(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)

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> The pandemic precipitated what is shaping up to be a permanent shift in cybersecurity spending patterns. As a direct result of hybrid work, CSOs have vested heavily in endpoint security, identity access management, cloud security, and further hardening the network beyond the headquarters. We've reported on this extensively in this Breaking Analysis series. Moreover, the need to build security into applications from the start rather than bolting protection on as an afterthought has led to vastly high heightened awareness around DevSecOps. Finally, attacking security as a data problem with automation and AI is fueling new innovations in cyber products and services and startups. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we present our quarterly findings in the security industry, and share the latest ETR survey data on the spending momentum and market movers. Let's start with the most recent news in cybersecurity. Nary a week goes by without more concerning news. The latest focus in the headlines is, of course, Russia's relentless cyber attacks on critical infrastructure in the Ukraine, including banking, government websites, weaponizing information. The hacker group, BlackByte, put a double whammy on the San Francisco 49ers, meaning they exfiltrated data and they encrypted the organization's files as part of its ransomware attack. Then there's the best Super Bowl ad last Sunday, the Coinbase floating QR code. Did you catch that? As people rushed to scan the code and participate in the Coinbase Bitcoin giveaway, it highlights yet another exposure, meaning we're always told not to click on links that we don't trust or we've never seen, but so many people activated this random QR code on their smartphones that it crashed Coinbase's website. What does that tell you? In other news, Securonix raised a billion dollars. They did this raise on top of Lacework's massive $1.3 billion raise last November. Both of these companies are attacking security with data automation and APIs that can engage machine intelligence. Securonix, specifically in the announcement, mentioned the uptake from MSSPs, managed security service providers, something we've talked about in this series. And that's a trend that we see as increasingly gaining traction as customers are just drawing in and drowning in security incidents. Peter McKay's company, Snyk, acquired Fugue, a company focused on making sure security policies are consistent throughout the software development life cycle. It's a really an example of a developer-defined security approach where policy can be checked at the dev, deployment, and production phases to ensure the same policies are in place at all stages, including monitoring at runtime. Fugue, according to Crunchbase, had raised $85 million to date. In some other company news, Cisco was rumored to be acquiring Splunk for not much more than Splunk is worth today. And the talks reportedly broke down. This would be a major move in security by Cisco and underscores the pressure to consolidate. Cisco would get an extremely strong customer base and through efficiencies could improve Splunk's profitability, but it seems like the premium Cisco was willing to pay was not enough to entice board to act. Splunk board, that is. Datadog blew away its earnings, and the stock was up 12%. It's pulled back now, thanks to Putin, but it's one of those companies that is disrupting Splunk. Datadog is less than half the size of Splunk, revenue-wise, but its valuation is more than 2 1/2 times greater. Finally, Elastic, another Splunk disruptor, settled its trademark dispute with AWS, and now AWS will now stop using the name Elasticsearch. All right, let's take a high level look at how cyber companies have performed in the stock market over time. Here's a graph of the Cyber ETF, and you can see the March 1st crosshairs of 2020 signifying the start of the lockdown. The trajectory of cybersecurity stocks is shown by the orange and blue lines, and it surely has steepened post March of 2020. And, of course, it's been down with the market lately, but the run up, as you can see, was substantial and eclipsed the trajectory of the previous cycles over the last couple of years, owing much of the momentum to the spending dynamics that we talked about at our open. Let's now drill into some of the names that we've been following over the last few years and take a look at the firm level. This chart shows some data that we've been tracking since before the pandemic. The top rows show the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ prices, and the bottom rows show specific stocks. The first column is the index price or the market cap of the company just before the pandemic, then the same data one year later. Then the next column shows the peak value during the pandemic, and then the current value. Then it shows in the next column where it is today, in percentage terms, i.e., how far has it pulled back from the peak, then the delta from pre-pandemic, in other words, how much did the issue earn or lose during the pandemic for investors? We then compare the pre-pandemic revenue multiple using a trailing 12-month revenue metric. Sorry, that's what we used. It's easy to get. (laughs) And that's the revenue multiple compared to the August in 2020, when multiples were really high, and where they are today, and then a recent quarterly growth rate guide based on the last earnings report. That's the last column. Okay, so I'm throwing a lot of data at you here, but what does it tell us? First, the S&P and the NAS are well up from pre-pandemic levels, yet they're off 9% and 15%, respectively, from their peaks today. That was earlier on Friday morning. Now let's look at the names more closely. Splunk has been struggling. It definitely had a tailwind from the pandemic as all boats seem to rise, but its execution has been lacking. It's now 30% off from its pre-pandemic levels. (groans) And it's multiple is compressing, and perhaps Cisco thought it could pick up the company for a discount. Now let's talk about Palo Alto Networks. We had reported on some of the challenges the company faced moving into a cloud-friendly model. that was before the pandemic. And we talked about the divergence between Palo Alto's stock price and the valuations relative to Fortinet, and we said at the time, we fully expected Palo Alto to rebound, and that's exactly what happened. It rode the tailwinds of the last two years. It's up over 100% from its pre-COVID levels, and its revenue multiple is expanding, owing to the nice growth rates. Now Fortinet had been doing well coming into the pandemic. In fact, we said it was executing on a cloud strategy better than Palo Alto Networks, hence that divergence in valuations at the time. So it didn't get as much of a boost from the pandemic. Didn't get that momentum at first, but the company's been executing very well. And as you can see, with 155% increase in valuation since just before the pandemic, it's going more than okay for Fortinet. Now, Okta is a name that we've really followed closely, the identity access management specialist that rocketed. But since it's Auth0 acquisition, it's pulled back. Investors are concerned about its guidance and its profitability. And several analyst have downgraded their price targets on Okta. We still really like the company. The Auth0 acquisition gives Okta a developer vector, and we think the company is going hard after market presence and is willing to sacrifice short-term profitability. We actually like that posture. It's very Frank Slupin-like. This company spends a lot of money on R&D and go-to-market. The question is, does Okta have inherent profitability? The company, as they say, spends a ton in some really key areas but it looks to us like it's going to establish a footprint. It's guiding revenue CAGR in the mid-30s over the mid to long-term and near term should beat that benchmark handily. But you can see the red highlights on Okta. And even though Okta is up 59% from its pre-pandemic levels, it's far behind its peers shown in the chart, especially CrowdStrike and Zscaler, the latter being somewhat less impacted by the pullback in stocks recently, of course, due to the fears of inflation and interest rates, and, of course, Russian invasion escalation. But these high flyers, they were bound to pull back. The question is can they maintain their category leadership? And for the most part, we think they can. All right, let's get into some of the ETR data. Here's our favorite XY view with net score, or spending momentum on the Y-axis, and market share or pervasiveness in the data center on the horizontal axis. That red 40% line, that indicates a highly elevated spending level. And the chart inserts to the right, that shows how the data is plotted with net score and shared N in each of the columns by each company. Okay, so this is an eye chart, but there really are three main takeaways. One is that it's a crowded market. And this shows only the companies ETR captures in its survey. We filtered on those that had more than 50 mentions. So there's others in the ETR survey that we're not showing here, and there are many more out there which don't get reported in the spending data in the ETR survey. Secondly, there are a lot of companies above the 40% mark, and plenty with respectable net scores just below. Third, check out SentinelOne, Elastic, Tanium, Datadog, Netskope, and Darktrace. Each has under 100 N's but we're watching these companies closely. They're popping up in the survey, and they're catching our attention, especially SentinelOne, post-IPO. So we wanted to pare this back a bit and filter the data some more. So let's look at companies with more than 100 mentions in the same chart. It gets a little cleaner this picture, but it's still crowded. Auth0 leads everyone in net score. Okta is also up there, so that's very positive sign since they had just acquired Auth0. CrowdStrike SalePoint, Cyberark, CloudFlare, and Zscaler are all right up there as well. And then there's the bigger security companies. Palo Alto Network, very impressive because it's well above the 40% mark, and it has a big presence in the survey, and, of course, in the market. And Microsoft as well. They're such a big whale. They skew the data for everybody else to kind of mess up these charts. And the position of Cisco and Splunk make for an interesting combination. They get both decent net scores, not above the 40% line but they got a good presence in the survey as well. Thinking about the acquisition, Al Shugart was the CEO of of Seagate, and founder. Brilliant Silicon valley icon and engineer. Great business person. I was asking him one time, hey, you thinking about buying this company or that company? And of course, he's not going to tell me who he's thinking about buying or acquiring. He said, let me just tell you this. If you want to know what I'm thinking, ask yourself if it were free, would you take it? And he said the answer's not always obviously yes, because acquisitions can be messy and disruptive. In the case of Cisco and Splunk, I think the answer would be a definitive yes It would expand Cisco's portfolio and make it the leader in security, with an opportunity to bring greater operating leverage to Splunk. Cisco's just got to pay more if it wants that asset. It's got to pay more than the supposed $20 billion offer that it made. It's going to have to get kind of probably north of 23 billion. I pinged my ETR colleague, Erik Bradley, on this, and he generally agreed. He's very close to the security space. He said, Splunk isn't growing the customer base but the customers are sticky. I totally agree. Cisco could roll Splunk into its security suite. Splunk is the leader in that space, security information and event management, and Cisco really is missing that piece of the pie. All right, let's filter the data even more and look at some of the companies that have moved in the survey over the past year and a half. We'll go back here to July 2020. Same two-dimensional chart. And we're isolating here Auth0, Okta, SalePoint CrowdStrike, Zscaler, Cyberark, Fortinet, and Cisco. No Microsoft. That cleans up the chart. Okay, why these firms? Because they've made some major moves to the right, and some even up since last July. And that's what this next chart shows. Here's the data from the January 2022 survey. The arrow start points show the position that we just showed you earlier in July 2020, and all these players have made major moves to the right. How come? Well, it's likely a combination of strong execution, and the fact that security is on the radar of every CEO, CIO, of course, CSOs, business heads, boards of directors. Everyone is thinking about security. The market momentum is there, especially for the leaders. And it's quite tremendous. All right, let's now look at what's become a bit of a tradition with Breaking Analysis, and look at the firms that have earned four stars. Four-star firms are leaders in the ETR survey that demonstrate both a large presence, that's that X-axis that we showed you, and elevated spending momentum. Now in this chart, we filter the N's. Has to be greater than 100. And we isolate on those companies. So more than 100 responses in the survey. On the left-hand side of the chart, we sort by net score or spending velocity. On the right-hand side, we sort by shared N's or presence in the dataset. We show the top 20 for each of the categories. And the red line shows the top 10 cutoffs. Companies that show up in the top 10 for both spending momentum and presence in the data set earn four stars. If they show up in one, and make the top 10 in one, and make the top 20 in the other, they get two stars. And we've added a one-star category as honorable mention for those companies that make the top 20 in both categories. Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks, CrowdStrike, and Okta make the four-star grade. Okta makes it even without Auth0, which has the number one net score in this data set with 115 shared N to boot. So you can add that to Okta. The weighted average would pull Okta's net score to just above Cyberark's into fourth place. And its shared N would bump Okta up to third place on the right-hand side of the chart Cisco, Splunk, Proofpoint, KnowBe4, Zscaler, and Cyberark get two stars. And then you can see the honorable mentions with one star. Now thinking about a Cisco, Splunk combination. You'd get an entity with a net score in the mid-20s. Yeah, not too bad, definitely respectable. But they'd be number one on the right-hand side of this chart, with the largest market presence in the survey by far. Okay, let's wrap. The trends around hybrid work, cloud migration and the attacker escalation that continue to drive cybersecurity momentum and they're going to do so indefinitely. And we've got some bullet points here that you're seeing private companies, (laughs) they're picking up gobs of money, which really speaks to the fact that there's no silver bullet in this market. It's complex, chaotic, and cash-rich. This idea of MSSPs on the rise is going to continue, we think. About half the mid-size and large organization in the US don't have a SecOps, a security operation center, and outsourcing to one that can be tapped on a consumption basis, cloud-like, as a service just makes sense to us. We see the momentum that companies that we've highlighted over the many quarters of Breaking Analysis are forming. They're forming a strong base in the market. They're going for market share and footprint, and they're focusing on growth, at bringing in new talent. They have good balance sheets and strong management teams and we think they'll be leading companies in the future, Zscaler, CrowdStrike, Okta, SentinelOne, Cyberark, SalePoint, over time, joining the ranks of billion dollar cyber firms, when I say billion dollar, billion dollar revenue like Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, and Splunk, if it doesn't get acquired. These independent firms that really focus on security. Which underscores the pressure and consolidation and M&A in the whole space. It's almost assured with the fragmentation of companies and so many new entrants fighting for escape velocity that this market is going to continue with robust M&A and consolidation. Okay, that's it for today. Thanks to my colleague, Stephanie Chan, who helped research this week's topics, and Alex Myerson on the production team. He also manages the Breaking Analysis podcast. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight, who get the word out. Thank you to all. Remember these episodes are all available as podcasts wherever you listen. All you do is search Breaking Analysis podcast. Check out ETR's website at etr.ai. We also publish a full report every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. You can email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com. @dvellante is my DM. Comment on our LinkedIn posts. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Have a great week. Be safe, be well, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>Hello, and welcome to this cubes presentation with unstoppable domains. It's a showcase we're featuring all the best content in web three. And with unstabled a showcase I'm John furrier, your host of the cube. We've got a great guest here, Matt Miscavige. Covich 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 three marketplace with unstoppable domains, the chief revenue officer, you guys have a very intriguing, interesting concept. That's going extremely well. Congratulations, but you're using NFTs for access and domains. Of course, the, 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, tech talks, Snapchat, et cetera. Whenever we get these usernames for free it's because we in our data are the product as some of the recent leaks. And the media has shown incentives. Individuals and 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 in create online. That's all we're trying to do here at unstoppable domains is provide user own take control identity to four and a half billion internet users. >>It's interesting to see change that's happening with web three. And just in cultural terms, users are expecting to be part of the creative, the personality of the company. There's this almost this disintermediation of the middleman. You know, 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 web through really shifts the power away from aggregators, aggregators and marketplaces have been some of the best business models. The last 20 years onto the internet, the web three is going to dramatically change that over the next decade, paying 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, what's give us some examples of the kinds of companies you're doing business with and partnering with. >>Yeah. So let's talk about use cases. First actually is 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 the council while it's is familiar with these awkwardly long hexadecimal strings of random numbers and letters, where if you make a single type of money is lost forever. That's a pretty scary experience that exists today in our $2 trillion asset class with 250 million users. So the first set of partners that we worked on integrating with who actually cook the wilds and exchanges. So we will allow users to do is replace all their long hexadecimal wallet addresses with a single human readable name, like John dot NFT or Maxim needs give each dot crypto to allow for simple crypto transfers. >>And how did the exchange work with you guys on that as it is? Is it a plugin? Is it co-locating code together? What's the, what's the, what's the relationship between exchanges and unstoppable domains? >>Yeah, absolutely. A great question. So exchange has actually have to do a little bit of an engineering lift to work with us, and they can do that by either using our resolution libraries or using one of our API APIs or in order to look up an unstoppable name 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 Oko DX 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 there wallets that you work well with? Explain the wallet dynamic between unstoppable domains and wallets. >>Yeah. So while it's 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 they make a single type where their money can be lost forever. So we enable these wallets to do is to make crypto transfer as simple and as less scary than the current status code by giving the users on a sub well name that they can use to attach to all the waltz addresses on the backend. So companies like trust world, for example, which has 10 million users or Coinbase wallet. When you go to the crypto transfer fields, they can just type in an unstoppable name. They'll correctly, route the currency to the right person, to the right world, without any chance for human error. >>You know, when these big waves come, I gotta ask you this question. Cause a lot of people in the mainstream are getting into it. Now reminds me of the web wave that hit the big thing was how many people are coming online. It was one of the key metrics and how many web pages are being developed was another metric, which meant that people were building out web pages. And it's hard to look back and think, wow, that was actually a KPI. So internet users and webpages were the two proxies cause then search and just came out and everything else happened. So I'm going to ask you, there are people watching, they're seeing that 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 if 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 words and numbers that you'd have to memorize. That would be super painful for users. And didn't, it wouldn't have gotten to where it is today with this, you know, 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 this, the Toshi white paper without a human readable naming system, other than supple domains and 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 and 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 Googled 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, Hey, Google was successful, you know, keyword advertising industry for less than 25 years or 20 years. >>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 NFT standard, which is only a couple of years old know, has taken off massively around trading of profile pictures like crypto punks and the boy apes yacht club where they use cases extended much more than just, you know, a cool JPEG that goes up in value two or three X year over year. There is the true use case here around ownership of identity ownership over a data set, decentralized log-in authentication and permission data sharing. One of the sad things that happened in Jeanette on the internalized decade really was that the platforms built out have now allowed developers to built on top of them and a trustless permissionless way. Developers who build applications on top of some of the early monopolies in the last decade, got the rules changed on them. APIs, cutoff, new fees instituted. That's not going to happen in web three because all permissionless custody in a user's own wallet, we cannot take the way they 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 web three identity standard that we're building out. >>You guys amazing is that's a whole nother generational shift. I'm always been a big fan of abstractions when innovation is needed, when they're problems that need to be solved, messes to be cleaned up. Good abstraction layer on top of new architecture is really, really phenomenal. I guess the key question for I have for you is, you know, the queue, we have all this video where where's our NFT should, how should we implement NFTs? >>There's a couple of 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 events. So just in the same way that people collect, t-shirts some conferences, people will be collecting. And if Ts to show, there were in person attending in person cultural moments, whether they were acquired an event online or offline, you could do NFTs for employees to show that they were at your company during certain periods of the company's growth. So think of replacing the resume with a cryptographically secure resume like this on the blockchain and perpetuity. Now more than half of all the resumes contain lies, which is a pretty gnarly problem as a hiring manager, or you constantly have to sort through as ways that this can impact that side of the market as well. >>I saw some, and I think it was a use case for everything. Appreciate that. And of course we can have the most favorite, cute moments. It could be a cube host NFT at 40 apes out there. Why not have a board cube host going on and, and >>Auction for charity on open? >>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 and FTS, if you will. What's the response been on this? Log-in with unstoppable for that product? What some of the use gates is. Can you give some examples of the momentum and traction? >>Yeah, absolutely. So we launched the product less than 90 days ago. 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's user owned and user controlled. And over time, people will be capturing additional information back to their NFP domain names, 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 get any rewards, once you own all your data and you can choose to share it with companies or incentivize you to share data. For example, imagine you just bought a new house and you have 3000 square feet to furnish. 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 house buyer or not. But if you could permission to share that to using a log-in open software 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 is referred to in the cube talk here, but we were still always called that old guard is 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 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 web three and the cryptos ecosystem in general, people are very tightly knit and they all support each other. 