(energetic music) >> Narrator: Live from San Juan, Puerto Rico, it's theCUBE, covering CoinAgenda. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE. >> Hello and welcome to our exclusive Puerto Rico coverage of CoinAgenda, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. We're here covering all the action at Restart, we've got a ton of events, all the thoughts leaders, influencers, decision makers, you name it, in the industry, pioneers making it happen. My next guest is Toni Lane, who's the founder of CoinGraph. She's a true influencer with a lot of impact in this market. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me. >> We're so glad to have you on. Like the little joke at the beginning about being an influencer, you actually are an influencer. You've done such great work in the industry, well regarded in the community. You have publication and you do a lot of great content. Thanks for coming on. >> Oh, for sure, yeah, thanks for having me. >> So being the influencer, what does that mean these days? Because we were just talking before the camera on, we came on camera, influence changes. You can't be an influencer all the time. You can be super or expert at something, but your expertise could change, you move to a new topic, learn something. And there's a lot of people in the digital marketing world saying I'm an influencer. It's kind of half baked, and really, I mean, it's not about the followers, your thoughts? >> Well, I mean, most of those followers are purchased. So there's a big difference between being an influencer and having actual influence. Because if you're, you know, if you have a million followers on Twitter, that's nice. How much engagement do you have? And that's actually what you look for, it's like when you look at someone's, whether it's, you know, social media, their digital presence, it's not about followers, it's all about engagement. You know, I don't even have that many, like I don't spend a lot of time doing that, at least I haven't so far, it's something I'm getting more into. But I have people that are really engaged, and so I look at people that have 15 million followers and I'm like, you have just as many likes on your things as I do, right. Because these people aren't real people. And it's less about, having influence in general is in many ways about having authenticity. And so influence is your ability to get something done. Being an influencer is your ability to hold someone's attention for a fragment of time. But being an influencer is not the same as having influence. >> And this community here, certainly, with decentralization here, you get the decentralized applications coming up blockchain, you got ICOs booming. It's all about the network effect, if you look at network effect, that is a new concept that ad technology does not know because you can't cookie a network connection. The only way to measure someone's true network is through malware today, and that's not good, no one does that. Well, they do, they're-- >> Toni: Unfortunately, yeah. >> But you can't you do it at business price, not sustainable. So the point is, it's not about how many followers you have. It could be that one follower, maybe 200 or 2,000, that opens up more. This is the network effect. This is what this community is all about, so I want to get your thoughts on this community's vibe. A lot of mission-driven, impact-oriented, merged with tech. So you have a fusion of technology, artistry, craftsmanship and mission-driven societal change in one melting pot. This is your wheelhouse. Share your thoughts on this. >> Well, so all of the different digital currencies have different value systems and they attract a different breed. And there are different incentives for each of these based on how the technology is designed, each protocol, right? So if you look at Bitcoin, in Bitcoin, the incentives are, you know, mining is done by computers, so your only incentive is like having social influence? And this is, I think, why we've seen a lot of kind of I would call it a scarcity mentality in terms of the way, why we see even more trolls in Bitcoin is because social influence is a huge way that success is measured, because as a developer, you can't have, you can't achieve a level of status any other way as a developer or as an influencer in Bitcoin, because the Bitcoin network is so far removed from that. And that's actually a perverse incentive in and of itself, and not only that, but early days in Bitcoin, there were major organizations who would hire people to man 100 Reddit and Twitter accounts and go into the Bitcoin community and actually fragment the public opinion using a technique grassroots psychological insurgency. So buying Reddit accounts that had been active for the last 10 years and going through and, you know, essentially just stabbing at people and creating, even having conversations with themselves to empower the voice of trolls. And what happens is you start bringing out what we call, actually, what the former Assad called, after Henry Kissinger, there was a big move that happened in the Middle East, where Kissinger realized the Middle East was becoming too powerful, and he saw it as a threat to American democracy. And so Kissinger organized a deal that fragmented the Middle East. And Assad said to Kissinger that his actions would be, he played Assad, basically. And Assad said to Kissinger, "Your actions "will bring up demons hidden underneath "the surface of the Arab world." And that strategy is actually something used in the Bitcoin community to leverage the incentives that are created, which is why we have seen previously so much, even from our industry leaders, so much fragmentation and so much tension. But the network is the most secure and the least corruptible, hands down, fundamentally. It's real cryptography. >> But let's talk about that, I love this conversation, because with networks, you have the concept of self-heal, and this gets nerdy on the packets, how packets move, at that level, self-healing networks has been a paradigm that's been proven. So that's out there, that's got to go to a societal level. The other one is the incentive system, if you have an immune system, if you will, in a network, this is a cultural thing. So actions, the Reddit's obvious, right. Weaponizing content has been well-documented, it's coming now mainstream, people are getting it that this outcome was actually manufactured by bad behavior. Now, I argue that there's an exact opposite effect. You can actually weaponize for good, 'cause everything has a polar opposite. So what is your view on that, because this is something that we've been teasing out for the first time. How do you weaponize content for good, (mumbles) not the right word, but look for the opposite value? >> Right, yeah, I mean, it is in so many ways, right. So I think it's about, there's a professor at Stanford whose name is BJ Fogg, and he's a behavioral researcher and he talks about essentially, you know, he writes a lot about habits. But something that's even more interesting about his understanding of propaganda is I studied a lot of Edward Bernays, he's responsible, he created the theory of propaganda, right. And he's the nephew of Sigmund Freud, he's responsible for essentially every consumptive theory in like leading up to the last century, he's actually, I would say he's responsible for the state of advertising and the economy today, almost really single handedly. And what's fascinating about this theory is that you can use propaganda to get women to smoke by unearthing what it is unconsciously in men that makes them not want to smoke. You can also use propaganda to get people to invest in health and wellness. You can also use propaganda to get people to stop their bad habits. So it's understanding that a technique works in a cognitive capacity in a way that affects a large amount of people. And it's really about the intention behind why a person who has influence, as we were saying, is leveraging that relationship. So I would say it's more about-- >> So we have to reimagine influence. Because the signalings that are igniting the cognitive brain can be tweaked. So that's what you're getting at here, right, so that's what we have to do. >> And it's an illusion from almost every angle. It's even the idea that, in the United States, the level of influence the president has and who's running, you know, and who, yeah, and who's at the wheel, right. So it's, we live in a world that is built on manufactured consent, and manufactured consent is enabled through thinkers like Bernays and through what I call the illusion of things like our former construct of even American democracy. That these things we've imagined to be so, the foundation and the structure for the way that we live. All of those things have become so far removed from their theory that they're no longer serving the principles under which they were founded, and that disconnect is actually a huge, it's a gap, it's an inertia gap for exploitation or it's an inertia gap for growth, and usually what happens is you have the exploitation first. Someone says oh, here's a big gap of information asymmetry, so I'm going to exploit the information asymmetry. And then once people start realizing that that information asymmetry is being exploited, you experience a huge inversion of that and you have enough kind of, you have enough inertia behind that slingshot to launch it into something totally different. >> Yeah, this is a great concept, I interviewed the founder of the Halcyon HAL in Washington, DC, and she's an amazing woman. And she had a great conscious about this, and what she postulated was, bubbles that burst, exploitation's always, we've seen it in all trends. The underbelly, 'cause it's motivated, no dogma. They don't care about structural incentives, they just want to make cash. But she had an interesting theory, she was talking about you can let the air out of the bubble with community and data. So all the societal entrepreneurship activities now that are mission-driven, now getting back to mission-driven is interesting. There might be a way to actually avoid the pop. Because, depending upon what the backlash might be on the exploitation side, as we saw in the dotcom bubble, you can actually let the air out a little bit through things like data. I mean, how do you see, in your mind, just thinking out loud, how do you see that playing out, because we have community now. We have access to open data. Blockchain is all about immutability. It's all about power to the user's data. This is a mega trend. Your thoughts? >> So interdependence is huge in the blockchain community, and that's actually to touch back on the incentives in Bitcoin, I think that that's actually one of Bitcoin's, it's not that it's a wrong or a right, it just is, right, like sidechains will be launched eventually, but the idea that Ethereum created something that was adaptable and empowered people to be creative, and yet they're creating incentives for her people to launch products that are, I believe, 'causing, in some ways, could cause some serious harm to the ecosystem once the air is let out of that bubble. >> John: The data. >> The data, so data, yes yes yes. >> How do you let the air out of the bubble, because the pop will be massively implosion, it'll leave a crater. >> So data is a non-scarce resource. This is actually how I describe blockchain to people. And this is actually, I think, one of the, the challenge, if you want to look at it from the perspective of challenge, and then I'll talk about for the benefit, just between Bitcoin and Ethereum, there are obviously other blockchains, EOS is like coming out super soon, Holochain. There are tons, Steem has actually its own infrastructure, tons of other blockchains to speak about. But just to take these two main blockchains, which are not competitors. In Bitcoin, you have, it's really cryptography. Cryptography is not about, you know, like let's do some rapid prototyping, cryptography is about let's like put a lot of thought into this thing and have mathematical certainty that this is not exploitatable. And Ethereum is just kind of like, well, let's build a framework and then let people play as much as they can. And so there are challenges and benefits to both of those models, the challenge of Ethereum being that you've let all of this capital into the industry which is not actually, 46% of ICOs have already failed. Already failed. And then if you look at Bitcoin-- >> And a person with your industry (mumbles) at 1,200, so it's a 50% discount. >> Oh yeah, oh yeah. And then if you do the same thing and you're looking at the Bitcoin blockchain, we've seen that the capacity for innovation, Bitcoin could have done what, they could've been the first to market for what Ethereum is doing. And they chose a different route, and I think there are some pros and cons to both of those things, but I think there is an intentionality behind why the world played out in the way that it did. And I think it's the right strategy for both products. So the way I describe applications using blockchain technology to people and what I call the future of an infinite economy is that, if you think about why are Facebook and Google these multi billion dollars companies, it's really simple. It's because what do they own, right? The data, the data. And they're some of the last companies that are still stewarding these things in a way that is taking vast amount of aggregated ownership over an asset that people are generating every day that's extremely valuable to companies in the private sector. So the way that I describe blockchain is that, if we being to own our self-sovereign identity, then when we're owning our data, that's the foundation for universal basic income. If we take a non-scarce resource like data that's being generated every day, not just from us, right, but the data in the health of the ocean, right. The stewardship of the ocean, the health of the fish, actually saying okay, fish are thriving in this area, and so there's a healthy ecosystem, and so this coin is trading higher because we're stewarding this area of the ocean so we don't overfish. The quality of the air so that, when we're actually de-polluting the air collectively, everyone around us is creating and generating data to say we're making the air better. The air, actually, the health of our bodies, of our Earth, of our minds, of our planet, of even the health of our innovation. Right, what are the incentives behind our innovation, those are all forms of data. And that's a non-scarce resource, so if we take all of these different applications and make many different blockchains. Which I fundamentally believe that there's a powerful theory in having blockchains that are economically scarce, because I believe you're going to empower more diverse spectrums and also have a level of difficulty in creating the coin. You're going to have more innovation. And so-- >> Well, this is a key area. I mean, this is super important. Well, I mean, you step back for a second, you zoom out, you say okay, we have data, data's super valuable, if you take it to the individual's levels, which has not been, quite frankly, the individual's been exploited. Facebooks of the world, these siloed platforms, have been using the data for advertising. That's just what everyone knows, but there's other examples. The point is, when you put the data in the hands of the users, combine that with cloud computing and the Internet of Things when you can have an edge of the network high powered computer, the use cases have never been pushed before. The envelope that we're pushing now has never been in this configuration. You could never have a decentralized network, immutable, storing users' data, you've never had the ability to write the kind of software you can today, you've never had cloud computing, you've never had compute at the edge, which is where the users live, they are the edge. You have the ability where the user's role can enable a new kind of collective intelligence. This is like mind blowing. So I mean, just how would you explain that to a common person? I mean, 'cause this is the challenge, 'cause collective intelligence has been well documented in data science. User generated content is kind of the beginning of what we see in user wearables. But if you can control the data streaming into the network, with all the self-healing and all the geek stuff we're talking about, it's going to change structural things. How do you explain that to a normal person? >> You don't, you don't, right. So you show them. Because I can sit here all day and I can talk to you about, you know, I could talk to you about all of these things, but at the end of the day, with normal people, it's not something you want to explain. You want to show them, because with my, actually, my grandma gets Bitcoin. My grandma hit me up in like 2012 and she was like, "Do you know what that Bitcoin thing is?" I'm like, "Mimi," I'm like, "How do you know "what Bitcoin is, Mimi?" And she's just like, "I don't know, I read." You know, I was like, "This is, so what are you reading? "Like, are you hanging out on like libertarian forums, "like what's up?" And so-- >> What's going on in the club there, I mean, are they playing-- >> Yeah, but she is a really unique lady. So I would say that, for most people, they are not going to, when you explain things to people-- >> What would you show them, I mean, what's an example? >> The way that, so when I was, so I got into Bitcoin in 2011, and the way that I would explain Bitcoin to people is I would just send it to them. I would be like, "Here's Bitcoin, like take this Bitcoin, "here's some Bitcoin for you." And that was, people got it, because they were like, I have five dollars now in my hands that was not there. And this person just sent it to me. And for some people even still, you know, to be honest, even then, I remember how much energy it took for me to do that. Everywhere I go, I'd be like, in cabs, I'd be checking out grocery stores and I would try, I would essentially pitch Bitcoin to every person that I met. >> John: You were evangelizing a lot of it. >> It took so much energy though, and even after that, there was a period-- >> It was hard for people to receive it, they would have to do what at that time? Think about what the process was back then. >> Oh yeah. There were very few people who, even after doing that, really got it. But you know what happened. This is so much perspective for me, I remember doing that in 2013 and I remember, in 2018, actually, I think it was the end of 2017. I went to a gas station, it's the only gas station in San Francisco with a Bitcoin ATM. And I was like, I need to get some cash and I'm running on Bitcoin. >> John: You guys want a mountain view now. >> Yeah, yeah. And so I go in and these guys, I'm like frustrated, I'm like oh, the ATM is like the worst user experience ever, I'm like (groans). That's literally, I'm like, it's just, it was like eyes rolling in the back of my head, like just so frustrated because I'm a super privacy freak. And so it was just a super complex process, but the guys that, the guy's (mumbles) he looks at me and he goes, "Yo." And I was like, "What's up, man?" And he goes, "Are you trying to buy some Bitcoin?" I was like, "I'm trying to sell some Bitcoin right now." (John laughs) >> You're dispensing it, they're like yeah. >> Yeah, he's like, "Oh, word." And he's like, "How much are you trying to sell?" And I'm like, "I don't know, like 2K." And so he goes, "Aight." And he's like, "Let me hit up my friends," he literally calls three of his friends who come down and they just like, they're like, "Do you want to sell more?" They're like, all they just peer to peer. It's like we bypass the ATM and it was actually a peer to peer exchange. And I didn't have to explain anything. You know what made people get it? You showed them the money, you showed them the money. And sometimes people don't, you can explain these concepts that are world-changing, super high level or whatever. People are not actually going to get it until it's useful to them. And that's why a user interface is so important. Like, if you even look at the Internet. Who made the money on the Internet, right, it was the people who understood how to own the user interface. >> I had a conversation with Fred Kruger from WorkCoin, he's been around the block for a long time, great guy. We were riffing on the old days. But we talked about the killer app for the mini computer and the mainframe, the mini computer and then the PC, it was email, for 20 years, the killer app was email. We were like, what's the killer app for blockchain? It's money, the killer app is money. And it's going to be 50 year killer app. Now, the marketplace is certainly maybe tier two killer app, but the killer app is money. >> For sure, that's amazing. >> That's the killer app. Okay, so we're talking about money, let's talk about wallets and whatnot. There's a lot of people that I know personally that had been, wallets had been hacked. Double authentication (mumbles) news articles on this, but even early on, you got to protect yourself. It's something that you're an advocate of, I know recently, you've been sharing some stuff on Telegram. Share your thoughts on newbies coming in, be careful. Your wallet can be hacked, and you got to take care of yourself online. Is there a best practice, can you share some color commentary on when you get into the system, when you get Bitcoin or crypto, what are some of the best practices? >> It's not even, I think you need to remember a key principle of cryptography when you're dealing with digital currency, which was like don't really trust anything unless you call someone, you have like first hand verification from a person that you trust. Because these things are, I mean, I've had, literally last week, I had seven friends contact me, actually more than that once I posted about it, and they were like, "Is this you?" And I was like what, like people would literally just go online, they would scrape my Facebook photo, they'd go on Telegram and they would make, my name is @ToniLaneC, T-O-N-I-L-A-N-E-C, and so is my Twitter, and people would scrape my photos from my Twitter or my Telegram or my Facebook and they would create fake accounts. And they would start messaging people and say "Hey, like "what's up, how are you, that's cool, great, awesome. "So like, I need like 20 BTC for a loan. "Can you help me?" And all my friends were like, "I was just talking to you, is this you?" And I'm like no. And so I think that there's, the other thing you have to, it's not just security in terms of, and this is actually a problem Blockchain has to solve, right. It's not just security in terms of protecting your wallet and, you know, getting like a Ledger or a Trezor and making sure that you're keeping things like in cold storage, that you're going, there are so many, keeping your money in a hard wallet, not keeping your private keys on your computer, like keeping everything, storing your passwords in multiple places that you know are safe. Both handwritten, like in lock boxes, putting it in your safe deposit box or, you know, there are so many different ways that we can get into like the complexities of protecting yourself and security. Not using centralized cell networks is one of the big ways that I do this. Because if you are using two factor-- >> John: What's a centralized cell network? >> AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile. Because you are putting yourself in a situation where, if you're using a centralized system, those centralized systems are really easily exploitable. I know because my mom, when I was a kid one time, she put a password on my account so I couldn't buy games. I was not happy about it, it was my money that I was using, it was my money I was using to buy games, she was like, "You should just spend your money on better things." And so I remember going in when I was a kid, and I was like, this is my money, I totally want to buy this upgrade on this game. And so I went in and I essentially figured out how to hack into my own phone to be able to use my own money to buy the games that I wanted to buy-- >> Highly motivated learning opportunity there (laughs). >> But I realized that, in the same way we were talking about things that can be used for good can be used for bad, in the same way that someone can do something like that, you can also say, well, I'm in a call and say that I'm this person and take their phone and then get their two factor auth. So I don't use centralized cell networks, I don't use cell networks at all. >> John: What do you use? >> So, I mean, I have different kinds of like strategies or different things that mostly-- >> You might not want to say it here, okay, all right. >> Yeah yeah yeah, they're different, I'm happy to talk about those privately. The way that I've kind of handled that situation, and then the other thing that I would say is like, we really need hardcore reputation systems in our industry and for the world. And not social reputation systems like what is happening in China right now, where you can have someone leave you, like let's say I get into an Uber and I'm 30 seconds late. I can end up in a situation where I'm like not able to be admitted into a hospital or I'm not able to take a public train. Because someone rates me lower on this reputation system, I think that's a huge human rights issue. >> John: Yeah, that's a huge problem. >> And so not reputation systems like this, but reputations like the one we're working on at CULTU.RE that are really based more on the idea of restoration and humanization, rather than continued social exploitation to create some kind of collective norm, I think that kind of model is, it's not only a-- >> Well, the network should reject that by-- >> Toni: Exactly, exactly. >> All right, so let's talk about digital nations, we have China, so there's some bad behavior going on there. I mean, some will argue that there's really no R&D over there, and now they're trying to export the R&D that they stole into other countries, again, that's my personal rant. But the innovation there is clear, we chat and other things are happening. They finally turned the corner where they're driving a lot of, you know, mainly because of the mobile. But there's other nations out there that are kind of left behind. The UK just signed this week with Coinbase a pretty instrumental landmark licensing deal, which is a signal, 'cause I know Estonia, Armenia, you name every country wants to, Bahrain's got, you know, Dubai envy. So I mean, every country wants to be the crypto country. Every country wants to be the smart cities digital nation. I know this is something that you liked, and you and I were talking about 'cause we both are interested in. Your reaction, your thoughts on where that's going, I see, it's a good sign. What are the thresholds there, what are some of the keys things that they need to do to be a real digital nation? >> Well, I think it's less about digital nations in terms of like a nation is a series of borders, and more about first nations that we are, this is what we work on at CULTU.RE, that we are actually a nation of people and a lot of those nations have overlap and we should be able to participate in many different nations who have many different economies that are all really cooperating interdependently to create the best possible life for all human good, rather than just saying like I care about me and mine, because that strategy, the way government works now, it's a closed network with low trust that is extremely inefficient in management of resources. And the only way you can really-- >> That's the opposite, by the way, of what this movement's about. >> Yeah, exactly. And the only way you can have influence in government is to go in government and to work through government. All right. So it's the idea that, look at how much food we waste in the United States. If we took the food we wasted in the United States and repurposed it, we could literally cure world hunger. That is how bad it has gotten, right. And there are people starving in the US. There are people on food stamps in the US. >> Well, I mean, every institution, education, healthcare, you name it, it's all, you know, FUBAR, big time. >> Yeah, but we're throwing away tons of lettuce and all of this different kinds of produce because it like looks funky. Like this peach looks a little too much like a bottom. So we're like not able to sell it. >> Or lettuce got a little brown on it, throw the whole thing away. >> Yes, exactly, exactly, and that waste is unacceptable. So what we need to move toward is a model of open networks of governance where we have peer to peer distribution of finance and of resources in a way that allows people to aggregate around the marketplaces that are actually benefiting the way that they believe the world should work. So it's about creating a collective strategy of collective non-violence and eliminating harm, so obviously, you know, having a society that has enough proper incentives so that people are well off and that people are provided for, and I think blockchain will-- >> I noticed you're wearing a United Nations pin. >> Woo-hoo, yeah. And blockchain, I think, will also create this. >> John: I have one too. >> Let's up top. (slap) Yeah, I think blockchain will also help create universal basic income, but in addition to that, it's the idea that, if I'm living next door, I'll give two examples. So one is about the legality of the way that we contribute to the society. So let's say I have a next door neighbor. And let's say that this next door neighbor and I feel literally, we totally get along on everything, there's just one issue we feel we're like, I totally disagree with this, I totally disagree. And that issue is the use of, and I hope this isn't controversial to say, but anyway. So the use of medical marijuana, right. And it shouldn't be, because we can have two different opinions and the world can still work and that's the point. >> Well, in California, it's now legal to own marijuana. >> Yeah, for sure, it's legal here as well. So it's the idea that, if I, so let's say I'm a woman who, you know, I have someone in my life who was injured by a driver who was driving under the influence of marijuana. And so that's all I know about marijuana because I don't really do drugs, I've never been around drugs. So when I hear that word, I immediately think about the person in my life who was harmed because of, yes, and so immediately triggered, and I'm like, I don't want to support anything, I don't want to support anything to do with marijuana, I think marijuana is like the Devil's lettuce. And I have no interest in supporting marijuana. She never has to support marijuana, she doesn't have to. But her next door neighbor is a veteran with Parkinson's disease, her, me, whatever, is a veteran with Parkinson's disease, okay. And the only way that this man can move is, he's literally shaking, but when he smokes medical marijuana, he's actually able to, you watch and literally 30-45 minutes, he's upright, he looks like a normal healthy man. And so he says, "I believe that every, "after I fought in this, I believe every person "should have access to medical marijuana, "because this is the only way I'm able "to even operate my life." >> The different context. >> And I'm so, yes, exactly. And so what culture is really about is about understanding each other's context, that's even how reputation works. It's contextual awareness that provides greater understanding of who we are as individuals and the way we work together to make society work. So maybe they can mutually agree that he is not going to smoke while he's driving and he can pay to support everyone to have access who needs access to medical marijuana. >> Or he could finance Uber rides for them. You know, or whatever, I mean, these are mechanisms. >> Yes, yes, but it's the, yes, exactly, exactly. It's the idea that we are all, we're coming together to share context is a way that's not aggressive and not accusatory, so two people can believe two totally different things and still develop enough mutual respect to live together peacefully in a society. >> You know, the other too I'm riffing on that is that now KYC is a concept (mumbles) kicked around here, know your customer. I've been riffing on the notion of KYC for know your neighbor. And what we're seeing in these communities, even the analog world, people don't know who their neighbors are. Like, they don't actually even like care about them. >> Toni: For sure. >> You know, maybe I grew up in, you know, a different culture where, you know, everyone played freely, the parents were on the porch having their cocktail or socializing and watching the kids from the porch play on the lawn. Now I call that Snapchat, right. So I can see my kids Snapchat, so I'm not involved, but I have peripheral view. >> Toni: For sure. >> But we took care of each other. That doesn't happen much anymore, and I think one of the things that's interesting in some of these community dynamics that's been successful is this empathy about respect. They kind of get to know people in a non-judgmental way. And I think that is something that you see in some of these fragmented communities, where it's just like, if they just did things a little bit different. Do you agree, I see you're shaking your head, your thoughts on this? This super interesting social science thing that's, now you can measure it with digital or you can measure that kind of-- >> We can incentivize it. We can incentivize it. And that's the difference, measurement is one thing. Incentive is a behavior changer. Incentive is a behavior changer. And that is what we actually have to do in the way we think about the foundation of these systems, is it's not incentivizing competitive marketplaces that are like my way of thinking about this is right and your way of thinking about this thing is wrong, and like ah, it's not about that. At the end of the day like, I think we forget or misquote so much of, so many of the great thinkers of the last generation, like if you think about Darwin. What does everyone know about Darwin, right, it's like survival of the fittest. It's not what Darwin said, okay. It's misquoted and it's used, it's like one of those things where people who want to exploit-- >> It's a meme, basically. >> Yeah, people who want to exploit someone else's knowledge for their own ends will use that to, in some way, uplift the kind of like strategy of, you know, incentives of the time. What Darwin actually said was that human beings with the highest capacity for sympathy, qualities we now identify as altruism, compassion, empathy, reciprocity, will be the most likely to survive during hardship. Fundamentally, I mean, look at the state of the world today. It doesn't look good, it's like, you look at the way people interact with each other, it's like a virus that's attacking itself in an ecosystem that is our planet Earth, and we need to be, you know what is the antibody, our own sense of consideration for our fellow man. That is the antibody to violence. And so we can incentivize this, and we're going to have to because we're going to, AI, automation, these will fundamentally transform the way we think about jobs in a way that will liberate us like we've never known before. And once given the freedom, I think that we'll see the world start to change. >> Toni, I really appreciate you spending the time in this thought leadership conversation, riffing back and forth. Feels great and it's a great productive conversation. I got to ask you, how did you get there? I mean, who are you? I mean, you're amazing. Like, how did you get here, you obviously, Coin Telegraph's one of the projects you're running, great content. You're wearing the UN pin, I'm aligning with that. Got a great perspective. What's your story? Where did you come from originally, I mean... How did you get here? >> I think, you know, I don't know. I'm really connected to Saturn, I don't know where my home planet is. >> Which spaceship did you come in on? No, I mean, seriously, what's your background? How did you weave into this? 