. And so you can log in with your domain name and then you can give the app permission to get certain information about you or proof of information about you, not the actual information, if you don't want to share it because it's your choice and you're in control. And so that would be, that would be another thing. Like if you all launch a DAP, we should absolutely have log-in with unstoppable. >>Yeah. There's so much headroom here. You've got a short-term solution with exchange. Get that distribution. I get that that's early days of the foundation, push the distribution, get you guys everywhere. But the real success comes in for the login. I mean, the sign-on single sign-on concept. I think that's going to be powerful, great stuff. Okay. Future, tell us something we don't know about ensemble domains that people might be interested in. >>I think it's really, I think the thing that you're going to hear about a lot from us in the future is going to be around this idea of identity, of being able to prove that you're a human and be able to tell apps that and apps are going to give you all kinds of special access and rewards and all kinds of other things, because, because you gave them that information. So that's the that's, that's probably, that's the hint I'm going to drop. >>Yeah. It's interesting. Brad, you bring trust, you bring quality verified data to intelligence, software, and machine learning, AI and access to distributed communities and distributed applications. Interesting to see what the software does, what that, cause it traditionally didn't have that before. I mean just in mindblowing, I mean, it's pretty crazy great stuff, Brad. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for sharing the insight. Co-founder unstoppable domains, Brad camp. Thanks for stopping by the cubes. Showcase with unstoppable domains.