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, you know, tens of millions of people got into crypto for the first time during the super bowl face on some of those awesome ads that ran. >>Yeah. Love the QR code. That's a direct response. I remember when the QR code has been around for a long time. I remember in the nineties, late nineties, it was a thing, a device at red QR codes that did navigation to a webpage. So I mean, QR codes are super cool, great way to get, and we all using it to, 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 gotta 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 doing things, why are they gravitating towards this login concepts? Can you give some examples and put, give some color commentary to why are these D application distribute application guys and gals programming and with you guys? >>Yeah. They all believe that the potential for why we're trying to create a round user own the controlled identity. We're 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 deliver to 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, 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 that took changes to wallets, to individual NFT projects, to more recently even exploring partnership, partnership opportunities with fashion brands. For example, the Tyree market is moving so so fast. And what we're trying to essentially do here is create the standard naming system for web three. So a big part of that for us, we'll be working with partners like blockchain.com and with circle who's behind the DC coin on creating registries, such as dot blockchain and dot coin and making those available to tens of millions and ultimately hundreds of millions and billions of users worldwide. We want an ensemble domain name to be the first asset that every user in crypto gets, even before they buy their Bitcoin Ethereum or dovish coin. >>It makes a lot of sense obstruct the way the long hexadecimal string. We all know that we all write down putting a safe, hopefully you don't forget about it. You know, I always say, make sure you tell someone where your addresses. So in case something happens, you don't lose all that crypto. All good stuff. I got to ask the question around the ecosystem. Okay, can you share your view and vision of either your purse, yourself or the company when you have this kind of new market, you have all kinds of, and we meant the web was a good example, right? Web pages, you need web development 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 was the web three stakeholder ecosystem space evolving? What's what are some of the white spaces? What are some of the clearly defined areas that are developing? >>Yeah, I mean, we've seen an explosion in new smart contract blockchains and 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 maintaining and managing their domain name. So we're trying to move all obstacles around user adoption. Here. We all need to have Ethereum in your wallet. You know, it'd 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 and infrastructure, new capabilities, new new applications. I think it's a, it's a great thing. You guys doing the naming system makes a lot of sense. This abstraction layer creates that ease of use. It simplifies things makes things easier. I mean, this is, was the promise of, of these abstraction layers. 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 wallets, exchanges, browsers, and companies who are in the crypto space already and realize they have a huge problem around usability with crypto transfers and wild addresses. Additionally, we're looking to partner with decentralized applications as well as web to companies who perhaps want to offer log-in with unstoppable domain functionality. In addition to, or in replacement of the login with Google and log-in 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 names, free of charge from us. I might add in order to use that on Twitter or 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 wave that we're all riding at the most. >>May I great insight, chief revenue officer ensemble domains. Thanks for coming on the showcase, the cube and unstoppable domain share in the insights. Thanks for coming on. Okay. This cubes coverage here with the unstoppable domain showcase. I'm John furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> When Facebook changed its name to Meta last fall, it catalyzed a chain reaction throughout the tech industry. Software firms, gaming companies, chip makers, device manufacturers, and others have joined in hype machine. Now, it's easy to dismiss the metaverse as futuristic hyperbole, but do we really believe that tapping on a smartphone, or staring at a screen, or two-dimensional Zoom meetings are the future of how we work, play, and communicate? As the internet itself proved to be larger than we ever imagined, it's very possible, and even quite likely that the combination of massive processing power, cheap storage, AI, blockchains, crypto, sensors, AR, VR, brain interfaces, and other emerging technologies will combine to create new and unimaginable consumer experiences, and massive wealth for creators of the metaverse. Hello, and welcome to this week's Wiki Bond Cube Insights, powered by ETR. In this "Breaking Analysis" we welcome in cyber expert, hacker gamer, NFT expert, and founder of ORE System, Nick Donarski. Nick, welcome, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you, sir, glad to be here. >> Yeah, okay, so today we're going to traverse two parallel paths, one that took Nick from security expert and PenTester to NFTs, tokens, and the metaverse. And we'll simultaneously explore the complicated world of cybersecurity in the enterprise, and how the blockchain, crypto, and NFTs will provide key underpinnings for digital ownership in the metaverse. We're going to talk a little bit about blockchain, and crypto, and get things started there, and some of the realities and misconceptions, and how innovations in those worlds have led to the NFT craze. We'll look at what's really going on in NFTs and why they're important as both a technology and societal trend. Then, we're going to dig into the tech and try to explain why and how blockchain and NFTs are going to lay the foundation for the metaverse. And, finally, who's going to build the metaverse. And how long is it going to take? All right, Nick, let's start with you. Tell us a little bit about your background, your career. You started as a hacker at a really, really young age, and then got deep into cyber as a PenTester. You did some pretty crazy stuff. You have some great stories about sneaking into buildings. You weren't just doing it all remote. Tell us about yourself. >> Yeah, so I mean, really, I started a long time ago. My dad was really the foray into technology. I wrote my first program on an Apple IIe in BASIC in 1989. So, I like to say I was born on the internet, if you will. But, yeah, in high school at 16, I incorporated my first company, did just tech support for parents and teachers. And then in 2000 I transitioned really into security and focused there ever since. I joined Rapid7 and after they picked up Medis boy, I joined HP. I was one of their founding members of Shadowlabs and really have been part of the information security and the cyber community all throughout, whether it's training at various different conferences or talking. My biggest thing and my most awesome moments as various things of being broken into, is really when I get to actually work with somebody that's coming up in the industry and who's new and actually has that light bulb moment of really kind of understanding of technology, understanding an idea, or getting it when it comes to that kind of stuff. >> Yeah, and when you think about what's going on in crypto and NFTs and okay, now the metaverse it's you get to see some of the most innovative people. Now I want to first share a little bit of data on enterprise security and maybe Nick get you to comment. We've reported over the past several years on the complexity in the security business and the numerous vendor choices that SecOps Pros face. And this chart really tells that story in the cybersecurity space. It's an X,Y graph. We've shown it many times from the ETR surveys where the vertical axis, it's a measure of spending momentum called net score. And the horizontal axis is market share, which represents each company's presence in the data set, and a couple of points stand out. First, it's really crowded. In that red dotted line that you see there, that's 40%, above that line on the net score axis, marks highly elevated spending momentum. Now, let's just zoom in a bit and I've cut the data by those companies that have more than a hundred responses in the survey. And you can see here on this next chart, it's still very crowded, but a few call-outs are noteworthy. First companies like SentinelOne, Elastic, Tanium, Datadog, Netskope and Darktrace. They were all above that 40% line in the previous chart, but they've fallen off. They still have actually a decent presence in the survey over 60 responses, but under that hundred. And you can see Auth0 now Okta, big $7 billion acquisition. They got the highest net score CrowdStrike's up there, Okta classic they're kind of enterprise business, and Zscaler and others above that line. You see Palo Alto Networks and Microsoft very impressive because they're both big and they're above that elevated spending velocity. So Nick, kind of a long-winded intro, but it was a little bit off topic, but I wanted to start here because this is the life of a SecOps pro. They lack the talent in a capacity to keep bad guys fully at bay. And so they have to keep throwing tooling at the problem, which adds to the complexity and as a PenTester and hacker, this chaos and complexity means cash for the bad guys. Doesn't it? >> Absolutely. You know, the more systems that these organizations find to integrate into the systems, means that there's more components, more dollars and cents as far as the amount of time and the engineers that need to actually be responsible for these tools. There's a lot of reasons that, the more, I guess, hands in the cookie jar, if you will, when it comes to the security architecture, the more links that are, or avenues for attack built into the system. And really one of the biggest things that organizations face is being able to have engineers that are qualified and technical enough to be able to support that architecture as well, 'cause buying it from a vendor and deploying it, putting it onto a shelf is good, but if it's not tuned properly, or if it's not connected properly, that security tool can just hold up more avenues of attack for you. >> Right, okay, thank you. Now, let's get into the meat of the discussion for today and talk a little bit about blockchain and crypto for a bit. I saw sub stack post the other day, and it was ripping Matt Damon for pedaling crypto on TV ads and how crypto is just this big pyramid scheme. And it's all about allowing criminals to be anonymous and it's ransomware and drug trafficking. And yes, there are definitely scams and you got to be careful and lots of dangers out there, but these are common criticisms in the mainstream press, that overlooked the fact by the way that IPO's and specs are just as much of a pyramid scheme. Now, I'm not saying there shouldn't be more regulation, there should, but Bitcoin was born out of the 2008 financial crisis, cryptocurrency, and you think about, it's really the confluence of software engineering, cryptography and game theory. And there's some really powerful innovation being created by the blockchain community. Crypto and blockchain are really at the heart of a new decentralized platform being built out. And where today, you got a few, large internet companies. They control the protocols and the platform. Now the aspiration of people like yourself, is to create new value opportunities. And there are many more chances for the little guys and girls to get in on the ground floor and blockchain technology underpins all this. So Nick, what's your take, what are some of the biggest misconceptions around blockchain and crypto? And do you even pair those two in the same context? What are your thoughts? >> So, I mean, really, we like to separate ourselves and say that we are a blockchain company, as opposed to necessarily saying(indistinct) anything like that. We leverage those tools. We leverage cryptocurrencies, we leverage NFTs and those types of things within there, but blockchain is a technology, which is the underlying piece, is something that can be used and utilized in a very large number of different organizations out there. So, cryptocurrency and a lot of that negative context comes with a fear of something new, without having that regulation in place, without having the rules in place. And we were a big proponent of, we want the regulation, right? We want to do right. We want to do it by the rules. We want to do it under the context of, this is what should be done. And we also want to help write those rules as well, because a lot of the lawmakers, a lot of the lobbyists and things, they have a certain aspect or a certain goal of when they're trying to get these things. Our goal is simplicity. We want the ability for the normal average person to be able to interact with crypto, interact with NFTs, interact with the blockchain. And basically by saying, blockchain in quotes, it's very ambiguous 'cause there's many different things that blockchain can be, the easiest way, right? The easiest way to understand blockchain is simply a distributed database. That's really the core of what blockchain is. It's a record keeping mechanism that allows you to reference that. And the beauty of it, is that it's quote unquote immutable. You can't edit that data. So, especially when we're talking about blockchain, being underlying for technologies in the future, things like security, where you have logging, you have keeping, whether you're talking about sales, where you may have to have multiple different locations (indistinct) users from different locations around the globe. It creates a central repository that provides distribution and security in the way that you're ensuring your data, ensuring the validation of where that data exists when it was created. Those types of things that blockchain really is. If you go to the historical, right, the very early on Bitcoin absolutely was made to have a way of not having to deal with the fed. That was the core functionality of the initial crypto. And then you had a lot of the illicit trades, those black markets that jumped onto it because of what it could do. The maturity of the technology though, of where we are now versus say back in 97 is a much different world of blockchain, and there's a much different world of cryptocurrency. You still have to be careful because with any fed, you're still going to have that FUD that goes out there and sells that fear, uncertainty and doubt, which spurs a lot of those types of scams, and a lot of those things that target end users that we face as security professionals today. You still get mailers that go out, looking for people to give their social security number over during tax time. Snail mail is considered a very ancient technology, but it still works. You still get a portion of the population that falls for those tricks, fishing, whatever it might be. It's all about trying to make sure that you have fear about what is that change. And I think that as we move forward, and move into the future, the simpler and the more comfortable these types of technologies become, the easier it is to utilize and indoctrinate normal users, to be able to use these things. >> You know, I want to ask you about that, Nick, because you mentioned immutability, there's a lot of misconceptions about that. I had somebody tell me one time, "Blockchain's Bs," and they say, "Well, oh, hold on a second. They say, oh, they say it's a mutable, but you can hack Coinbase, whatever it is." So I guess a couple of things, one is that the killer app for blockchain became money. And so we learned a lot through that. And you had Bitcoin and it really wasn't programmable through its interface. And then Ethereum comes out. I know, you know a lot about Ether and you have solidity, which is a lot simpler, but it ain't JavaScript, which is ubiquitous. And so now you have a lot of potential for the initial ICO's and probably still the ones today, the white papers, a lot of security flaws in there. I'm sure you can talk to that, but maybe you can help square that circle about immutability and security. I've mentioned game theory before, it's harder to hack Bitcoin and the Bitcoin blockchain than it is to mine. So that's why people mine, but maybe you could add some context to that. >> Yeah, you know it goes to just about any technology out there. Now, when you're talking about blockchain specifically, the majority of the attacks happen with the applications and the smart contracts that are actually running on the blockchain, as opposed to necessarily the blockchain itself. And like you said, the impact for whether that's loss of revenue or loss of tokens or whatever it is, in most cases that results from something that was a phishing attack, you gave up your credentials, somebody said, paste your private key in here, and you win a cookie or whatever it might be, but those are still the fundamental pieces. When you're talking about various different networks out there, depending on the blockchain, depends on how much the overall security really is. The more distributed it is, and the more stable it is as the network goes, the better or the more stable any of the code is going to be. The underlying architecture of any system is the key to success when it comes to the overall security. So the blockchain itself is immutable, in the case that the owner are ones have to be trusted. If you look at distributed networks, something like Ethereum or Bitcoin, where you have those proof of work systems, that disperses that information at a much more remote location, So the more disperse that information is, the less likely it is to be able to be impacted by one small instance. If you look at like the DAO Hack, or if you look at a lot of the other vulnerabilities that exist on the blockchain, it's more about the code. And like you said, solidity being as new as it is, it's not JavaScript. The industry is very early and very infantile, as far as the developers that are skilled in doing this. And with that just comes the inexperience and the lack of information that you don't learn until JavaScript is 10 or 12 years old. >> And the last thing I'll say about this topic, and we'll move on to NFTs, but NFTs relate is that, again, I said earlier that the big internet giants have pretty much co-opted the platform. You know, if you wanted to invest in Linux in the early days, there was no way to do that. You maybe have to wait until red hat came up with its IPO and there's your pyramid scheme folks. But with crypto it, which is again, as Nick was explaining underpinning is the blockchain, you can actually participate in early projects. Now you got to be careful 'cause there are a lot of scams and many of them are going to blow out if not most of them, but there are some, gems out there, because as Nick was describing, you've got this decentralized platform that causes scaling issues or performance issues, and people are solving those problems, essentially building out a new internet. But I want to get into NFTs, because it's sort of the next big thing here before we get into the metaverse, what Nick, why should people pay attention to NFTs? Why do they matter? Are they really an important trend? And what are the societal and technological impacts that you see in this space? >> Yeah, I mean, NFTs are a very new technology and ultimately it's just another entry on the blockchain. It's just another piece of data in the database. But how it's leveraged in the grand scheme of how we, as users see it, it can be the classic idea of an NFT is just the art, or as good as the poster on your wall. But in the case of some of the new applications, is where are you actually get that utility function. Now, in the case of say video games, video games and gamers in general, already utilize digital items. They already utilize digital points. As in the case of like Call of Duty points, those are just different versions of digital currencies. You know, World of Warcraft Gold, I like to affectionately say, was the very first cryptocurrency. There was a Harvard course taught on the economy of WOW, there was a black market where you could trade your end game gold for Fiat currencies. And there's even places around the world that you can purchase real world items and stay at hotels for World of Warcraft Gold. So the adoption of blockchain just simply gives a more stable and a more diverse technology for those same types of systems. You're going to see that carry over into shipping and logistics, where you need to have data that is single repository for being able to have multiple locations, multiple shippers from multiple global efforts out there that need to have access to that data. But in the current context, it's either sitting on a shipping log, it's sitting on somebody's desk. All of those types of paper transactions can be leveraged as NFTs on the blockchain. It's just simply that representation. And once you break the idea of this is just a piece of art, or this is a cryptocurrency, you get into a world where you can apply that NFT technology to a lot more things than I think most people think of today. >> Yeah, and of course you mentioned art a couple of times when people sold as digital art for whatever, it was 60, 65 million, 69 million, that caught a lot of people's attention, but you're seeing, I mean, there's virtually infinite number of applications for this. One of the Washington wizards, tokenized portions of his contract, maybe he was creating a new bond, that's really interesting use cases and opportunities, and that kind of segues into the latest, hot topic, which is the metaverse. And you've said yourself that blockchain and NFTs are the foundation of the metaverse, they're foundational elements. So first, what is the metaverse to you and where do blockchain and NFTs, fit in? >> Sure, so, I mean, I affectionately refer to the metaverse just a VR and essentially, we've been playing virtual reality games and all the rest for a long time. And VR has really kind of been out there for a long time. So most people's interpretation or idea of what the metaverse is, is a virtual reality version of yourself and this right, that idea of once it becomes yourself, is where things like NFT items, where blockchain and digital currencies are going to come in, because if you have a manufacturer, so you take on an organization like Nike, and they want to put their shoes into the metaverse because we, as humans, want to individualize ourselves. We go out and we want to have that one of one shoe or that, t-shirt or whatever it is, we're going to want to represent that same type of individuality in our virtual self. So NFTs, crypto and all of those digital currencies, like I was saying that we've known as gamers are going to play that very similar role inside of the metaverse. >> Yeah. Okay. So basically you're going to take your physical world into the metaverse. You're going to be able to, as you just mentioned, acquire things- I loved your WOW example. And so let's stay on this for a bit, if we may, of course, Facebook spawned a lot of speculation and discussion about the concept of the metaverse and really, as you pointed out, it's not new. You talked about why second life, really started in 2003, and it's still around today. It's small, I read recently, it's creators coming back into the company and books were written in the early 90s that used the term metaverse. But Nick, talk about how you see this evolving, what role you hope to play with your company and your community in the future, and who builds the metaverse, when is it going to be here? >> Yeah, so, I mean, right now, and we actually just got back from CES last week. And the Metaverse is a very big buzzword. You're going to see a lot of integration of what people are calling, quote unquote, the metaverse. And there was organizations that were showing virtual office space, virtual malls, virtual concerts, and those types of experiences. And the one thing right now that I don't think that a lot of organizations have grasp is how to make one metaverse. There's no real player one, if you will always this yet, There's a lot of organizations that are creating their version of the metaverse, which then again, just like every other software and game vendor out there has their version of cryptocurrency and their version of NFTs. You're going to see it start to pop up, especially as Oculus is going to come down in price, especially as you get new technologies, like some of the VR glasses that look more augmented reality and look more like regular glasses that you're wearing, things like that, the easier that those technologies become as in adopting into our normal lifestyle, as far as like looks and feels, the faster that stuff's going to actually come out to the world. But when it comes to like, what we're doing is we believe that the metaverse should actually span multiple different blockchains, multiple different segments, if you will. So what ORE system is doing, is we're actually building the underlying architecture and technologies for developers to bring their metaverse too. You can leverage the ORE Systems NFTs, where we like to call our utility NFTs as an in-game item in one game, or you can take it over and it could be a t-shirt in another game. The ability for having that cross support within the ecosystem is what really no one has grasp on yet. Most of the organizations out there are using a very classic business model. Get the user in the game, make them spend their money in the game, make all their game stuff as only good in their game. And that's where the developer has you, they have you in their bubble. Our goal, and what we like to affectionately say is, we want to bring white collar tools and technology to blue collar folks, We want to make it simple. We want to make it off the shelf, and we want to make it a less cost prohibitive, faster, and cheaper to actually get out to all the users. We do it by supporting the technology. That's our angle. If you support the technology and you support the platform, you can build a community that will build all of the metaverse around them. >> Well, and so this is interesting because, if you think about some of the big names, we've Microsoft is talking about it, obviously we mentioned Facebook. They have essentially walled gardens. Now, yeah, okay, I could take Tik Tok and pump it into Instagram is fine, but they're really siloed off. And what you're saying is in the metaverse, you should be able to buy a pair of sneakers in one location and then bring it to another one. >> Absolutely, that's exactly it. >> And so my original kind of investment in attractiveness, if you will, to crypto, was that, the little guy can get an early, but I worry that some of these walled gardens, these big internet giants are going to try to co-op this. So I think what you're doing is right on, and I think it's aligned with the objectives of consumers and the users who don't want to be forced in to a pen. They want to be able to live freely. And that's really what you're trying to do. >> That's exactly it. You know, when you buy an item, say a Skin in Fortnite or Skin in Call of Duty, it's only good in that game. And not even in the franchise, it's only good in that version of the game. In the case of what we want to do is, you can not only have that carry over and your character. So say you buy a really cool shirt, and you've got that in your Call of Duty or in our case, we're really Osiris Protocol, which is our proof of concept video game to show that this all thing actually works, but you can actually go in and you can get a gun in Osiris Protocol. And if we release, Osiris Protocol two, you'll be able to take that to Osiris Protocol two. Now the benefit of that is, is you're going to be the only one in the next version with that item, if you haven't sold it or traded it or whatever else. So we don't lock you into a game. We don't lock you into a specific application. You own that, you can trade that freely with other users. You can sell that on the open market. We're embracing what used to be considered the black market. I don't understand why a lot of video games, we're always against the skins and mods and all the rest. For me as a gamer and coming up, through the many, many years of various different Call of Duties and everything in my time, I wish I could still have some this year. I still have a World of Warcraft account. I wasn't on, Vanilla, Burning Crusade was my foray, but I still have a character. If you look at it that way, if I had that wild character and that gear was NFTs, in theory, I could actually pass that onto my kid who could carry on that character. And it would actually increase in value because they're NFT back then. And then if needed, you could trade those on the open market and all the rest. It just makes gaming a much different thing. >> I love it. All right, Nick, hey, we're out of time, but I got to say, Nick Donarski, thanks so much for coming on the program today, sharing your insights and really good luck to you and building out your technology platform and your community. >> Thank you, sir, it's been an absolute pleasure. >> And thank you for watching. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcasts, just search "Breaking Analysis Podcast", and you'll find them. I publish pretty much every week on siliconangle.com and wikibond.com. And you can reach me @dvellante on Twitter or comment on my LinkedIn posts. You can always email me david.vellante@siliconangle.com. And don't forget, check out etr.plus for all the survey data. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR, happy 2022 be well, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