'Cause you have a holistic view on things, it's impressive. But you also can get down and dirty on the tech, and you have a good, strong network. Did you kind of back into this by accident on purpose, or was it something that you studied? What's the evolution that you have? >> Yeah, you know. I studied performance art and I was an artist all of my life. And I had a really big existential crisis, because I realized, as I was looking around, that technology was replacing every form. I remember the first time I watched an AI generate, this was maybe in like, I don't remember how, this was a long time ago, but I was essentially watching, before like the deep dream stuff, maybe like 2009 or 10. And I remember watching computers generate art. And I just was like, I was like mic drop, I was like anything that could ever be created can and will be created by computers, because these are, you are looking at this data, you can scan every art piece in the world and create an amalgamation of this in a way that extends so far beyond team and capacity that the form that we have used to express artistic integrity, all forms will, in some way, become obsolete as a form of creative expression. And I had this huge existential crisis as a performer, realizing that the value of my work was essentially, like, how long would the value of my work live on if no one is, I am not alive to continue singing the song. You don't remember the people who played Carmen, you remember Bizet who wrote the opera, you remember Carmen the character, but the life of the performer is like that of a butterfly. It's like you emerge from the cocoon, you fly around the world beautifully for a very short amount of time. And then you just, you know, stardust again. And so I had this huge existential moment, and it was a really big awakening call. It was as though the gravity of the universe came into the entire dimension of my being and said these, what you have learned has given you a skill, but this is not your path. So I went okay, I just need some time to like process that and so, 'cause this is my entire life, it's the only thing I ever imagined I would ever do. And so I ended up spending three months in silence meditating. And people are like whoa, like how did you do that? And I don't think people, I don't know, not that people don't understand, but I'm not certain that a lot of people have the level of this kind of existential moment that I experienced. And I couldn't have done anything else, I really just needed to take that time to process that I was actually reformulating every construct at the foundation of my own reality. And that was going to take, that's not something you just do overnight, right, like some people can do it more fluidly, but this was a real shift, a conscious shift. And so I asked myself three questions in that meditation, it was what is my purpose, what is the paradigm shift and where is my love. And so I just meditated on these three questions and started to, I don't know how deeply you've studied lucid dreaming or out of body experiences, but that's another, a conversation we can get into in another time, that was my area of study during that period. And so I ended up leaving the three months in silence and I just kind of, I started following my intuition. So I would just, essentially, sometimes I'd walk into a library and I would just shut my eyes and I would just walk around and I would touch books. And I would just feel what they felt like to me, like the density of their knowledge. And I would just feel something that I felt called to, and I would just pull it out of the shelf and just read it. And I don't know how to explain it-- >> (mumbles) Energy, basically-- >> I was guided, I was guided to this. This was in 2011. And so what I started getting into was propaganda theory, the dissolution of Aristotelian politics as an idea of citizen and state when we're really all consumers in a Keynesian economy structured by Edward Bernays, the inventor of propaganda, who essentially based our entire attitude of economic health on, you know, a dissolving human well being. Like, the evolution of our economic well being and our human well being were fundamentally at odds, and not only was that system non-sustainable, but it was a complete illusion. At every touch, point and turn, that the systems we lived in were illusions. And so is all of the world, right, like this whole world is an illusion, but these illusions in particular have some serious implications in terms of people who don't have the capacity, or not the capacity, everyone has the capacity, but who have not explored that deeply, right, who haven't gone that deep with themselves. >> And one of those books was like a tech book or was like-- >> It was just multiple, no, it was multiple books. And it's not that I would even read all of the books all of the way through. Sometimes I would just pick up a book and I would just open it to a certain page and I would read like a passage or a couple pages, and I'd just feel like that's all I need to read out of that book. It's, you just tune into it. >> When was your first trade on Bitcoin, first buy, 2011? >> You want to know something nuts? People always, people are like, "When did you first buy Bitcoin?" I was not, I didn't. So after I started, once you know, all this knowledge came to me, I just started talking about it, I was like, I've been given some wisdom, I just have to share it. So I started going out into the world and finding podiums and sharing. And that was when someone put a USB full of Bitcoin into my hands. I very rarely, I don't necessarily buy, I've just been gifted a lot. >> Good gifts. >> Toni: They've been great gifts, yeah. >> And then when did you start Coin Telegraph, when did that come online? >> So that was in 2013. I joined, the property had been operable for I think like three or four months. And some guys called me and they said, "We're just really impressed with you "and we want to work with you." And I said, "Well, that's nice," I was like, "But you don't have a business, right?" And they were like, "What do you mean?" And I was like, "Well, you have a blog, right?" And so I went in and I said, essentially like, here's, to scale the property, I was like, "Here's a plan for the next three years. "If we really want to get this property to where "it needs to be." I'm like, "Here are the programs that we need "to institute, here's like this entire, "countries we can be operable in "and then other acquisitions of other properties." I essentially went in and said like, "Here's the business model and the plan at scale," and they were just like, I think they were a little like, the first call that we had, I think they were just like, "We just called you to," it was a bold move, like, "We just called you to offer you something, "and you countered our offer by saying "we don't have a business?" It was one of those things, but they-- >> Well, it was the labor of love for them, right, I mean-- >> Well, for all of us, yeah, for all of us. >> When all you do is you're blogging, you're just sharing. And then you start thinking about, you know, how to grow, and you got to nurture it, you need cash. >> Yes, and so I essentially came in and then started, I was both editor in chief and CEO and co-founder of the property who helped bring in a lot of the network, build the reputation for the brand, create a scaling strategy. A lot of mergers and acquisitions, a lot of franchises and-- >> How many properties did you buy roughly, handful, six, less than six? >> So I would also say that-- >> Little blogs and kind of (mumbles) them together, bring people together, was that the thinking? >> Yeah, you know, what's interesting is media from all shapes and sizes, 15 to 20 offices in 25 different countries. I always say this when I talk about this, a very important lesson that I learned. How do you manage a team of 40 anarchists? You don't, you don't, that's the answer, you don't, you don't even like, you're like oh. I remember when I was like, "We're a team!" And someone was like, "No, we're not, "I don't believe in teams, I work for myself "and I don't need," I was like oh, wow. I was like oh-- >> John: The power of we, no. >> I was just like, all right, but it was a good learning experience, because I was like well, this is the way, these are your needs. So if that's your, I was like, well, let's embrace that, let's embrace the idea-- >> But that's the culture, you can't change it. >> And let's create the economy around that, let's actually do direct incentive for it, if you think that you're, if you want to be in this on your own, then let's say okay, we're going to make this fully free market economics and we're going to have a matter of consensus on whether or not someone who's exploiting the system, you write an article, you send it out, the number of views and shares that it gets from accounts that are, you know, proven verified, that is how much you get out of the bounty that's created from our ad sales, and if the community comes together in a consensus and says that someone wrote an article that was basically exploiting the system, like beer, guns, tits and weed plus Bitcoin and then they just shared it with everyone, then obviously, they would be weighted differently because the community would reach consensus so-- >> Change the incentive system. >> We just, I started, yeah, I started redesigning, essentially, once I had that moment, I was like okay, I was like, well, we really got to change the incentives here then because the incentives are not going to work like that. If that's the, if there's a consensus that that is the way you guys want to do things, then I got to change things around that. All right, cool, and so yeah, it was a really interesting awesome learning experience from like, you know, a team of like, maybe like 20 to 40 into, probably took it up 40, and then with all of the other, you know, companies and franchises, to about 435 people. And then just took the revenue from, yeah, just took, it was like skating revenue and then rocketing revenue. So that was really my role in the growth of the business and we're all, you know, it's amazing to see how these kind of blockchain holacracies work, you know, at a micro scale and at a macro scale. And what it really takes to build a movement, right. And then, in some ways, I guess it'd either become or create a meme. >> Well, I really appreciate the movement you've been supporting, we're here to bring theCUBE to the movement, our second show, third show we've been doing. And getting a lot more this year, as the ecosystem is coming together, the norms are forming, they're storming, they're forming, it's great stuff. You've been a great thought leader, and thanks for sharing the awesome range of topics here for theCUBE. >> For sure. >> Toni Lane here inside theCUBE, I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching our exclusive Puerto Rico coverage of CoinAgenda, we'll be right back. (energetic music)

>> Narrator: Live from San Juan, Puerto Rico, it's theCube, covering CoinAgenda, brought to you by SiliconANGLE. (salsa music) >> Hello everyone, welcome to our special CUBE exclusive coverage in Puerto Rico. I've been here on the island all week, talking to the most important people, entrepreneurs, citizens of Puerto Rico, the entrepreneur, the students, connecting with Blockchain, investors, thought leaders, and the pioneers. I'm John Furrier, the cohost of theCUBE, co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media, and we're here with Crystal Rose, who is the CEO and co-founder of Sensay, doing something really cutting edge, really relevant, and kind of ahead of its time, but I think it's time to get it out there and get that token program. Crystal Rose, thanks for joining me and spending time with me. >> Thank you for having me. >> So one of the things I think that you're doing, and I want you to explain this because it's nuanced, and a lot of the super geeks get it and alpha geeks will get it, but the mainstream people are used to dealing in their silos. I use Facebook, I use LinkedIn, I use Twitter, I use chat, I use Telegram, I use these apps. The world's kind of horizontally being disrupted because of the network affect that Blockchain and Crypto is now the underpinnings of, and there's ICOs out there and other things happening, but it's a disruption at the technology stack with software. You guys are doing something with Sensay in the SENSE token that is changing the equation of how people come together, how people grow and learn, whether it's a nonlinear path of some proficiency or connecting with folks or just learning, whatever it is, it's a discovery mechanism. Take a minute to explain what you guys are doing and why it's so important. >> Well we built Sensay to connect everyone together without any borders or intermediaries, and so really it's as simple as every phone has the capability to have a messenger. We have five billion phones that have SMS on them, and so we wanted to take the most basic messaging system, which is the most important thing that people do, and connect it to any other messenger, so Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Slack, anywhere where people are chatting, we wanted to create a system that is interoperable and can decentralize your contact list, essentially. >> Yeah, so this is important, so like most people when they go to social networks you got to find a friend, you get connected. In some cases I don't want to have to friend someone just to have a chat, I mean I may not want to friend them, or I might want to or it's a hassle, I don't know who to friend. Is that kind of where you guys come in? >> Yeah, that's one really great use case, because things like Facebook max you at five thousand friends, so if you friended everybody that you had a conversation with, if you needed to know something. Let's say that every Google search that you did was actually a conversation, you would cap the number of potential contacts. We have a circle of people around us that extends out with different tiers. But I think some of the most important people in our lives are actually strangers. So instead of building the social graph we wanted to build the stranger graph. Sensay cares more about what you know than who you know. Because if we can connect people together around similar interests and like-mindedness, we're connecting tribes, and that's really the innate human connection that we're all looking for. And it's also when you extend yourself outside of your social graph, you're most likely to educate yourself or to uplift yourself more. So the way to level up is to get somebody who's an eight or a 10 if you're a five or a two, and find someone outside of your current circle. >> And that also eliminates all this group think we've seen on some of these hate threads that have been on, whether it's Facebook or some IRC backchannel or Slack channel, you see the hate just comes in because everyone's just talking to themselves. This is the new way, right? Connecting out? Through the metadata of the chat. >> Exactly, we want people to seek out good connections, helpful connections, and so if you can both contribute what you know you get rewarded. And if you can ask people on the network you also get rewarded. So by asking something, you're receiving a reward. It's a two-way system. So it's not just the person who is helping, so we don't really encourage an economy of experts. We think that everyone is a sensei. A sensei literally means a person who's been there before. So we think of that as somebody who has had that life experience. And I think if we look at the internet, the internet democratized expertise. It gave us the ability for every single person to write what they were thinking, or contribute some kind of content in some way. But for 20 years the internet has been free. It's a really beautiful thing for consumption, and open source is the absolute right methodology for software. When it comes to your own content a reward makes sense, and so we wanted to create SENSE on top of the platform as a value exchange. It was a point system, so kind of like Reddit Karma. And we wanted to let people exchange it out for some value that they could transact in the world. >> So basically you're going to reward folks with a system that says, okay, first ante up some content, that's your SENSE token, and then based upon how you want to work with people in the network, there's a token transaction that could come out of it. Did I get that right? >> Exactly. So the person who contributes on the network gets rewarded for that data, and it can be anything that you've done in the past, too. So if you have a lot historical data on Facebook or on GitHub for instance. Let's say you're a developer and you have a bunch of repos out there that could be analyzed to see what kind of developer you are, or if you've contributed a lot to Reddit, all of that data is out there, and it's been something that defines you and your personality and your skills and who you are, so you can leverage that, and you can get a reward for it just by letting Sensay understand more about you, so the AI runs through it. You get more rewards, though, if you have real conversations. So it's almost like a bounty program on conversation. >> So we have the same mission. We love what you're doing. I'm really so glad you're doing it. I want to get to an example in Puerto Rico where you've reached out with strangers, I know you have. And get that, I want to get to that in a minute, but I want to continue on the Sensay for a second and the SENSE token. As you guys do this, what is the token going to be looking like to the user? Because you have a user who's contributing content and data, and then you have people who are going to transact with the token, it could be a bounty, it could be someone trying to connect. How is the token economics, just so I can get that out there, how does that work? >> Well right now in Sensay the transaction is peer to peer, so both users who are chatting have the ability to tip each other, essentially. They can give each other some coins within the chat. We have the concept that when you're having a conversation it's always a buyer and a seller. It's always a merchant and a consumer, and sometimes those roles flip, too. I'll be selling you something and eventually you're selling me something. But it's a natural way that we chat to transact. So that was the first way that the token could be used. We then realized that the powerful part of the platform is actually everything underlying the application. So the layer underneath really was the most powerful thing. And so SENSE network evolved as a way for developers who are creating apps or bots to be able to build on top of the network and leverage the access to the humans or to their data, and so now the token can be used to access the network. You get paid if you contribute data or users and vice versa, you can pay to access them. What that's doing is it's taking away the advertising model from being the only entity that's earning a profit on the data. So you, the user, when you're giving your data to Facebook, Facebook earns a lot of money on it, selling it over and over repeatedly to advertisers, and while it's technically yours in the terms you own it, you don't actually have any upside of that profit, and so what we're doing is saying, well why don't we just let a potential business talk to you directly on your consent and give you the money directly for that? So that two or five dollars for one connection would go straight to you. >> This is the new business model. I mean, this is something that, I mean first of all, don't get me started on my ad and tech rant because advertising creates a bad behavior. Okay? You're chasing a business model that's failing, attention and page views, so the content is not optimized the proper way. And you mentioned the Facebook example. Facebook's not optimizing their data for a user experience, they're optimizing for their monetization, which is counter to what users want to do. So I think you kind of are taking it in another direction, which we love 'cause that's what we do, we are open source content, but the role of the data is critical so I got to ask you the hard question. I'm a user, it's my data, how do the developers get access to it? Do they pay me coins or... You want developers because that's going to be a nice piece of the growth so what's the relationship between the developer, who's trying to add value, but also respecting the user's data? >> Exactly, so the developer pays the network and as a user you're a token holder, you own the network, essentially. So there is really no real middle layer since the token will take a small amount out for continuing to power the network, but a nominal amount. Right now the most expensive thing that happens is the gas that's on top of Ethereum because we're an ERC20 token. So we're looking to be polychain. We want to move onto other types of blockchains that have better, faster transactions with no fees and be able to pass that through as well. So we really want to just do a peer-to-peer connection. There's no interest in owning that connection or owning the repository of data. That's why the blockchain's important. We want the data to be distributed, we want it to be owned by the user, and we want it to be accessible by anyone that they want to give access to. So if it's a developer, they're building a bot maybe, or if it's a brand, they're using a developer on their behalf they have to pay the user for that data. So the developer's incentives are completely aligned with the peer-to-peer architecture that you have, users interests, and the technical underpinnings of the plumbing. Is that right? >> Exactly. >> Okay, good, so check. Now I got that. All right, now let's talk about my favorite topic, since we're on this kind of data topic. Who's influential? I mean, what does an influencer mean to you? Is it the most followers (mumbles) it's kind of a canned question, you can hear it coming. I'll just say it. I don't like the influencer model right now because it's all about followers. It's the wrong signal. 'Cause you can have a zillion followers and not be influential. And we know people are buying followers. So there's kind of been that gamification. What should influence really be like in this network? Because sometimes you can be really influential and then discover and go outside your comfort zone into a new area for some reason, whether it's a discovery or progression to some proficiency or connection, you're not an influencer, you're a newbie. So, context is very important. How do you guys look at, how do you look at influencers and how influence is measured? >> I think at the bare bones an influencer is someone who drives action. So it's a person who can elicit an action in another person. And if you can do that at scale, so one to many, then you have more power as an influencer. So that's sort of the traditional thinking. But I think we're missing something there, which is good action. So an influencer to me, a good influencer, is somebody who can encourage positive action. And so if it's one to one and you get one person to do one positive thing, versus one to a thousand and you get a thousand people to do something not so great, like buy a product that's crap because it was advertised to them for the purpose of that influencer making profit, that metric doesn't add up. So I think we live in a world of vanity metrics, where we have tons of numbers all over the place, we have hearts and likes and stars and followers and all of these things that keep adding up, but they have no real value. And so I think it's a really, like you said before, the behavior is being trained in the wrong way. We're encouraged to just get numbers rather than quality, and so what I think a really good influencer is is somebody who has a small group of people who will always take action. It can be any number of people. But let's say a group of followers who will take action based on that person's movements and will follow them in a positive direction. >> And guess what, its a network graph so you can actually measure it. That's interesting... >> Exactly, exactly. >> I can see where you're going with this. Okay, so I got to talk about your role here in Puerto Rico. You mentioned earlier about reaching out to strangers, the stranger graph, which is a way, people's outside of their comfort zones sometimes, reaching out to strangers. You came here in the analog sense, you're in person, but on the digital side as well, kind of blends together. Give an example where you reached out to strangers and how that's impacted your life and their life, because this is the heart of your system, if I can get that right. You're connecting people and creating value, I mean sometimes there might not be value, but you're creating connections, which have the potential for more value. What have you done here in Puerto Rico that's been a stranger outreach that turned into a wow moment. >> Our outreach has been so far an invitation. So we bought a space here that's turned into a community center. Even at the very beginning we had no power as most of the places around that have been sitting for a year or two or since the hurricane, and so we put a call out and said we'd like to get to know the community. We're doing something called Let There Be Light, which is turn the power on, and you know, we put it out to a public group and saw who would show up. So basically it's a community, central building, it's a historical building, so a lot of people know it. There's a lot of curiosity, so it was just a call, it was a call for help. It was really, I think the biggest thing people love is when you're asking them for help, and then you give gratitude in return for that help and you create a connection around it. So that's why we built Sensay the way that we did, and I think there's a lot of possibilities for how it could be used, but having that encouragement of the community to come and share, we've done that now this whole week, so this is restart week, and one of the other things that we've done is help all of the conferences come together, collaborate rather than compete, so go into the same week, and put all of these satellite groups around it. And then we blanketed a week around it so that we had one place for people to go and look for all of the events, and also for them to understand a movement. So we since then have done a dinner every single night, and it's been an open invitation. It's basically whoever comes in first, and we've had drinks every night as well, open. So it's really been an invitation. It's been an open invitation. >> Well congratulations. I really love what you're doing. You guys are doing great work down here. The event this week has been great. We've got great content. We have some amazing people and it's working, so congratulations on that. As you guys look forward, one of the things I've observed in my many years of history, is that there are a lot of waves, I've seen all the waves, this wave's the biggest. But what jumps out at me is the mission-driven aspect of it. So I mean I can geek out on what's the decentralize and the stacks and all the tech stuff happening, but what's most impressive is the mission oriented, the impact kind of thinking. This is now, society is now software driven. This is a new major thinking. Used to be philanthropy was a waterfall model. Yeah, donate, it either goes or doesn't go. Go to the next one, go to the next one. Now you have this integrated model where it's not just philanthropy, it's action, there's money behind it, there's coding, there's community. This is now a new era of societal entrepreneurship, societal missions. Let's talk about your vision on this mission and impact culture that's part of this ethos. >> I think impact is the important word there. So we think about, we think about bringing capital, like you said with normal philanthropy, you can bring capital and you can continuously pump capital into something, but if the model is wrong it's just going to drain, and it's going to go to inefficient systems, and in the end maybe do some help, but a very small percentage of the capacity of what it could do. So what we have the concept of is bringing funds here. We have a fund that was just launched called Restart Ventures, and the idea is instead of compounding interests, we want to make compounding impact, and so it's a social good focused fund, but at the same time all of the proceeds generated from the fund recycle back into other things that are making more impact. So we're measuring based on how much impact can be created with different projects. It could be a charity or it could be an entrepreneur. And if we're getting a multiple, most of that money is going back. So a very small percentage goes to the actual fund and to the fund managers, and the lion's share of the fund is going back into Puerto Rico. So I think if we look at how we can help in a way that is constantly regenerative, sustainable is good, regenerative is better. We want to at least elevate ourselves and get to the point of sustainability, but we're not improving at that point. We're still just fixing problems. We want regenerative. So if we can keep planting things that regrow themselves, if we can make it so that we're setting up the ecosystem to constantly mend itself, it's like a self-healing system of software, this is the right way to do it. So I think that's the new model. >> You built in some nurturing into the algorithm, I like that. 'Cause you're not going to do the classic venture capital carry, you're going to rotate in, but still pay some operators to run it, so they got to get paid. So I noticed in the announcement there was some money for managing directors to do it. So they get paid, and the rest goes into the compounding impact. >> Right. >> Okay, so I got to ask you what your view is these days on something that's really been important in open source software, which again, when I started it was a tier 2 citizen, at best, now it's running the world, tier 1. Open source ethoses are sprinkled throughout these new, awesome opportunities, but community made it happen. What is your current view on the role of the community, communities in general, to make this new compounding impact, whether it's software development, innovation, impact giving, regenerative growth. What's your view on community? >> If community operates with a mentality of giving or contribution over consumption we do a lot better. So when you have an open source network, if a community comes and they contribute to it more, that's something that regenerates. It keeps adding value. But if a community comes and they just keep consuming, then you have to continue to have more and more people giving. I think a really good example of this is Wikipedia. Wikipedia has hundreds of thousands of people who constantly contribute, and the only reward that they've ever gotten for that is a banner ad that says please donate because we don't do ads. So it's a broken model, because you want it to be free and you want it to continue to have the same ethos and you want it to have no advertising, yet the people who contribute most of the time also contribute most of the funding to keep it alive because they love it and care about it so much. So how could we change that model so that the community could give contributions while also receiving a way to make sure that they're able to keep doing that. And a reward system works, and maybe that's not the only solution, but we have to think about how we can keep creating more and more. >> Well I think transparency is one thing I've always loved. The thing that I always hear, especially with women in tech and these new important areas like underserved minorities, and also the bad behavior that goes on in other groups, is to shine the light on things. Having the data being open, changes everything. That is a huge thing. So community and open data. Your thoughts? I'm sure you agree? Open data and the importance of having the data exposed. >> One hundred percent. So our platform also has a layer of anonymity on the user by default, and part of the idea of being able to understand whether or not data is good. Because think of human data, we have to figure out quality. In the past there would be a validation system that is actually other humans telling you whether or not you're good and giving you some accreditation, some verification. This is our concept of experts on things. Now we would rather take consensus. So let's just crowdsource this validation and use a consensus mechanism that would see whether or not other humans think the data is good. If we're using a system like that, we have to have open data, it has to be transparent and it has to be able to be viewed in order to be voted on. So on our platform on just the first application on Sensay, we expose this consensus mechanism in a feature called Peek. So Peek basically lets you peek inside of conversations happening on the network. You can watch all the conversations that happen, the AI pulls out the good ones, and then you vote on them. >> It's kind of like when you walk into a nightclub, do I want to kind of hang out here? >> Yeah, you're kind of a voyeur but you get rewarded for doing it. It's a way for us to help classify, it's a way for us to help train the AI, and also it's a way for people to have passive ability to interact without having to have a conversation with an actual human. >> Well you're exposing the conversation to folks, but also you get signaling data. Who jumps in, who kind of walks away. I mean it's a gesture data, but it's a data point. >> Right, and it's completely private. So the beauty of the transparency is there's actually privacy baked in. And that's what I love about blockchain is it has all of the good things. >> Crystal, I got to ask you a final question. I know you're very busy, and thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts with me today here on theCUBE here in Puerto Rico. This week you've been super busy, you look great. I'm sure you've been up, burning the midnight oil, as they say. What is the, I won't say craziest thing because I've seen a lot of cool, crazy things going on here, it's been fun, what is some highlights for you? Conversations, meeting new people, can you just share a couple anecdotal highlights from restart week that have moved you or surprised you or just in general might be worth noting. >> I've been overall extremely surprised but the sheer number of people who showed up. I feel like a few months ago there was a small group of us sitting around wondering what it would be like if we could encourage our friends to come here and share the space. So just to see the thousands of people who have come here to support these several conferences has been amazing. My most surprising thing, though, is the amount of people that have told me that they bought a one-way ticket and have no intention of going home. So to make Puerto Rico your home I think is a really amazing first step, and I just did a panel earlier today with the person in government who had instituted Act 20 and 22, and that was the initial incentive-- >> Just take a minute to explain what that is for the folks that don't know what it is. >> Sure. So Act 20 and 22 are for the company and the individual respectively. They are a way for you to get a tax incentive for moving here as a resident or domiciling your company here. So you get 0% taxes. I think companies range up to 4% or something like that, and that incentive was created to bring more brilliant minds and entrepreneurs and different types of people with different vocations to the island. So basically, give them a tax incentive and encourage the stimulation of economy. So that has brought this wave of people in who have an idea that no taxes are great. At the same time they fall in love with the island. It's amazing because to me Puerto Rico is a combination of LA's weather, San Francisco's open-mindedness, and Barcelona's deep European history. It's just a really beautiful place. >> And it's US territory, so it's a short hop and a jump to the States if you need to, or Europe. >> Yeah exactly. And no customs and you have your driver's license to get here. Also it's a US dollar. And I say that because most people in America mainland don't realize that Puerto Rico is an American territory, and so they sort of think they're going to a foreign country because it's treated that way by our government. But what I've been really shocked about, though, is the sheer amount of innovation already here. The forward thinking ways of people and the embracing of things like open source and blockchain technology, because their minds are already in a mode of community, a mode of sharing, a mode of giving. >> We interviewed Michael Angelo from Edublock.ido, Edublock, they're connecting all the universities with blockchain. We also interviewed Damaris Rivera, with Puerto Rico Advantage. They'll move you down here. You can press a button, it's instant move. So folks in Silicon Valley who are watching who know us and around the world know theCUBE, there's a group of like-minded people here that have tech chops, there's capital flowing. There's capital people I know have moved here, setting up shop, as well as the Caymans and everywhere else, but it's nice. So it's kind of like LA. >> There is a lot of capital. I have just witnessed a couple hundred million dollars of funds that were established in the last couple of months. And this is around all different types of technology sectors. You don't have to be a blockchain company. You can be innovating in any way possible. One of my favorite projects is a machine that turns plastic bottles into diesel fuel. So one of the problems here is that the generators on the island, when we were here last time we met a guy that was working at a bar in a restaurant, and he was like, "Hey I saw you guys in New York Times "and I think you're like the Crypto people." And he had a conversation, and he said, "I was wondering if you could help my grandmother "who is stuck with no power, and it's been months, "and she's in her 90s, and she needs a generator to run "a machine that keeps her life supported." and so a couple of people went out to bring more fuel, bring a generator to donate. They started understanding that there are so many areas that still need this level of help, that there's a lot that we can do. So when I see projects like that, that's something I want to back. >> Yeah, it's entrepreneurial action taking impact. Crystal, thanks so much for coming out. Crystal Rose, CEO, co-founder of Sensay, real innovative company, pioneer here in the Puerto Rico movement. It's a movement, a lot of tech, entrepreneurs, capital, investors, and the pioneers in the blockchain, decentralized internet are all here. This is like the Silicon Valley of Crypto, right? >> I think they're calling it Crypto Island. >> Crypto Island, yes. It sounds like a TV show. We should be on it. It's not lost, it's Crypto Island. >> Exactly. >> Thanks so much for spending the time on theCUBE. >> Thanks John. >> John: I appreciate it. >> I appreciate it so much. Thanks for making sense of me. >> I'm John Furrier here on theCUBE here in Puerto Rico. Our coverage continues after this short break.

I'm from San Juan Puerto Rico it's the cube covering coin agenda brought to you by silicon angle hello everyone welcome to special cube covers we're here exclusive conversations at coin agenda we just had blockchain unbound Puerto Rico is where we're at and we'll covering all the trends and latest news and analysis and cryptocurrency blockchain decentralized internet my next guest is Dan Bates founder and president of impact PPA Dan great to have you on thanks John glad to be here so one of the trends I'm noticing is a couple things flight to quality on the ico side first of all lot of the Deadwood's being pushed aside by the community still some stuff out there that you know might not have a business model but good entrepreneurs doing it then you start to see real use cases emerging I interviewed Green Chain they're disrupting how produce grains movement between suppliers and buyers and other impact mission driven stuff like how do you solve the energy crisis right we're in Puerto Rico right the grids half alive everyone knows that you're doing something really compelling take a minute to explain what you guys are doing is you have a token up and running what are you guys doing what's your value proposition so what we do is we've created a system by which you can now have renewable energy delivered to developing nations and we've taken the intermediary out of the equation whereby the world bank historically would take years to fund a project if they would do that they're big trepidation was how do you get paid at the end of the day so what we've done is we've come up with a solution that allows for generation of rent you know with the energy using renewables and track it all the way through to a payment rail if you will that a user can now prepay for energy on their mobile device it's m-pesa if you know what end pace is in Africa 70% of the transactions in Africa are done on a mobile device we are decentralized and pace up for energy so ok mobile app I get out you everyone can think about BRR and all the benefits and Airbnb brings you just have stuff happened talk about what's under the hood what's actually disruptive about what you guys are doing give some specifics because you're tying into Isis and jittering energy using the blocks you have a token how does it all work okay so what we do is in in the in the ability to fund the project getting the World Bank getting USA USA ID out of the equation what we now allow for is the community typically we are very liberal or tend to skew liberal right we actually believe that climate change is real and we want to help support these economies and these new types of you know betterment of the planet right but we don't expect that to be a philanthropic effort so people will buy the impact token which will fund projects that will then create what we're doing right now it's an AR C 20 of what we call a gen credit not a secondary token it's a credit that allows people to access the ledger so a guy will go down to the store just like he does right now and he charges his phones with more minutes or with a data plan it's fiat to a plan a digital currency we do the same thing it's now fiat into a gen credit we call it that allows them and transact with the blockchain so we get identity we get reputation we get trust and honesty about those transactions using the blockchain okay so where does the energy come from because the energy sources now are interesting because you're seeing people do great amazing things solar panels wind farming they see an Asia top of the apartment buildings there's a lot of wind yeah generally but how do they move that power into the market all right so what we do is right now we're using wind and solar rooftop or micro grid for instance we just finished a project in Haiti doing 150 kilowatts for a town called les a wha they haven't had power in two years a hurricane matthew prior to Hurricane Maria coming through Puerto Rico Puerto Rico's in a similar situation right so we created this micro grid using their existing infrastructure of transmission to distribution then we put smart meters on the home that smart meter connects to the blockchain and now people can have power at their homes pay-as-you-go awesome so what I've been to some of the hurdles you guys have had obviously to me it's a no-brainer of energy being tokenized is that makes such sense why wouldn't you want to do that obviously these regulatory issues that are incumbent legacy Dogma or or specific legislation of paperwork what not where's the efficiencies being automated away with the blockchain and what are some of the hurdles that you guys have gone through to get to this point all right so we work in the emerging economies of the world oftentimes there is not the kind of regulation that we have in the US or in the developed world like the EU something like that so when we go out to remote we go out to remote places like you know in Kenya and Ethiopia Latin America wherever it might be we don't have some of the Institute's that you would have if you were trying to set this up in Palo Alto I don't have to worry about PG&E and an interconnect and an off take and all that so what we do is that we'll go out set up a micro grid we're giving power to people who may have never had it before so all those regulatory layers are stripped away they're grateful for it that can they pay for it yes they can't afford to go buy a solar panel and a wind turbine on batteries and inverters nor would they know how to hook it all up yeah but they know that if they can buy power on a cellphone like they're already doing for other goods and services now we've got a game-changer Dan talk about the token economics I get this the payment rail piece mobile app no-brainer I get that check okay easy to use now I want to as a buyer of energy there's a token I some children there where's the other side of the marketplace how does that token economics work do you just take us through a use case and walk us through that example sure so as I said the impact token is our base token that will be the the value token that purchasers will buy in order to fund projects once we go beyond that and we now have what we call a Jen credit it may not be a token in the traditional sense or a coin it's a credit that allows us to transact with the ledger that way we can know about these people one of the greatest opportunities that we feel that we have in the marketplace is identity and reputation you have a billion two people who don't have a connection what if we could learn about those billion too and understand how they use power and where they use power so Jen credits kind of off chain management that you're doing you write to the ledger for in term util access right for that Tran action I got to ask you about things like spoofing why can't I just take your energy this is where the tokens become interesting because I mean it should solve the spoofing problem well right and you know energy energy needs to be passed down copper it's got to go on a wire that doesn't mean somebody's not going to cut the wire and bootleg it and all that stuff smoothing is not going to be the problem in this case it is a physical connection that needs to be made our smart meters allow for us to turn on or off let that connection by the user right if he doesn't pay you don't forget it yeah you know there's vandalism they're stuffed all over the world and we have methods in place to try and mitigate that as much as possible you you saw our platform that we're building we're tokenizing our media business amazing you liked it was good thanks for the plug there I was an aspirin and we were talking last night about our you know generational gap between us and our kids and you have your son here and your son's working with you my sons Alex working with us we have a young team as well I want you to talk about someone who's so experienced in the business you've done a lot of variety adventures from you know film to entertainment technology us older veterans it's the polite way to say it have seen the movie before they've seen the waves this is a huge way but this wave is gonna be can surf a few of them hang ten on our boards but this wave is really gonna be powered and led by the younger generation what's your thoughts share your vision of the role that the younger generation has to take here and what makes them capable in your mind okay so I'm gonna answer that question two ways first of all I'm so enamored with what the younger generation is trying to do with this corruption let's change the existing paradigm and make something better that's what blockchain allows for all sorts of industries goods and services right it's gonna be amazing what these guys come up with that's one of the things I love about doing this thing right I'm an old guy and I get to hang around these young people makes me feel young again yeah but the other thing that we have and I think you share it as well as we have to offer to these young guys experience right it's not like we're gonna go out to a market that we don't know about and try and explore it for success you know I've been in the renewables business for ten years delivering projects to 35 countries I got my boots on the ground I got my hands dirty doing this for 10 years now and I think the other part of that building this project and making it successful is the team that we've put together behind it we have an advisor who advises presidents dr. Michael Dorsey that's really important that's valuable that he understands the global marketplace the way he does the other one is Vinay Gupta who has been in blockchain since the 90s and has always wanted to work in the developing world with a block came distributed ledger technology that's really important I think I want to just double down and we amplify that point this is not a young man's game only exclusively it's such this markets attracting alpha entrepreneurs older veterans because as you said earlier it disrupts every vertical that's right so experience and mentorship bringing people together that can help that's right celebrate the disruption that's right driven by the young guys cool I love that but it's not like Zuckerberg made this one comment oh if you're not under the age of 30 then you don't know such delivery he got his ass handed to him on that but in this case this market is open and willing to learn and the disruptions the mission that's right and this team matters that's our experience the makeup of your board makeup of your advisors since a roll for everybody look experiences capital right it is its own virtual currency having been in all these countries having worked with presidents having worked in the 90s you know since the 90s and what that is valuable it's intangible but it is valuable dan I think we just invented a new category in the ico category an advisor tokens [Laughter] cottage industry believe tokens anyway but imagine if you could actually measure an advisor yeah the quality of adviser and the roles that they play absolutely as a token that's coming up next in our our next I see oh hey I really appreciate what you're doing I love how you work with your son father-son team you recognize the role of how the generations can shift together love it love your mission thank you thanks for sharing the news coverage here in Puerto Rico been here on the island all week getting the best stories the best people sharing them with you were open content that's the cube doing our part here at coin agenda for one day we're not gonna be you tomorrow go to Vegas just came back from watching unbound great stuff John let me give you the the URL if you don't mind no problem please if you want to go learn more about us impact PPI calm great job impact PBA calm is the cube live coverage here in Puerto Rico more after this short break

>> Announcer: From Palo Alto, California, it's CUBEConversations with John Furrier. >> Welcome back to our special CUBEConversation here in Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media, and the co-host of theCUBE. We're with Grant Fondo who is an attorney, with Goodwin. Specializes in block chain, Initial Coin Offerings, also known as ICOs. Part two segment we just went over the high-level landscape, but I really want to walk through the playbook of ICO process. Call this the Initial Coin Offering, or ICO-101. Take me through the process, okay? Hypothetically, let's just say we want to do something, we want to have an ICO called "Crowd Coins". Something that we're looking at doing. But let's just walk through that. What's the advice, what's the playbook? Take me through the process. >> Sure. So the first question is, where are you located, and who are you targeting? So what I mean by that is, where is the founding team? Are they in the US? The threshold issue is whether they are in the US or abroad. If they're in the US, and they want to stay in the US, and most don't want to move, so they want to stay in the US, then we talk about, "Okay, you're going to be subject to US regu-- potentially subject to US regulation." And so, the next step on that is, who is your target audience for the token sales? Are you looking to do accredited investors? Are you looking for US people, are you looking for foreign, and who are those target people? So the threshold issue is, as I mentioned before, are you looking for accredited or unaccredited? Most people would rather, they believe in the democratization. >> Accredited over a million dollars of net worth? So it's like a... >> It's essentially a sophisticated-- yes, it's essentially a sophisticated investor. >> And what's the trade-off between the two of those? >> So the trade-off is, if you really want to get a large market, you do the unaccredited route. And that means anybody can participate. Accredited, if it's credited, it's a much more limited, typically from 50 to 100 people, high net worth individuals, there's a paperwork process, it's exemption under their security's rules. Most of the token sales we're seeing are unaccredited, although we're seeing a trend now, too, that people are doing a hybrid of accredited US investors, and unaccredited foreign investors. It's an interesting hybrid that we're seeing. But, so that's the initial threshold. We have many companies that say, "Well, what if we move our operations offshore? What if we open up a company in Switzerland or something like that?" And I think what they don't realize is that if they are trying to seek US money, or they are located in the US, or the money that they raise comes back to the US in some way, that they're going to be subject to US regulations. So simply sticking something offshore doesn't cut it from a regulatory perspective. So that's the first question we ask, is to trying to figure out, "Okay, where are we setting up this entity?" And typically you set up different entities to raise the token sale. >> So what if a company, say, us as an example, already exists, we're a Delaware corporation? Do I have to stand a new company up, or subsidiary? What's the playbook? So there's a clean sheet of paper is a new company, so that's where you start, I get that. But what about a pre-existing companies? >> So if you're a Delaware corporate pre-existing company, sometimes we'll set up a new, like a subsidiary. Sometimes just for typical corporate reasons it's good to set up separate entities. The other issue, threshold issue, is tax issues. We typically advise people to get sophisticated tax advice from CPAs, things like that, Deloitte's one of the players in the space, for example. And that decision then becomes, do you set that entity up in a more tax-friendly venue than the United States? The British Virgin Islands and the Cayman Islands are two of the examples of where these people set these entities up for tax purposes. >> The tax thing seems like it would take time. Does that slow things down, or is it...? It's super important, obviously. >> So, it does. It has a couple components. It slows it down because there's another player involved, you also have the potential transfer of assets and you have to figure out what are the assets that you're going to trade, move from the Delaware corporation, for example, to the Cayman Island corporation? You also have obligations of, you have to go live in the Cayman Islands for a while, which is not a bad thing. >> My wife wants me out of the house, time to go to the Cayman. >> So it's funny, I had a client who said, "Alright, let's set up in the hotel right next to the airport," and I'm like, "If you're in the Cayman Islands, go to the beach. Don't stay at the airport." >> Start scuba-diving. A lot of people would do that. Okay, so, great, so, jurisdiction and corporate structure is the first consideration. >> Yes. >> What's next? >> The next step is related to that, is what type of sale are you doing? Are you doing a token sale or a security sale? And what we mean, and that's a big threshold issue. What we mean by that is, and most of the sales are token sales. But is the token that you're using going to give someone equity in the company? Are they going to get a percentage of the profits from the company? Are they going to be able to control some of the decisions of the company? If so, that looks more like a stock. And so, therefore, it's deemed a security token. That is subject to SEC regulation, and there's a different route. Many people don't go that route, but some do. So, for example, people in real estate transactions where they want to give, use tokens, but they really want to give investors who get a percentage of the real estate profits. They'll go the accredited US investor route. For the other pivot is towards the utility token. Which is the utility token, like an arcade token, it's basically a token that works in the platform, and people use it so that they can transact on your platform, they can play games, they can get content, they can encourage people to find bugs in your software. >> John: So, transactional-type value. >> Transactional, exactly. >> So, smart network, smart contracts assume some sort of marketplace with coins and the currency, right? >> Grant: Exactly. >> Okay, so the next step. The tokens and security and utility, I get that. Okay, make that decision, now what? >> So the next step is, you need to do a white paper. And you need to hire a law firm to help you with the white paper and all the legal, all these different steps. So then we'll take a look at the white paper, and we'll advise them on what their token looks like, if they're trying to do the utility route we'll walk through the different language and things of that nature. We also try to clear it up, make it just a little bit more readable. And then, once they do the white paper, we then, also, help them with the pre-sale documents. Oftentimes they'll do two sales. So it's called a "pre-sale", which is where you give an opportunity for significant purchase, people that you believe will be significant purchases of tokens, and they'll come in and they'll buy a large amount of tokens, let's say $100,000 dollars in tokens, but at a significant discount from the price that will be for a regular token sale. So maybe a 20% discount. >> So once I have my token, security or utility, okay, now I got to go figure out how I'm going to sell this. >> Grant: Yes. >> And that's what we're getting at here. >> Yes. And so, typically you make a decision and do a pre-sale, and you raise a certain amount of money, and then you do the sale, the token sale, about a month later, typically. >> What about allocation of tokens? That comes up a lot. So I'm also thinking, "Okay, is there a structure for X percentage for the development, X percentage to sell, to offer to the community or network, how many stay in the company." we see people keep an allocation for the company, or, between 15 or some higher. So how do you put the pie chart together, or distribution of token? >> One of the things you have to figure out, is this a token that you're going to sell all your tokens right off the gate, except for some of the ones you keep, or do you envision later releasing tokens over time? So some of our token sales, every year, excuse me, token companies, will release tokens over the time to continue to provide tokens to the users. So you have to make that threshold decision. What you typically see, is you see a percentage kept by the company, you see, and it's usually, usually you see 15 to 20%, although I've seen companies up to 90%, and then you'll see a bunch of the tokens issued to the market, and they will tell people through their white paper what they intend to use that money for. Most of the times it's for R&D and development of the platform, and continued maintenance of the platform, but also legal and administrative expenses for that company. One of the big issues that companies face, is where are they in the development of that platform? Ideally, by the time they do the token sale, the platform exists and the tokens can be used immediately. That helps, we talked earlier about, being a security versus a token. That helps in that analysis. If you're building a platform, and you've already got it up and running, that looks more like utility token. If it's going to be a year or two before that platform's available for use, the SEC may say that looks more like a security. >> And a lot of people get flagged in ICOs where it's like, "We're going to see something in late 2018." And so they hope to raise money through the tokens to do development. And it can be like a Kickstarter kind of model there. But it's not legit. I mean, from a product standpoint. I shouldn't say, "not legit". It can be scrutinized. >> I think now, the SEC gave some guidance a couple weeks ago, and I think that in Coin Center, which is a very think tank in this area, they issued a spreadsheet, essentially, that talks about when are you more a token versus security. And I think that's an issue. I think, especially going forward, companies, if they can, are better off having a platform up and running by the time they issue the tokens. >> Okay, so next question is, okay, great, now I'm rockin' and rollin', now I got to do some blocking and tackling. I need a white paper, I got to have a website, what are the minimum viable elements that need to be in market for an ICO? Obviously a website. What are the elements there? >> One is the white paper, which we talked about. You also, as part of that white paper, you want to make sure you are conscious that this is a white paper that has to live and breathe potentially years, and so you want to be honest and forthcoming, and also give yourself some flexibility. But the other thing is, not every company is a super-sophisticated smart contract company. And so they'll often hire vendors to do that. >> John: Do the white paper. >> No, not to do the white paper, sorry, to do the actual smart contracts to set up the token sales. Those companies will also assist with the white paper, just like we do, but their primary platform, or purpose, is to help launch the smart contracts. You'll also have marketing companies that will assist with marketing the token sales, so that more of the community knows about your business, and that there's a platform out there and that hopefully that's a platform that you want to use tokens on, and so that's another component. And then, also, the tax advice that I mentioned before. >> Alright, so in that white paper, is also the consideration for who the service providers will be in the process. >> Sometimes. Not always, though. Sometimes it will identify who's going to get, if the service provider, for example, is going to get tokens, but oftentimes you don't see that in there. >> Alright, so white paper, probably an FAQ of some sort, but, again, thinking about this being an evergreen, living document that'll be on the web. It could bite you in the butt, or help you, so be careful, right? So that's what you're saying. Good advice. Okay. Tax considerations. Okay, now I have my tax hat on. Bring in Deloitte, bring in tax guys. What are they talking about? How does that impact the process? >> So, you mentioned the delay before. I think any time that you bring more players in it obviously delays things. But they're important players. All these are important players. And part of what you want to do, is you want to bring them in early, versus waiting, because the tax implications are significant. It takes time to set up foreign entities, it takes time to go live in the Cayman Islands, not the worst time, but it takes time. >> John: What duration in the Cayman Islands would someone have to live? >> I'm not an expert on that, but you're going to spend a couple weeks there, for sure, if not longer, and you're going to have to stay there through the token sale. >> Does the boat get paid as part of the token sale? >> I'll leave it up to you on how you decide to spend that money. >> Okay, so back on the jurisdictional thing, this is important. People, can they do it in the US? >> Yes. >> Yeah, they can. Okay. But how does that impact the process? Is it a tax issue, or is it just, comfort? What's the consideration between a Cayman Islands, foreign makes sense if you have people there, but Caymans would be the alternative to the US companies, right? >> So if you do it in the US, you can still have your operations here, and essentially you can have some people here, but the primary wallet, essentially, entity receiving the money would be in the Cayman Islands. If you decide, and that's really mostly for tax issues. If you decide to forego that, so some companies decide the tax issues are not significant enough that I want to deal with it, setting up a Cayman operation, there's a delay, there's expense, and we'll deal with the US tax issues. And so that's just a business decision. >> And because the tokens are viewed as income? >> Revenue. >> Revenue. >> Grant: It would be viewed as a revenue for the company. >> Okay, so does that mean, if a corporation wants to buy tokens, that's an expense? >> So, it's funny, we haven't had that question asked, and I'm not a tax expert, but yes, I think it would be an expense. >> We'll have to get a referral, get a tax guy in here to answer these questions. The post-ICO issues. Did we get to the ICO? So the next step is, okay, I got my tax considerations, it's time for the ICO. What happens next? Do I ring a bell? Is it a digital bell? What happens? >> It's kind of fun. Most companies, what they do is they put a countdown to when the ICO is about to start, and they usually give a window. And it's typically a two-component thing. One is, if we raise X, so let's just pick a number, $30 million dollars. It's a $30 million dollar X amount of tokens we sold, the token sale will stop at that point. And/or a time limit, so two weeks. We'll have a two week token sale. And so, you'll have the timeline, and they'll actually register for you on their website how much they've raised, how many tokens have been sold, as well as where they are in that timeline. And then the timeline ends either through one of those two mechanisms, and then the token sale is closed. >> And then I'm sure there's a protection issue around protecting the tokens. Can you add some color there? Because there's been rumors that someone raised $34 million dollars and lost it all. They've basically been robbed, digitally, by hackers. Who do you call, then? Better Coin Bureau? >> So we've dealt with that issue, and we can give advice when that happens, but it's a tough issue. Tracking, the FBI, obviously you notify the FBI... >> John: It's a fatal flaw. >> It's a real problem. Typically there are people abroad. So you have to assume it's gone. So one of the immediate things we talk about is security. And some of it is very basic security. And that is, if you are receiving all these Ethereum or Bitcoin or however you're raising it, set up a bunch of different wallets. If you're going to lose money, it's better to lose one out of 10 wallets, or one out of 20 wallets, versus one wallet with all your money there. So some of that is just prudent, in a sense, but I also think you really need to make sure. That's part of why you bring some experts in, if you don't have that inside expertise it's going to make it extraordinarily insecure. >> How do vet the service providers if I'm going to work with the company if I'm an entrepreneur or an entity to deal with the front-end of the first collection? The wallets make sense. You sprinkle it around, it's like digging a hole, or putting mattresses all over your house, so I get that. Who do I deal with on the inbound? Is there a central authority that takes the cash in before it goes to wallets, or it goes right into different wallets? >> That's where we talked about a smart contract vendor will assist you in setting things up so that it goes directly into a wallet. Part of it is just word of mouth. People get referrals, they look for who's done other ICOs. Part of it's reputational. Some of it, too, is when you talk to people, you can figure out, do they really know what they're talking about? Hopefully you have some IT security people on your team, or that at least you can rely on who can really vet, vet these providers and to say, okay, this is a really strong product, and we feel comfortable with that. And you're betting a lot on it, so it's a really important decision. >> John: So you invest in a security resource. >> I think you have to. >> Okay, now ICO is completed, everyone's high-fiving, the clock is ticking, and there's a post, maybe a trickle, or a one-shot opportunity, assuming that trickles is part of the process. What's the post ICO consideration? >> One of the issues is the money, right? So what do you do with it? So this is a pre and post token sale issue. And that is, do you provide employees, or founders, with tokens? And I think the consensus now is that the more you provide tokens for employees and founders it more looks like securities. So there's a tendency for people like advisors who come onto the company, to provide them tokens. I think there's a risk that if you do that, it looks more like securities. So you have to treat that money and that token, especially the tokens, because the company keeps some tokens, too, right? You have to continue to remember that that's a utility token, not a security token. As far as the money goes and what you want to use it for, you have to keep consistent with your mission. So it's just like crowdfunding. If you ask people to donate money to an idea, you can't change that idea. And if you do change that idea, you need to let them know about it. So you have to be very transparent. So there's no such thing as "free money", and I believe that one of the risks with the post-token sales is, some of these companies are not going to make it. And so you want to be very cognizant of that you're doing the right thing, you're making the right decisions. Pretend, in a sense, that it's truly your money, and every dollar that you spend is your own dollar. You want to use it wisely, and you never want to be embarrassed or ashamed or concerned about how you spent that money. >> As long as it's not buying a boat or having a, like on Silicon Valley, renting out Treasure Island and having a big party. Use it wisely, and to the mission of the firm. Okay, so the question I have for you, this comes up a lot is, okay, I get the utility token. That creates value for the currency, you're not selling the appreciation as an investment, it's a transactional component of a smart network with smart contracts, and values the creation and distribution of that value. I get that. If a company wants to do that, they can still have an equity plan, I assume, because you have to assume that that utility is contributing to the value of the overall enterprise itself, the company. That's where the employees would get the stock options in a normal stock option plan. >> Yeah, it's just like any other company. When you