from the cube studios in palo alto in boston bringing you data-driven insights from the cube and etr this is breaking analysis with dave vellante the convenience of online access to bank accounts payment apps crypto exchanges and other transaction systems has created enormous risks which the vast majority of individuals either choose to ignore or simply don't understand the internet has become the new private network and unfortunately it's not so private apis scripts spoofing insider crime sloppy security hygiene by users and much more all increase our risks the convenience of cloud-based services in many respects exacerbates the problem but software built in the cloud is a big part of the solution hello everyone and welcome to this week's wikibon cube insights powered by etr in this breaking analysis we'll try to raise awareness about a growing threat to your liquid assets and hopefully inspire you to do some research and take actions to lower the probability of you losing thousands hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars let's go back to 2019 in an event that should have forced us to act but for most of us didn't in september of that year jack dorsey's twitter twitter account was hacked the hackers took over his account and posted racial slurs and other bizarre comments before twitter could regain control of the account and assure us that this wasn't a system-wide attack most concerning however was the manner in which the attackers got a hold of dorsey's twitter account they used an increasingly common and relatively easy to execute technique referred to as a sim hijack or a sim swap the approach allows cyber thieves to take control of a victim's phone number now they often will target high-profile individuals like ceos and celebrities to embarrass or harass them but increasingly they're going after people's money of course now just in the past month we've seen a spate of attacks where individuals have lost cash it's a serious problem of increasing frequency so let's talk a little bit about how it works now some of you are familiar with this technique but most people that we talk to either aren't aware of it or aren't concerned you should be in a sim hack like this one documented on medium in may of 2019 four months prior to the dorsey attack the hackers who have many of your credentials that have likely been posted on the dark web they have your email they have your frequently used passwords your phone number your address your mother's maiden name name of your favorite pet and so forth they go in and they spoof a mobile phone carrier rep into thinking that it's you and they convince the agent that they've switched phones or have some other ruse to get a new sim card sent to them or they pay insiders at the phone carrier to steal sim card details hey 100 bucks a card big money now once in possession of the sim card info the attacker now can receive sms messages as part of two-factor authentication systems that are often used to verify identity they can't use face id on mobile but what they can do is go into your web account and change the password or other information the website then sends an sms and now the attacker has the code and is in then the individual can lock you out and steal your money before you even know what hit you all right so what can you do about it first there's no system that is hack proof if the bad guys want to get you and the value is high enough they will get you but that's the key roi what's roi simply put it's a measure of return derived from dividing the value stolen by the cost of getting that value it's benefit divided by cost so a good way to dissuade a criminal is to increase the denominator if you make it harder to steal the value goes down the roi is less here's a layered system shared by jason floyer the son of our very own david floyer smart dna there so we appreciate his contribution to the cube the system involves three layers of protection first you got to think about all the high value online systems that you have here are just a few you got bank accounts you have investment accounts you might have betting sites that has cash in it e-commerce sites and so forth now many of these sites if not most will use sms-based two-factor authentication to identify you now that exposes you to the sim hack the system that jason proposes let's start in the middle of this chart the first thing is you got to acknowledge that the logins that you're using to access your critical systems are already public so the first thing you do is to get a in quotes secure email in other words one that no one knows about and isn't on the dark web find a provider that you trust maybe the one maybe one that doesn't sell ads but that look that's your call or maybe go out and buy a domain and create a private email address now the second step is to use a password manager now for those who don't know what that is you're probably already using one that comes with your chrome browser for example and it remembers your passwords and autofills them now if you on your iphone if you're an iphone user go to settings passwords and security recommendations or if you're on an android phone open your chrome app and go to settings passwords check passwords you're likely to see a number of recommendations as in dozens or maybe even hundreds that have been compromised reuse passwords and or or are the subject of a data breach so a password manager is a single cloud-based layer that works on your laptop and your mobile phone and allows you to largely automate the creation management and maintenance of your online credentials now the third layer here involves an external cloud-based or sometimes app-based two-factor authentication system that doesn't use sms one that essentially turns your phone into a hardware authentication device much like an external device that you would use like a yubikey now that's also a really good idea to use as that third layer that hardware fob so the system basically brings together all your passwords under one roof under one system with some layers that lower the probability of your money getting stolen again it doesn't go to zero percent but it's dramatically better than the protection that most people have here's another view of that system and this venn the password manager in the middle manages everything and yes there's a concern that all your passwords are in one place but once set up it's more secure than what you're likely doing today we'll explain that and it'll make your life a lot easier the key to this system is there's there's a single password that you have to remember for the password manager and it takes care of everything else now for many password managers you can also add a non-sms based third-party two-factor authentication capability we'll come back and talk about that in a moment so the mobile phone here uses facial recognition if it's enabled so it would require somebody they had either have you at gunpoint to use your phone and to stick it in front of your face to get into your accounts or you know eventually they'll become experts at deep fakes that's probably something we're going to have to contend with down the road so it's the desktop or laptop via web access that is of the greatest concern in this use case this is where the non-sms-based third-party two-factor authentication comes into play it's installed on your phone and if somebody comes into your account from an unauthorized device it forces a two-factor authentication not using sms but using a third-party app as you guessed it is running in the cloud this is where the cloud creates this problem but it's also here to help solve this problem but the key is this app it generates a verification code that changes on your phone every 20 seconds and you can't get into the website without entering that auto generated code well normal people can't get in there's probably some other back door if they really want to get you but i think you see that this is a better system than what 99 of the people have today but there's more to the story so just as with enterprise tech and dealing with the problem of ransomware air gaps are an essential tool in com combating our personal cyber crime so we've added a couple of items to jason's slide so the this air gap and the secure password notion what you want to do is make sure that that password manager is strong and it's easy for you to remember it's never used anywhere except for the password manager which also uses the secure email now if you've set up a non s if you've set up a two factor authentication sms or otherwise you're even more protected non-sms is better for the reasons we've described now for your crypto if you got a lot first of all get out of coinbase not only does coinbase gouge you on transaction costs but we'd recommend storing a good chunk of your crypto in an air-gapped vault now what you want to do is you want to make a few copies of this critical information you want to keep your secure password on you in one spot or memorize it but maybe keep a copy in your wallet your physical wallet and put the rest in a fireproof filing cabinet and a safety deposit box and or fire proof lock a lock box or a book in your library but but have multiple copies that somebody has to get to in order to hack you and you want to put also all your recovery codes so when you set all this up you're going to get recovery codes for the password manager in your crypto wallets that you own yeah it gets complicated and it's a pain but imagine having 30 percent or more of your liquid assets stolen now look we've really just scratched the surface here and you you're going to have to do some research and talk to people who have set this stuff up to get it right so figure out your secure email provider and then focus on the password manager now just google it and take your time deciding which one is the best for you here's a sample there are many some are free you know the better ones are for pay but carve out a full day to do research and set up your system take your time and think about how you use it before pulling the trigger on these tools and document everything offline air gap it now the other tooling that you want to use is the non-sms based third-party authentication app so in case you get sim hacked you've got further protection this turns your phone into a secure token generator without using sms unfortunately it's even more complicated because not only are there a lot of tools but not all your financial systems and apps we will support the same two-factor authentication app your password manager for example might only support duo your crypto exchange might support authy but your bank might only support symantec vip or it forces you to have a key fob or use sms so it's it's a mishmash so you may need to use multiple authentication apps to protect your liquid assets yeah i'm sorry but the consequences of not protecting your money and identity are worth the effort okay well i know there's a deviation from our normal enterprise tech discussions but look we're all the cios of our respective home i.t we're the network admin the storage admin the tech support help desk and we're the chief information security officer so as individuals we can only imagine the challenges of securing the enterprise and one of the things we talk about a lot in the cyber security space is complexity and fragmentation it's just the way it is now here's a chart from etr that we use frequently which lays out the security players in the etr data set on two dimensions net score or spending velocity in the vertical axis and market share or pervasiveness within the data set on the horizontal now for change i'm not going to elaborate on any of the specific vendors today you've seen a lot of this before but the chart underscores the complexity and fragmentation of this market and this is just really literally one tiny subset but the cloud which i said at the outset is a big reason that we got into this problem holds a key to solving it now here's one example listen to this clip of dave hatfield the longtime industry exec he's formerly an executive with pure storage he's now the ceo of laceworks lace work a very well-funded cloud-based security company that in our view is attacking one of the biggest problems in security and that's the fragmentation issue that we've often discussed take a listen so at the core of what we do you know you know it's um it's really trying to merge when we look at we look at security as a data problem security and compliance is the data problem and when you apply that to the cloud it's a massive data problem you know you literally have trillions of data points you know across shared infrastructure that we you need to be able to ingest and capture uh and then you need to be able to process efficiently and provide context back to the end user and so we approached it very differently than how legacy approaches have been uh in place you know largely rules-based engines that are written to be able to try and stop the bad guys and they miss a lot of things and so our data-driven approach uh that we patented is called uh polygraph it's it's a security architecture and there are three primary benefits it does a lot of things but the three things that we think are most profound first is it eliminates the need for you know dozens of point solutions um i was shocked when i you know kind of learned about security i was at symantec back in the day and just to see how fragmented this market is it's one of the biggest markets in tech 124 billion dollars in annual spend growing at 300 billion dollars in the next three years and it's massively fragmented and the average number of point solutions that customers have to deal with is dozens like literally 75 is the average number and so we wanted to take a platform approach to solve this problem where the larger the attack service that you put in the more data that you put into our machine learning algorithms the smarter that it gets and the higher the efficacies look hatfield nailed it in our view i mean the cloud and edge explodes the threat surface and this becomes a data problem at massive scale now is lace work going to solve all these problems no of course not but having researched this it's common for individuals to be managing dozens of tools and enterprises as hatfield said 75 on average with many hundreds being common the number one challenge we hear from csos and they'll tell you this is a lack of talent lack of human skills and bandwidth to solve the problem and a big part of that problem is fragmentation multiple apis scripts different standards that are constantly being updated and evolved so if the cloud can help us reduce tooling creep and simplify and automate at scale as the network continues to expand like the universe we can keep up with the adversaries they're never going to get ahead of them so look i know this topic is a bit off our normal swim lane but we think this is so important and no people that have been victimized so we wanted to call your attention to the exposure and try to get you to take some action even if it's baby steps so let's summarize you really want to begin by understanding where your credentials have been compromised because i promise they have been just look at your phone or look into your browser and see those recommendations and you're going to go whoa i got to get on this at least i hope you do that now you want to block out an entire day to focus on this and dig into it in order to protect you or your and your family's assets there's a lot of stake here and look one day is not going to kill you it's worth it then you want to begin building those three layers that we showed you choose a private email that is secure quote-unquote quote-unquote research the password manager that's find the one that's going to work for you do you want one that's web-based or an app that you download how does the password manager authenticate what do the reviews say how much does it cost don't rush into this you may want to test this out on a couple of low risk systems before fully committing because if you screw it up it's really a pain to unwind so don't rush into it then you want to figure out how to use your non-sms based two-factor authentication apps and identify which assets you want to protect you don't want to protect everything do you really care about your credentials on a site where you signed up years ago and never use it anymore it doesn't have any credit cards in it just delete it from your digital life and focus on your financial accounts your crypto and your sites where your credit card or other sensitive information lives and can be stolen also it's important to understand which institutions utilize which authentication methods really important that you make sure to document everything and air gap the most sensitive credentials and finally you're going to have to keep iterating and improving your security because this is a moving target you will never be 100 protected unfortunately this isn't a one-shot deal you're going to do a bunch of work it's hard but it's important work you're going to maintain your password you're going to change them every now and then maybe every few months six months maybe once a year whatever whatever is right for you and then a couple years down the road maybe two or three years down the road you might have to implement an entirely new system using the most modern tooling which we believe is going to be cloud-based or you could just ignore it and see what happens okay that's it for now thanks to the community for your comments and input and thanks again to jason floyer whose analysis around this topic was extremely useful remember i publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com these episodes are all available as podcasts all you can do is research breaking analysis podcasts or you can always connect on twitter i'm at d vallante or email me at david.velante siliconangle.com of course i always appreciate the comments on linkedin and clubhouse follow me so you're notified when we start a room and riff on these topics don't forget to check out etr.plus for all the survey data this is dave vellante for the cube insights powered by etr be well and we'll see you next time

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of IBM. Think 20, 21 brought to you by IBM, >>Welcome back to IBM. Think at 2021, the virtual edition, my name is Dave Volante and you're watching the cubes continuous coverage of think 21. And right now we're going to talk about banking and the post isolation economy. I'm very pleased to welcome our next guests. Look at Wigley's the general manager global banking financial markets at IBM and John diagonal is the global CTO and vice president and distinguished engineer for banking and financial services. Gentlemen, welcome to the cube. That's my pleasure. Look at this current economic upheaval, it's quite a bit different from the last one. Isn't it? I mean, liquidity doesn't seem to be a problem for most banks these days. I mean, if anything, they're releasing loan loss reserves that they didn't need. What's from your perspective, what's the state of banking today and hopefully as we exit this pandemic soon. Okay. >>So, so Dave, I think, like you say, it's a, it's a, it's a state in a picture that, uh, in a significantly different from what people were expecting. And I, and I think some way, in some ways you're seeing the benefits of a number of the regulations that were put into, into place after the, you know, the financial crisis last time round, right? And therefore this time, you know, a health crisis did not become a financial crisis because I think the banks were in better shape. And also, you know, governments clearly have put worldwide a lot of liquidity into the, into the system. Um, I think if you look at it though, um, maybe two or three things ready to call out, firstly, there's a, there's a massive regional variation. So if you look at the U S banking industry, uh, it's extremely buoyant and I'll come back to that in a managing the way in which it's performing. >>Uh, you know, the banks that are starting to report that first quarter results are going to show a profitability that's significantly ahead of where they were last year. And probably some of those, some of that best performance for quite a long time, if you go into Europe, it's a completely different picture. I think the banks are extremely challenged at that. And I think you're going to see a much Bleaker outlook in terms of what those banks report, as far as Asia Pacific is concerned again, you know, because they did, they have come out of the pandemic much faster that consumer businesses back into growth. Again, I think they're showing some pretty buoyant up performance as far as, as far as banking performance is concerned. I think the beast that's particularly interesting. And I think Kim is a bit of a surprise to most, uh, is, is what we've seen in the U S right? >>And in the U S what's actually happened is, uh, the investment banking side of banking businesses has been doing better than they've ever done before. There's been the most unbelievable amount of acquisition activity. You've seen a lot of what's going on with the specs that's driving the res you know, deal based fee income for the banks, the volatility in the marketplace, meaning that trading income is much, much higher than it's ever been. And therefore the banks are very much seeing a profitability on that investment banking side. That was way ahead of what I think they were, they were expecting. Consumer business is definitely down. If you look at the credit card business, it's down, if you look at, uh, you know, lending activity, that's going down, going out, it's substantially less than where it was before. There's hardly any lending growth because the economy is flat at this moment in time. >>But again, the good news that, and I think this is a worldwide, but you're not just in the us. The good news here is that because of the liquidity and some of them are special mentions that government put out that there has not been, uh, the, the level of bankruptcies that people were expecting. Right. And that for most of the provisioning that the banks did, um, in expectation of non-performing loans has been, I think, a much more, much greater than what they're going to need, which is why you're starting to supervision is being released as well, which I kind of flattering, flattering the income flattering. I think going forward though, you're going to see a different picture. >>It's the, thank you for the clarification on the regional divergence is that you're right on, I mean, European central banks are, are not the same, the same position, uh, to, to affect liquidity, but is that nuance, is that variation across the globe? Is that, uh, is that a blind spot? Is that a, is that a, a concern, uh, or the other, other greater concerns, you know, inflation and, and, and the, the, the pace of the, the return to the economy. What are your thoughts on that? >>So I think, I think the, um, the, the, the concern, um, you know, as far as the European marketplace is concerned is, um, you know, whether the, the performance that in particularly, I don't think the level of Verition in there was quite as generous as we saw in other parts of the world. And therefore, um, you know, ease the issue around non-performing loans in, in Europe going to hold the European, uh, European banks back. And are they going to, you know, therefore constrained them under lending that they put into the economy. And that then, um, you know, reduces the level of economic growth that we see in Europe. Right. I think, I think that is certainly that is certainly a concern. Um, I would be surprised and I've been looking at, you know, forecasts that have been brought forward by various people around the world around infection. >>I would be surprised if inflation starts to become a genuine problem in the, in the kind of short to medium term. I think in the industry that are going to be two or three other things that are probably going to be more, you know, going