raise money, you still have equity. So I think they are generally Delaware corporations that stick with the standard structure. You can give options in the company. There's no concerns with that. >> So you have a coin vehicle going on, and a standard equity program. >> Grant: Yes. Absolutely. >> Okay, so, post-ICO, what else? Cross your fingers and hope you can use the development cash? >> I think, too, and this goes throughout the process from the beginning through the post, which is, be careful how you talk about the token sales. Don't talk about, "We're going to try to increase the value of the tokens." Remember, the token is a utility token. It's an arcade token. It's not a security. >> It's like playing a video game. Pinball Wizard. You pump it in to thing, play your game, and people get value out of that. >> So that's fine. But what you don't want to say, is you don't want to encourage people to continue to trade and buy the token for the purpose of they hope it's going to go up in value and not use the platform. >> Even though everyone's doing that. >> There's some truth to that. There's a little bit of, that's the elephant in the room, a little bit. But there's different ways to do that. As you build your community, as you talk about it and you're excited about your company, and people are. It's a great, it's a fantastic tool, and what's really been fun about it is you're seeing these companies that hadn't thought about the block chain and utility tokens and say, "Wow, this is such a great mechanism to build this huge community, and have all these people participate through these tokens. Setting aside the fund-raising aspect of it, but just this, it's a great mechanism to do this. The democratization of my platform. And I can reach internationally. So focus on that. Don't focus on the value of the token. There's another issue, which is putting them up on exchanges, particularly pre-token sale, I think you need to think twice about trying to connect with an exchange and sticking your tokens up on an exchange. >> John: Why? >> Because it sounds like security again. It sounds like you're trying to develop this market for more people to buy this token to go up in value. Now, it's okay to provide a platform, just like the arcade owner, it's okay if that arcade owner thinks that other people can sell his token for him, or her token for him, that's fine, but you got to be really careful about how you do it. >> So Brave browser, which is obviously utility, has BAT tokens. They're listed, I believe. >> So you can list, yeah and I think, you can list, I think it's just a risk. And I think what you don't want to do, is you don't want to say, "We're listing our tokens and trying to encourage people to buy the tokens." >> So it's optics. It's how you position it. >> It's important. The optics are important. >> So talking about expectations. Can we talk about this in our first segment, but I just wanted to just end this, ICO-101. Went through the process, overall expectations? Any thoughts on that? What people should expect? Duration? Fees? Costs? Is it order or manual, what solar system are they in? Million dollars is it going to cost, is it going to be $20K, how do you engage on fees, and then process timeframe? >> The process depends in part of the company. How far along are they on the white paper, how far along are they on the platform? But setting aside that issue, and more from the legal technical advisor, generally takes two to three months. We're seeing some that are longer. It takes time to put the white paper together, and we proof it and give advice, and then I'll also have some of the other advisers give advice on it. It does take time to set up the tax structure, so if you're doing the Cayman Islands, that's probably a two to three month process for sure. Depends on how much IP you transfer as well, so that can slow things down. >> John: Licensing and agreements. It's like standard legal stuff. There's no fast-track. There's no shortcuts. >> There's no shortcuts. You're bringing in an initial consultant so it takes time to negotiate. So I think safe, you're going to assume at least three months, if not, definitely more. >> Well, the number one question I think here, today, for you, is, who's going to pay for this hour? Who are we going to bill for this? >> Grant: You'll get my bill. >> I appreciate the candid conversation. Thanks for sharing your knowledge, again. This is an expensive hour here on the CUBE. The community is a freebie. Grant, thanks for sharing. You do some great work. I think I'm going to look back on this time in history and say, "Man, glory days, or hell-of-a time." It's going to crash and burn or go big, in my opinion. Great stuff. Grant Fondo. Attorney at Goodwin. Great firm, check him out. Doing great work. 25+ ICOs in the pipeline. Done a bunch of work. New area. Exploring the future of block chain, a lot of disruption, anything that has to do with supply chain, anything that has to do with technology, decentralize concepts in a distributed manner is really the rage. We see this as a game changer. It's SiliconANGLE. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome to theCUBE's presentation with Unstoppable Domains. It's a showcase we're featuring all the best content in Web 3 and with unstoppable showcase, I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We got a great guest here, Matt Mickiewicz who's the Chief Revenue Officer of Unstoppable Domains. Matt, welcome to the showcase, appreciate it. >> Thank you for having me. >> So the theme of this segment is the potential of the Web 3 marketplace with Unstoppable Domains. You're the Chief Revenue Officer, you guys have a very interesting concept that's going extremely well, congratulations. But you're using NFTs for access and domains, Of course through the metaverse is huge. People want their own domains, but it's not just like real estate in the sense of a website. It's bigger than that it's a lot going on. So take us through what is the value proposition and what is the product? >> Absolutely, so for the past 20 years, most of us have been interacting on the internet using usernames issued to us by big corporations like Facebook, Google, Twitter, TikTok, Snapchat, et cetera. Whenever we get these usernames for free it's because we and our data are the product. As some of the recent leaks in the media have shown incentive individual in companies are not always aligned. And most importantly individuals are not in control of their own digital identity and the data, which means they can economically benefit from the value they create online. Think of Twitter as a two-sided marketplace with 0% revenue share back to its creators. We're now having in the creator economy and we believe that individuals should see the economic rewards of what they do and create online. That's what we are trying to do in** support of domains is provide user own and control identity to four and a half billion internet users. >> It's interesting to see change that's happening with Web3 and just in cultural terms, users are expecting to be part of the creator the personality of the company, there's this almost this intermediation of the middle man whether it's an ad network or a gatekeeper of any kind people going direct, right? So if I'm an artist, I can go direct to my fans. >> Exactly, so Web3 really shifts the power away from a aggregators. Aggregators and marketplaces have been some of the best business models for the last 20 years onto the internet. But Web3 is going to dramatically change all over the next decade. Bring more power back in the hands of consumers. >> What type of companies do you guys work with and partner with that we see out there? Give us some examples of the kinds of companies you're doing business with end partnering with. >> Yeah, so let's talk about use cases first actually. Was the big use case that we identified initially for NFT domain names was around cryptocurrency transfers. Anyone who's ever bought cryptocurrency and tried to transfer it between accounts or wallets is familiar with these awkwardly long hexa decimal strings of random numbers and letters, or even if you make a single type of money is lost forever. That's a pretty scary experience that exists today. That 2 trillion asset dollar as a class with 250 million users. So the first set of partners that we worked on integrating with, we're actually crypto wallets and exchanges. So we will allow users to do is replace all their long hexa decimal wallet addresses with a single human readable name, like John.NFT or MattMickiewicz.crypto to allow for simple crypto transfers. >> And how do the exchange work with you guys on that is it a plugin, is it co-locating code together? What's the relationship between exchanges and Unstoppable Domains? >> Yeah, absolutely great question. So exchanges actually have to do a little bit of engineering list to work with us and they can do that by either using our resolution libraries or using one of our APIs in order to look up an Unstoppable Domain and figure out all the wallet addresses that's associated with that name. So today we work with dozens of the world's top exchanges and wallets ranging from OKX to Coinbase wallet, to Trust wallet, to bread wallet, and many many others. >> I got to ask you on the wallet side, is that a requirement in terms of having specific code and are the wallets that you work well with? Explain the wallet dynamic between Unstoppable Domains and wallets. >> Yeah, so wallets all have this huge usability problem for their users because every single cryptocurrency held by every single one of their users has a different hexadecimal wallet address. And once again every user is subject to the same human fallacies and errors where if they make a single type their money can be lost forever. So what we enable these wallets to do is to make crypto transfer simple and less scary than the current status quo by giving the users an Unstoppable name that they can use to attach to all the wallet addresses on the back end. So companies like Trust Wallet for example, which has 10 million user or Coinbase Wallet. When you go to the crypto transfer fields, there you can just type in an unstoppable name It'll correctly route the currency to the right person, to the right wallet, without any chance for human error. >> When these big waves coming out I got to ask this question, 'cause a lot of people in the mainstream are getting into it now. It reminds me of the web wave that hit the big thing was how many people are coming online, was one of the key metrics and how many web pages are being developed was another metric, which meant that people were building out webpages. And it's hard to look back and think, wow, that was actually a KPI. So internet users and webpages where the two proxies 'cause then search engines came out and everything else happened. So I got to ask you, there are people watching, they're seeing it on commercials on TV, they're seeing it everywhere stadiums are named after crypto companies. So, the bottom line is people want to know how NFT domains take the fear out of working with crypto and sending crypto. >> Yeah, absolutely, so imagine we had to navigate the web using IP addresses rather than typing in Google.com. You'd have to type in a random string of numbers that you'd had to memorize. That would be super painful for users and internet wouldn't have gotten to where it is today with almost 5 billion people online. The history of computer networks we have human readable naming systems built on top in every single instance, it's almost crazy that we got to a $2 trillion asset class with 250 million users worldwide. 13 years after the Satoshi white paper, without a human readable naming system other Unstoppable Domains in a few of our competitors, that's a fundamental problem that we need to solve in order to go from 250 million crypto users in 2022 to 5 billion crypto users a decade from now. >> And just to point out, not to look back and maybe make a correlation but I will, if you look at the naming system of DNS, what it did to IP addresses, that's one major innovation that enabled the web. Then you look at what keyword navigation has done on top of DNS, what that did for the industry, and that basically birthed Google keywords basically ads. So that's trillions and trillions of dollars. Again, now shifting to you guys, is that how you see it? Obviously it's decentralized, so what's different? Okay, I get, so if you compare here Google was successful, keyword advertising industry for the last of 25 years or 20 years. >> What's different now is? >> yeah >> Yeah, what's different now is the technology inflection points. So Blockchains have evolved to a point where they enable high throughput high transaction volume and true decentralized ownership. The NFTs standard, which is only a couple years old, has taken off massively around trading of profile pictures like CryptoPunks and the Bored Apes Yacht Club where the use cases extend much more than just a cool JPEG that goes up in value two or three X year over year. There is a true use case here around ownership of identity ownership over data, a decentralized login authentication and permission data sharing. One of the sad things that happened on the internet the last decade really was, that the platforms built out have now allowed developers to build on top of them in a trustless comissionless way. Developers who built applications on top of them, the early monopolies in the last decade, got the rules changed on them. APIs cut off, new fees instituted. That's not going to happen in Web3 because all permission list. Once an NFT is minted, it's custody in a user's own wallet, we cannot take the way it will continue to exist in eternity, regardless of what happens to Unstoppable Domains, which gives developers a lot more confidence in building new products for the Web3 identity standard that we're building out. >> You know what's amazing is that's a whole another generational shift. I've always been a big fan of abstractions when innovation is needed when there are problems that need to be solved, messes to be cleaned up, a good abstraction layer on top of new architecture is really, really phenomenal. I guess the key question for I have for you is, theCUBE we have all this video where's our NFT how should we implement NFTs? >> There's a couple different ways you could think about it, you could do proof of attendance protocol NFTs, which are really interesting way for users to show that they were at particular event. So just in the same way that people collect T-shirts from conferences, people will be collecting NFTs to show they were attending in person cultural moments or that they were part of an event online or offline. You could do NFTs for our employees to show that they were at your company during certain periods of the company's growth. So think of replacing their resume with a cryptographically secure resume like this on the Blockchain and perpetuity. Now more than half of all resumes contain lies, which is a pretty gnarly problem as a hiring manager that we constantly have to sort through. There's where that this can impact that side of the market as well. >> That's awesome, and I think this is a use case for everything we appreciate that. And of course we can have the most favorite cube moments, it can be a cube host NFT at Board Apes out there. Why not have a board cube host going on and then.. >> We're an auction for charity and OpenSea. >> All right, great stuff, now let's get into some of the cool tech nerd stuff, which is really the login piece which I think is fascinating. The having NFTs be a login mechanism is another great innovation, okay. So this is cool, 'cause it's like think of it as one click NFTs, if you will. What's the response been on this login with Unstoppable for that product? What's some of the use cases, can you get some examples of the momentum intraction? >> Yeah, absolutely, so we launched a product less than 90 days ago and we already have 90 committed or integrated partners live today with a login product. And this replaces login with Google, login with Facebook with a way that it's user owned and user controlled. And over time people will be attaching additional information back to their NFT domain name, such as their reputation, their history, things they've done online and be able to permission to share that with applications that they interact with in order to gain rewards. Once you own all of your data, and you can choose who you shared with . Companies will incentivize you to share data. For example, imagine you just buy a new house and you have 3000 square feet to furnish. If you could tell that fact and prove it, to a company like Wayfair, would they be incentivized to give you discounts? We're spending 10, 20, $30,000 and you'll do all of your purchasing there rather than spread across other e-commerce retailers. For sure they would, but right now when you go to that website, you're just another random email address. They have no idea who you are, what you've done, what your credit score is, whether you're a new house buyer or not. But if you could permission to share that using a log and installable product, I mean the web would just be much much different. >> And I think one of the things too, as these, I call them analog old school companies, old guard companies as referred to in theCUBE talk here. But we always call that old guard as the people who aren't innovating. You could think about companies having more community too, because if you have more sharing and you have this marketplace concept and you have these new dynamics of how people are working together, sharing will provide more or transparency but yet security on identity. Therefore things are going to be happening organically. That's a community dynamic what's your view on that? And what's your reaction. >> Communities are such an important part of Web3 and the cryptos ecosystem in general. People are very tightly knit, they all support each other. There there's a huge amount of collaboration in this space because we're all trying to onboard the next billion users into the ecosystem. And we know we have some fundamental challenges and problems to solve, whether it's complex wallet addresses, whether it's the lack of portable data sharing, whether it's just simple education, right? I'm sure, tens of million of people have gone to crypto for the first time during this year's Super Bowl based on some of those awesome ads they ran. >> Yeah, love the QR code, that's a direct response. I remember when the QR codes been around for a long time. I remember in the late 90's, it was a device at red QR code that did navigation to a webpage. So I mean, QR codes are super cool, great way to get, and we all using it too with the pandemic to ordering food. So I think QR codes are here to stay, in fact, we should have a QR code on all of our images here on the screen too. So we'll work on that, but I got to ask you on the project side, now let's get into the devs and kind of the applications, the users that are adopting unstoppable and this new way of things. Why are they gravitating towards this login concept? Can you give some examples and give some color commentary to why are these D-application, distributed application, dApps guys and gals programming with you guys? >> Yeah, they all believe that the potential for what we're trying to create around user own controlled identity. Where the only company in the market right now with a product that's live and working today. There's been a lot of promises made, and we're the first ones to actually delivered. So companies like Cook Finance for example, are seeing the benefit of being able to have their users, go through a simple process to check in and authenticate into the application using your NFT domain name rather than having to create an email address and password combination as a login, which inevitably leads to problems such as lost passwords, password resets, all those fun things that we used to deal with on a daily basis. >> Okay, so now I got to ask you the kind of partnerships you guys are looking at doing. I can only imagine the old school days you had a registry and you had registrars, you had a sales mechanism. I noticed you guys are selling NFT kind of like domain names on your website. Is that a kind of a current situation, is that going to be ongoing? How do you envision your business model evolving and what kind of partnerships do you see coming along? >> Yeah, absolutely, so we're working with a lot of different companies from browsers to exchanges, to wallets, to individual NFT projects, to more recently even exploring partnership opportunities with fashion brands for example. Monetarily, market is moving so so fast. And what we're trying to essentially do here is create the standard naming system for Web3. So a big part of that for us will be working with partners like blockchain.com and with Circle, who's behind the USDC coin on creating registry such as .blockchain and .coin and making those available to tens of millions and ultimately hundreds of millions and billions of users worldwide. We want an Unstoppable domain name to be the first asset that every user in crypto gets even before they buy their Bitcoin, Ethereum or Dogecoin. >> It makes a lot of sense to abstract the way the long hexa desal stream we all know, that we all write down, put in a safe, hopefully we don't forget about it. I always say, make sure you tell someone where your address is. So in case something happens, you don't lose all that crypto. All good stuff. I got to ask this the question around the ecosystem. Okay, can you share your view and vision of either yourself or the company when you have this kind of new market, you have all kinds of, we meant the web was a good example, right? Web pages, you need to web develop and tools. You had HTML by hand, then you had all these tools. So you had tools and platforms and things kind of came well grew together. How is the Web3 stakeholder ecosystem space evolving? What are some of the white spaces? What are some of the clearly defined areas that are developing? >> Yeah, I mean, we've seen explosion in new smart contract blockchains in the past couple of years, actually going live, which is really interesting because they support a huge number of different use cases, different trade offs on each. We recently partnered and moved over a primary infrastructure to Polygon, which is a leading EVM compatible smart chain, which allows us to provide free gas fees to users for minting and managing their domain name. So we're trying to move all obstacles around user adoption. Here you'll need to have Ethereum in your wallet in order to be an Unstoppable Domains customer or user, you don't have to worry about paying transaction fees every time you want to update the wallet addresses associated with your domain name. We want to make this really big and accessible for everybody. And that means driving down costs as much as possible. >> Yeah, it's a whole nother wave. It's a wave that's built on the shoulders of others. It's a shift in infrastructure, new capabilities, new applications. I think it's a great thing you guys do in the naming system, makes a lot of sense. It abstraction layer creates that ease of use, it simplifies things, makes things easier. I mean was the promise of these abstraction layer. Final question, if I want to get involved, say we want to do a CUBE NFT with Unstoppable, how do we work with you? How do we engage? Can you give a quick plug on what companies can do to engage with you guys on a business level? >> Yeah, absolutely, so we're looking to partner with wallet exchanges, browsers and companies who are in the crypto space already and realize they have a huge problem around usability with crypto transfers and wallet addresses. Additionally, we're looking to partner with decentralized applications as well as Web2 companies who perhaps want to offer logging with Unstoppable domain functionality. In addition to, or in replacement of the login with Google and login with Facebook buttons that we all know and love. And we're looking to work with fashion brands and companies in the sports sector who perhaps want to claim their Unstoppable name, free of charge from us. I might add in order to use that on Twitter or in other marketing materials that they may have out there in the world to signal that they're not only forward looking, but that they're supportive of this huge waves that we're all riding at the moment. >> Matt, great insight, chief revenue officer, Unstoppable Domains. Thanks for coming on the showcase, theCUBE and Unstoppable Domains share in the insights. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Okay, this CUBE's coverage here with the Unstoppable Domain showcase. I'm John Furrier, your host, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2019 brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Okay welcome back everyone we are here live in Las Vegas with Dell Technology World 2019 and I'm John Furrier and my co-host Dave Vellante breaking down all the action, three days of wall-to-wall coverage. We go all day, all night here at Dell's great event. We're here with the CMO of Dell Technology Allison Dew, great to see you, thanks for coming on. >> My pleasure, it's nice to be here. >> Good to see you again, Allison. >> It's fun. >> What a show, action-packed as always. We got two sets, we call it the theCUBE content cannons. We're just firing off content, a lot of conversations, a lot of boxes being checked, but also growth, lookin' at the numbers. The business performance of Dell is strong. Leadership across all categories, large-scale, and an integrated approach with the products and the relationship with VMware paying off in big-time. Azure News, Microsoft integrating in, so a lot of great product leadership, business results, things are booming at Dell Technologies. >> They really are and you know, when you think about the journey for us in particular over the last three years since starting the EMC combination, and all of the things that are written about integrations, technology integrations of this scale and scope, and you look at what the teams together have successfully done, the business performance, the share growth across categories, and as of today, the true end-to-end solutions that we're announcing in partnership with VMware and Secureworks. And we tend to be a pretty humble culture, but I will say, I think it's a pretty impressive result, when you look at most integrations are focused on don't break anything, and not only did we not break anything, we've kept the trust of our customers, we've continued to grow the customer base, and now we're really focused on, how across the Dell Technologies family, primarily with VMware and Secureworks and Pivotal do we bring to life the solutions that solve our customers' biggest IT problems. Pretty amazing spot to be in. >> You know one of the luxuries of doing theCUBE for 10 years is that we've had conversations over 10 years and I remember many years ago when Michael was about to go private, we saw him in Austin, was a small Dell world back then, we had two conferences, and he was standing there alone. We approached him, Dave and I, and we had a long conversation with him, he was very approachable, and then when he talked about, when he did the private and then the acquisition at these points, everyone was pooh-poohing it at saying, it's a declining market, things are going, why would you want to do this? Obviously the scale benefits are showing, but the macroeconomic conditions of the marketplace, you couldn't be happier for. Public cloud drove a lot of application deployment, you have SAS businesses started, you have on-premise booming, refresh and infrastructure, a complete growth. >> Right. >> Yeah, there's actual growth there. >> Right. >> So the bet paid off. You as a marketer have to market this now, so what's your strategy because you have digital transformation as the kind of standard positioning posture, but as you have to market Dell Technology on the portfolio of capabilities, which is large, I can only imagine it's challenging. >> So let me actually back up, and to one of the points that you talked about, and then I'll answer your actual question. So I can't remember off the top of my head, but we very jokingly talk about, in the era since the PC was declared dead, we have sold billions of PCs right and it would be funnier if I could remember the number, but you know we used to joke around with Jeff Clark, ala Monty Python, I'm not dead yet. >> Yeah. >> And so you get this hype about what's happening in the industry, and the truth is it's actually a very different picture than some of that hype, and one of the reasons I think that's important is because obviously we've continued to take share on the PC business, we've continued to grow there, but we also believe that the hype sometimes applies to these other technology cycles as well. So if you go back a couple of years ago, it was everything was going to the public cloud. If you don't go to the public cloud you are a dinosaur. You don't know what you're doing. You're going to go out of business. The traditional infrastructure companies are going to go out of the business, and to be honest, that is also just nonsense, right. And so if you think about what's evolving, is we believe very firmly that we're going to see the continued growth of a hybrid cloud, multi-cloud world and it's not one thing or the other. And in fact, when you look at all of the research around the economics of doing one or the other, it all becomes workload-dependent. So for some workloads you should go to the public cloud. For some workloads, you should have it on-prem and that conversation may not be as interesting a headline, but it's the truth. >> It's reality actually. >> It's the truth. >> Well it's also reality, the workloads are dictating what the architecture should be or the solutions. That's what you're saying is a reality. >> Exactly, and so that's why we're so excited about the announcements that we had this morning with VMware, with Microsoft. We're really talking about a multi-cloud, hybrid cloud world, and across all of the solutions that we announced this morning. The key, continuity and what we're really focused on, sounds so hackneyed, is how do we make it simpler for our customers? How do you make it simpler to manage and deploy PCs? How do you make it simpler to manage and deploy your cloud environment, that's it. >> So let's talk about the show a little bit, let's see 15,000 attendees, 122 countries represented, 4,000 channel partners, 250 industry analysts and media folks, so pretty big numbers. You could see it in the hallways. It's not quiet. You're kind of doing a lot of this. >> It's actually sort of hard to pay attention to you guys with all the noise in the background. You must be used to it. I'm like a goldfish, like what's happening? >> Now the interesting thing to me is, and we were talking about you know, it's the transitions, consolidations, oh it's traditional infrastructure companies are dead, et cetera, et cetera. I'd observe that over the years the testament of today's leaders is they respond, they don't just sit back and say oh Unix is snake-oil. Do you remember that famous quote? Look at what Microsoft has done, but my point is Michael's keynote today, it wasn't about a bunch of products, it was about big visions, solving a lot of the world's problems, and really conveying that Dell is in a position to help these companies as a partner. I presume you had some input to that keynote, I just wonder. >> I hope so. (laughs) >> What the thinking was there? >> So there's a lot of conversation and it's, you don't have to go that far in the media to read everything about technology as a force of evil in the world. One of the things that you notice, Michael's keynote