to be more issues. Right. I think the first one, which is becoming top of mind for chief executives is this whole area around operational resiliency. So, you know, regulators universally are making very, very sure that banks do not have a technical debt or a complexity of legacy systems issue. They are. And, you know, the UK has taken the lead on this and they are going so far as even requiring non-executive directors to be liable. If banks are found to not have the right policies in place, this is not being followed by other regulators around the world. Right. So, so that is very much top of mind at this moment in time. >>So I think discretionary investment is going to be, uh, you know, to watch, um, uh, solving that particular problem. I think that that's one issue. I think the other issue is what the pandemic has shown is that, and, and, and this was very evident to me. I mean, I spent the last three years out in Singapore where, you know, banks have become very digital businesses. Right. When I came into the U S in my current role, it was somewhat surprising to me as to where the U S marketplace was in terms of digitization of banking. But if you look in the last 12 months, uh, you know, I think more has been achieved in terms of banks becoming digital businesses. And they've probably done in the last two or three years. Right. And then the real acceleration of that, uh, digitalization, which is going to continue to happen. But the downside of that has been that the threat to the banking industry from essentially fintechs and big decks has exactly, you know, it's really accelerated. Right, right. I mean, just to give you an example, pay Pat is the second largest financial services institution in the us, right. So that's become a real problem of my English. The banking industry is going to have to deal with, >>I want to come back to that, but now let's bring John into the conversation. Let's talk about the tech stack. Look, it was talking about whether it was resiliency going digital. We certainly saw with the pandemic remote work, huge, huge volumes of things like PPP and, and, and, and, and mortgages and with dropping rates, et cetera. So, John, how has the tech stack been altered in the past 14 months? >>Great question, Dave and it's top of mind for almost every single financial services firm, regardless of the sector within the overall industry, every single business has been taking stock of how they handled the pandemic and the economic conditions thereafter, and all of the business needs that were driven by the pandemic. In so many situations, firms were unable to service their clients or were not competitive in serving their clients. And as a result, they've had to do very deep, uh, uh, architectural, uh, transformation and digital transformation around their core platforms, their systems of analytics and their systems, their front end systems of engagement in terms of, uh, the core processing systems that many of these institutions, some in many cases, they're 50 years old. And with any 50 year old application platform, there are inherent limitations as an inflexibility and flexibility as an inability to innovate for the future as a speed of delivery issue. In, in other words, it can be very hard to accelerate delivery of new capabilities onto an aging platform. And so in every single case, um, institutions are looking to hybrid cloud and public cloud technology, and pre-packaged AI and pre-packaged solutions from an ISV ecosystem of software vendor ecosystem to say, as long as we can crack open many of these old monolithic cores and surround them with new digitization, new user experience that spans every channel and automation from the front to back of every interaction, that's where most institutions are prioritizing. Yep. >>Banks, aren't gonna migrate. Uh, they're gonna, they're going to build a abstraction layer. I want to come back to the disruption is so interesting. You had the Coinbase IPO last month, see Tesla and micro strategy. They're putting Bitcoin on their balance sheets. Jamie diamond says traditional banks are playing a smaller role in the financial system because of the new fintechs. Look at, you mentioned PayPal, the Stripe does Robin hood. You get the Silicon Valley giants have this dual disruptive disruption agenda, Apple, Amazon, even Walmart, Facebook. The question is, are traditional banks going to lose control of the payment systems? >>Yeah, I mean, I think to a large extent that is, that is already happened, right? Because I think if you look at, if you look at the experience in Asia, right, and you look at particularly organizations like iron financial, uh, you know, in India, you look at organizations like ATM the, you know, very substantial trends, particularly on the consumer payment side has actually moved, uh, away from the banks. And I think you're starting to see that in the West as well, right. With organizations like, you know, cloud. Now that's coming out with this, um, you know, pay, you know, buying out the later type of schemes. You've got and then, so you've got PayPal. And as you said, Stripe, uh, and, and others as well, but it's not just, um, you know, in the payment side. Right. I think, I think what's starting to happen is that, that are very core part of the banking business, you know, especially things like lending, for instance, where again, you are getting a number of these, um, fintechs and big, big tech companies entering the marketplace. >>And I, and I think the threat for the banks is, and this is not going to be small chunks of market share that you're going to actually lose. Right. It's, it's, it's actually, uh, it could actually be a Kodak moment. Let me give you an example. Uh, you know, you will have just seen that grab is going to be acquired by one of these facts for about $40 billion. I mean, this organization started like the Uber in Singapore. It very rapidly got into both the payment side, right? So it actually went to all of these mom and pop shops and it offered QR based, um, go out code based payment capabilities to these very small retailers. They were charging about half or a third of what MasterCard or visa were charging to run those payment routes. They took market share overnight. You look at the remittance business, right? >>They, they went into the remittance business, they set up these wallets in 28 countries around the ICR and region. They took huge chunks of business completely away from DBS, which is the local bank out there from Western union and all of these, all of these others. So, so I, I think it's a real threat. I think Jamie Dimon is saying what the banking industry has said always, right? Which is the reason we are losing is because the playing field is not even, this is not about playing fields and even right. All of these businesses have been subject to exactly the same regulation that the bank shop subject to regulations in Singapore and India, more onerous than maybe in other parts of the world. This is around the banking business, recognizing that this is a threat. And exactly, as John was saying, you got to get to delivering the customer experience. >>That juniors are wanting at the level of pasta they're prepared to pay. And you're not going to do that by purely shorting out the channels and having a cool app on somebody's smartphone. Right? If that smartphone is 48 by arcade processes and legacy systems, where can I apply? You know, like, like today, you know, you make a payment, your payment does not clear for five days, right? Whereas in Singapore I make a payment, the payment is instantaneously cleared, right? That's where the banking system is going to have to get to in order to get to that. You need to order the whole stack. And the really good news is there are many examples where this has been done very successfully by incumbent banks. You don't have to set up a digital bank on the side to do it. An incumbent bank could do it, and it can do it in a sense of a period of time, or does sense for level of investment. A lot of IBM's business across our consulting, as well as our, our technology stack is very much trying to do that with our clients. So I am personally very bullish about what the industry >>Yeah. I mean, taking friction out of the system sometimes with the case of crypto taking the middle person out of the system. But I think you guys are savvy. You understand that, you know, like, yeah, Jamie diamonds a couple of years ago said, he'd fire anybody doing crypto Janet Yellen and says, ah, I don't really get it. You know, Warren buffet. But I think as technology people, we look at it and say, okay, wait a minute. This is an interesting Petri dish. There's, there's fundamental technology here that has massive funding that is going to inform, you know, the future. I think, you know, big bags are gonna lean in some of them and others, others. Won't, uh, John, give you the last word here, >>But for sure they're leaning in. Uh, so to just, to, to, to think about, uh, uh, something that Likud said a moment ago, the reason these startups were able to innovate fast was because they didn't have the legacy. They didn't have the spaghetti lying around. They were able to be relentlessly laser focused on building new, using the API ecosystem, going straight to public and hybrid cloud and not worrying about everything that had been built for the last 50 years or so. The benefit for existing institutions, the incumbents is that they can use all of the same techniques and tools and hybrid cloud accelerators in terms. And we're not just thinking about, um, uh, retail banking here, your question around the industry, that disruption from Bitcoin, blockchain technologies, new ways of processing securities. It is playing out in every single securities processing and capital markets organization. Right now I'm working with several organizations right now, exactly on how to build custody systems, to take advantage of these non fungible digital assets. It's a hot, hot topic around which there's, uh, incredible, uh, appetite to invest an incredible appetite to innovate. And we know that the center of all these technologies are going to be cloud forward cloud ready, AI infused data infuse technologies. >>So I want to have you back. I wish you had more time. I want to talk about specs. I want to talk about NFTs. I want to talk about technology behind all this really great conversation and really appreciate your time. I'm sorry. We got to go. >>Thank you. Thanks so much indeed, for having us. >>Oh, really? Pleasure. Was mine. Thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante for IBM. Think 2021. You're watching the cube.

(upbeat music) >> The innovation around databases has exploded over the last few years. Not only do organizations continue to rely on database technology to manage their most mission critical business data. But new use cases have emerged that process and analyze unstructured data. They share data at scale, protect data, provide greater heterogeneity. New technologies are being injected into the database equation. Not just cloud which has been a huge force in the space, but also AI to drive better insights and automation, blockchain to protect data and provide better auditability, new file formats to expand the utility of database technology and more. Debates are bound as to who's the best number one, the fastest, the most cloudy, the least expensive, et cetera. But there is no debate, when it comes to leadership and mission critical database technologies. That status goes to Oracle. And with me to talk about the developments of database technology in the market is cube alum Juan Loaiza, who's executive vice president of Mission Critical Database Technology at Oracle. Juan always great to see you, thanks for making some time. >> Thanks, great to see you Dave, always a pleasure to join you. >> Yeah and I hope you have some time because they've got a lot of questions for you. (chuckles) I want to start with- >> All right I love questions. >> Good I want to start and we'll go deep if you're up for it. I want to start with the GoldenGate announcement. We're covering that recent announcement, the service on OCI. GoldenGate it's part of this your super high availability capabilities that Oracle is so well known for. What do we need to know about the new service and what it brings for your customers? >> Yeah, so first of all, GoldenGate is all about creating real time data throughout an enterprise. So it does replication, data integration, moving data into analytic workloads, streaming analytics of data, migrating of databases and making databases highly available. All those are use cases for real-time data movement. And GoldenGate is really the leading product in the market, has been for many years. We have about 80% of the global fortune 500 running GoldenGate today, in addition to thousands and thousands of smaller customers. So it is the premier data integration, replication, high availability, anything involving moving data in real time, GoldenGate is the premier platform. And so we've had that available as a product for many years. And what we just recently done is we've released it as a cloud service, as a fully managed and automated cloud service. So that's kind of the big new thing that's happening right now. >> So is that what's unique about this, is it's now a service, or there are other attributes that are unique to Oracle? >> Yeah, so the service is kind of the most basic part to it. But the big thing about the service is it makes this product dramatically easier to use. So traditionally the data integration, replication products, although very powerful, also are very complex to use. And one of the big benefits of the service is we've made a dramatically simpler. So not just super experts can use it, but anyone can use it. And also as part of releasing it as a cloud service, we've done a number of unique things including making it completely elastically scalable, pay per use and dynamic scalability. So just in time, real time scalability. So as your workload increases we automatically increase the throughput of GoldenGate. So previously you had to figure all this stuff out ahead of time. It was very static. All these products have been very static. Now it's completely dynamic a native cloud product and that's very unique in the market. >> So, I mean, from an availability standpoint, I guess IBM sort of has this with Db2 but it doesn't offer the heterogeneity that GoldenGate has. But at what about like AWS, Microsoft, Google, do they provide services like, like GoldenGate? >> There's really nothing like the GoldenGate service. When you're talking about people like Google and Azure, they really have do it yourself third-party products. So there'll be a third party data integration replication product, and it's kind of available in their marketplace and customers have to do everything. So it's basically a put it together, your own kit. And it's very complicated. I mean these data integration products have always been complicated, and they're even more complicated in the cloud, if you have to do everything yourself. Amazon has a product but it's really focused on basic data migration to their cloud. It doesn't have the same capabilities as Oracle has. It doesn't have the elasticity, it doesn't have pay peruse, so it's really not very clavy at all. >> Well, so I mean the biggest customers have always glommed onto GoldenGate because they need that super ultra high availability. And they're capable of do it yourself. So, tell us how this compares to two DIY. >> Yeah, so you have mentioned the big customers so you're absolutely right. The big customers have been big users of GoldenGate. Smaller customers or users as well, however, it's been challenging because it's complicated. Data integration has been a complicated area of data management. More and most complicated. And so one of the things this does, is that it expands the market. Makes it much dramatically easier for smaller companies that don't have as many it resources to use the product. Also, smaller companies obviously don't have as much data as the really large giants. So they don't have as much data throughput. So traditionally the price has been high for a small customer. But now, with pay per use in the cloud, it eliminates the two big blockers for smaller enterprises. Which are the costs, the high fixed costs and the complexity of the products. So in which, by the way, it's helpful for everyone also. And for big customers they've also struggled with elasticity. So sometimes a huge batch job will kick in, the rate of change increases and suddenly the replication product doesn't keep up. Because on-prem products aren't really very elastic. So it helps large customers as well. Everybody loves these reviews but the elasticity pay per use, on demand nature of it's really helpful for everybody. >> Well, and because it's delivered as a service I would imagine for the large customers that you're giving them more granularity, so they can apply it maybe for a single application, as opposed to trying to have to justify it across a whole suite. And because the cost is higher, but now if you're allowing me to pay by the drink, is that right? I could just sort of apply it in a more granular level. >> Yes, that's exactly right. It's really pay per use. You can use it as much or as little as you want. You just pay for what you use. And as I mentioned, it's not a static payment either. So if you have a lot of data loads going on and right now you pay a little more, at night when you have less going on, you pay a lot less. So you really just paying for what use. It's very easy to set it up for a single application or all your applications. >> How about for things like continuous replication or real-time analytics, is the service designed to support that? >> Yes, so that's the heritage of GoldenGate. GoldenGate has been around for decades and we've worked with some of the most demanding customers in the world on exactly those things. So real time data all over the enterprise is really the goal that everyone wants. Real-time data from OTP and to analytics, from one system to another system, and for availability. That is the key benefit of GoldenGate. And that's the key technology that we've been working on for decades. And now we have it very easy to use in the cloud. >> Well what would be the overheads associated with that? I mean, for instance, you've go it, you need a second copy. You need the other database copies, and where does it make sense to incur that overhead? Obviously the super high availability apps that can exploit real time. Think like fraud detection is the obvious one, but what else can you add there? >> Well, GoldenGate itself doesn't require any extra copies of anything. However, it does enable customers that want to create for example, an analytics system, a data warehouse, to feed data from all their systems in real time into that data warehouse for example. And it also enables the real-time capabilities, enable high availability and you can get high availability within the cloud with it, between on premises in the cloud, between clouds. Also, you can migrate data. Migrate databases without having to take them down. So all these capabilities are available now and they're very easy to use. >> Okay. Thanks for that clarification. What about autonomous? Is that on the roadmap or what you thinking? >> Yeah, the GoldenGate is essentially an autonomous service. And it works with the Oracle Autonomous Database. So you can both use it as a source for data and as a sink for data, as a place you're writing data. So for example, you can have an autonomous OTP database, that's replicating to another autonomous OTP database in real time. And both of them are replicating changes to the autonomous data warehouse. But it doesn't all have to be autonomous. You can have any mix of, autonomous not autonomous, on-prem in cloud, in anybody's cloud. So that's the beauty of GoldenGate, It's extremely flexible. >> Well, you mentioned the plasticity a couple of times. I mean, why is that so important that that GoldenGate on OCI gives you that elastic, whatever billing the auto-scaling talk, talk to me in terms of what that does for the customer. >> Yeah, there's really two big benefits. One benefit is it's very difficult to predict workloads. So normally on an on-prem configuration, you have to say, okay what is the max possible workload that's going to happen here? And then you have to buy the product, configure the product, get hardware, basically size, everything for that. And then if you guess wrong, you're either spending too much because you oversized it or you have a big data real-time problem. The data can't keep up with the real-time because you've undersized the configuration. So that's hard to do. So the beauty of elasticity and the dynamic elasticity, the pay per use, is you don't have to figure all this stuff out. So if you have more workload, we grow it automatically. If you have less workload, we shrink it automatically. And you don't have to guess ahead of time. You don't have to price ahead of time. So you, you just use what, what you use, right? You don't pay for something that you're not using. So it's a very big change in the whole model of how you use these data, replication, integration, high availability technologies. >> Well, I think I'm correct to say GoldenGate primarily has been for big companies. You mentioned that small companies can now take advantage of this service. We talked about the granularity. And I could definitely see, can they afford it? I guess this is part one and then, and then the other part of the question is, I can see GoldenGate really satisfying your on-prem customers and them taking advantage of it, but do you think this will attract new customers beyond your core? So two part question there. >> Yeah, absolutely. So small customers have been challenged by the complexity of data integration. And that's one of the great things about the cloud services is it's dramatically simpler. So Oracle manages everything. Oracle does the patching, the upgrades. Oracle does the monitoring. It takes care of the high availability of the product. So all that management, complexity, all the configuration set up, everything like that, that's all automated, that's owned by Oracle. So small customers were always challenged by the complexity of product, along with everything else that they had to do. And then the other of course benefit is small customers were challenged by the large fixed price. So now with pay per use, they pay only for what they use. It's really usable by easily by small customers also. So it really expands the market and makes it more broadly applicable. >> So kind of same answer for beyond your existing customer base, beyond the on-prem that that's kind of... You answered >> Right. >> my two part question with one answer, so that was pretty efficient, (chuckles) pun intended. So the bottom line for me and squinting through this announcement is you've got the heterogeneity piece with GoldenGate OCI and as such it's going to give you the capability to create what I'll call an architecturally coherent decentralized data mesh. Big on this data mesh these days, could have decentralized data. With the proviso then I going to be able to connect to OCI, which of course you can do with Azure or I guess you could bring cloud to a customer on prem, first of all, is this correct? And can we expect you over time to do this with AWS or other cloud providers? >> It can move data from Amazon or to Amazon. It can actually handle, any data wherever it lives. So, yeah, it's very flexible and it's really just the automation of all the management, that we're running in our public cloud But the data can be from anywhere to anywhere. >> Cool, all right, let's switch topics here a little bit. Just talk about some of the things that you've been working on, some of the innovation. I sat through your blockchain announcement, it was very cool. Of course I love anything blockchain and crypto, NFTs are exploding, so that Coinbase IPO. It's just really an exciting time out there. I think a lot of people don't really appreciate the innovation that's occurring. So you've been making a lot of big announcements last several months. You've been taking your R and D bringing it into product, So that's great, we love to always see that because that's where really the rubber meets the road. Just for the database side of the house, you announced 21c the next generation of the self-driving data warehouse, ADW, blockchain tables, now you got GoldenGate running on OCI. Take us inside the development organizations. What are the underlying drivers other than your boss. >> When we talk about our autonomous database, it is the mission critical Oracle database, but it's dramatically easier to do. So Oracle does all the management all on automation, but also we use machine learning to tune, and to make it highly available, and to make it highly secure. So that that's been one of our biggest products we've been working on for many years. And recently we enhanced our autonomous data warehouse taking it beyond being a data warehouse to complete a data analytics platform. So it includes things like ETL. So we built ETL into the autonomous data warehouse. We're building our GoldenGate replication into autonomous data warehousing. We built machine learning directly natively into the database. So now, if someone wants to run some machine learning they just run a machine learning queries. They no longer have to stand up a separate system. So a big move that we've been making is, taking it beyond just a database to a full analytic platform. And this goes beyond what anyone else in the industry is doing, because we have a lot more technology. So for example, the ML machine learning directly in the database, the ETL directly in the database. The data replication is directly in the database. All these things are very unique to Oracle. And they dramatically simplify for customers how they manage data. In addition to that, we've also been working in our database product. We've enhanced it tremendously. So our big goal there is to provide what we call it converged database. So everything you need, all the data types. Whether it's JSON, relational, spatial, graph, all that different kinds of data types, all the different kinds of workloads. Analytics, OTP, things like blockchain, microservices events, all built into the Oracle database, making it dramatically easier to both develop and deploy new applications. So those are some of our big, big goals. Make it simple, make it integrated. Take the complexity, we'll take on the complexity. So developers and customers find it easy to develop an easy to use. And we've made huge strides in all these areas in the last couple of years. >> That's awesome. I wonder if we could land on blockchain again for now it's kind of jogging, but sort of on crypto. Though you're not about crypto but you are about applying blockchain. Maybe you can help our audience understand what are some of the real use cases where blockchain tech can be used with Oracle database. >> Yeah, so that's a very interesting topic. As you mentioned, blockchain is very currently, we see a lot of cryptocurrencies. I distributed applications for blockchain. So in general, in the past, we've had two worlds. We've had the enterprise data management world and we've had the blockchain world. And these are very distinct, right? And on the blockchain side the applications have mostly centered around, distributed multi-party applications, right? So where you have multiple parties that all want to reach consensus and then that consensus is stored in a blockchain. So that's kind of been the focus of blockchain. And what we've done is very innovative. We're the first company to ever do this. Is we've taken the core architecture, ideas. And really a lot of it has to do with the cryptography of blockchain. And we've built, we've engineered that natively into the mainstream Oracle database. So now in mainstream Oracle database, we have blockchain technology built in. And it's very dramatically simpler to use. And the use cases, you asked about the use case, that's what we've done. And it's taken us about five years to do this. Now it's been released into the market in our mainstream 19c Oracle database. So the use case is different from the conventional blockchain use case. Which I mentioned was really multi-party consensus based apps. We're trying to make blockchain useful for mainstream, enterprise and government applications. So any kind of mainstream government application, or enterprise application. And that idea of blockchain, the core concept of blockchain, is it addresses a different kind of security problem. So when you look at conventional security, it's really trying to keep people out. So we have things like firewalls, passwords, networking cryption, data encryption. It's all about keeping bad people out of the data. And there's really two big problems that it doesn't address well. One problem is that there's always new security exploits being published. So you have hackers out there that are working overtime. Sometimes they're nation States that are trying to attack data providers. And every week, every month there's a new security exploit that's discovered and this happens all the time. So that's one big problem. So we're building up these elaborate walls of protection around our core data assets. And in the meantime, we have basically barbarians attacking on every side.(chuckles) And every once in a while, they get over the walls and this is just what's happening. So that's one big problem. And the second big problem is elicit changes made by people with credentials. So sometimes you have an insider in your, in your company. Whether it's an administrator or a sales person, a support person, that has valid credentials, but then uses those valid credentials in some illicit way. They go out and change somebody's data for their own gain. And even more common than that cause there's not that many bad guys inside the company to they exist, is stolen credentials. So what's happened in many cases is hackers or nation States will steal for example, administrative credentials and then use those administrative credentials to come into a system and steal data. So that's the kind of problem that is not well addressed by security mechanism. So if you have privileges security mechanism says, yeah you're fine. If somebody steals your privileges, again you get the pass through the gate. And so what we've done with blockchain is we've taken the cryptography elements of blockchain. We call it crypto secure data management. And we've built those into the Oracle database. So think of it this way. If someone actually makes it through over the walls that we built, and in into the core data, what we've done with that cryptographic technology of blockchain, is we've made that immutable. So you can't change it. So even if you make it over the gate you can't get into the core data assets and change those assets. And that's not built into Oracle databases is super easy to adopt. And I think it's going to really enhance and expand the community of people that can actually use that blockchain technology. >> I mean, that's awesome. I could talk all day about blockchain. And I mean, when you think about hackers, it's all there. They're all about ROI, value over cost. And if you can increase the denominator they're going to go somewhere else, right? Because the value will will decline. And this is really the intersection of software engineering cryptography. And I guess even when you bring crypto currency into it, it's like sort of the game theory. That's really kind of not what you're all about, but the first two pieces are really critical in terms of just next generation of raising that security hurdle. Love it. Now, go ahead. >> Yeah it's a different approach. I was just going to say, it's a different approach. Because think about trying to keep people out with things like passwords and firewalls, you can have basically bugs in that software that allow people to exploit and get in. When you're talking about cryptography, that's math, it's very difficult. I mean, you really can't fight pass math. Once the data is cryptographically protected on a blockchain, a hacker can't really do anything with that. It's just, math is math. There's nothing you can do to break it, right. It's very different from trying to get through some algorithm. That's really trying to keep you out. >> Awesome. I said, I could talk forever on this topic. But let me, let me go into some competitive dynamics. You recently announced Autonomous Data Warehouse. You've got service capabilities that are really trying to appeal to the line of business. I want to get your take on that announcement and specifically how you think it compares name names. I'm going to name names you don't have to. But Snowflake, obviously a lot of momentum in the marketplace. AWS with Redshift is doing very, very well. Obviously there are others. But those are two prominent ones that we've tracked in our data shows that have momentum. How do you compare? >> Yeah, so there's a number of different ways to look at the comparison. So the most simplest and straightforward is there's a lot more functionality in Oracle data warehousing. Oracle has been doing this for decades. We have a lot of built-in functionality. For example, machine learning natively built into the database makes it super easy to use. We have mixed workloads, we have spatial capabilities. We have graph capabilities. We have JSON capabilities. We have a microservice capabilities. We have-- So there's a lot more capabilities. So that's number one. Number two, our cloud service is dramatically more elastic. So with our cloud service all you really do, is you basically move the slide. You say hey, I want more resources, I want less resources. In fact, we'll do that automatically, that's called auto-scaling. In contrast when you look at people like Snowflake or Redshift they want you to stand up a new cluster. Hey you have some more workload on Monday, stand up another cluster and then we'll have two sets of clusters or maybe you'd want a third cluster, maybe you want a fourth cluster. So you end up with all these different systems which is how they scale. They say, hey, I can have multiple sets of servers access the same data. With Oracle you don't have to even think about those things. We auto scale, you get more workload. We just give it more resources. You don't even have to think about that. And then the other thing is we're looking at the whole data management end to end problem. So starting with capturing the data, moving the data in real time, transforming the data, loading the data, running machine learning and analytics on the data. Putting all kinds of data in a single place that you can do analytics on all of it together. And then having very rich screen capabilities for viewing the data, graphing the data, modeling the data, all those things. So it's all integrated. It makes it super easy to use. So a much easier, much more functionality and much more elastic than any of our competitors in the market. >> Interesting, thank you for those comments. I mean, it's a different world, right? I mean, you guys got all the market share, they got all the growth, those things over time, you've been around, you see it, they come together and you fight it out and may the best approach wins. >> So we'll be watching >> Yeah also I forgot to mention the obvious thing, which is Oracle runs everywhere. So you can run Oracle on premises. You can run Oracle on the public cloud. You can run what we call cloud at customer. Our competitors really are just public cloud only. So you customers don't get the choice of where they want to run their data warehouse. >> Now Juan a while ago I sat down with David foyer and Mark steamer. We reviewed how Gartner looks at the marketplace and it wasn't surprise that when it came to operational workloads, Oracle stood out. I mean, that's kind of an understatement relative to the major competitors. Most of our viewers, I don't think expected for instance Microsoft or AWS to be that far away from you. But at the same time, the database magic quadrant maybe didn't reflect that gap as widely. So there's some dissonance there with the detailed workload drill downs were dramatic. And I wonder what your take on the results. I mean, obviously you're happy with them. You came out leading in virtually every category or you will one and two, and some of that sort of not even non-mission critical operational stuff. But what can you add to my narrative there? >> Yeah, so Gartner, first of all, we're talking about cloud databases. >> Right. >> Right, so this is not on premises databases this is pure cloud databases. And what they did is they did two things. One is, the main thing was a technical rating of the databases, of the cloud databases. And, there's other vendors that have been had database in the cloud for longer than we have. But in the most recent Gartner analysis report, as you mentioned, Oracle came out on top for cloud database technology, in almost every single operational use case including things like Internet of Things, things like JSON data, variable data, analytics as well as a traditional OTP and mixed workloads. So Oracle was rated the highest technology which isn't a big surprise. We've been doing this for decades. Over 90% of the global fortune 500 run Oracle. And there's a reason, because this is what we're good at. This our core strength. Our availability, our security, our scalability, our functionality, both for OTP and analytics. All the capabilities, built-in machine learning, graph analytics, everything. So even when we compare narrowly things like Internet of Things or variable data against niche competitors that that's what all they do. We came up dramatically ahead. But what surprised a lot of people is how far ahead of some of the other cloud vendors like Amazon, like Azure, like Google, Oracle came out ahead in the cloud database category. So a lot of people think, well, some of these other pure cloud vendors must be ahead of Oracle in cloud database. But actually not. I mean, if you look at the Gartner analyst report, it was very clear. It was Oracle was dramatically ahead of their cloud database technologies with our cloud database. >> So I'm pretty much out of time but last question. I've had some interesting discussions lately and we've pointed out for years in our research that of course you're delivering the entire stack, the database, part of the infrastructure the applications, you have the whole engineered system strategy. And for the most part you're kind of unique in this regard. I mean, Dell just announced that it's spinning off VMware and it could have gone the other direction. And become more integrated hardware and software player, for the data center. But look, it's working for Dell based on the reaction, from the street post announcement. Cisco they got a hardware and software model that's sort of integrated but the company's value that peaked back in the .com boom, it's been very slow to bounce back. But my point is for these companies the street doesn't value, the integrated model. Oracle is kind of the exception. You know, it's at trading at all time highs, I know you're not going to comment on the stock price, but I guess in SAP until it missed it guided conservatively, was kind of on the good trajectory. But so I'm wondering, why do you think Oracle strategy resonates with investors, but not so much those companies? Is it, because you have the applications piece? I mean, maybe that's kind of my premise for, for SAP but what's your take? Why is it working for you? >> Well, okay. I think it's pretty simple, which is some of our competitors, for example, they might have a software product and a hardware product. But mostly those are acquired in their separate products that just happen to be in a portfolio. They are not a single company with a single vision and joint engineering going on. It's really, hey, I got the software on over here. I got the hardware over there, but they don't really talk to each other, they don't really work together. They're not trying to develop something where the stack is actually not just integrated but engineered together. And that is really the key. Oracle focuses on data management top to bottom. So we have everything from our ERP, CRM applications talking to our database, talking to our engineered systems, running in our cloud. And it's all completely engineered together. So Oracle doesn't just acquire these things and kind of glue them together. We actually engineer them and that's fundamentally the difference. You can buy two things and have them as two separate divisions in your company but it doesn't really get you a whole lot. >> Juan it's always a pleasure, I love these conversations and hope we can do more in the future. Really appreciate your time. Thanks for coming to the CUBE >> Pleasure, Dave nice to talk to you. >> All right keep it right there, everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, we'll see you next time. (upbeat musiC)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCube and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> When a piece of digital art sells for $69.3 million, more than has ever been paid for works, by Gauguin or Salvador Dali, making it created the third most expensive living artists in the world. One can't help but take notice and ask, what is going on? The latest craze around NFTs may feel a bit bubblicious, but it's yet another sign, that the digital age is now fully upon us. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon's CUBE insights, powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we want to take a look at some of the trends, that may be difficult for observers and investors to understand, but we think offer significant insights to the future and possibly some opportunities for young investors many of whom are fans of this program. And how the trends may relate to enterprise tech. Okay, so this guy Beeple is now the hottest artist on the planet. That's his Twitter profile. That picture on the inset. His name is Mike Winkelmann. He is actually a normal looking dude, but that's the picture he chose for his Twitter. This collage reminds me of the Million Dollar Homepage. You may already know the story, but many of you may not. Back in 2005 a college kid from England named Alex Tew, T-E-W created The Million Dollar Homepage to fund his education. And his idea was to create a website with a million pixels, and sell ads at a dollar for each pixel. Guess how much money he raised. A million bucks, right? No, wrong. He raised $1,037,100. How so you ask? Well, he auctioned off the last 1000 pixels on eBay, which fetched an additional $38,000. Crazy, right? Well, maybe not. Pretty creative in a way, way early sign of things to come. Now, I'm not going to go deep into NFTs, and explain the justification behind them. There's a lot of material that's been published that can do justice to the topic better than I can. But here are the basics, NFTs stands for Non-Fungible Tokens. They are digital representations of assets that exist in a blockchain. Now, each token as a unique and immutable identifier, and it uses cryptography to ensure its authenticity. NFTs by the name, they're not fungible. So, unlike Bitcoin, Ethereum or other cryptocurrencies, which can be traded on a like-for-like basis, in other words, if you and I each own one bitcoin we know exactly how much each of our bitcoins is worth at any point of time. Non-Fungible Tokens each have their own unique values. So, they're not comparable on a like-to-like basis. But what's the point of this? Well, NFTs can be applied to any property, identities tweets, videos, we're seeing collectables, digital art, pretty much anything. And it's really. The use cases are unlimited. And NFTs can streamline transactions, and they can be bought and sold very efficiently without the need for a trusted third party involved. Now, the other benefit is the probability of fraud, is greatly reduced. So where do NFTs fit as an asset class? Well, they're definitely a new type of asset. And again, I'm not going to try to justify their existence, but I want to talk about the choices, that investors have in the market today. The other day, I was on a call with Jay Po. He is a VC and a Principal at a company called Stage 2 Capital. He's a former Bessemer VC and one of the sharper investors around. And he was talking about the choices that investors have and he gave a nice example that I want to share with you and try to apply here. Now, as an investor, you have alternatives, of course we're showing here a few with their year to date charts. Now, as an example, you can buy Amazon stock. Now, if you bought just about exactly a year ago you did really well, you probably saw around an 80% return or more. But if you want to jump in today, your mindset might be, hmm, well, okay. Amazon, they're going to be around for a long time, so it's kind of low risk and I like the stock, but you're probably going to get, well let's say, maybe a 10% annual return over the longterm, 15% or maybe less maybe single digits, but, maybe more than that but it's unlikely that any kind of reasonable timeframe within any reasonable timeframe you're going to get a 10X return. In order to get that type of return on invested capital, Amazon would have to become a $16 trillion valued company. So, you sit there, you asked yourself, what's the probability that Amazon goes out of business? Well, that's pretty low, right? And what are the chances it becomes a $16 trillion company over the next several years? Well, it's probably more likely that it continues to grow at that more stable rate that I talked about. Okay, now let's talk about Snowflake. Now, as you know, we've covered the company quite extensively. We watched this company grow from an early stage startup and then saw its valuation increase steadily as a private company, but you know, even early last year it was valued around $12 billion, I think in February, and as late as mid September right before the IPO news hit that Marc Benioff and Warren Buffett were going to put in $250 million each at the IPO or just after the IPO and it was projected that Snowflake's valuation could go over $20 billion at that point. And on day one after the IPO Snowflake, closed worth more than $50 billion, the stock opened at 120, but unless you knew a guy, you had to hold your nose and buy on day one. And you know, maybe got it at 240, maybe you got it at 250, you might have got it at higher and at the time you might recall, I said, You're likely going to get a better price than on day one, which is usually the case with most IPOs, stock today's around 230. But you look at Snowflake today and if you want to buy in, you look at it and say, Okay, well I like the company, it's probably still overvalued, but I can see the company's value growing substantially over the next several years, maybe doubling in the near to midterm [mumbles] hit more than a hundred billion dollar valuation back as recently as December, so that's certainly feasible. The company is not likely to flame out because it's highly valued, I have to probably be patient for a couple of years. But you know, let's say I liked the management, I liked the company, maybe the company gets into the $200 billion range over time and I can make a decent return, but to get a 10X return on Snowflake you have to get to a valuation of over a half a trillion. Now, to get there, if it gets there it's going to become one of the next great software companies of our time. And you know, frankly if it gets there I think it's going to go to a trillion. So, if that's what your bet is then you know, you would be happy with that of course. But what's the likelihood? As an investor you have to evaluate that, what's the probability? So, it's a lower risk investment in Snowflake but maybe more likely that Snowflake, you know, they run into competition or the market shifts, maybe they get into the $200 billion range, but it really has to transform the industry execute for you to get in to that 10 bagger territory. Okay, now let's look at a different asset that is cryptocurrency called Compound, way more risky. But Compound is a decentralized protocol that allows you to lend and borrow cryptocurrencies. Now, I'm not saying go out and buy compound but just as a thought exercise is it's got an asset here with a lower valuation, probably much higher upside, but much higher risk. But so for Compound to get to 10X return it's got to get to $20 billion valuation. Now, maybe compound isn't the right asset for your cup of tea, but there are many cryptos that have made it that far and if you do your research and your homework you could find a project that's much, much earlier stage that yes, is higher risk but has a much higher upside that you can participate in. So, this is how investors, all investors really look at their choices and make decisions. And the more sophisticated investors, they're going to use detailed metrics and analyze things like MOIC, Multiple on Invested Capital and IRR, which is Internal Rate of Return, do TAM analysis, Total Available Market. They're going to look at competition. They're going to look at detailed company models in ARR and Churn rates and so forth. But one of the things we really want to talk about today and we brought this up at the snowflake IPO is if you were Buffet or Benioff and you had to, you know, quarter of a dollars to put in you could get an almost guaranteed return with your late in the game, but pre IPO money or a look if you were Mike Speiser or one of the earlier VCs or even someone like Jeremy Burton who was part of the inside network you could get stock or options, much cheaper. You get a 5X, 10X, 50X or even North of a hundred X return like the early VCs who took a big risk. But chances are, you're not one of these in one of these categories. So how can you as a little guy participate in something big and you might remember at the time of the snowflake IPO we showed you this picture, who are these people, Olaf Carlson-Wee, Chris Dixon, this girl Sono. And of course Tim Berners-Lee, you know, that these are some of the folks that inspired me personally to pay attention to crypto. And I want to share the premise that caught my attention. It was this. Think about the early days of the internet. If you saw what Berners-Lee was working on or Linus Torvalds, in one to invest in the internet, you really couldn't. I mean, you couldn't invest in Linux or TCP/IP or HTTP. Suppose you could have invested in Cisco after its IPO that would have paid off pretty big time, for sure. You know, he could have waited for the Netscape IPO but the core infrastructure of the internet was fundamentally not directly a candidate for investment by you or really, you know, by anybody. And Satya Nadella said the other day we have reached maximum centralization. The main protocols of the internet were largely funded by the government and they've been co-opted by the giants. But with crypto, you actually can invest in core infrastructure technologies that are building out a decentralized internet, a new internet, you know call it web three Datto. It's a big part of the investment thesis behind what Carlson-wee is doing. And Andreessen Horowitz they have two crypto funds. They've raised more than $800 million to invest and you should read the firm's crypto investment thesis and maybe even take their crypto startup classes and some great content there. Now, one of the people that I haven't mentioned in this picture is Camila Russo. She's a journalist she's turned into hardcore crypto author is doing great job explaining the white hot defining space or decentralized finance. If you're just at read her work and educate yourself and learn more about the future and be happy perhaps you'll find some 10X or even hundred X opportunities. So look, there's so much innovation going around going on around blockchain and crypto. I mean, you could listen to Warren Buffet and Janet Yellen who implied this is all going to end badly. But while look, these individuals they're smart people. I don't think they would be my go-to source on understanding the potential of the technology and the future of what it could bring. Now, we've talked earlier at the, at the start here about NFTs. DeFi is one of the most interesting and disruptive trends to FinTech, names like Celsius, Nexo, BlockFi. BlockFi let's actually the average person participate in liquidity pools is actually quite interesting. Crypto is going mainstream Tesla, micro strategy putting Bitcoin on their balance sheets. We have a 2017 Jamie diamond. He called Bitcoin a tulip bulb like fraud, yet just the other day JPM announced a structured investment vehicle to give its clients a basket of stocks that have exposure to crypto, PayPal allowing customers to buy, sell, and Hodl crypto. You can trade crypto on Robin Hood. Central banks are talking about launching digital currencies. I talked about the Fedcoin for a number of years and why not? Coinbase is doing an IPO will give it a value of over a hundred billion. Wow, that sounds frothy, but still big names like Mark Cuban and Jamaat palliate Patiala have been active in crypto for a while. Gronk is getting into NFTs. So it goes to have a little bit of that bubble feel to it. But