this morning and I'll come back to what we're doing about it again later this week, is we are putting a very firm stake in the ground that we believe that technology is overall a force for positive change in the world and we're having a conversation about that on Wednesday that I'll talk a little bit more about in a second. And there's a subtlety there, that I think sometimes again, may not be the most interesting headline but is true, which is technology in aggregate drives great progress in the world, however we as leaders, we as humans, also have a responsibility to drive the responsible use of technology and so you see some of the conversations that we're having later this week in the Guru sessions, for example, where Joy Bilal-Meany is talking about responsible use of AI and some of the inherent biases in AI. Those are the tough issues that leaders need to be tackling now. >> Yeah well and one of the other you know, you're right a trade press loves to pick up on it and pick at it but one of the things to talk about, of course, is jobs, automation affecting jobs, I know Erik Brynjolfsson is one of your speakers, he's been on theCUBE before, and the discussion we had was machines have always replaced humans. For the first time ever,now they're replacing humans in cognitive functions. So the the answer is not protect the past from the future it's educate people, find new ways to be creative. I mean, technology has always been-- >> That's right. >> Part of human good and human advancement. There's always a two-sided coin, but it's got to be managed. >> That's right, one of the conversations that I think gets lost is when we talk about, I am a Battlestar Galactica fan, the second one not the one from the 70s, so you know I always say jokingly-- >> Darn. >> Yeah, yeah. >> We're a little older. >> Did you watch the one from the 2,000s? >> Yes, of course. >> 2,000s are so good. You know the conversation about are the Cylons coming to get us? And is AI really the thing that's destroying what's happening for human populations? The reality is AI has been evolving for many years, so it's not actually new. What is new is the combination of AI and data and the compute power to make that real and I do think it requires a different conversation with societies, with employers about how do you continue to reeducate your employee base? What does that mean? And that is really meaty stuff that we need to be leaning into. On aside, you've got me thinking of this whole Battlestar Galactica. My mind's thinking Star Trek, Star Wars. I heard a rumor that you guys had so many unhappy employees because Game of Thrones was on yesterday. >> Yeah. >> That you actually rented a big screen? >> Yeah, we did. >> A lot of Game of Thrones fans? Are you in that mix? >> So yeah. >> No spoiler alerts. >> No, I won't say anything about what happened. But I'll tell you, so we have all of our employees who work at the show, have to get here on Saturday or Sunday at the very latest. And even me personally, we came to Las Vegas and I thought, well I can watch it in my hotel room and then my hotel room didn't have HBO and I thought I don't really want to watch it on my little HBO Go app that's about this big because we're all waiting for what's going to happen in episode three, and I won't tell you if you haven't seen it. >> It's a lot of battling. >> So exactly, so my team and I had this conversation about could we have a joint viewing of Game of Thrones and it's really my team who did all of the work, but it was super-fun and we had a party with a bunch of team, had a few beers and it was fun. >> That's a great culture. >> I just wanted to get that out there. I think, cool culture. Allison, you mentioned something about the press and stories for good and how people looking for headlines. You know we're not advertising, so we're not trying to chase the clickbait, it's about getting the story right and sometimes the boring story doesn't get the headlines. Or the page views, advertising. So we're in a world now where a lot of other people in the media, they're censoring posts, there was an incident on Forbes where I wrote a negative post about a company and they took it down, that was Oracle. A lot of journalists looking for stories just to put tech in a bad spot. >> Right. >> And there's a lot of tech for good, but a lot of people can't point to one thing saying that's an example for tech for good and there's some few out there missing children, exploited children, trafficking, all kinds of things, talk about that dynamic because this is changing how you market, how people consume. You have the role of open communities. >> Yep. >> Social networking. A lot of dynamics going on. How do you view all this? >> So first of all, I think so much of the conversation about tech for good or tech for bad actually indexes only on social media and media broadly, and perhaps that's because it's the media who are writing about that. And so there's sort of this loop that we get in and I do think there are real issues that we need to think about in terms of social media. You guys likely saw Kara Swisher had a an op-ed in the New York Times after the Sri Lankan bombings where she, long-term technology advocate, actually said after the Sri Lankan bombings when the government shut down all social media communications, I thought that was a good thing and so that probably actually did help with the immediate situation on the ground and yet is a very scary precedent, right? I'd like to to take the conversation and say what about media? Right, so there's a lot of work that we need to do in order to maintain media fairness and then there's a whole other conversation about technology that we're not talking about. Everything that we're doing in terms of medicine and indexing the human genome, and addressing deafness and Michael talked about that even this morning, there are these really big technology problems that were really leaning into, and yet we're either talking about Amazon drone delivery or what Facebook is doing. We need to talk about those, but let's talk about where technology is really struggling to address real problems. >> I just read an essay yesterday from Dana Boyd who wrote a great fascinating piece around extremism in social media. Media's being hijacked by these extreme groups and they're mixing up causation and correlation and conflating many things to just tell a story to support an initiatives, no curation. >> Right. >> And with social media everything's open so that just flies out there. And so that's a big problem. >> And then takes off, you know. >> So how do you deal with that as a CMO 'cause you're spending advertising dollars. You're trying to deploy capital. You now have a new open source kind of mindset around communities customers are shopping themselves now. >> Right, so this is going to sound possibly a little bit overly simplistic but what I am responsible for in my job is the reputation and brand of this company right. I think about other things in terms of how we think about media and everything but I want to make sure that we are spending our media dollars in a responsible way and yet also recognize that people can disagree with us and that's okay and be comfortable with, we can be both a media advertiser on a publication who might write a review where they don't like one of our products and I'm never going to be in the business of saying take down our media dollars because that sets a terrible precedent and frankly there are people who would say take down our media dollars so that's one thing that we're really focused on. And then the other is, we consistently year-over-year are recognized as one of the world's most ethical companies and I will tell you from the leadership with Michael across the board I believe that that is true. And we actually think about business in an ethical way and we behave in an ethical way and that's why frankly you're not reading those headlines about us which are a lot more problematic. >> It's a cultural thing you guys have. Michael's always been a direct-to-consumer. That's been a direct mail, back in the glory days, now-- >> We still do that actually. >> Cloud, SAS, he texts me all the time. Hey John, what's going on? So he's he's open. >> Yeah. >> He's also now with Cloud and SAS, it's a direct to consumer business. >> I love your positive attitude. You have a session tomorrow, Optimism and Happiness in the Digital Age, looking forward to that. I have a personal question. So you started out your career, I think, in East Asia studies, right? >> That's right, good memory. >> You speak multiple languages. >> Yeah. >> I think three languages? >> If you count English, three. >> Yes okay so you're trilingual. >> Trilingual, yeah. >> If you speak two, you're what? >> Bilingual. >> Speak one, you're what? >> Monolingual, American. (all laughing) American, I was like, I know this joke. >> I wonder how that affected sort of your career? >> Absolutely. >> In terms of getting into this business. >> I would first say that I was an incredibly naive undergraduate. I wanted to be an editor of a paper and I loved foreign languages. So I studied Japanese and French and that led me to going to Japan as a very naive 22 year old and I started working in this small Japanese ad agency. I was the only non-Japanese person in that company and of course I learned some functional things in terms of the art of advertising but what I actually learned was how to survive in an environment that was so different to mine. Even if you speak Japanese, it is a language of unsaid things and you have to constantly be figuring out what's actually happening here and so ironically that decision that I made at 18, very naively, to study Japanese is one of the things that sets the course of my life because I've always been, my entire career, in international jobs and I think if I ever had to come back to just being in an American job, I wouldn't know what to do with myself, I'd be so bored. And it's also one of the reasons when we talk about technology and education and AI and what are robots going to do, This is my personal opinion, somewhat controversial opinion which is of course we need to support STEM, of course I want to see more women in STEM. At the same time, I want to see us focus our children on critical thinking skills. How do you write well? How do you have an argument? How do you convince somebody? And that's because until I went to business school I was a liberal arts major born and bred and so that's not the pat answer that you expect from somebody in my job which is it's all about STEM. It's about STEM and more. >> Emotional quotient's a big thing we're seeing a lot. The whole self. That's a big part of the kids growing up being aware. >> Yeah. >> Socially emotional. Allison, thanks coming on theCUBE and sharing. >> My pleasure. >> Great insights here in theCUBE. We're here with the CMO, Allison Dew, with Dell Technologies. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. Stay with us for more day one coverage after this short break. >> Awesome. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering Google Cloud Next 2018. Brought to you by Google Cloud and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE live coverage of Google Cloud Next '18 in San Francisco. I'm John Furrier with Jeff Frick. We're at day three of three days of wall-to-wall coverage. Go to SiliconANGLE dot com on theCUBE dot net. Check out the on demand videos and the Cloud series special journalism report that we have out there, tons of articles, tons of coverage of Google Next with the news, analysis and opinion, of course, SiliconANGLE. Our next guest is Indranil Chakraborty, Project Manager for IoT Google Cloud. Certainly IoT part of the network part of the Cloud, one of the hottest areas in Cloud is IoT. We've been seeing that. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for joining us. IoT is certainly the intersection of a lot of things: Cloud, data center, A.I., soon to be, you know, cryptocurrency and blockchain coming down, not for you guys, but in general those are the big hottest areas. >> IOT is not like, you can't say it's an IoT category, so IoT has to kind of sit in the intersection of a lot of different markets that are kind of pure playing. >> So I first want you to explain to the folks out there watching, what is the Google IoT philosophy? What is the products trying to do? And what are guys announcing here? >> Absolutely. Thanks for having me here, it's really great to be here. And if you think about IoT, and if you think about what we have on Google Cloud, we already have a great set of service for data storage, processing, and machine intelligence. Right, so we have Cloud Machine Learning Engine, we have an on start ML. So most of those data processing and intelligence services are already there. What we announced last year was Cloud IoT Core, which is our fully-managed service for our customers and partners who easily and securely connect their IoT devices to Google Cloud, so they can start transmitting data and then ingest and store in the user downstream services for analysis and machine intelligence. >> I mean, IoT is a great use case of Cloud because one, Cloud shows that you can be incented to collect data. >> Right. >> Cuz now you have the lower cost storage, You've got machine learning, all these things are going on. It's great. >> Exactly. >> But Iot is now the Edge of the network. You've got sensors. You've got cars, like Teslas, people can relate to. So everything's coming online has, not just an IP connection, anything that's a sensor. The IoT's been just evolving. What is the Edge to you guys? What does that mean when I say IoT Edge? What is Google view of the Edge? >> Yeah absolutely, it's a great question. You know, we identified early on the emergent trend of moving compute and intelligence to the edge and close to the device itself. So this week, as you already know, we've announced two products for Edge. One is Cloud IoT Edge, which is a software stack which can run on your gateway device, cameras, or any connected device that has some compute capabilities, which extends that powerful AI and machine learning capabilities of Google Cloud to your Edge device. And we also announced Edge TPU, which is a Google designed high performing chip for to run machine learning inference on the Edge device itself. And so with the combination of Cloud IoT Edge as a software stack and with our Edge TPU, we think we have an integrated machine learning solution for on Google Cloud platform. >> How does that get rolled out? So the chip, I'm assuming, you're doing OEM or deals with manufacturers. Same with the software stack. Is the software stack portable? Explain how you roll those out. >> Yeah, you know we are big into working with our ecosystem and we really want to build a robust part of ecosystem. So we are working with semiconductor companies, such as NXP and Arm, who will build a system-on-module using our Google Edge TPU, which can then be used by gateway device makers. So we have partnership with Harting, Nokia, NEXCOM. We're going to take those SOM, add it to their gateway devices, so to take it to the market. We're also working with a lot of computing companies, such as ADLINK, Acton, and a couple of others, Olya. So they can build an analytic solution using our Cloud IoT Edge software and Edge TPU to combine with the rest of Cloud IoT platform. So we're pretty excited about the partners. >> But every coin has two sides, right? So the kind of knock on the Edge is, now you're attack surface on the security side is growing exponentially. So clearly, security is an important part of what you guys do. And now this is kind of a different challenge when you're now, your point to presence is not like our point to presence, but are going to expand exponentially to all these connected autonomous devices. >> Yep, that's a great point. And you know, we take security very seriously. In fact, last year when we announced Cloud IoT Core, we reject any connection that doesn't use TLS, number one, right? And number two, we individually authenticate each and every device using an asymmetry keypad. In addition to that, we've also announced partnership with Microchip. So Microchip has built this microcontroller crypto, which can have the private key inside the crypto, and we use JWT token that was signed by inside the chip itself. So your private key never leaves the chip at all. So that's one additional reinforcement for security. So we have end to end security. We make sure that the devices are connecting over TLS, but we also have hardware root of trust on the Edge device as well. >> The token model is interesting. Talk about blockchain because you know, David Floy on our analyst team, he and I are constantly riffing on that. IoT actually is interesting use case for blockchain and potentially token economics. How do you guys view that? I know that you just mentioned that this is kind of a thing there. Does it fit in your vision at all? What's your position on how that would work out? >> You know, we are closely looking at the blockchain technology. As of today, we don't have anything specific to announce in terms of a product perspective, but we do have, we do use JSON web token, which is standard on the web, use to sign those using our private keys. So that works beautifully, but we're closely monitoring and looking at it. We don't have anything to announce today. >> Not yet, but they're going to share that. Their research is working on it, interesting scenario. So in general, benefits to customers who're working with IoT, your team, cuz you have the core, you have the chip, you have the software stack. There's always an architectural discussion depending upon the environment. Do you move the compute to the data? Do you move the data to the Cloud? What's the role of data in all this cuz certainly you got the processing power. What's the architectural framework and benefits to the customers who are working with Google. >> Yeah, so let's make a specific example, LG CNS. They want to improve their productivity in the factory, and what they've done is they've built a machine learning model to detect defects on their assembly line using Cloud machine learning engine. And they've used this one engineer a couple of weeks and they would train the model on Cloud. Now with Cloud IoT Edge and the Edge TPU, they can run that train model locally on the camera itself, so they can do realtime defect analysis at a pretty fast moving assembly line. So that's the model which we are working on where you use Cloud for high compute for training, but you use the Edge TPU and the Cloud IoT Edge for local inference for real time detection as well. >> How do you guys look at the IoT market because depending on how you're looking at it, you can look at smart cities, you can look at self-driving cars? There's a huge aperture of different use cases. It could be humans with devices, also you guys have Android, so it's kind of a broad scope. You guys got to kind of have that core tech, which it sounds like you're putting in the center of all this. How do you guys look at that? How do you guys organize around that? I think Ann Green mentioned verticals, for instance, is there different verticals? I mean, how do you guys go at that mark with the product? >> IoT is a nation market. And what we offer as Google Cloud, is a horizontal platform, what we call it is Cloud IoT platform, which has got Cloud IoT core on the Cloud side, Cloud IoT Edge, the Edge TPU. And we really want to work with our partners our solution integrators and ISVs, to help build those vertical applications. And so we're working with partners on the healthcare side, manufacturing. We have Odin Technology as one of the partner to really build this vertical up. >> You guys are not going to be dogmatic, this is how our IoT sleeve. You're going to let a thousand flowers bloom kind of philosophy. Put it out there, connect, and let the innovation happen with the ecosystem. >> Yeah, we really believe in driving, moving the, having robust ecosystem. So we want to provide a horizontal platform, which really makes it easy for partners and customers to build vertical solutions. >> Another kind of unique IoT challenge, which you didn't have in the past, we've all seen great pictures of the inside of Google Data Centers. They're beautiful and tight and lots of pretty pictures, very different than out in a minefield or a lot of these challenging IT environments where power could be a challenge. The weather could be a challenge. Connectivity to the internet could be a challenge. Obviously, and then you need to power them. When you talk about how much store do you have locally, how much compute do you have locally. So as you look at that landscape, how has that shaped your guys' views? What are some of the unique challenges that you guys have faced? And how are you overcoming some of those? >> Yeah, that's a great question and this is one of the primary reasons why we announced Cloud IoT Edge, which is software stack, and Edge TPU. So that for use cases where you have limited connectivity, oil wells or farm field, windmills. Connectivity is limited, and you cannot rely on connectivity for reliable operations. But you can use Cloud IoT Edge with our partner device ecosystem to run some of the compute locally. You can store data locally. You can analyze locally, and then push some of the incremental data to the Cloud to further update your model in the Cloud. So that's how we were thinking about this. We have to have some compute locally for those reasons. >> Release the hard coupling, if you will. So it's really got to be a dynamic coupling based on the situation, based on the timing, maybe. >> Exactly. >> Schedule updates, and these type of things. So it's not just connected. >> Exactly. It doesn't need to be continuously connected, right? As long as there's enough connectivity to download some of the updated model, to download the latest firmware and the software. You can run local compute and local machine learning inference on the Edge itself. That's the model we're looking at. So you can train in Cloud, push down the updates to the Edge device, and you can run local compute and intelligence on the device itself. >> A lot of conscious we've been having lately has been about, how do you manage the Edge, has been an area of discussion. Why I want to have a multi-threaded computer, basically, on a device that could be attacked with malware, putting bounds around certain things. You need the IP there. You want to have as much compute, obviously, we'd agree. But there's going to be policies you're starting to think about. This is where I think it gets interesting when you look at what's going on at the abstractions up the stack that you guys are doing. How does that kind of thinking impact some rollouts of IoT because I'm looking to imagine that you won't have policies. Some might trickle data back. It might not be data intensive. Some might want more security. Containers, all this kind of tying in. Is that right? Am I getting that right? How do you see that happening? >> So when you think about Edge, there are different layers. There are different tiers. There are the gateway class devices, which has high compute, and all the way to sensors. Our focus really is on the Edge devices, which has some decent compute capabilities and you can scale up to high-end devices as well. And when you think about policies, on the Cloud side, we have IM policies, so you can define roles, and you can define policies, based on which you can decide which devices should get what software or which user should get access to particular data types as well. So we have the infrastructure already, and we're leveraging that for the IoT platform. >> Yeah, and automate a lot of those kind of activities as well. >> Exactly. >> Alright, so I got to ask you about the show. What's some of the cool things you're seeing, for the folks that couldn't make it that are watching this video live and on demand. What's happening here at Google? What's the phenomenon Google Cloud? What are some of the hot stories? What's the vibe? What are the cool things that you are seeing? >> Absolutely. So I'm biased, so I'm going to start with IoT. You know, we have an IoT showcase where we have a pedestal where we're showing the Edge TPU and the Edge TPU board as well. And there is a lot of work which is happening there. There's a maintenance team there as well, so I would highly encourage attendees to go check it out. >> What are people saying about that? The demos and the sessions, what are some of the feedback? Share some color commentary around reactions. >> Yeah, we've been getting a lot of positive reactions. In fact, we just had a couple of breakout sessions, and a lot of interest from partners across the board to engage with us. So we are pretty excited with our announcement on the Edge side. The whole orchestration of training model in the Cloud and then pushing it down and then sending updates, that's where it really makes it easy for a lot of the partners. So they're excited about it as well. >> They're going to make some good money with it too. You guys are making the mark, and not trying to go too far. Laying the foundational work, the horizontal scale. >> Yes, exactly. And we really focused, for the Edge TPU, we really focused on performance per dollar and performance per watt. And so that has been what we are striving to really have high performance for lower cost. So that's what we're targeting. And a couple of other things, the whole server-less capabilities, and the fact that Cloud functions have become GA, is pretty exciting. And Cloud IoT Core is also a fully managed server-less architecture in a machine. The AI and auto ML which we announced with NLP and text and speech is pretty exciting as well. And that works very well with some of our IoT use cases as well. So I think those are a couple of announcements, which I'm pretty excited about. >> Yeah, I think the automation theme too, really resonated well on all that. Cuz what comes out of that is, humans still got to be more proficient in doing the new stuff, but also they got to run this. And you've got developers enough to build apps that drives value, so you got the value development with the applications, and then also the operational side, which is, I don't want to say becoming generic, but it's not specialized as used to be. Network operator, this guys does this, this gal does that. I mean, it used to be very stove piped. Now it's much more of a how do you run the environment? >> Exactly, and to your point, even on the IoT space, it's also very relevant. I mean there are a lot of overlaps between what used to be just devops and OTE and IT. There are a lot of overlaps there. And so we're looking at it closely as well to make sure that we can really simplify the overall requirement and the tooling which is needed for building an IoT solution. >> For the people that are not following Google as closely as say we are, for instance, they're not inside the ropes, inside the baseball, if you will, in the industry. See Google Cloud, they know Google as Gmail, search, et cetera. They look a couple years ago, Google Cloud had app engine, the OG of Google Cloud, as it's called. What would you say to the folks now that are watching? What's different about Google Cloud now, and what should they know about Google Cloud that they may not know about. What would you say to that person? >> Absolutely, and the first thing is we are very serious about enterprise. You can see here the number of attendees who have come here and how we have multiple buildings where we organized the conference. We're very serious over enterprise. Second, back in the days, two years back, we were really focused on building products, which works for specific use cases. We didn't think about end to end solution, but now the focus has changed. And we're really thinking about, we always had the technology with packaging the products, and now we're thinking about providing end to end solutions, the framework where for a business user, enterprise user, they can just take the solution, and they know it will work. Alright, so there's been a lot of focus on that. And our key differentiator is about machine intelligence and AI, right? That's where Google thrives. We've been spending a lot of time on it, and now we're focused on democratizing AI. Not just on the Cloud, but also on the Edge with the announcement of HTPU. >> And I really think you guys have done a good job with the mindset of making it consumable. In an end to end framework with the option. We've got Kubernetes, and Container's been around for a while, but it's working with multiple environments. I think that is a real mindset shift. >> Exactly. >> So congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for coming on, appreciate it. >> Absolutely, was great having you guys. >> Google IoT, just plug into the Google Cloud. It'll suck all your data in. Give you some compute at the Edge. Open it up to partners, really focusing on the ecosystem and enabling new types of functionality. It's theCUBE, bringing you the data here on day three at Google Cloud Next '18. We'll be right back with more coverage. Stay with us after this short break. (modern music)

>> Announcer: From New York, it's theCUBE. Covering Blockchain Week. Now, here's John Furrier. >> Hello everyone and welcome back to theCUBE coverage here exclusively at the block party, at the Crypto-House's part of Blockchain Week in New York City, Blockchain New York. Also, Consensus 2018 is having a variety of other events. I'm here with Allan Rothstein, the co-founder of Strategic Coin, also managing partner at Decentralized Ventures. Hey welcome to this Cube conversation. Nights, night party here, exclusive event here in the East Village, thanks for joining me. >> Thank you, thank you for having me. >> So, co-founder of Strategic Coins doing some great work in the maturization of this sector. Still in the first in the half inning, bottom of the first, some would say but also Decentralized Ventures, which I love the name because what does it mean? I mean, it means crypto, token economics, block chain, brand new field. >> Exactly. >> Emerging very very fast. >> And it's global, so it's decentralized. Right now we're in Malta, but we're going all over the world, Estonia, other countries because that's where this market is going. >> So for the folks that don't really grock all that, how would you describe it to your friend that says Hey Allan, what is this all about? What is this decentralized tokens, ICOs, blockchain, bottom line me, what's going on? >> Blockchain is probably the first really global business model that is not controlled by anybody, by any single government, by any single company, by any single industry. It dis-intermediates all of these industries that are filled with middle-men and which prevent end users and peers from interacting with each other. >> I was told by some guy I was interviewing in Puerto Rico, you know the United States is the place where all the money went into because that's where the entrepreneurial energy was. And Europe was the entity that was slow, antiquated, all these rules, hard to make money, hard to be a capitalist. He goes: "now, the United States is turning into Europe." We are the new Europe in the US and all the money is going outside the US, into massively growing middle-class economies outside the United States. And the perfect storm is the crypto token economic model, where money is just running hard. Your thoughts on that comment and reaction. >> I think it's exactly right, and more importantly the road blocks being set up by the US government are not only sending the economics to other places in the world, they're actually sending the technologies to other places in the world. So I've lived in New York all of my life, I've been on Wall Street; the reason I'm setting up in Malta is exactly for that reason. Because it is very difficult to work in Blockchain and crypto here. We don't know what the definition is. The IRS says that cryptos are property. SEC says that they're securities. SFTC says they're commodities. The FED says they're currencies. So you have four different agencies claiming jurisdiction and you don't know who to report to. You don't know what the rules are. >> And all the service providers like law firms, and advisories, accountings, they all come to a screeching halt because they don't know what to say. They don't want to get sued. Entrepreneurs give up, that stifles innovation. >> It stifles innovation, but it, more importantly, it's really sending potentially the most important technology overseas. And you have other jurisdictions that are grabbing at it. You've got Bermuda, I work with the government in Malta, and they are setting up what they call Blockchain Island. They are setting up a crypto-friendly regime. This will be the first EU country with a full set of regulations. It's not that the regulations are easy but you know what the rules are. And at the moment, that's the only EU country that you know all the rules. >> As all these regulations, I mean GDPR is happening this month, I still think that's a shit show, in my opinion, but we'll see what happens there. This is, all these regulations, I get it, but I think that as the economy starts to go global, it's a competitive opportunity for our country and nation to be a digital nation and do it right. And also, people need advisory. What the hell is the playbook? You can't just go to the manual, there's no manual for this. There's no playbook. Strategic Coin, Decentralized Ventures, other leaders in the community on the finance side are pushing the envelope to try and lead by example. Because, as you just said, things are pretty much sideways from a regulatory standpoint. >> Yeah, that's exactly what we do. So at Strategic Coin, we help with jurisdiction. We help with the regulations, we try and direct companies to understand what they're dealing with. We do deep research for companies, we help them work on the corporate side, we really help them navigate some very difficult and choppy waters. >> What's the biggest challenge that companies have right now? Is it domicile, is it token economics? >> The biggest challenge is, there are two. One is regulation, knowing what the rules are. Second one is banking. Without regulation, bank will not allow companies who are getting funding from crypto to open accounts and accept funds. Once regulation is in place, the banks understand that they're no longer at risk of violating laws because they know what the laws are. So banking, in particular is a real issue around the world. >> What's the overseas outlook, obviously age is booming, there's been some, you know here sound here and there, shut it down, build it out, other countries are saying we're going to be the first global Wall Street, clearing out crypto, the Fiat, moving it around. This is all up in the air. Who's leading and who's not leading? >> Right now, obviously Malta's leading because of the first EU country with a full set of regulations that they've proposed. Singapore is looking to do this. South Korea is starting to now turn. They were looking to shut down exchanges and they're actually now starting to realize that they're just sending business and technology overseas. >> What's your story these days, what are you working on? What did you do last week? Did you fly to South Korea, I mean you traveling a lot? What kind of, what are you working on? What kind of things? Give me a little taste of how your life goes every day? What are some of the challenges, opportunities you're working on? >> Well, one of the challenges is trying to filter all of the business that is actually coming to us with Strategic Coin and with Decentralized Ventures. We can handle the business because we have a lot of the answers that people are looking for. >> So you need to hire people? >> We are continuing to hire people. What's important with Strategic Coin is that we're hiring Wall Street people. We're hiring veterans in the industry. Many of these companies out there now are 25 year old kids, mom and pops, who really don't even understand what they're looking at. >> You know, baseball, the old expression about a five tool player, what's the equivalent, crypto young gun that you look for? What are the attributes that you look for in a candidate that really can handle the pressure. I mean it's not pressure, it's really just more of the pace. You need smarts, you got to have energy, got to have integrity but also you got to push the envelope. >> They have to work about 35 hours a day. They have to have the capacity to really continue to learn very very quickly to understand, to take direction. And to really understand what this business looks like and where it's going. >> And good money making opportunities as well. >> There are tremendous money making opportunities as there are in any new industry, in any new technology. >> Before we came on camera, we were talking about your background, some of the things you've done entrepreneurially and also growth. What's your assessment of the current wave we're in? Compared, you seen many waves, of all the waves, compare and contrast order of magnitude, this wave versus other waves. >> What's interesting about this wave is there have been paradigm changes in industry, technology, and they've taken generations. So, an understanding of how that change happens, generally is from text books, you had the industrial revolution and first software revolution in these generations for people my age, or people in their 40's. You've seen the software revolution then you've seen the internet revolution and now you're seeing this, so you actually have experience in seeing how these play out. And that's part of the reason that this technology is moving so quickly. I know how it's going to go, I've seen how it's going because I was involved in the internet. >> Software economics, you've seen software economics before, you know what it looks like. >> I've seen software and I've seen internet. And with blockchain, we know blockchain is here, and we don't know what use it's going to be, we know a lot of these companies are going to fall by the wayside. We know a lot of these companies set up a mom and pop will disappear and we know a lot of these ICOs will be acquired by bigger ICOs who have more experience. >> Well you know, just to add two things to that list of awesome commentary is add in open source software and cloud computing and you got the perfect storm. On top of what you just said, that is the magic. Alright, so I got to ask you for the young people out there, what's your advise, or if you could talk to your 22 year old self right now, what would you say to yourself, walking into this new landscape that's exploding with opportunity, change in all theaters? >> That's a really good question. I would say to try and find mentors, learn from industry veterans, as opposed to setting up your own shop, setting up your own ICO, thinking you're going to raise 50 million dollars and you're going to conquer the world by the time you're 25. >> Allan, thanks for coming on to share. I know you had a big party, we're having a great time here. Thanks for taking a minute out of the networking and schmoozing and to come in and speak with us on theCUBE here in New York City. >> Thank you. >> Alright, I'm John Furrier, we're here at Blockchain Week, New York, of course theCUBE's continuing coverage. Go to siliconangle.com, thecube.net for all the videos. We'll be at Consensus 2018 all week. More coverage on Silicon Angle and thecube.net. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: From New York, it's The Cube, covering Blockchain Week. Now, here's John Furrier. >> Hello everyone and welcome back, I'm John Furrier, co-host of The Cube. We're here on the ground, in the middle of all the action. Consensus 2018, I'm here with Andrew Prell, with Convergence. Cube alumni, we met in Puerto Rico, industry legend, veteran, been around, welcome back. >> Thank you, like to be here. >> So Convergence, you guys got a unique opportunity, we did a deep dive on YouTube, check Andrew Prell, Convergence, youtube.com/siliconangle, great video to watch from Puerto Rico. Quickly, one minute, explain what you guys do, and then we'll get into the new hot news. >> All right, so we're reimagining the whole video game space. We marry the consumer game industry to the out of home entertainment industry, into one operating layer, where all devices get to play against each other, in the same game space. Then we put our virtual currency on the Blockchain, to eliminate all the fraud and theft that happens when people try to convert their digital assets to actual cash. >> Okay, so what's the news real quick? Give us the update, what's going on, what's the update? >> Well see the update, we had initially named our token, back in September of 2014, while we're building everything out. We had named it Nano. Raiblocks, put it out on the Blockchain, just what a month ago, month and a half ago, as Nano, so we had to rename the token. So we announced, and we've already burnt them, put them on the Blockchain, they're in our wallets right now, on May the fourth, we announced our new token, as the Droid coin. So May the fourth be with you. (laughter) These are the Droids your looking for. So we have the Droid coin now in twenty different wallets ready to start deploying them as our white paper states. >> And you get the big momentum going on. Team updates, any new personnel, what's going on, what's the progress? >> Well the personnel actually, we just had a major event, called run for the unicorns, we had it in Louisville, Kentucky, derby week. And we took all the VIP's and press and that to the derby at the end of the week. It was a really great event. There's when we rolled out the coin, we had the team up on day two talking through all of it. It was really an awesome event then, we're now here at Consensus talking with Ledger. What they're doing right now really works well with our investment funds. 'Cause we did the, we talked last about the virtuous circle of a token based investment fund, and where we're breaking up ten funds allowing the VC's to have nine of them, and go up against the DOW on the Blockchain. Well the vault that the Ledger has, we're starting to walk through with them because we'll bring it to it's limits and it really seems like something awesome for, you know, just the whole Blockchain industry in general, in having that security at a industrial level or a institutional investor level. >> Andrew I would literally appreciate you coming back on. Real quick, what are you learning here at the show? What are doing, any business deals? Let's get the update on the ground here for you. >> On the ground here for me, we're actually have several major deals in the works that we're trying to close right now. If all goes well, by the end of this week, if not next, we will be done closing our funding rounds, period. And then from that point on, the only way you'll be able to get our tokens is to buy them from some of the startups that we're investing in, so. >> Great model. Check out our YouTube video with Andrew, deep dive, changing the gaming industry a whole nother level, really innovative solution and business model. And the tech underneath is all cutting edge. Andrew thanks for coming on The Cube again, giving us a quick update, I'm John Furrier here on the ground at Consensus 2018, in Manhattan at the Hilton Midtown for Blockchain week, New York City. >> But did we tell them where they can find our stuff? >> Go get, give the URL plug. >> Yeah, ico.silicanexus.com and fund.silicanexus.com that's where you can find all of our information on everything we're doing. >> All right, good luck with the progress, we'll be right back with more coverage after this break. >> Thank you.

>> Announcer: From New York, it's theCUBE, covering Blockchain Week, now here's John Furrier. (upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome back, this is theCUBE's coverage here in New York City in Manhattan at the Hilton Midtown for Consensus 2018 part of Blockchain Week New York. Our next guest here is Greg Landegger who's with Smith Parsons and Whittemore also known for Bit Digest, investor in this space since the beginning, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me John. >> So I've got to ask you, you've been an investor in a lot of coins and equity deals the space is now busting out, I mean first of all are you amazed by the amount of people here? >> I'm more than amazed, it's surreal. >> And you now have an interesting culture of new investors in the space coming in. What's it like for you working with the new investors? >> So we are a single family office that started originally in 2014 and the way I describe it is for the past few years I was the loser at the lunchroom, everyone was making fun of me and then last year all the cool jocks wanted me to sit at their table. (John laughing) A lot of our bankers, all the traditional firms, started calling up saying, "What are you doing? What is this bitcoin thing that you've been spending your time on?" >> So you had a nice little cover story there for a while but can't ignore the returns, at the end of the day. >> That's exactly right, last year was too good a year. >> Alright, so talk about some of the dynamics that you're seeing here at Blockchain Week. What are you seeing? What's the top story, what's the big news that you think is most important? >> I think the news right now is that there's real development going on, I mean we're all waiting, the holy grail to me is coming up with an institutional custodial project. Ledger Wallets announced something today so we're very excited about that and there's more and more effort being done in that area. And that's really what'll bring in more people into the market. >> Big controversy yesterday in the panel about you know Blockchain washing or you know seeing blockchain, pretty heated argument there, your thoughts? I mean obviously, it's early, embryonic, it's growing really fast, I've heard the same arguments when the web came along, too slow, you know it's not fully functional, but it was still early. Same here? What's your take on all this? >> As an investor we'd like it to be must faster, but realistically everything's surpassing any expectations. I mean nobody, if you talked to people early last year we would laugh about people predicting bitcoin at 2,500. >> So with the coins, talk about the investment you're making in coins. >> So we invest it. >> 'Cause that's different than the equity. >> It is, but we had a learning experience where one of our companies ICOed, we chose not to participate in it and it was the wrong decision, it really told us we need to be on the equity side as well the coin side. >> When was that? Early on or? >> Last year. >> Last year. >> The middle of last year. >> Okay, so what kind of coin deals are you doing? What's that profile? >> So we do a little bit of everything, I mean we've come up with a term rebel coins which are the top six coins, it's Ripple, Etherium, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, EOS, and Lightcoin, we like those. Then we invest in a total of about 20 coins. >> And the blockchain doesn't bother you in the performance and all that good stuff? >> No because we're making a bet on the future of different things >> Long game. >> It's a long game for us. >> What's your criteria for investment? You obviously get the, you're kind of a rebel in yourself, but your returns are there, I've seen this movie before in the web, but everything happened in the web and the returns were made you know really before the dot com bubble popped around 2001 timeframe. But there's still great returns, but the decisions were interesting then. How do you make your choices? How do you know what a good deal is? >> It's, I'd say 80% the team. Do they have the experience? Do they have an understanding of what they're doing? I mean I have a lot of great ideas on things I know nothing about and know I'll never succeed in 'em. So if we find a team that is experienced in an area, understands it, has a real go to market story, >> Interesting enough. >> that's exciting us. >> Okay so it's the classic criteria with a twist. How about running hard? You say really you got to run hard in this game it's a fast-moving, unlike the dot com bubble, this thing is highly accelerated, you got to, you can't be sittin' on you butt on this one. >> No agreed, you've got to be very aggressive in the area, but I think with the ICOs there's more money up front than people typically had and that's really what's changed the market a lot for us, is it's not a deal where the venture capitalists go out and give a million dollars to five companies, wait to see what happens, now those five companies are able to raise a lot more money, but it doesn't guarantee they'll succeed. >> Greg you've become kind of a great known investor, certainly the Bit Digest is well-known for great following there. I got to ask you the double coin question, pun intended. There's the good and the bad, name something that's really good about this industry right now, that people should know about that might not be familiar. And what are some of the things that you're concerned with? That you want to see kind of stopped, or bad behavior eradicated? Share your perspective on the double coin side of the life if you're in the crypto world. >> So let's, starting with the bad, I think it's education, people don't understand what's going on. We keep on hearing about Mt Gox, Silk Road, that's in the past, bitcoin, and I use bitcoin as a general term at times, but you know it is not a, I mean it's a transparent currency, it's safer than a lot of other things out there, people don't understand that and I blame the media a lot for just repeating the story, maybe it sells papers, but just people aren't explaining what's really going on in the market. >> That's the Ed model for you, if it leads, if it bleeds, it leads, and that's a story. No but I think people see the ICO things too happening right? They go, "Okay, there's been some scams on the ICO-side, so I've heard that story, you know I'm worried about that." >> I mean I've spent some time in the microcap space I dealt with a lot more questionable people in microcaps than I deal in crypto. >> You mean in the traditional market? >> Traditional, pink sheets area. >> So I think what's different now, I'd love to get your perspective on that I see at least, observation wise, is you have an open source ethos kind of community model where there's a lot of self-governing going on. Are you seeing the same thing? Is there people talking, it's a tight knit community, still small, growing, is there like a special self-governance thing going on in the finance world? I mean you know there's been talk on people kind of organizing, syndicating, pooling deals together, which is natural. But how about the self-governing aspect of it? >> You know I think, I mean people, the funds or the actual token offerings themselves, that's still something that needs to be addressed, people haven't done it in the same way a typical equity raise would be done and a lot of the different fund managers, let me back up by saying this is the most open market I've ever seen where everybody is willing to talk to each other to try and share ideas and make this grow and a lot of the fund managers are now looking at it saying, "We need some more governance." There're things going on today, such as in the ICO market, if you invested in equity, you never thought that a ICO offering may occur originally and is it a liquidity event and what happens? So we're trying to come up with some governance that hasn't existed but probably needs to be, but to be fair the companies that we've been lucky enough to invest with are supporting the ideas. >> Yeah so there's liquidity going on. It's a new kind of liquidity. What is that liquidity? Where is the liquidity? It's not just a Kickstarter campaign, there's actually liquidity going on. >> There is liquidity going on and I think we're trying to figure out how to now take equity that is established in the traditional sense, we talked about security tokens, but the companies that are actually have issued ICOs are trying to determine how to give a dividend or some form of liquidity to the shareholders and that's a new market. >> Greg does the domicile matter to you? Where they are located? I mean I've heard things like special purpose vehicles have always been kind of an analogy. >> I mean traditionally I will say no, our attorneys would say yes, but if it's a Cayman, we've invested in some Cayman companies, Europe, Asian companies, so that really doesn't bother us that much, again it's the team >> It's not a deal killer. >> It's definitely not a deal killer. >> But you'd prefer, obviously, security token, in the US. >> Delaware-based would make us the happiest. But if they have a real team behind it, if they have real attorneys, real auditors, we'll look past that. >> And global reach, that's a big factor. >> Absolutely. >> How much is global impacting this world? I mean, we're in the US, we're kind of turning into it. >> It's incredibly, but I think the one area where we need to do a better job is in expanding it, I mean there are a lot of foreigners at this market today, at this event, but it's, we know the US market really well, we don't know what's going on in Asia, we read the trade magazines and that's how we know what's going on there's efforts now, I'm even, Consensus announced today they're having an event next year, or this year, in Singapore. We need to have greater reach to share what's going on around the world versus what a few people are telling us. >> John: You see that as a big issue? >> I do, we don't see what's going on in China today, we don't see what's going on in Singapore, the Philippines, and that's where a lot of the effort is going on. >> Well I think you're right, I think one of the things and that's where fake news on Facebook, you know with the whole election here in the US and now outside influence, whether it's terrorist groups or propaganda-based systems, quality of the data >> That's exactly right. >> is a really important with real time. >> And the data's limited today, I mean it's not. >> I agree, I mean we totally agree with the same thing. Okay final thought, walk away this week from big data, not big data, Blockchain Week NYC, your big walk away here this week. What's your takeaway? What do you take home? >> We went in the right direction, I mean that this is still developing, we're not there yet, there's still a lot of work to be done, but long-term whether you believe in digital currencies or not today, this is something that central governments are looking at in supporting, enterprise is getting into it, and this is the future. So we made the right choice. >> And is it only going to get better you think? >> Absolutely. >> Yeah I think stability-wise, technically, and the business models are starting to shake out. Just quickly before, I know you got to go, thank you for your time, quickly token economics, big part of the business model side of it your thoughts and reaction to how that's going and how people should start thinking about that if they could meet their criteria for some sort of de-centralized business opportunity. >> So I think, it's looking at network usage, I mean that's really the way we look at it today, the fundamental model doesn't work, or we haven't been able to determine how to do that, but adoption, it's growth, and that's how we've focused things and see where it is. >> Well congratulations for all the work and all the work you're doing and that continue to do. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, appreciate it. >> Thank you very much. >> Great to have a big-time investor on theCUBE here. Big-time investors, we had entrepreneurs, we had folks from Europe, Lithuania, all over the world here on theCUBE, we're out in the open. This is theCUBE covering Blockchain Week New York City Consensus 2018, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. Stay with us for more, after this break. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From New York it's theCUBE covering Blockchain Week. Now here's John Furrier. >> Everyone I'm John Furrier, the cofounder and cohost of theCUBE. We're here in New York City for exclusive coverage of Blockchain Week New York put out with a variety of events. One is Consensus 2018 sold out packed house as well as another event Cryptohou.se here in East Village for a great event. And I'm here with Patty Perez who's the owner of the Cryptohou.se, used to live here. Hey thanks for having us today and I want to What's the story, you own this place. It's now a great venue for inspiring a lot of entrepreneurs who couldn't have an outlet to have their voice heard. >> Well originally this was my yoga school. It was a live work house for ten years and I closed it seven years ago and just lived here and, and now I'm ready for my next venue and I was telling my boyfriend that, you know, I really want to do something with my house. Sort of like the yoga school, but I'm so excited and interested in Blockchain for the last year and wouldn't it be great to have a social club or an education hub for this because I have no idea what's going on and I want to learn. And so why not have all the thought leaders come to my house and, and teach each other and just open it up to all of us because I know you're learning every day. I know I am. >> That's fantastic, and then in forces they learn the whole time and that's why they make some influences, but I think what's important here that I want to just share and it's a great story and I think you really deserve a lot of credit for it is that it's a venue for people to not only learn and share their experiences but it's also an outlet for some collaboration in the open in a way that's community based. It's not like a structured event, big tent event, sponsors everywhere, you know, make money. This is about people, the community having a access. And so I got to ask you when did this happen? Like just, 'cause I love this place. >> Well we've been coconspiring it and I've been speaking with Strategic Coin like come on, let's do this, let's do this at my house and they're so busy with you know a million projects and but somehow the waters parted and here we are and we got a great team together and Strategic Coin has been just amazing and >> Well I got to tell you in California, last week I was in San Francisco for some events, Red Hat Summit, big open source community. Of course we watched the Twittersphere and the Snapchat sphere, Instagrams, Facebooks of the world all that place. You guys had great buzz over the weekend and even coming in yesterday and today. A lot of great community conversations, not just people promoting their, their event at like Consensus, hey come to our booth. There's just authentic knowledge being shared on the digital sphere and that works, that connects with people so congratulations. >> There's a great need obviously, above and beyond us or anyone, it's so organic and today, yesterday there were a series of speakers and they were all amazing and interesting but today the conference took on what we coined as the unconference and sure enough it was more of a boxing ring than a conference, of debating and just sort of being in the vulnerable place of actually not knowing something and being in the inquiry in that uncomfortable space and people felt so comfortable to take deep dives into what they're actually wanting to create or, you know, so it's-- >> That's great progress too, when you have a debate and not have to worry about being judged doing a learning exercise. >> Exactly, and you don't have to, you know, look a certain way or have your, you know everyone was really like, you know what? And you don't know what you're talking about. It's like wait a minute. >> Sounds like my Facebook feed. >> (laughs) >> What did you learn this week? What was the big surprise for you? What was a cool thing you've learned? Can you share an anecdote so far from this week? >> Wow, that's a good question, and I have to respond right this moment. Well, the greatest thing that I learned is how much people need education around this. You know it, not just businesses, but everyone because it ignites, I think so. And also one thing that I've noticed more than anything else is that there is an interculteration between the old bankers and the new kids that are really and the old bankers are saying well you kids are idiots. There is an interculturation between the old bankers and the new kids that are really and the old bankers are saying well you kids are idiots. >> Cation like this in a way that can be contentious, offending sometimes, on the other side of the debate. But it's floating in the digital sphere so we believe at theCUBE, we've seen it with content. Good content, authentic, genuine content codeveloped creates community karma, and you're doing that here. >> Yes, I think so, and also one thing that I've noticed more than anything else is that there is an interculturation between the old bankers and the new kids that are really, and the old bankers are saying well you kids are idiots. And the new kids are like oh my God. >> John: Get off my lawn. >> And so it's so much fun just meeting in the middle and it's a whole new culture that's being created. >> Well I was having a conversation with Richard from Arcadia Crypto Partners and I was, and there needs to be some mentoring because this is an opportunity for both. I mean I know some of the smartest guys from Crypto are old dogs and gals, they're out there but the young guns have the energy and the ideas as well so I see a mix and I think it's important that the older generation, if you will, that's like I'm talking about me myself, you know, really kind of let the young kids in-- >> And there's a young kid in you that is so excited right now, I see it in your eyes. >> I wish I was 20 something, I wish I was 20. It's the most exciting wave, I've been involved in a lot of waves of innovation. This one, by far, is the best. >> I see the inner teenager right now. >> Okay we're bonding here on theCUBE. Patty thanks so much for doing what you do and Cryptohou.se is an amazing initiative and project, very strong mission, love the mission, and I love to promote it. Thanks for having us on theCUBE, thanks for having us-- >> Thanks so much, thank you. >> We appreciate it. I'm John Furrier here at the Cryptohou.se for the Block event but there have been events all week as part of Blockchain Week New York. Of course theCUBE is there covering it as usual. Thanks for watching, see you next time.