look often when tech bubbles burst they shake out the pretenders but if there's real tech involved, some contenders emerge. So, and they often do so as dominant players. And I really believe that the innovation around crypto is going to be sustained. Now, there is a new web being built out. So if you want to participate, you got to do some research figure out things like how PolkaWorks, make a call on whether you think avalanche is an Ethereum killer dig in and find out about new projects and form a thesis. And you may, as a small player be able to find some big winners, but look you do have to be careful. There was a lot of fraud during the ICO. Craze is your risk. So understand the Tokenomics and maybe as importantly the Pump-a-nomics, because they certainly loom as dangers. This is not for the faint of heart but because I believe it involves real tech. I like it way better than Reddit stocks like GameStop for example, now not to diss Reddit. There's some good information on Reddit. If you're patient, you can find it. And there's lots of good information flowing on Discord. There's people flocking to Telegram as a hedge against big tech. Maybe there's all sounds crazy. And you know what, if you've grown up in a privileged household and you have a US Education you know, maybe it is nuts and a bit too risky for you. But if you're one of the many people who haven't been able to participate in these elite circles there are things going on, especially outside of the US that are democratizing investment opportunities. And I think that's pretty cool. You just got to be careful. So, this is a bit off topic from our typical focus and ETR survey analysis. So let's bring this back to the enterprise because there's a lot going on there as well with blockchain. Now let me first share some quotes on blockchain from a few ETR Venn Roundtables. First comment is from a CIO to diversified holdings company who says correctly, blockchain will hit the finance industry first but there are use cases in healthcare given the privacy and security concerns and logistics to ensure provenance and reduce fraud. And to that individual's point about finance. This is from the CTO of a major financial platform. We're really taking a look at payments. Yeah. Do you think traditional banks are going to lose control of the payment systems? Well, not without a fight, I guess, but look there's some real disruption possibilities here. And just last comment from a government CIO says, we're going to wait until the big platform players they get into their software. And so that is happening Oracle, IBM, VMware, Microsoft, AWS Cisco, they all have blockchain initiatives going on, now by the way, none of these tech companies wants to talk about crypto. They try to distance themselves from that topic which is understandable, I guess, but I'll tell you there's far more innovation going on in crypto than there is in enterprise tech companies at this point. But I predict that the crypto innovations will absolutely be seeping into enterprise tech players over time. But for now the cloud players, they want to support developers who are building out this new internet. The database is certainly a logical place to support a mutable transactions which allow people to do business one-on-one and have total confidence that the source hasn't been hacked or changed and infrastructure to support smart contracts. We've seen that. The use cases in the enterprise are endless asset tracking data access, food, tracking, maintenance, KYC or know your customer, there's applications in different industries, telecoms, oil and gas on and on and on. So look, think of NFTs as a signal crypto craziness is a signal. It's a signal as to how IT in other parts of companies and their data might be organized, managed and tracked and protected, and very importantly, valued. Look today. There's a lot of memes. Crypto kitties, art, of course money as well. Money is the killer app for blockchain, but in the future the underlying technology of blockchain and the many percolating innovations around it could become I think will become a fundamental component of a new digital economy. So get on board, do some research and learn for yourself. Okay, that's it for today. Remember all of these episodes they're available as podcasts, wherever you listen. I publish weekly on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. Please feel free to comment on my LinkedIn post or tweet me @dvellante or email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com. Don't forget to check out etr.plus for all the survey action and data science. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Be well, be careful out there in crypto land. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (soft music)

(water running) (upbeat music) (electric buzzing) >> Fuel up! (upbeat music) (audience clapping) (upbeat music) >> Announcer: From around the globe. It's the queue with digital coverage of DockerCon live 2020, brought to you by Docker and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone, welcome to DockerCon 2020. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE I'm in our Palo Alto studios with our quarantine crew. We have a great lineup here for DockerCon 2020. Virtual event, normally it was in person face to face. I'll be with you throughout the day from an amazing lineup of content, over 50 different sessions, cube tracks, keynotes, and we've got two great co-hosts here with Docker, Jenny Burcio and Bret Fisher. We'll be with you all day today, taking you through the program, helping you navigate the sessions. I'm so excited. Jenny, this is a virtual event. We talk about this. Can you believe it? Maybe the internet gods be with us today and hope everyone's having-- >> Yes. >> Easy time getting in. Jenny, Bret, thank you for-- >> Hello. >> Being here. >> Hey. >> Hi everyone, so great to see everyone chatting and telling us where they're from. Welcome to the Docker community. We have a great day planned for you. >> Guys great job getting this all together. I know how hard it is. These virtual events are hard to pull off. I'm blown away by the community at Docker. The amount of sessions that are coming in the sponsor support has been amazing. Just the overall excitement around the brand and the opportunities given this tough times where we're in. It's super exciting again, made the internet gods be with us throughout the day, but there's plenty of content. Bret's got an amazing all day marathon group of people coming in and chatting. Jenny, this has been an amazing journey and it's a great opportunity. Tell us about the virtual event. Why DockerCon virtual. Obviously everyone's canceling their events, but this is special to you guys. Talk about DockerCon virtual this year. >> The Docker community shows up at DockerCon every year, and even though we didn't have the opportunity to do an in person event this year, we didn't want to lose the time that we all come together at DockerCon. The conversations, the amazing content and learning opportunities. So we decided back in December to make DockerCon a virtual event. And of course when we did that, there was no quarantine we didn't expect, you know, I certainly didn't expect to be delivering it from my living room, but we were just, I mean we were completely blown away. There's nearly 70,000 people across the globe that have registered for DockerCon today. And when you look at DockerCon of past right live events, really and we're learning are just the tip of the iceberg and so thrilled to be able to deliver a more inclusive global event today. And we have so much planned I think. Bret, you want to tell us some of the things that you have planned? >> Well, I'm sure I'm going to forget something 'cause there's a lot going on. But, we've obviously got interviews all day today on this channel with John and the crew. Jenny has put together an amazing set of all these speakers, and then you have the captain's on deck, which is essentially the YouTube live hangout where we just basically talk shop. It's all engineers, all day long. Captains and special guests. And we're going to be in chat talking to you about answering your questions. Maybe we'll dig into some stuff based on the problems you're having or the questions you have. Maybe there'll be some random demos, but it's basically not scripted, it's an all day long unscripted event. So I'm sure it's going to be a lot of fun hanging out in there. >> Well guys, I want to just say it's been amazing how you structured this so everyone has a chance to ask questions, whether it's informal laid back in the captain's channel or in the sessions, where the speakers will be there with their presentations. But Jenny, I want to get your thoughts because we have a site out there that's structured a certain way for the folks watching. If you're on your desktop, there's a main stage hero. There's then tracks and Bret's running the captain's tracks. You can click on that link and jump into his session all day long. He's got an amazing set of line of sleet, leaning back, having a good time. And then each of the tracks, you can jump into those sessions. It's on a clock, it'll be available on demand. All that content is available if you're on your desktop. If you're on your mobile, it's the same thing. Look at the calendar, find the session that you want. If you're interested in it, you could watch it live and chat with the participants in real time or watch it on demand. So there's plenty of content to navigate through. We do have it on a clock and we'll be streaming sessions as they happen. So you're in the moment and that's a great time to chat in real time. But there's more, Jenny, getting more out of this event. You guys try to bring together the stimulation of community. How does the participants get more out of the the event besides just consuming some of the content all day today? >> Yes, so first set up your profile, put your picture next to your chat handle and then chat. John said we have various setups today to help you get the most out of your experience are breakout sessions. The content is prerecorded, so you get quality content and the speakers and chat so you can ask questions the whole time. If you're looking for the hallway track, then definitely check out the captain's on deck channel. And then we have some great interviews all day on the queue. So set up your profile, join the conversation and be kind, right? This is a community event. Code of conduct is linked on every page at the top, and just have a great day. >> And Bret, you guys have an amazing lineup on the captain, so you have a great YouTube channel that you have your stream on. So the folks who were familiar with that can get that either on YouTube or on the site. The chat is integrated in, So you're set up, what do you got going on? Give us the highlights. What are you excited about throughout your day? Take us through your program on the captains. That's going to be probably pretty dynamic in the chat too. >> Yeah, so I'm sure we're going to have lots of, stuff going on in chat. So no cLancaerns there about, having crickets in the chat. But we're going to be basically starting the day with two of my good Docker captain friends, (murmurs) and Laura Taco. And we're going to basically start you out and at the end of this keynote, at the end of this hour and we're going to get you going and then you can maybe jump out and go to take some sessions. Maybe there's some stuff you want to check out and other sessions that you want to chat and talk with the instructors, the speakers there, and then you're going to come back to us, right? Or go over, check out the interviews. So the idea is you're hopping back and forth and throughout the day we're basically changing out every hour. We're not just changing out the guests basically, but we're also changing out the topics that we can cover because different guests will have different expertise. We're going to have some special guests in from Microsoft, talk about some of the cool stuff going on there, and basically it's captains all day long. And if you've been on my YouTube live show you've watched that, you've seen a lot of the guests we have on there. I'm lucky to just hang out with all these really awesome people around the world, so it's going to be fun. >> Awesome and the content again has been preserved. You guys had a great session on call for paper sessions. Jenny, this is good stuff. What other things can people do to make it interesting? Obviously we're looking for suggestions. Feel free to chirp on Twitter about ideas that can be new. But you guys got some surprises. There's some selfies, what else? What's going on? Any secret, surprises throughout the day. >> There are secret surprises throughout the day. You'll need to pay attention to the keynotes. Bret will have giveaways. I know our wonderful sponsors have giveaways planned as well in their sessions. Hopefully right you feel conflicted about what you're going to attend. So do know that everything is recorded and will be available on demand afterwards so you can catch anything that you miss. Most of them will be available right after they stream the initial time. >> All right, great stuff, so they've got the Docker selfie. So the Docker selfies, the hashtag is just DockerCon hashtag DockerCon. If you feel like you want to add some of the hashtag no problem, check out the sessions. You can pop in and out of the captains is kind of the cool kids are going to be hanging out with Bret and then all they'll knowledge and learning. Don't miss the keynote, the keynote should be solid. We've got chain Governor from red monk delivering a keynote. I'll be interviewing him live after his keynote. So stay with us. And again, check out the interactive calendar. All you got to do is look at the calendar and click on the session you want. You'll jump right in. Hop around, give us feedback. We're doing our best. Bret, any final thoughts on what you want to share to the community around, what you got going on the virtual event, just random thoughts? >> Yeah, so sorry we can't all be together in the same physical place. But the coolest thing about as business online, is that we actually get to involve everyone, so as long as you have a computer and internet, you can actually attend DockerCon if you've never been to one before. So we're trying to recreate that experience online. Like Jenny said, the code of conduct is important. So, we're all in this together with the chat, so try to be nice in there. These are all real humans that, have feelings just like me. So let's try to keep it cool. And, over in the Catherine's channel we'll be taking your questions and maybe playing some music, playing some games, giving away some free stuff, while you're, in between sessions learning, oh yeah. >> And I got to say props to your rig. You've got an amazing setup there, Bret. I love what your show, you do. It's really bad ass and kick ass. So great stuff. Jenny sponsors ecosystem response to this event has been phenomenal. The attendance 67,000. We're seeing a surge of people hitting the site now. So if you're not getting in, just, Wade's going, we're going to crank through the queue, but the sponsors on the ecosystem really delivered on the content side and also the sport. You want to share a few shout outs on the sponsors who really kind of helped make this happen. >> Yeah, so definitely make sure you check out the sponsor pages and you go, each page is the actual content that they will be delivering. So they are delivering great content to you. So you can learn and a huge thank you to our platinum and gold authors. >> Awesome, well I got to say, I'm super impressed. I'm looking forward to the Microsoft Amazon sessions, which are going to be good. And there's a couple of great customer sessions there. I tweeted this out last night and let them get you guys' reaction to this because there's been a lot of talk around the COVID crisis that we're in, but there's also a positive upshot to this is Cambridge and explosion of developers that are going to be building new apps. And I said, you know, apps aren't going to just change the world, they're going to save the world. So a lot of the theme here is the impact that developers are having right now in the current situation. If we get the goodness of compose and all the things going on in Docker and the relationships, this real impact happening with the developer community. And it's pretty evident in the program and some of the talks and some of the examples. how containers and microservices are certainly changing the world and helping save the world, your thoughts. >> Like you said, a number of sessions and interviews in the program today that really dive into that. And even particularly around COVID, Clement Beyondo is sharing his company's experience, from being able to continue operations in Italy when they were completely shut down beginning of March. We have also in theCUBE channel several interviews about from the national Institute of health and precision cancer medicine at the end of the day. And you just can really see how containerization and developers are moving in industry and really humanity forward because of what they're able to build and create, with advances in technology. >> Yeah and the first responders and these days is developers. Bret compose is getting a lot of traction on Twitter. I can see some buzz already building up. There's huge traction with compose, just the ease of use and almost a call for arms for integrating into all the system language libraries, I mean, what's going on with compose? I mean, what's the captain say about this? I mean, it seems to be really tracking in terms of demand and interest. >> I think we're over 700,000 composed files on GitHub. So it's definitely beyond just the standard Docker run commands. It's definitely the next tool that people use to run containers. Just by having that we just buy, and that's not even counting. I mean that's just counting the files that are named Docker compose YAML. So I'm sure a lot of you out there have created a YAML file to manage your local containers or even on a server with Docker compose. And the nice thing is is Docker is doubling down on that. So we've gotten some news recently, from them about what they want to do with opening the spec up, getting more companies involved because compose is already gathered so much interest from the community. You know, AWS has importers, there's Kubernetes importers for it. So there's more stuff coming and we might just see something here in a few minutes. >> All right, well let's get into the keynote guys, jump into the keynote. If you missing anything, come back to the stream, check out the sessions, check out the calendar. Let's go, let's have a great time. Have some fun, thanks and enjoy the rest of the day we'll see you soon. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) >> Okay, what is the name of that Whale? >> Molly. >> And what is the name of this Whale? >> Mobby. >> That's right, dad's got to go, thanks bud. >> Bye. >> Bye. Hi, I'm Scott Johnson, CEO of Docker and welcome to DockerCon 2020. This year DockerCon is an all virtual event with more than 60,000 members of the Docker Community joining from around the world. And with the global shelter in place policies, we're excited to offer a unifying, inclusive virtual community event in which anyone and everyone can participate from their home. As a company, Docker has been through a lot of changes since our last DockerCon last year. The most important starting last November, is our refocusing 100% on developers and development teams. As part of that refocusing, one of the big challenges we've been working on, is how to help development teams quickly and efficiently get their app from code to cloud And wouldn't it be cool, if developers could quickly deploy to the cloud right from their local environment with the commands and workflow they already know. We're excited to give you a sneak preview of what we've been working on. And rather than slides, we thought we jumped right into the product. And joining me demonstrate some of these cool new features, is enclave your DACA. One of our engineers here at Docker working on Docker compose. Hello Lanca. >> Hello. >> We're going to show how an application development team collaborates using Docker desktop and Docker hub. And then deploys the app directly from the Docker command line to the clouds in just two commands. A development team would use this to quickly share functional changes of their app with the product management team, with beta testers or other development teams. Let's go ahead and take a look at our app. Now, this is a web app, that randomly pulls words from the database, and assembles them into sentences. You can see it's a pretty typical three tier application with each tier implemented in its own container. We have a front end web service, a middle tier, which implements the logic to randomly pull the words from the database and assemble them and a backend database. And here you can see the database uses the Postgres official image from Docker hub. Now let's first run the app locally using Docker command line and the Docker engine in Docker desktop. We'll do a Doc compose up and you can see that it's pulling the containers from our Docker organization account. Wordsmith, inc. Now that it's up. Let's go ahead and look at local host and we'll confirm that the application is functioning as desired. So there's one sentence, let's pull and now you and you can indeed see that we are pulling random words and assembling into sentences. Now you can also see though that the look and feel is a bit dated. And so Lanca is going to show us how easy it is to make changes and share them with the rest of the team. Lanca, over to you. >> Thank you, so I have, the source code of our application on my machine and I have updated it with the latest team from DockerCon 2020. So before committing the code, I'm going to build the application locally and run it, to verify that indeed the changes are good. So I'm going to build with Docker compose the image for the web service. Now that the image has been built, I'm going to deploy it locally. Wait to compose up. We can now check the dashboard in a Docker desktop that indeed our containers are up and running, and we can access, we can open in the web browser, the end point for the web service. So as we can see, we have the latest changes in for our application. So as you can see, the application has been updated successfully. So now, I'm going to push the image that I have just built to my organization's shared repository on Docker hub. So I can do this with Docker compose push web. Now that the image has been updated in the Docker hub repository, or my teammates can access it and check the changes. >> Excellent, well, thank you Lanca. Now of course, in these times, video conferencing is the new normal, and as great as it is, video conferencing does not allow users to actually test the application. And so, to allow us to have our app be accessible by others outside organizations such as beta testers or others, let's go ahead and deploy to the cloud. >> Sure we, can do this by employing a context. A Docker context, is a mechanism that we can use to target different platforms for deploying containers. The context we hold, information as the endpoint for the platform, and also how to authenticate to it. So I'm going to list the context that I have set locally. As you can see, I'm currently using the default context that is pointing to my local Docker engine. So all the commands that I have issued so far, we're targeting my local engine. Now, in order to deploy the application on a cloud. I have an account in the Azure Cloud, where I have no resource running currently, and I have created for this account, dedicated context that will hold the information on how to connect it to it. So now all I need to do, is to switch to this context, with Docker context use, and the name of my cloud context. So all the commands that I'm going to run, from now on, are going to target the cloud platform. So we can also check very, more simpler, in a simpler way we can check the running containers with Docker PS. So as we see no container is running in my cloud account. Now to deploy the application, all I need to do is to run a Docker compose up. And this will trigger the deployment of my application. >> Thanks Lanca. Now notice that Lanca did not have to move the composed file from Docker desktop to Azure. Notice you have to make any changes to the Docker compose file, and nor did she change any of the containers that she and I were using locally in our local environments. So the same composed file, same images, run locally and upon Azure without changes. While the app is deploying to Azure, let's highlight some of the features in Docker hub that helps teams with remote first collaboration. So first, here's our team's account where it (murmurs) and you can see the updated container sentences web that Lanca just pushed a couple of minutes ago. As far as collaboration, we can add members using their Docker ID or their email, and then we can organize them into different teams depending on their role in the application development process. So and then Lancae they're organized into different teams, we can assign them permissions, so that teams can work in parallel without stepping on each other's changes accidentally. For example, we'll give the engineering team full read, write access, whereas the product management team will go ahead and just give read only access. So this role based access controls, is just one of the many features in Docker hub that allows teams to collaboratively and quickly develop applications. Okay Lanca, how's our app doing? >> Our app has been successfully deployed to the cloud. So, we can easily check either the Azure portal to verify the containers running for it or simpler we can run a Docker PS again to get the list with the containers that have been deployed for it. In the output from the Docker PS, we can see an end point that we can use to access our application in the web browser. So we can see the application running in clouds. It's really up to date and now we can take this particular endpoint and share it within our organization such that anybody can have a look at it. >> That's cool Onka. We showed how we can deploy an app to the cloud in minutes and just two commands, and using commands that Docker users already know, thanks so much. In that sneak preview, you saw a team developing an app collaboratively, with a tool chain that includes Docker desktop and Docker hub. And simply by switching Docker context from their local environment to the cloud, deploy that app to the cloud, to Azure