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Hello everyone and welcome back to theCube's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18 here in Las Vegas. I'm your host Rebacca Knight along with my co-host Dave Vellante, and we are theCube. We are the leader in live tech coverage. We're joined by Sean Caron. He is the principal architect of Linium, at Linium. Thanks so much for coming on theCube again, you're welcome back. >> My second time, and thank you very much for the opportunity. I've really been looking forward to it all week. >> Awesome, Good to have you back. >> We love to hear that. So tell us about Linium and what you do as principal architect. >> Sure, so we are a gold services and sales partner of ServiceNow. Been in the ServiceNow space for about nine years total. And we specialize in helping organizations do digital transformations. So they want to take the platform and really get maximum value from that and that's both a technology discussion, but it's also a organizational change discussion, and you know can be a process discussion. All those kind of things are things that we help our customers with. >> We've been talking a lot about the technology but the organizational change is really what fascinates me. Can you tell, can you just talk about a lot of the organizational change challenges that customers are facing, and they come to you. >> You've got it right. So we've been in this business for 18 years. We started out as a Peregrine partner and also HP, when HP acquired Peregrine, and we noticed that we would get specs from customers and we would nail it. It would be a perfect technical delivery and then six months later when you talk to the customer, they weren't using the product. They didn't get any value from the investment that they made. So we started to engineer a process and we do that around, you know we look at the structure. Where is this project going to land? What's the structure around it? Who supports it? What's your culture? Do you have a culture of dedication to accuracy or customer service? If you don't have those kind of things, we can help build those in your organization. And of course that also gets to helping you find talent, right. So if you need the right people, we can help with that process. Helping you define business best practice process for your organization. Those are all things we work with customers every day and frankly we don't do technology projects. We only do a project where we know when we deliver the technology that that structure will be there to catch it and get value from it. >> So you were recently acquired by Ness Digital Engineering, >> Correct >> Which is really an interesting name for a company. Tell us more about the motivation for that acquisition and how things have changed, and what the future looks like. >> So for the first 17 years of our business we were a privately held company and we grew organically, and we did a great job at that. I mean we became several hundred employees across the U.S. and a couple in AMIA, and a couple in Canada. But to really take the next step right, we saw, we had a vision of what we wanted to do, to take that next step was going to require an equity investment of some type. So we started probably about this time last year, talking to organizations. Ness was one of the first ones that we met and it became immediately apparent that they were a great fit for us. So they have about, well with us about 4,000 people across the world. They're not a billion dollar company right. So their culture is very similar to our culture. They do digital engineering projects, industrial scale, you know hard core grade digital engineering projects, and they tend to focus on platforms that are front of the business, so customer touching. They own the platform under Standard & Poor's right, so they built that. So Standard Poor's ratings, all that information flows in, they do the ratings based on that. That's something they built. PayPal, they do a lot of work in the payments industry. But they didn't really do much on the backend right. The operations that keep all the lights on and obviously that's a great fit for Linium, where we would come in with the ServiceNow platform and help them with that process. So that really worked out well. It was a great fit for us. >> So how do you guys compete? What's your difference relative to, you've been here a while in this ecosystem. It's started to get crowded. How do you, what's your secret sauce? How do you guys compete? >> So our goal is always to try and stay 12 months ahead of where ServiceNow is going. In the past couple of years, that really has been around user experience. Really designing experiences with the platform that are intuitive, that don't require a lot of training, that allow people to approach the platform and get value from it very quickly. Whether that's end users, or our customer's customers. Those kind of things, really, and that's in our DNA. That's a big part of what we do is design these experiences and do them in a way that really help our customers get value. I would say, you know looking forward, so the buzzword that we've heard around here this week is DevOps right, and we see, and one of the things that Ness does very well is DevOps engineering. I think next year will be the knowledge of DevOps. It will be what everybody's talkin' about. ServiceNow will have a lot more throw-weight in that space. So really that's where we're going. We're helping people get that continuous integration, continuous deployment process using ServiceNow as a foundation. >> CJ Desai laid out the roadmap in more detail than I had seen publicly anyway, and we were talking to him and he said, "Look the motivation really came from the ecosystem." You know obviously the customers as well, but the ecosystem as well, wanted better visibility on what was coming, because you guys have to plan for that. You're tryin' to fill white space. You're tryin' to fill a vacuum. So I wondered if you could talk about that. It's a two-edged coin though right? I mean, but having that visibility has to be a godsend. >> Right and we found that when we are some number of months ahead of ServiceNow, we work very well with them. We, you know obviously, like any large ServiceNow partner, we're very plugged in to where they're going. Their roadmap sets our direction and the kind of things that we can do. But it enables conversations, especially DevOps, and user experience too, enabled conversations at new levels within the organization and that's a big differentiator for us. >> But so, what I'm trying to understand is you guys have to make a call on where to put your investments and your resources, and you don't want to, you've said a couple of times, you're ahead of ServiceNow by, let's say N months, six months, 12 months, 9 months, whatever it is. You don't want to develop something and put too much into something that they're just going to replace in a few months. >> Right. >> Dave: So how do you keep that innovation engine going on your end? >> That right, so it takes a lot of research. We have a person whose dedicated job at our organization is Chief Innovation Officer. She spends her entire day talking to customers, hearing what buzzwords are in the industry, looking and talking to ServiceNow, looking at where they're going. So how can we be positioned when ServiceNow gets there 'cause to deliver services, that's not an instant on right. If the technology shows up tomorrow in the next release, to be able to deliver services for that, you have to start well in advance to actually be able to do that, to understand the process, and the structure, and what's required. >> I see, okay so by being ahead of ServiceNow, what you mean is you're going to develop capabilities that plug in to their release when it hits. >> So that we can deliver to what they have, >> Not things that are duplicative, but things that are, add value when it hits. >> Yeah, I mean ServiceNow comes out with, let's say automated testing. That's something they want to really, they want to get into the automated testing market. That's a discipline. You can't be instant on with that and if you want to have credibility with customers, you have to have trained people. You've got to be six months ahead to be able to step into that world and get value from the platform. >> So take the DevOps example that we heard Pat Casey talk about yesterday. So you guys are preparing for that now obviously. >> Yes. >> And how will you go about it? How will that change your customers world? If can take us through an example. >> So obviously DevOps is, you know it's the big accelerator. It's the idea of we're going to do what we've always done and we're going to do it in timeframes that are minutes or hours, as opposed to weeks, or months, or even years right, so it's a big ramp up. So understanding how to put that in play is a big deal. If you're a startup, alright so one of the themes of DevOps is the two pizza team right. You should never have teams bigger than you can feed with a couple of pizzas. If you're a startup and you already got a two pizza team it's easy to do DevOps. You build it into your culture and away you go. But our customers, you know many of our customers, one we were talkin' about here, talking to here at the show, 130 year old firm and they want to do DevOps. So what's that on-ramp? How do you figure that out? One of our new colleagues from Ness, who has been in the DevOps world for a while says, "You know, it's all about unlearning stuff." Because in order to move into this world, you got to unlearn that old world. >> Well right, it is a mindset. >> It is, it's a culture. >> So how, and one that will be very tricky for a 130 year old firm that maybe doesn't order pizzas that often (chuckling) for it's team. So how do you do that? I mean that's a challenge. >> We're working diligently on having a roadmap to onboard DevOps into existing organizations. The secret really tends to be, start with a NET new project and introduce DevOps into those kind of projects. Build one, build two, build three now you've got a culture of DevOps and you can start then to do some of the unlearning and the retrofitting right. But it's very difficult. You can't really take an existing projects and transform how they do their work. Which is what DevOps is all about. >> No, but in a lot of the companies that I've talked to that have, you know hundred plus year old companies that want to do DevOps right. A lot of times, and I wonder if this has been your experience, it's the Ops guys learning Dev, as opposed to the Dev guys learning Ops. I mean the Dev guys like, "Yeah, yeah we can do infrastructure as code, that's fine", but then you've got all these Ops guys runnin' around. So it's a urgency to retrain the Ops guys, who are eager to learn, most of 'em. The ones that aren't probably in trouble. >> Will do something else. >> So I often joke about OpsDev versus DevOps. What's your experience? >> So I think the big difference is Ops guys are trained from the day they take that job to, you know shun failure right. Failure of a system is a big problem. In DevOps it's going to happen. Not only is it going to happen but the best DevOps practitioners create failure. >> Break stuff (laughing) >> Yeah, you know Netflix kind of has this famous program called Chaos Monkey, when it runs running, turn stuff off right, and how do you respond to that. And that's a big leap culturally and structurally for the Ops guys to get over that. You know the idea is we break stuff, but we learn from that, and not only do I learn from that, but I spread that knowledge across the organization. And that's where ServiceNow steps in right, because they know when things are broken, 'cause they're tied to monitoring, and they got this great knowledge capability to hook up the information we learn from how that broke. So what better testing could we have done so that we could have avoided that break? Or if it's a enforced break, what could we have learned about how to respond to that more quickly? You know the classic example is when AWS lost their east availability center and Netflix kept tickin' because they had lost their east availability center through Chaos Monkey a half a dozen times. >> Right >> It was old hat, and everybody else kind of went dark right. So that idea, and enabling that with the ServiceNow platform is a great opportunity. We really see ServiceNow as the context, the engine with all the knowledge about when things happen, how to fix them, and how to record the knowledge that you learn. >> Give us an example of a company, I mean you're talking about simple, streamlined, intuitive tech, no-training required, so give us some examples of some of the most creative uses. >> I'll give you a great example. So, we have a center in Atlanta. We have some folks in Atlanta. And of course if your in Atlanta, you love Chick-fil-a, and maybe if you're anywhere else you love Chick-fil-a. And they had an issue, which was they have franchisees, and their franchises are different from McDonald's, where you might have one franchisee at McDonald's that owns 200 restaurants. They have a lot of power, market power, and they don't share information with any other franchisee, 'cause that's differentiating for them. Chick-fil-a doesn't do that. The maximum number of restaurants you can own as a Chick-fil-a franchisee I believe is three. It's a number like that. So their franchisees are incented to talk to each other and share information. "Hey I found a better way to clean the ice cream machine", or something like that or to fix a problem. So they were looking to build a portal that they could use to both answer questions from the organization to the franchisees, but allow the franchisees to talk to each other. That kind of a thing has to be zero training right, because the people who are on that might be store managers, but it could be, you know the teenager who runs the point of sale terminal and is havin' a problem with that, so it's really got to be intuitive. So we spent a lot of time with them. We actually, it was we brought one of our designers, so we have UI, UX designers, experience designers, and we were in the sales meeting, and we're having a discussion about what they need, and he's kind of heads down typin' on his computer. And they're kind of lookin' at him like, what's up with this guy right, he's not payin' attention. >> He's designing the interface. >> These guys pay attention to everything. He's lookin' at the logo as we're walkin' in, the colors that are on the wall, the way they talk about themselves. So about an hour into the meeting we got a pause and he just kind of picks his head up and goes, "You mean like this?" And turned his computer around and he had a prototype that he built in the meeting of this really easy to use process. >> Very cool. >> Sean: So that was our intro to Chick-fil-a. >> Your sales guy must'a hated that. (hosts laughing) >> No, no, it was, I'll tell you what, so it was competitive, we have multiple competitors, who were going for that business, when he turned that computer around, the sale was done. >> Dave: Boom. >> We were done, right. They looked at that and said, This is, you know it's not perfect clearly, but this is what we need. >> This is the kind of company we want to work with. >> Exactly, well and that, you know part of that is there are partners in the ecosystem who come in and say, "We can do anything. "Tell us what you want." We are much more consultative and we'll come in and be prescriptive and say this is what you should do, and it's a differentiator for us. It's something we do differently. >> Well Sean that's a great note to end on. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE again. >> It's been great, I really enjoyed my time. >> We'll look forward to having you back at Knowledge 19. >> Terrific, I will certainly be here. >> Great, I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. We will have more of theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18 in just a little bit. (electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live from San Juan, Puerto Rico. It's the CUBE, covering Blockchain Unbound. Brought to you by Blockchain Industries. (upbeat Spanish-style music) >> Hey, welcome back everyone. We're here in Puerto Rico for exclusive CUBE coverage, I'm John Furry, you're host. Here, with Blockchain Unbound, this is a global event. From everyone from Silicon Valley, New York, Miami, Russia, Eastern Europe, all over the world, and Puerto Rico coming together, talk about the future of the economy, Blockchain decentralized apps, and more. Our next guest is CUBE alumni, and part of our inaugural crypto currency coverage, from Polycon 18, back to give a command performance, Nithin Eapen Chief Investment Officer at Arcadia Crypto Ventures, good to see you. >> Good to see you too John. >> So, you had a great showing at our first crypto event, PolyCon, great to see you back in the trenches, you're out, hard-working, pounding the pavement, doing deals. What's your analysis here, I mean, you're here networking, you checked out the sessions. What's your take? >> We've met some really good founders, really good projects, so that's the key thing that we are looking for. The main idea as our tagline says, "We back Blockchain's best." We are looking for the best founders. We are looking for the teams, then for the idea. Anything that's decentralized, we are backing them. >> So, network effect has been a big part of the conference I've been having. We talked about security tokens, utility tokens. A lot of interesting things going on here, but there's a backdrop. You've got multiple events going on. You've have Blockchain Unbound, run by Blockchain Industries, great team, which put this event together in five weeks. So, shout out to those guys. >> (laughs) You have Coin Agenda, >> That's coming! going on, another event going next door, which is after this event. And then you have a lot of series of little events, meet-ups, the local community had a great crypto mixer, Puerto Rico, a lot of action. >> Too much action, and it's like at the same time, look at it, TokenFest in San Francisco, another 2,000 people over there, here people are on the waiting list, so much action. >> And that's going on this week, as well. You have anyone going to that event? >> I know, I've got a lot of friends going over there. For me, it made sense, this is closer. I thought I would meet a lot of them. Puerto Rico is better I found, you know? >> A lot of big money here, a lot of smart money. >> A lot of smart money, a lot of big money. >> John: Global? >> Global, and the greatest part of Puerto Rico is, it's bringing this concept like, they have reduced taxes for US people to zero percent for individuals, for the next, until 2036. Now that's a big difference. If you want to change your domicile to Puerto Rico, for your business it's 4% corporate taxes, and individual it's 0% now, that's... >> John: But you got to move here. >> You got to move here, okay. But you don't have to give up your US citizenship. Now, I think what's going to happen right now is they're going to be other states maybe going to compete for this, or other countries are going to compete for the capital to flow, where does capitol flow to? Capital will flow to cheaper places, or lesser taxes. >> So, I got to ask you, I was talking to you earlier this morning, here on the CUBE I said, "There's two killer apps, one of them is money." Money is the killer app. >> No doubt! >> Your reaction to that? >> It is, okay all of our lives, let's say for your son, or my kid, or for me, what my parents, when we went to school, why did they make us go to school or learn, they tell us, "Okay you got to go to college!" Why, they want us to have a better life, they want to have a better car. How do you get them, you want money for them. But in none of those years did somebody teach you, how does money originate? What is money, is it something you should buy the Garmin? So in everything that we go for, unless we're the Buddha or Jesus himself, we do it for money. >> Well you bring up a good point. I mean I have a immigrant background from my family, my wife's family as well. >> Where did you come from? >> Well I'm actually Native American, I mean American. >> Okay But two, three generations back they, Ireland, >> Ireland, okay! French Canadian, a little bit of Armenian in me but that's okay, all kind of blended. I'm in the melting pot, I'm not 1st generation but, in Boston where my parents were from, very much an immigrant town, and they didn't have any money. So if you look at now, what's gone through the financial dot-com bubble, which had some impact, but the financial crisis is 2018, if you look at what's happened since then, the generation of millennials there in more debt. They're not realizing college, it might not be the thing. So we went to school so that we can have a better life than our parents did. Now it's like everyone's realizing that, shit we're screwed. So watching as a path, of freedom. >> It is! A new way to create wealth, capture the value, but in a new way. >> Yes, because you have a chance to be a part of an economy without, a permission of a centralized organization. So, earlier if you wanted to work somewhere, you needed an organization to work. This is making it much easier to be a part of the economy. to contribute, to help people to get help, all this is happening and you don't have to go to school. Maybe school is overrated, our colleges overrated. It is too expensive, you spend 200 thousand dollars on college. What is your ROI, when is your ROI? Maybe some disciplines have it. But this is your chance to.. >> Well, you you know that we love media and our disruptive media at the CUBE is to do things differently, but lets talk about some current events that's been happening. So this week, John Oliver created a video trashing crypto currency, it was actually funny. But it got to the Brock Pierce part, and he really had it out for Brock Pierce. He absolutely destroyed him. >> He did! And since then, he lost his place EOS. They wiped away all his DNA of evidence with the company. This is a comedian, at John Oliver, you're a freaking comedian. What gives him the right to I have that kind of influence on someone's job when he's just telling a joke. There's no actually substance of any facts of any kind at what he's doing, So that's a central authority figure that took an editorial comedic routine, and put it out there, but people think that's news. >> See, >> That's not The power of media, that the power of all the old traditional media, is that they had a bigger reach. I think it's going to change, it is going to be the YouTube's. And it's going to become a decentralized YouTube equivalent, or a decentralized media equivalents. Like, a lot of people have made memes and you know, fun videos that go viral and they'll take things down. The same, John Oliver obviously, he has us laugh. >> He's funny as hell though. He is funny as hell! >> You got to admit, >> He's pretty funny! The bit was really good, >> But end of the day, but he really went after Brock Pierce. Something was going on there, he took him down. >> See the traditional industries or traditional media they want to take down everybody that they don't consider, the birds of a same feather, this is somebody weird, like Trump, they try to take down Trump. They will try to take down anything which doesn't fit their globalist, elitist agenda. End of the day, like Brock Pierce sitting on a billion, and John over with his comedy, who has the bigger laugh? I don't know, if you ask me. >> When you have F U money like Brock Pierce does, I'm sure it rolls off his shoulders. But it does impact the ecosystem a bit. Basically EOS has erased his name in any capacity. So, obviously this impacts to public opinion. So these comedians and news rep, they have an obligation to share the data. Editorializing, I mean I do it all the time, don't get me wrong. >> (laughs) But, there's a point, consensus is part of the algorithm now in these Blockchain and Crypto communities where you have Blockchain as a store, against him. >> Okay! But consensus and transparency is a huge deal. >> Nithin: Yes! >> This is part of the formula. >> I know but see, the whole thing... When John Oliver does something, it's not about consensus. He can do it, okay, it's going to change! It's like this, when Bitcoin came in 2009, the traditionalists were coming up at the story that, "it is fake money, it's not going to go anywhere." Then it became one dollar, they were just laughing at it. Then became 10 dollars, they said it's going to go down. Then it became hundred dollars, they did the same thing. And it's only after long time they will realize, "Oh my God, it's changed." The rock has been pulled under my leg. It's like when Amazon came, all the traditional retail guys said, "Nobody's going to go and buy a book without touching it." Now we have Toys "R" Us that just went bankrupt. There's no more Toys" R" Us, you know, you have to buy your toys pretty much from Amazon at this point. >> Well everything in the model of future will be all contexual so, videos, comedian, news articles, reports, editorial, all will roll into one thing. That's going to be a great thing. >> Yes! >> And media is going to take a lot of, natural language processing, it's going to get transcript link. I think you're already doing it right, you're going to take a transcript of what I speak, you're going to attach the words, you're going to attach it to brands, you can sell that, and that is going to be the future. >> Well lets get some of that intellectual property out of your head and into the camera, and for the audience. What are you hearing in the hallways here, obviously this is a great networking event here. Lot's of agendas, phenomenal, as well as we had over sold almost by double. There's people out in the hallways, it's sold out, so there's a lot of Lobby Con going on. There's a conference within the conference going on. >> Nithin: It is! We call it Lobby Con! >> (laughs) What are you hearing in the hallways, what is some of the cool things that's new to you, that you're discovering? >> So lot of people are now telling me they are very excited about security tokens. They're telling me they're buying security tokens. I asked them, which security tokens? It's not there yet, okay. See, that's where I tend to differ. If security tokens are going to be the big thing, I'm going to be buying it because we are informed. >> John: Buy everything that moves. >> We buy it as it moves, but, security token, my question is, so you're trying to make something that is a utility, now you're going to make it security? So that is equity markets, there is a CC for that. And you're going to fit this in over there, I'm like, I don't know, what are people trying achieve? This is a free market and they're trying to bring it into regulation. >> What's a red flag for you as a, security token implies directly that you're securing something. What are they, >> You're pretty much What are people securing, equity, future cash flows, dividends, what are some of the vehicles you've seen? >> At that time they are pretty much secure, or securing future cash flows as dividends. They're going to give dividends, they're saying if you're a token holder, you're going to get dividends. My question at that time is, then why do you want a token, why can't it be in equity? Oh, you think you can come with their argument that it's more liquid, but equity's a liquid. I don't think it isn't a liquid. But it is a great way to go around and secularize a lot of things. You can have a small business, think of it, you and me we have a small business, let's say we have a partnership We have a small... >> We have a small business, We have a small business, we have a partnership. It's very hard to exit out of a small business. If we can fractionalize the ownership of a business thru tokens, and there might be people are willing to buy, put thousand dollars in, and maybe I can exit at some point. Otherwise there's no exit for me. It's very hard to exit out of a small business. Now then, what's the difference between that and equity? I don't know you know, those lines are blurred but, I'm happy for the fact that something like that will give liquidity to a lot of small business owners. America is a country of small business owners. Across the globe it supports small business owners. If it brings liquidity, okay I'm happy with that. But it's really beating the purpose that we don't want a centralized power controlling us. Because now that you have Google and Facebook that banned crypto-currency ads. Why, Women's Day, all our data, they give us a free access but they hold a lot of our personal data. I'm thinking, the guy who brings in the, a decentralized search or a decentralized social media, I'm going to invest in them. I don't care if their a success or if the success will come later. There are going to be multiple libertarian investors like me that's going to invest in them. >> What I learned was that money is a killer app, and I'll stand by that. I think marketplaces are also the killer app. You ever think, >> Perfectly true! that this conference, that kind of validates where I was thinking was, the people who nailed a business model, that's the critical, critical pacing item. If you screw the business model up, you go sideways. The technology risk isn't as bad as the business model decision risk. So I'm seeing the successful ICOs, or plays, have a lock in on the structural value proposition and to be directionally correct, with an understanding of what the hedge is on the technology. >> Yep! >> So they can manage it. So it's like programmable plumbing. They're recognizing that dynamic. The other thing that I'm learning is that the money flow from other countries is massive. If you want a money launderer from Colombia, it's coming in from Metadine Narcos. It's coming in from Japan, and China. Bitcoin and Blockchain is a money transfer opportunity so, I'm seeing a massive amount of money, flowing in >> Capital is flowing, in massive waves. >> it's flowing in. >> And it's good, and even if these projects fail, it's a good thing because, you had all this money that was stuck somewhere, that flowed in, and as I said, many of those projects are going to fail. Let them fail, because this money has flowed in, you will have a lot of people come and work on these projects, and eventually the correct solution will emerge. >> And new structural dynamics are at play. And new investors are coming in. >> New investors, so many new investors. You know the funny thing John, after we met at Polycon, I think that 99% of the people I meet here are totally new. All the guys we met at Polycon in Bahamas, totally different. I only know very few people that I met over there. So that means a whole set of investors, or common people, who just want to learn about it, totally new. That's really good! And who wins here, the average citizen entrepreneur, the average citizen player that wants to start something whether it's a banking, a service provider of some sort, a entrepreneur, or a new financial instrument or firm, all have greenfield opportunity here. >> Because, see earlier when you wanted to raise money, I was talking to a founder the other day, I asked him, how hard it was for you to raise your first raise, like 10 years ago? He was telling me that he walked the doors across multiple VCs, to kind of scrap in one and a half million dollars. And then he did his second loan after eight years. >> He'd have to crawl on his knees to get that. >> And that too, you won't get the attention, you need to know reference, now you have a chance to go to the world, and monies were, so easy money coming in is a bad thing in a way that most entrepreneurs will feel the investors will lose their money. but that's different, but it at least you have access and you can try to think that you had any in mind earlier. You had no option, they would take a big stake. Now there's no dilution, this is pretty much cloud funding on steroids. You have a chance to go to market, you get the go to market money and see if it works. And if it doesn't work, let's fix it after that. >> Nithin, I got to get your thoughts on building a company, 'cause obviously, you're also not only in this as an investor, you're also doing strategic advisory work for people building the venture architecture and then the actual build up plans for their venture. So you've talked about this in the past, you have a relationship with some protocol guys, you can check with them, there's some good network there. But there's also a dynamic with this industry where the business development aspect of it is really important. People are partnering, >> Very very important. And there's a way to partner and a way not a partner. There's a way to