without leaving the command line using Docker commands they already know. And in doing so, really simplifying for development team, getting their app from code to cloud. And just as important, what you did not see, was a lot of complexity. You did not see cloud specific interfaces, user management or security. You did not see us having to provision and configure compute networking and storage resources in the cloud. And you did not see infrastructure specific application changes to either the composed file or the Docker images. And by simplifying a way that complexity, these new features help application DevOps teams, quickly iterate and get their ideas, their apps from code to cloud, and helping development teams, build share and run great applications, is what Docker is all about. A Docker is able to simplify for development teams getting their app from code to cloud quickly as a result of standards, products and ecosystem partners. It starts with open standards for applications and application artifacts, and active open source communities around those standards to ensure portability and choice. Then as you saw in the demo, the Docker experience delivered by Docker desktop and Docker hub, simplifies a team's collaborative development of applications, and together with ecosystem partners provides every stage of an application development tool chain. For example, deploying applications to the cloud in two commands. What you saw on the demo, well that's an extension of our strategic partnership with Microsoft, which we announced yesterday. And you can learn more about our partnership from Amanda Silver from Microsoft later today, right here at DockerCon. Another tool chain stage, the capability to scan applications for security and vulnerabilities, as a result of our partnership with Sneak, which we announced last week. You can learn more about that partnership from Peter McKay, CEO Sneak, again later today, right here at DockerCon. A third example, development team can automate the build of container images upon a simple get push, as a result of Docker hub integrations with GitHub and Alaska and Bitbucket. As a final example of Docker and the ecosystem helping teams quickly build applications, together with our ISV partners. We offer in Docker hub over 500 official and verified publisher images of ready to run Dockerized application components such as databases, load balancers, programming languages, and much more. Of course, none of this happens without people. And I would like to take a moment to thank four groups of people in particular. First, the Docker team, past and present. We've had a challenging 12 months including a restructuring and then a global pandemic, and yet their support for each other, and their passion for the product, this community and our customers has never been stronger. We think our community, Docker wouldn't be Docker without you, and whether you're one of the 50 Docker captains, they're almost 400 meetup organizers, the thousands of contributors and maintainers. Every day you show up, you give back, you teach new support. We thank our users, more than six and a half million developers who have built more than 7 million applications and are then sharing those applications through Docker hub at a rate of more than one and a half billion poles per week. Those apps are then run, are more than 44 million Docker engines. And finally, we thank our customers, the over 18,000 docker subscribers, both individual developers and development teams from startups to large organizations, 60% of which are outside the United States. And they spend every industry vertical, from media, to entertainment to manufacturing. healthcare and much more. Thank you. Now looking forward, given these unprecedented times, we would like to offer a challenge. While it would be easy to feel helpless and miss this global pandemic, the challenge is for us as individuals and as a community to instead see and grasp the tremendous opportunities before us to be forces for good. For starters, look no further than the pandemic itself, in the fight against this global disaster, applications and data are playing a critical role, and the Docker Community quickly recognize this and rose to the challenge. There are over 600 COVID-19 related publicly available projects on Docker hub today, from data processing to genome analytics to data visualization folding at home. The distributed computing project for simulating protein dynamics, is also available on Docker hub, and it uses spirit compute capacity to analyze COVID-19 proteins to aid in the design of new therapies. And right here at DockerCon, you can hear how Clemente Biondo and his company engineering in Gagne area Informatica are using Docker in the fight with COVID-19 in Italy every day. Now, in addition to fighting the pandemic directly, as a community, we also have an opportunity to bridge the disruption the pandemic is wreaking. It's impacting us at work and at home in every country around the world and every aspect of our lives. For example, many of you have a student at home, whose world is going to be very different when they returned to school. As employees, all of us have experienced the stresses from working from home as well as many of the benefits and in fact 75% of us say that going forward, we're going to continue to work from home at least occasionally. And of course one of the biggest disruptions has been job losses, over 35 million in the United States alone. And we know that's affected many of you. And yet your skills are in such demand and so important now more than ever. And that's why here at DockerCon, we want to try to do our part to help, and we're promoting this hashtag on Twitter, hashtag DockerCon jobs, where job seekers and those offering jobs can reach out to one another and connect. Now, pandemics disruption is accelerating the shift of more and more of our time, our priorities, our dollars from offline to online to hybrid, and even online only ways of living. We need to find new ways to collaborate, new approaches to engage customers, new modes for education and much more. And what is going to fill the needs created by this acceleration from offline, online? New applications. And it's this need, this demand for all these new applications that represents a great opportunity for the Docker community of developers. The world needs us, needs you developers now more than ever. So let's seize this moment. Let us in our teams, go build share and run great new applications. Thank you for joining today. And let's have a great DockerCon. >> Okay, welcome back to the DockerCon studio headquarters in your hosts, Jenny Burcio and myself John Furrier. u@farrier on Twitter. If you want to tweet me anything @DockerCon as well, share what you're thinking. Great keynote there from Scott CEO. Jenny, demo DockerCon jobs, some highlights there from Scott. Yeah, I love the intro. It's okay I'm about to do the keynote. The little green room comes on, makes it human. We're all trying to survive-- >> Let me answer the reality of what we are all doing with right now. I had to ask my kids to leave though or they would crash the whole stream but yes, we have a great community, a large community gather gathered here today, and we do want to take the opportunity for those that are looking for jobs, are hiring, to share with the hashtag DockerCon jobs. In addition, we want to support direct health care workers, and Bret Fisher and the captains will be running a all day charity stream on the captain's channel. Go there and you'll get the link to donate to directrelief.org which is a California based nonprofit, delivering and aid and supporting health care workers globally response to the COVID-19 crisis. >> Okay, if you jumping into the stream, I'm John Farrie with Jenny Webby, your hosts all day today throughout DockerCon. It's a packed house of great content. You have a main stream, theCUBE which is the mainstream that we'll be promoting a lot of cube interviews. But check out the 40 plus sessions underneath in the interactive calendar on dockercon.com site. Check it out, they're going to be live on a clock. So if you want to participate in real time in the chat, jump into your session on the track of your choice and participate with the folks in there chatting. If you miss it, it's going to go right on demand right after sort of all content will be immediately be available. So make sure you check it out. Docker selfie is a hashtag. Take a selfie, share it. Docker hashtag Docker jobs. If you're looking for a job or have openings, please share with the community and of course give us feedback on what you can do. We got James Governor, the keynote coming up next. He's with Red monk. Not afraid to share his opinion on open source on what companies should be doing, and also the evolution of this Cambrin explosion of apps that are going to be coming as we come out of this post pandemic world. A lot of people are thinking about this, the crisis and following through. So stay with us for more and more coverage. Jenny, favorite sessions on your mind for people to pay attention to that they should (murmurs)? >> I just want to address a few things that continue to come up in the chat sessions, especially breakout sessions after they play live and the speakers in chat with you, those go on demand, they are recorded, you will be able to access them. Also, if the screen is too small, there is the button to expand full screen, and different quality levels for the video that you can choose on your end. All the breakout sessions also have closed captioning, so please if you would like to read along, turn that on so you can, stay with the sessions. We have some great sessions, kicking off right at 10:00 a.m, getting started with Docker. We have a full track really in the how to enhance on that you should check out devs in action, hear what other people are doing and then of course our sponsors are delivering great content to you all day long. >> Tons of content. It's all available. They'll always be up always on at large scale. Thanks for watching. Now we got James Governor, the keynote. He's with Red Monk, the analyst firm and has been tracking open source for many generations. He's been doing amazing work. Watch his great keynote. I'm going to be interviewing him live right after. So stay with us and enjoy the rest of the day. We'll see you back shortly. (upbeat music) >> Hi, I'm James Governor, one of the co-founders of a company called RedMonk. We're an industry research firm focusing on developer led technology adoption. So that's I guess why Docker invited me to DockerCon 2020 to talk about some trends that we're seeing in the world of work and software development. So Monk Chips, that's who I am. I spent a lot of time on Twitter. It's a great research tool. It's a great way to find out what's going on with keep track of, as I say, there's people that we value so highly software developers, engineers and practitioners. So when I started talking to Docker about this event and it was pre Rhona, should we say, the idea of a crowd wasn't a scary thing, but today you see something like this, it makes you feel uncomfortable. This is not a place that I want to be. I'm pretty sure it's a place you don't want to be. And you know, to that end, I think it's interesting quote by Ellen Powell, she says, "Work from home is now just work" And we're going to see more and more of that. Organizations aren't feeling the same way they did about work before. Who all these people? Who is my cLancaern? So GitHub says has 50 million developers right on its network. Now, one of the things I think is most interesting, it's not that it has 50 million developers. Perhaps that's a proxy for number of developers worldwide. But quite frankly, a lot of those accounts, there's all kinds of people there. They're just Selena's. There are data engineers, there are data scientists, there are product managers, there were tech marketers. It's a big, big community and it goes way beyond just software developers itself. Frankly for me, I'd probably be saying there's more like 20 to 25 million developers worldwide, but GitHub knows a lot about the world of code. So what else do they know? One of the things they know is that world of code software and opensource, is becoming increasingly global. I get so excited about this stuff. The idea that there are these different software communities around the planet where we're seeing massive expansions in terms of things like open source. Great example is Nigeria. So Nigeria more than 200 million people, right? The energy there in terms of events, in terms of learning, in terms of teaching, in terms of the desire to code, the desire to launch businesses, desire to be part of a global software community is just so exciting. And you know, these, this sort of energy is not just in Nigeria, it's in other countries in Africa, it's happening in Egypt. It's happening around the world. This energy is something that's super interesting to me. We need to think about that. We've got global that we need to solve. And software is going to be a big part of that. At the moment, we can talk about other countries, but what about frankly the gender gap, the gender issue that, you know, from 1984 onwards, the number of women taking computer science degrees began to, not track but to create in comparison to what men were doing. The tech industry is way too male focused, there are men that are dominant, it's not welcoming, we haven't found ways to have those pathways and frankly to drive inclusion. And the women I know in tech, have to deal with the massively disproportionate amount of stress and things like online networks. But talking about online networks and talking about a better way of living, I was really excited by get up satellite recently, was a fantastic demo by Alison McMillan and she did a demo of a code spaces. So code spaces is Microsoft online ID, new platform that they've built. And online IDs, we're never quite sure, you know, plenty of people still out there just using the max. But, visual studio code has been a big success. And so this idea of moving to one online IDE, it's been around that for awhile. What they did was just make really tight integration. So you're in your GitHub repo and just be able to create a development environment with effectively one click, getting rid of all of the act shaving, making it super easy. And what I loved was it the demo, what Ali's like, yeah cause this is great. One of my kids are having a nap, I can just start (murmurs) and I don't have to sort out all the rest of it. And to me that was amazing. It was like productivity as inclusion. I'm here was a senior director at GitHub. They're doing this amazing work and then making this clear statement about being a parent. And I think that was fantastic. Because that's what, to me, importantly just working from home, which has been so challenging for so many of us, began to open up new possibilities, and frankly exciting possibilities. So Alley's also got a podcast parent-driven development, which I think is super important. Because this is about men and women rule in this together show parenting is a team sport, same as software development. And the idea that we should be thinking about, how to be more productive, is super important to me. So I want to talk a bit about developer culture and how it led to social media. Because you know, your social media, we're in this ad bomb stage now. It's TikTok, it's like exercise, people doing incredible back flips and stuff like that. Doing a bunch of dancing. We've had the world of sharing cat gifts, Facebook, we sort of see social media is I think a phenomenon in its own right. Whereas the me, I think it's interesting because it's its progenitors, where did it come from? So here's (murmurs) So 1971, one of the features in the emergency management information system, that he built, which it's topical, it was for medical tracking medical information as well, medical emergencies, included a bulletin board system. So that it could keep track of what people were doing on a team and make sure that they were collaborating effectively, boom! That was the start of something big, obviously. Another day I think is worth looking at 1983, Sorania Pullman, spanning tree protocol. So at DEC, they were very good at distributed systems. And the idea was that you can have a distributed system and so much of the internet working that we do today was based on radius work. And then it showed that basically, you could span out a huge network so that everyone could collaborate. That is incredibly exciting in terms of the trends, that I'm talking about. So then let's look at 1988, you've got IRC. IRC what developer has not used IRC, right. Well, I guess maybe some of the other ones might not have. But I don't know if we're post IRC yet, but (murmurs) at a finished university, really nailed it with IRC as a platform that people could communicate effectively with. And then we go into like 1991. So we've had IRC, we've had finished universities, doing a lot of really fantastic work about collaboration. And I don't think it was necessarily an accident that this is where the line is twofold, announced Linux. So Linux was a wonderfully packaged, idea in terms of we're going to take this Unix thing. And when I say package, what a package was the idea that we could collaborate on software. So, it may have just been the work of one person, but clearly what made it important, made it interesting, was finding a social networking pattern, for software development so that everybody could work on something at scale. That was really, I think, fundamental and foundational. Now I think it's important, We're going to talk about Linus, to talk about some things that are not good about software culture, not good about open source culture, not good about hacker culture. And that's where I'm going to talk about code of conduct. We have not been welcoming to new people. We got the acronyms, JFTI, We call people news, that's super unhelpful. We've got to find ways to be more welcoming and more self-sustaining in our communities, because otherwise communities will fail. And I'd like to thank everyone that has a code of conduct and has encouraged others to have codes of conduct. We need to have codes of conduct that are enforced to ensure that we have better diversity at our events. And that's what women, underrepresented minorities, all different kinds of people need to be well looked off to and be in safe and inclusive spaces. And that's the online events. But of course it's also for all of our activities offline. So Linus, as I say, I'm not the most charming of characters at all time, but he has done some amazing technology. So we got to like 2005 the creation of GIT. Not necessarily the distributed version control system that would win. But there was some interesting principles there, and they'd come out of the work that he had done in terms of trying to build and sustain the Linux code base. So it was very much based on experience. He had an itch that he needed to scratch and there was a community that was this building, this thing. So what was going to be the option, came up with Git foundational to another huge wave of social change, frankly get to logical awesome. April 20 April, 2008 GitHub, right? GiHub comes up, they've looked at Git, they've packaged it up, they found a way to make it consumable so the teams could use it and really begin to take advantage of the power of that distributed version control model. Now, ironically enough, of course they centralized the service in doing so. So we have a single point of failure on GitHub. But on the other hand, the notion of the poll request, the primitives that they established and made usable by people, that changed everything in terms of software development. I think another one that I'd really like to look at is Slack. So Slack is a huge success used by all different kinds of businesses. But it began specifically as a pivot from a company called Glitch. It was a game company and they still wanted, a tool internally that was better than IRC. So they built out something that later became Slack. So Slack 2014, is established as a company and basically it was this Slack fit software engineering. The focus on automation, the conversational aspects, the asynchronous aspects. It really pulled things together in a way that was interesting to software developers. And I think we've seen this pattern in the world, frankly, of the last few years. Software developers are influences. So Slack first used by the engineering teams, later used by everybody. And arguably you could say the same thing actually happened with Apple. Apple was mainstreamed by developers adopting that platform. Get to 2013, boom again, Solomon Hikes, Docker, right? So Docker was, I mean containers were not new, they were just super hard to use. People found it difficult technology, it was Easter Terek. It wasn't something that they could fully understand. Solomon did an incredible job of understanding how containers could fit into modern developer workflows. So if we think about immutable images, if we think about the ability to have everything required in the package where you are, it really tied into what people were trying to do with CICD, tied into microservices. And certainly the notion of sort of display usability Docker nailed that, and I guess from this conference, at least the rest is history. So I want to talk a little bit about, scratching the itch. And particularly what has become, I call it the developer authentic. So let's go into dark mode now. I've talked about developers laying out these foundations and frameworks that, the mainstream, frankly now my son, he's 14, he (murmurs) at me if I don't have dark mode on in an application. And it's this notion that developers, they have an aesthetic, it does get adopted I mean it's quite often jokey. One of the things we've seen in the really successful platforms like GitHub, Docker, NPM, let's look at GitHub. Let's look at over that Playfulness. I think was really interesting. And that changes the world of work, right? So we've got the world of work which can be buttoned up, which can be somewhat tight. I think both of those companies were really influential, in thinking that software development, which is a profession, it's also something that can and is fun. And I think about how can we make it more fun? How can we develop better applications together? Takes me to, if we think about Docker talking about build, share and run, for me the key word is share, because development has to be a team sport. It needs to be sharing. It needs to be kind and it needs to bring together people to do more effective work. Because that's what it's all about, doing effective work. If you think about zoom, it's a proxy for collaboration in terms of its value. So we've got all of these airlines and frankly, add up that their share that add up their total value. It's currently less than Zoom. So video conferencing has become so much of how we live now on a consumer basis. But certainly from a business to business perspective. I want to talk about how we live now. I want to think about like, what will come out all of this traumatic and it is incredibly traumatic time? I'd like to say I'm very privileged. I can work from home. So thank you to all the frontline workers that are out there that they're not in that position. But overall what I'm really thinking about, there's some things that will come out of this that will benefit us as a culture. Looking at cities like Paris, Milan, London, New York, putting a new cycling infrastructure, so that people can social distance and travel outside because they don't feel comfortable on public transport. I think sort of amazing widening pavements or we can't do that. All these cities have done it literally overnight. This sort of changes is exciting. And what does come off that like, oh there are some positive aspects of the current issues that we face. So I've got a conference or I've got a community that may and some of those, I've been working on. So Katie from HashiCorp and Carla from container solutions basically about, look, what will the world look like in developer relations? Can we have developer relations without the air miles? 'Cause developer advocates, they do too much travel ends up, you know, burning them out, develop relations. People don't like to say no. They may have bosses that say, you know, I was like, Oh that corporates went great. Now we're going to roll it out worldwide to 47 cities. That's stuff is terrible. It's terrible from a personal perspective, it's really terrible from an environmental perspective. We need to travel less. Virtual events are crushing it. Microsoft just at build, right? Normally that'd be just over 10,000 people, they had 245,000 plus registrations. 40,000 of them in the last day, right? Red Hat summit, 80,000 people, IBM think 90,000 people, GitHub Crushed it as well. Like this is a more inclusive way people can dip in. They can be from all around the world. I mentioned Nigeria and how fantastic it is. Very often Nigerian developers and advocates find it hard to get visas. Why should they be shut out of events? Events are going to start to become remote first because frankly, look at it, if you're turning in those kinds of numbers, and Microsoft was already doing great online events, but they absolutely nailed it. They're going to have to ask some serious questions about why everybody should get back on a plane again. So if you're going to do remote, you've got to be intentional about it. It's one thing I've learned some exciting about GitLab. GitLab's culture is amazing. Everything is documented, everything is public, everything is transparent. Think that really clear and if you look at their principles, everything, you can't have implicit collaboration models. Everything needs to be documented and explicit, so that anyone can work anywhere and they can still be part of the team. Remote first is where we're at now, Coinbase, Shopify, even Barkley says the not going to go back to having everybody in offices in the way they used to. This is a fundamental shift. And I think it's got significant implications for all industries, but definitely for software development. Here's the thing, the last 20 years were about distributed computing, microservices, the cloud, we've got pretty good at that. The next 20 years will be about distributed work. We can't have everybody living in San Francisco and London and Berlin. The talent is distributed, the talent is elsewhere. So how are we going to build tools? Who is going to scratch that itch to build tools to make them more effective? Who's building the next generation of apps, you are, thanks.