do token economics and there's a way not to do token economics. What is your advice, to companies that have a good thing going on, they have a tail wind at their back, they got wind in their sails, but have to make some hot partnering decisions. Looking for fellows, fellowship in that ecosystem. How do you advise folks in this partnerships and then talk about token economics after? >> So the first thing I would tell founders is to reach out. This community is very very supportive. Like you can reach out to me, you can reach out to other guys, LinkedIn, Facebook, or come to these events, and in the hallways. Say your idea and you need help, because you will need help, you cannot run this alone. You are running a company, you are running your team. Have a good team, that's a first thing. Have a great team, great founders, vision, execution, you need that. The next key thing is, you have to think about marketing and how do you market, you need to get some big names on your board who can reach out to their network and tell them about your idea. And they reach out of the rest for you. >> So networks are super important. >> Super super important, like... >> So advisor, that their advisor selection should be based on their network that they bring to the table. >> Right, so the first advisor selection is the guy who will help you flush out your idea properly as tokens. The next advisor set is a marketing advisor or a technical advisor. The marketing advisers also very important because you need to market the product, get the money in, because end of the day, you need money to build it. You need to pay your employees, whether it's in Bitcoins or in fear, It doesn't matter, one of these is required. So you have these three things, then you need to build strategic partnerships in your business. Say, let's see your a loyalty points guy, like Al is doing, You know Al right? >> Al Burgio, >> From FuZe Chain now doing DigitalBits. Hot deal, hot deal! >> Hot deal, hot deal. >> Look at what Al did, he went out, he got his strategic partnerships with the loyalty guys, now he's got the brand, the strategic partnerships, he's built a product already. The money he needs is only for go to market so that he can push it to multiple companies and get them on the chain. Brilliant idea so, strategic partnerships, advisors, founding team, and then, show the idea to the people. Go out there, let them know that this is what you're doing, why this idea is great, how big is the market, there was a problem that you're solving, what is your solution. Explain yourself frankly and honestly, and I think the community will reward you, to go and find your dream. >> Great point, be honest, ask for help. Again, I can't reiterate my experience of, I'll share, is during the computer revolution, Internet revolution, Web.1.o, and now partnering in the early days when it's forming, can make or break a company. Make or break a company. >> Very True! So, note to that, okay now, token economics. >> Nithin: Sure! >> Sounds easy, but you really got to make sure that you have a good economic framework that matches the value proposition. Talk about what you advise there. >> So last day of the one founder restart to me, ICO is going on for our seventh day into the ICO. He's raised less than 300 thousand dollars. I meet him, and he needs help. After what, seven days into the ICO, all I could tell him is, shut off your ICO, it's not going to raise money. He's like, "Why," and I'm like, he said, "read this paper." I'm like, "There's nothing in this paper "I can put money into." And he's like, "Why is that?" So I asked him, so how many companies has he put his money into, how many points has he bought? Four years, he has not bought a single coin. And he's flustered something by himself. So he's never bought a coin, and he's expecting people to buy coins at his price. So I tell people, either you should notice, you should be an investor yourself. So there are different kinds of investors, there are institutional investors that are funds, family offices, and then are retail investors. If you're not any one of these, or any one of in this group, how do you know what these guys are buying it for? So reach out to them! >> That's where the advisory comes in, Know your customer! >> Know your customer! And not the KYC in a different way, but know 'em from a marketing standpoint. Know how the retail, >> Exactly! purchase is made. >> Because if... >> If you yourself are a buyer, at least you have some idea. If you've never bought a token, and if you're, I had another founder tell me that, my tokens are worth hundred million. I'm like, you don't have a user, you just have a product. You're tokens are worth shite, if you ask me. It's worth zero, I can tell my house is worth hundred million dollars. It's only worth as much as the top buyer. How much is he willing to pay for me? So I told the founder, I'll pay so much for this price because I think, if it's about that, there's a huge risk as the main investor coming in. He doesn't agree! >> So lets talk about some, how rounds are being done now. So one trend that I'm seeing, not, I shouldn't say trend, a few deals I've seen done, but it seems like a trend, I'm trying to get validation on this, Where people are avoiding the public ICO altogether, doing all privates. >> Yes! Basically over subscribed round. Trend, dynamic, real deal, what's your thoughts on reaction to that? >> It's just that the founders are adapting. Because if you go to the public, the moment you're going to the public, what's happening is, there's the SEZ component. Whether it's a utility and they can come after you, so they have made it private. And then they went after, and even further, a lot of the founders that I know, they just stopped accepting money from US entities or US individuals. Well it's a bad deal for a small investor. See the big investors are wealthy investors. They all have an external entity where they can invest into it. What about the small investor who was investing thousand dollars or 5,000 dollars? Now you have pretty much shut out his chance of getting into a great ICO. So the founder is going to raise his money from maybe Korea, Japan, China, and Singapore. He's going to form a company or a foundation in Cayman, or Lichtenstein, or Gibraltar. The small investor is a loser. The large institutional investor has no loss in this process, so, that is the founder adapting because he does not want, >> They want to manage, >> They don't want it to become lawsuits, basically. >> Compliance, audits, SEZ problems, they don't end fencing problems. >> So now let's compare, in contrast, different kind of companies. US based company, wants to raise money in the US, they do accredited. But they want to go outside, say Asia, or an Asia company wants to raise money in the US, what's that dynamic like, what are the issues? >> I think what's going to happen is they going to, some of them are going to register themselves as a security token, some of them are going to do just a reg D for very high net worth individuals. And the common, the the public round, they going to raise it from the China, the Korea, Japan, or is lobbying them. And that's what I think, multiple small countries are going to come into the space, which they know now, they can get the capital flowing into their company, and they going to allow their rules to be lax. They going to let capitol flow through. And then US will have to change, or maybe UK will have to change, whoever is against this will have to change. Capital means money, belt capital, and resource capital, like humans, we tend to move to places that are freer. Why did I move from India to US, or why did your parents or the earlier generation move to US? >> John: For a better life. >> It's a better life, the real better life is, you have the freedom over your property, the fruits of your labor. If the fruits of your labor are taxed at 50% or thirty, the more it goes up, you just don't want to work anymore, or you're going to to search for that place that will tax you less. >> Like Puerto Rico! >> Nithan: Puerto Rico! >> Are you bullish on Puerto Rico? >> I am bullish on Puerto Rico because, these, if they can sustain this, and have the rule of law, means they can protect people's wealth, like from crime and all those things, crime or being kidnapped. These two things happen, I'm telling you, most people will move or some of state will have to change their laws. >> They got to get >> the security up. Nithan, thanks so much for coming on the CUBE. Really appreciate your insight. Thanks for sharing! >> Thank you very much. This is the CUBEs exclusive coverage from Puerto Rico where we're getting on the ground here. Getting all the data from the Blockchain Unbound Conference. Part of restart week. I'm John Furry here, we've got more coverage after this break, thanks for watching! (upbeat electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live from San Juan, Puerto Rico It's theCUBE. Covering Blockchain Unbound. Brought to you by Blockchain Industries. (latin music) >> Hello and welcome back to theCUBE exclusive coverage in Puerto Rico for Blockchain Unbound I'm John Furrier, your host, here covering all the action in Puerto Rico as the global society and industry come together. Our next guest is Marhall Taplits he's the Chief Strategy Officer and Co Founder of Nynja.biz, check out their site, Nynja.biz. Marshall, thanks for joining me. >> Thank you. >> So tell about what you guys do. You guys are doing some disruptive stuff, tell us about what you guys do, then it will jam into a conversation. >> Sure, so are you familiar with WeChat in China, for example? >> Yeah. >> Okay great. So I've personally been living in China 15 years, so we've watched kind of the birth of the Chinese internet, which as we know, is a little different than the regular internet. >> A lot of mobile users. >> A lot of mobile users, 800 million China mobile subscribers alone. WeChat, basically, is a platform that started off as just a messenger but basically what it's done is it's integrated into every facet of Chinese society. To give you an example, you go to a restaurant, you scan the QR code, the menu comes up, you pick the food, you pay for the food, it comes, you walk out. Everything like that is in China. Everything like that is in Wuzhen China. So what we've done is we've kind of taken this concept, and we're working on a global version of it, that's cryptocurrency based, and we are working specifically with Chinese companies in order to help them go global as part of the China One Belt One Road program and working with companies like Alibaba, what have you, in order to help Chinese companies go overseas and take what they've built in China but operate globally with cryptocurrency. >> Are you guys in China? Cause it's been hard for companies to start companies in China. So you're living in China or you're working in China? >> Yeah so because we live in Shenzhen, right next to it is Hong Kong. Hong Kong is where our company is based. Hong Kong, as you know, previous British colony, the legal system, and the financial system-- >> And you domicile in Hong Kong, that's where you're based? >> Me personally in Shenzhen, but the company is in Hong Kong. So we also have a Wyoming corporation in the US. >> That's where all the action is. >> That's right >> That's where WeChat is >> That's right >> Alibaba's got Alipay and then there's more business to business with their app. So I get that WeChat's been highly successful. In fact we have a huge following on WeChat, Sou Kanai, Niki Bond, free content. But that brings up the question of Chinese kind of showing the way with mobile expansion, so their users are heavily mobile savy. >> Marshall: That's right. >> This is pretty obvious when you think about it, but in America and around the world, that's going to translate to the new user experience. So in your opinion, how would you describe the expectations that users have? Because you're living on the front end of the wave of what mobile's doing, I mean there's a lot of gamification going on, some if it's kind of creepy, but what is your view of the expectations that users have and what's different about what's currently available in the webstac, and the 20 year old e-commerce stacks, that are out there? >> Sure, I think the most important thing is reducing friction, all right. You don't want to be using platforms where you can not do it wherever you are whenever you are, you don't want to have to go through payment processes, you don't want to have to re-authenticate yourself across whatever platforms you use. And interestingly, when I first went to China, it was all about copying what was in the west over to there, but actually it's kind of the opposite now, right, so we basically want to take this concept of the frictionless digital life, and make it a global opportunity. And especially with BlockChain and cryptocurrency you have that really as an opportunity, because if you look at all the apps that are out there, and the platforms that are out there, the only ones that have gone past a billion users, WhatsApp, Instagram, whatever are the free ones. But as soon as you layer in payment, it becomes very locked. And as big as WeChat is, and as big as LINE is, but ultimately it's locked into the Rem and B system or Reo in Korea, what have you, so the cryptocurrency is really the first opportunity that the world's had to create platforms that can get up to a billion, two billion, three billion users that are able to pay. And we just think that's a once in a lifetime opportunity and we want to be part of it. >> So I got to ask you about the impact that cloud computing has had on this, obviously we've seen cloud computing destroy the data center model, allow people to get time to value faster, mobile on top, big data analytics using data, all this stuff's awesome stuff. So the question is, is that, that's kind of a horizontally disruptive view, so these stacks that are built old way where I got to own the stack end to end, yeah there's some standardization on the lower end of the stack. But now you're thinking about more of a horizontal, I got jurisdictions, I got regions, I got countries, I got sovereignty, all these things are in the melting pot of the cryptocurrency BlockChain, de-centralized applications, are major impacts to all those things. How do you see that playing out because, that's kind of what developers worry about, oh shit will this work on that chain? I got Neo I got this I got that, so the plumbing is totally a moving train right now. >> Marshall: That's right. >> But the business models are pretty obvious. So there's like a business ops thing going on. What Dev opts did for Cloud, you got this new abstraction thing going on with this world. What's your view on that, do you agree? Or what's your take? >> Yeah well you pretty much nailed it. I mean basically what's happening is over the last 10 or 15 years people have finally accepted that having your own server is kind of silly, you know, and most people now will just spin up whatever they need in terms of resources on TheCloud. But over the last couple years, you're really going more toward Edge Cloud, where the way the clouds work, is that basically it's pushing to get the least amount of latency and store the data as close to the user as possible. And then there's also regulatory in some countries now in terms of, if your users are from this country, you have to legally store the data in this area. So this is all kind of evolving. And if you look at the BlockChain technology, I think it's the payment version of that. So for example, everyone's always concerned about getting in and out of Fiat Currency, and how am I going to get back to dollars, and this and that, but I think what's going to wind up happening, is this is going to get pushed towards the edges and there will be opportunities and ways with exchanges and what have you to get in and out. But more importantly, it's going to be like, just other currencies, so for example, I live in China but I come to the US a few times a year, I also travel to Europe, I have some dollars, I have some Euros, I have some Rem and B, when I leave China, I don't immediately sell all of my Rem and B, I just keep it because at some point I'm going to need it. And I think what's going to happen in the cryptocurrency space is, especially on the larger BlockChains, like Ethereum and Neo and what have you, is people are just going to get used to keeping some of it and they're going to stop worrying about what the exact exchange rate is and how am I going to get in and out, and this and that, and they're just going to start treating it as part of their currency stack that they keep. >> Yeah as long as there's some level of stability. It's just like, I remember when I was growing up, there was no Euro, every country had their own currency. You had the French Franc, the Swiss Francs, the Deutsche Mark, Lira, etc, etc. But you're seeing that the viability of the money aspect, cause at the end of the day there's two things that we've identified in analysis, and I was talking about it last night, talked about it this morning on theCUBE, is the killer apps for BlockChain cryptocurrency, these sorts of apps is two things, money and marketplaces. >> Marshall: That's right. >> Everything else is just kind of circling around those two. >> Well there's more but certainly that's the main part of it >> Money, moving around. So the UK just announced with coin based, the Financial Conduct Authority, reading the news yesterday, has essentially said we're going to allow for the fast payment system to convert to Fiat. This is a government, the UK is a nation. This is the beginning, to your point, that if they don't get up to speed, the edge of the network will democratize them and kind of circle the wagons, if you will, so it's already happening. >> Yeah and I think what governments are starting to realize is hey guys this is just a technology and not only do you don't really have jurisdiction to control it, but also that you don't even have the technical means. So Wyoming is a good example of regulation coming into play, that just kind of accepts the presence that this now exists, right. And they're not going to try to make it something and fit it into the old way. So, and in terms of the stability of these coins, I think it is important because people want stability, but in other ways, if you don't look at the exchange rate, it's actually way more stable than the current system, and I'll give an example. In the last month or two, the prices of cryptocurrency have dropped almost 40%. Now if the stock markets and the global affects markets drop 40%, you'd have blood in the streets. But the crypto market is asset based instead of debt based and because it's so structurally sound it's able to handle these wild swings without actually collapsing the system, so in may ways, it's way more stable, and then as the market gaps and the buy in of these currencies get bigger and bigger, of course it's going to be more stable over time. >> Well I mean its stable from a fail standpoint, but a lot of emotional instability. People losing money for the first time. >> But that's just because they're-- >> That's a lot of speculation, right? >> There's a lot of speculating and then if they're down they feel like they lost but, that's life. >> People that are into the game, like you, were long on this. So what would you explain to someone, cause I have two, a lot of friends that have two schools of thought, that's a total scam, don't associate with that, to oh my god, that's the next biggest wave, lets get our surfboards out there and lets get on this, there's a multiple set coming in, it's the biggest thing we've seen, and everything in between. How do you explain it to people for the first time? >> It's just your traditional curve, there's early adopters and what have you, and if you were one of the guys buying up domaine names in the early 90s, you know some people would say I can't believe you're spending $100,000 buying up domaine names, but some of them now are worth, you know, tens of millions of dollars. But again, this is the speculatory piece of it. And there's no shortage of opportunities for speculation and I encourage everybody to speculate a little bit because what it does is it gets you a taste of the technology. And usually, when you have some money on the line, you pay more attention, so if speculation is what gets people interested, and it gets them watching it and understanding the technology and using it, then I'm all for it, but people shouldn't be speculating with money they don't have. Anything could happen in the short term. Nobody knows what's going to happen with any specific currency. But in terms of the technology itself, this is a revolution way bigger than the internet itself. This is where you're getting, not only, communications like the internet, but financing governance and all as one. Programmable money, programmable contracts, that wipes out finance, it wipes out legal, it whites out governance in many ways. So this is a huge evolution in human society, and we've termed this Open Unity actually. And so we believe that society has to reach a state of open unity in order to go into the singularity as we would envision it wanting to be, as something that's under our control. >> Yeah and I think one of the things, first of all that's a great statement, well said. I'll just kind of put some reality on that, connect the dots, is that if you look at the trajectory of cloud computing, Amazon Web Services was laughed at years ago. S3 came out, compute storage building, basic building blocks and a slew more services. What Cloud did for software developers, and what they've disrupted from a business standpoint, dev ops, it's proven. What open source has done, even going back to the old red-hat days and linux, is that now a tier one global citizen in software, you look at those two trends, you can connect that dots to what you just said. And what made Cloud great was they made application developers have access to programmable infrastructure. >> Marshall: Exactly. >> You're talking about a whole nother level of software programmability, money, marketplace, society, >> Yeah you hit it on the head. >> We're there right? >> That's exactly right, so when a programmer wants to start a business, instead of going to create an LLC, and getting their EIN Tax ID or whatever, and when they want to go into Europe, and dealing with that and then trying to open a bank account, which is almost impossible, internationally now, instead of that, you just have your SDKs and your APIs or whatever and you've got access to money, program adding, you can take money, you can move money around, globally, frictionless, permissionless, with governancy, smart contracts-- >> They might not not need an SDK dashboard, its a console, click, click, click, smart contracts, governance, turn key. >> And one of the things we're working on with Nynja in particular, is this kind of on-demand marketplace and putting together a de-centralized teams for work. And this is all driven by smart contracts. So one of the issues with the economy is the huge booms and busts that people have in the economy. And if you look at the root cause of that, my personal opinion, is that it's because of payment terms. So for example, if I do work for you, and then there's an invoice, but it's not due for 30 days, now your business may be structurally sound, but the truth is your cashflow is all over the place. With BlockChain technology, we can actually do real time payments. You could be paid minute by minute, hour by hour. Real time, program, contract. So we're going to create very flat even money flows through the entire economy globally, and we're going to just completely remove these booms and busts that are really nothing more than just cashflow issues that are compounded and compounded at a global level. >> I mean I lived through the dot com bubble, I was actually part of it on the front end, on the euphoria side, as well as on the crash. Part of the whole search paradigm, google right there. Key words, all that stuff happening, growth, massive growth. So I saw that, the scammers in there, or the bubble people, that's what we called them. But the reality is, everything happened. It was pet foods online, you could get shopping delivered to your house. So again, to your point, it's a little euphoric right now, but what's different is, is you have now, community data. See what I see happening is, it's not a major bubble crash, because self government, self governing, self governance, is a community dynamic. So I think there's going to be a lot of self healing, inside the networks themselves. You're already seeing it here, a lot of people, bad act is being identified, investors flight to quality, looking at quality deals. Interesting times, your thoughts? >> Well I mean you know, we've been through many evolutions of society, we've had surf-dom, we've had monarchies, we've had representative democracies, we have all these things, and I just think the next evolution is decentralized governance. And we don't even know what that means yet, because it's just starting, but I think we can all, if we can close our eyes and really think about it. I think it's pretty obvious what the issues are with our current system and not just the US, but globally, and I think we have an opportunity here to build in organic program governance. And what's really special about BoxChain technology is if I program it to do X, it's going to do X. So we don't need to, I don't need to know who you are to trust you. I don't need to worry about where we're going to sue each other, or we're going to have arbitration if things go wrong. We're just going to make an agreement, and we're going to program it that way, and that's it. And now the next phase is, I could build on top of that trusting that that's just going to happen. So you can create these chains of trust, and that can happen anywhere in the world. So I think this is a whole nother-- >> Sounds like a bunch of web services. >> Well in many ways, in terms of the architecture, sure you could absolutely think of it like that. >> The reusability, the leverage is amazing. All right, so I want to just end the segment Marshall, take a minute to end the segment, to talk about what you're working on, Nynja coin, Nynja, N-Y-N-J-A .biz, you guys have a product, you got a BlockChain enabled platform, you got a coin, take a minute to explain what you're working on. >> Basically we want to provide the tools and services to help people live in this new reality. So in order to basically function in the world that we're entering into, we're going to need tools that far surpass what's currently available in terms of the messengers, the web sites, all these things. We need to be operating at a level that takes communication completely frictionless, payment completely frictionless, and governance completely frictionless. And we have to put this all together, and that's what we're doing with Nynja. We're staring with a global communicator, which is basically, if you want to take WeChat, telegram, whatever, but we have about 50 additional features that really take communications to the next level. And then on top of it, creating the baseline with cryptocurrency payment, and also smart contract wizards and helping people kind of get these teams going and get paid and organize their financial life in a de-centralized way. So we're just basically going to be the next generation of these messenger type platforms with BlockChain integrated. And what you're going to see is that over the next couple years you're going to get to the first companies that are achieving not just a billion or two billion or three billion users, but paying users, and we're going to be one of the probably three to five platforms that are offering tools at the global level like this. >> And have you got an IC already or not? >> We've just started our private ICO about two weeks ago. We're getting tremendous support in Asia. Quite frankly, the US is not seeing it as much-- >> Is it a utility token or security? >> Utility Token, and I think it's really telling, interesting, coming here. It's the first time I've been doing the presenting. We spoke yesterday at the d10e and we also spoke at d10e in Korea a week or two ago, and the response is incredible. And I think the reason is because-- >> The Asian market gets it. >> Well they're already living in this world within their own confines in terms of the messenger with their payment and governance built in, so when I tell them that we're going to do this globally with crypto, immediately they get it. I'm having trouble here, especially in these five minute pitches which is ridiculous, it's like a chop shop, I don't know how to communicate the idea within this short time frame, so, what I'm looking for while we're here this week is just to find people who really want to take an hour or two or even people like yourself who want to do interviews and just kind of really talk to people and really explain-- >> Well platform is complex, a lot of pieces to it. It's a system, but the value you offer is essentially offering developers, who are building products, for tools that you've built so they can scale faster. That sounds like your value. >> That's right and although I can't say specifically, we're also working on a deal that's going to get us started with about 15 million active users on day one, so that's very exciting and we're really really excited about that. >> And the coins will be utility of measures, what? >> Sorry? >> Well your utility coins going to be measuring what, what's the main token economics that drives the-- >> For the ICO economics? >> Your Nynja Coin. >> So basically we're releasing 5 billion tokens, 45% of them will be sold. There's five cents a token, so the hard cap, by definition is about 112 million, actually we're planning to do the public sale in April, but we may cancel it or postpone it just because the private sale is going really well, but we'll see how that goes. But in terms of once it's live, this will basically be the utility token of the entire eco-system, so anybody, not just within our Nynja App or platform, but even people, I don't know if you know XMPP federation, like back in the day-- >> Yeah you know about real messaging >> If you could think of us as the next version of XMPP federation, but using cryptocurrency in order to avoid bad actors by making it very expensive to do bad things, and very cheap to do good things and globally. >> So it's like Twitter you can create a bot instantly, but if there's coins involved, you'd have to spend to get it. >> That's right and also people could spin up nodes that are basically their own Twitters and decide if those Twitters of their own, their Nynja boxes of their own, are either just internally, or you could specify specifically context or group of context-- >> We agree, that's a great way to get bad actors out because it costs them money. And it's de-centralized, there's no single spot. >> That's right, if email came out today, when cryptocurrency existed, there would be no spam. Because it would be expensive as hell to send more than a few a second, but it would still be free and for everybody generally, and you wouldn't even have spam. So we think we can do that for messaging globally. >> Great. Marshall, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, really appreciate it, check out Nynja. Marshall Taplits is the Chief Strategy Officer and co-founder of Nynja.biz, check them out online. Check out the website, it's in Asia, bringing that culture of mobile and fast moving, real time apps, to the rest of the developers. This is theCUBE coverage in Puerto Rico for BlockChain Unbound exclusive two days of coverage. We'll be right back with more, after this short break, thanks for watching.