(intense orchestral music) >> Hi I'm Peter Burris, and welcome to another CUBE Conversation. Got a great conversation with a CMO today, we're going to spend some time talking about some of the changes affecting the tech industry, and specifically affecting marketing in the tech industry, and we're gonna be having that conversation with Meagen Eisenberg who's the CMO of MongoDB, Meagen welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, thank you for having me. >> Well so, we're gonna spend some time talking about a number of different things but MongoDB is an especially interesting company in the context of this conversation, why don't we start by tell us a little bit about MongoDB. >> Sure, MongoDB is a leading modern general database platform, downloaded by 35 million developers, and is used by the hottest private companies like Coinbase to storied brands like HSBC. >> So if we think about it, the reason why I think this is especially interesting is because MongoDB is an opensource company and so that means that that has some specific marketing challenges it recently went through an IPO, and the marketing role in IPO is especially interesting, but very importantly here's where I wanna start, that in many respects the tech industry has always been set up to sell products, and the proposition was I know about my product as a seller, you don't know that much about it, user, so I'm gonna spend an enormous amount of time bashing you about why my product is better, that's changed a bit, as we move to this digital transformation and the role that data plays in helping companies transform it's less about what the vendor's doing and more how the company utilized the technology it's kinda this underlying from a product orientation to a services orientation it has a continuous relationship. >> Yes, that's right. >> Especially in the opensource world where you have a continuous relationship with your developers. Tell us a little bit about how, at least in your experience at MongoDB, that relationship, that from a product orientation to a service, ongoing service orientation, affects marketing. >> Sure, I mean we think a lot about how are user are using the product. You know, we wanna win the hearts and minds of developers, they're out there building new ideas, they're using it, when we enter a company through one developer we have the opportunity to spread to many others you know, if we think of all size businesses there's thousands if not 10s of thousands of databases and applications, so we wanna make sure they have a great experience that we're collecting data that's useful to help them, and that it spreads to others. >> Now lemme amplify wat you just said, because again, we could go back and think about other technology companies where the role was to explain what a relational database was and why it was better than something else, and what you just described is no, we wanna create a community of users that are constantly developing their own visibility their own insight and our job is to call the best of that and use that as part of the marketing experience, do I got that right? >> Yeah, that's right. Developers are actually quite social, and when they're out there building or they find something new, they're creating apps, they're creating new tools, they're sharing that knowledge and so, from a marketing standpoint, we do a lot of work with developer relations building apps, out there speaking to language communities, we're out there at conferences really showing what the technology can do. >> So the, many years ago I had a conversation with a CEO who's now worth billions of dollars, and I asked specifically, I thought that marketing had been essential to his success, and he said something very interesting, he said ah, marketing, that's what I put between my engineers and my sales people so they don't kill each other. (Meagen laughs) That can't be the role of marketing in a community-oriented company. Tell us about how marketing stands in a collaborative relationship between, with product and sales at MongoDB. >> Sure, so, I mean for myself personally as a CMO, I think the success of marketing is it's relationships not only with sales but with engineering, and that they're really, sales I see as a internal customer, understanding what they need to be successful, making sure that we're talking to the right persona that we're helping them build pipeline we're putting tools out there that are helping the user go through the experience, and from a engineering standpoint, that we're collaborating, that there's a feedback loop as people are using the product we want it to be a frictionless experience when they meet us out in the field or they come to our website, and that part's important as a registering for the product, as they come in, as they start to use the product and making sure we all have access to that data it helps sales better do their job, engineering build a better product, and marketing better really hook, hook the user in. >> So marketing helps sustain that journey, but also, also being, ensuring that sales is getting the appropriate information and insight on what customers are doing, but it's much more, it's multi-nodal today, I mean people talk about multi-channel all the time, talk a bit about how you anticipate the engagement model changing as more personas get involved, as technology gets more deeply embedded into the risk profile changes, and very importantly, especially for a company like MongoDB, as the number of use cases explodes. >> Yes, yeah I mean it's a good point, we are, from a marketing standpoint we're going directed developers who wanna do self serve with our MongoDB Atlas product, all the way to the CIO and CTO, who are trying to digitally transform their businesses, and that's, they're all different channels, it's not just email, it's social, it's your website, it's how you interact with them in the field, it's supporting your sales team, it's our developers that are out there working in the field and building the product. So you're right, at MongoDB we have 28 technologies in our Martec stack, and we've sunset seven, so we've experimented with 35, and the reason is because there's a lot of work around website, making a better experience, there's work around social media, how we design what we put out there, what we're doing in the field, making sure every experience, every form you fill out is is really optimized for that customer experience. >> Yeah, it's creating some sort of value with customers, not a distraction, not an annoyance. But if you think about it, another CMO once said, here on theCUBE, that they kinda summarize some of the new role marketing, is that marketing is creating the community, and marking is sustaining the community, where a community really is defined as people who are doing something in common. So your customers are trying to imply this technology that has enormous flexibility, I'm gonna ask you to explain a little bit about that in a second, we're not gonna get too deep, to a lot of new use cases, and that's what your users are trying to do bringing those together so they can share insights share experience, improve the quality tool, speed the process, the rate at which it all happens, there's gotta be a central feature of the marketing mission at MongoDB, is that right? >> Yes, definitely, I mean we're very focused on the developer, their experience, winning their hearts and minds, and creating advocates, people and developers that come and use the product and love it and build upon it and have, you know, things that they've learned that they wanna share, we have a pretty detailed documentation for new folks, we have a MongoDB university where we've had over 800 thousand developers take courses, it's definitely a highly engaged group that wants to innovate, and they wanna use the hottest technology, they don't wanna be on Legacy. You know, Legacy databases came out 40 years ago, the likes of Oracle, right, that was designed before cloud before mobile, before the volume and variety of data that we have today, and so if you want to build new apps you have to do it in a new, modern way, and MongoDB is a real alternative to those Legacy databases. >> Yeah, so one of the things I think is especially important as we think about some of this stuff, ultimately is, you said you wanna build that, the developer community, and make sure that engagement's strong while at the same time, obviously, sustaining relationships with other personas who are gonna write the checks, probably through your sales organization. >> Yes, yes. >> What is the role of diffusing knowledge through a service, I mean do you have a university or do ya, how does content get designed and instrumented at MongoDB to catalyze that community activity? >> Yes, I mean content's very important, all the way from our developer advocates at relations are building content to educate developers, to help them learn about the product, use the product, and then for the C level execs that are trying to transform their businesses, they're trying to learn about microservices, blockchain, there's a lot of content, and we see it like HubSpot really educated the marketing community around inbound marketing, we're doing a lot of work to educate and work with developers and create that digital watering hole so they can learn what they need to build their next app. >> Especially on the idea of complex, rich, natural data. >> Yes that's right, we believe that MongoDB is the natural way and the best way to work with data, and you can put it where you want intelligently as well as the freedom to run it anywere, our MongoDB Atlas runs on all three major clouds, with AWS GCP and Azure, and that ability to migrate, we're on 54 different regions, so really anywhere in the world you want to have your app running, we've got it set up for you. >> So MongoDB as a database company is trying to reduce the limitations of how well database can handle more complex data, the engineering is using an opensource approach trying to ensure that there's a high quality offering associated with that promise, >> Sure. >> You're deploying it on a lot of different platforms, cloud, not cloud, so that people don't face fundamental infrastructure complaints as to try to get advantage of that, that creates an enormous number of opportunities for someone to come in and try it, the whole try by motion, or land and expand as people like to talk about. How is MongoDB refining that notion of land and expand through its marketing mission? >> Sure, I mean well certainly we're making it frictionless for you to sign up, self serve, you can go put a credit card in, we've got a free tier where you can quickly experiment, try it out, as your application grows and becomes mission critical we've got the tools that you need to maintain it, we've got security and all the features you would need to run a modern application, and we're, we've set it in a way where no matter where you are in the world or who you wanna collaborate with, it's easy for you, it's very frictionless for the developer, it's a natural way to develop, and you're not, you know, you're not worried about the operational overload that comes with relational or Legacy databases. >> So we've talked a little bit about how MongoDB is working with developers, let's pivot a little bit and talk about how MongoDB worked with potential investors. I've been fascinated by the role that marketing plays within IPOs, you've got finance with a very very well defined role, sales typically has a very well defined role, but marketing's trying to straddle that fine line between driving new volume, but being very careful about what you say and how you say it to keep people feeling confident and comfortable from a financial standpoint. You got, you joined MongoDB three years ago. >> Yes, yes three years ago. >> You had an IPO about halfway in your tenure. >> Yes. >> Tell us a little bit about that. >> Sure, I mean, October 2017 the company went public it was a very exciting time, certainly the first time that I had been with the company and taken them public, I was fortunate enough, our CEO Dev Ittycheria had done it multiple times as a leader and as a board member, and so he brought a lot of knowledge around that, and as a marketer you're thinking how do you stay within the guidelines but make sure everyone's aware of what you're doing, certainly if you've been doing it in the past you can keep doing, you know, if you're not hyping the market, you can keep doing what you've been doing you can keep running your events you can talk about the product, the day of is a really big day to get in front of media, I was really impressed by what the team did to align media interviews I think we had 24 different interviews in one day, and we had over 50 or 60 stories break within the next week or so. So that was exciting just, you know, that timing, 'cause you can't line those up too soon, you've gotta make sure everything's a go, and, you know, it really worked out and now we're just excited about the future of the market, 60 billion dollar market by 2020 according to IDC, so we've got a massive opportunity in front of us, so what can we do, certainly from a marketing standpoint, what do I need to be doing to get on that and work through that. >> So MongoDB is a growth company, you know, good solid set of employees, tell us a little bit about how marketing's role is gonna change in the next couple years, as MongoDB tries to grab more of this 60 billion dollar opportunity. >> Yeah, I mean we definitely have a strong vision around where we're going with our products and solutions as a database platform, we're doing a lot of work with partners, we've got some great stuff going on with SA- SIs like Accenture and Infosys and Wipro who have modern, you know, they're modernizing the tech stack and working with really large companies, and we're part of that offering, so we'll be working heavily with that. We're very close with the cloud vendors, with AWS and Microsoft Azure and GCP, so a lot of good work going around that and we'll continue to grow our cloud offering itself, Atlas, MongoDB Atlas, it's only been around two years, it's already 14% of our business now has grown 400% over the last year, and so we're excited to see-- >> Congratulations! That's not bad. (laughing) >> Thank you, yeah, thank you. That's a, you know, really exciting part of the business and so much moving to the cloud it's the right place to be, I feel like we've done a great job really, you know, looking at where we need to be and then highlighting that in the markets. >> So last question Meagen would be Mongo is carving out an interesting spot for itself within the marketplace and as you focus on customers, customers are increasingly dictating how the market's gonna evolve, it's an interesting dynamic, especially that community approach, but there's always efforts to pull it back, especially from some of the entrenched database competitors. How are you guys trying to both keep the focus in what the customer needs, drive them to this modernization while at the same time acknowledging, recognizing, that they can't change everything on day one, that you have to coexist? >> Yeah, so, I mean MongoDB is doing a lot of work around migrations, making it very easy and frictionless. If you're gonna move to the cloud, this is the perfect time to move off Legacy databases, and we see it with our customers, they're struggling with 40 year old technology they need a more modern approach, they want a single view of their data, they're dealing with so much of it, and it's the right time when they move to the cloud. So we're making sure our product is on all the major clouds, which it is, and all the regions, that we've got the tools that they need, and that that process is really simple. >> Alright, Meagen Eisenberg, CMO of MongoDB, thank you very much for being on theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me. >> It's been a great conversation, and once again, you will see additional CUBE Conversations, until next time I'm Peter Burris, thank you very much for watching. (intense orchestral music)

>> Announcer: From New York, it's theCUBE! Covering Blockchain Week. Now, here's John Furrier. Hello everyone this is theCUBE's exclusive coverage here in New York at Blockchain Week New York, #BlockchainNY this is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier your host. Our next guest is Madhu Kutty, who's a partner at Arcadia Crypto Ventures, thanks for joining me here in New York City. We're at the Block Party, a private event here, thanks for joining us during Blockchain Week. >> Yep. >> So you guys do a lot of deals, we had Richard on, who's the managing partner of the firm, early in the space, super early, so you're in the front wave, get all the best deals, now it's competitive, you got to read the white papers, you got to get down and dirty. Still got the pretenders, figure out what's the bad deals, the good deals, and then when you get a good deal make sure it's tailor fit, both the tech matches the economics. (laughing) which I find to be interesting, because, you can have a brilliant entrepreneur come in but their token model's off. Do you see this every day? >> Yeah, we see this a lot. Especially the last year things were much more easier, because most of the people who are coming were generally at least trying to do something good, but this year we see a lot of people who just want to make use of the bail that's happening, just get on the hype and get some quick buck, even on traditional firms that've failed are coming and trying to capture the blockchain hype. >> Yeah, so throw the hail Mary basically, let's do an ICO, and they're going, we're going under throw the hail Mary! >> Yes, that's what we see a lot happening, and then there was a lot of tech projects back in the past so it was a little more easy to evaluate, so, but this year you're seeing more real business applications coming onboard. >> I was talking with Richard about some of the growth things around crypto, and I want to get your take on it because, the internet infrastructure is changing. We see the web 1.0, I mean we hear in these, all the events I go to, similar kind of conversation, TCBIP created inter-networking and inter-operability, HTTP created a whole new way to do things: web 1.0. Now we're hearing token economics and blockchain as a new way, but yet, inter-operating with the old systems, so you have a whole seat change, and there's a real tech-enablement. What's your view on this, because some people get it wrong, they understand what the business logic means, but they want to know what the tech-enablement is. What's the tech that's driving all this new infrastructure? >> So the internet, you could think of it as a way to share information with a worldwide audience, so blockchain, for the first time ever, enables on blockchain, or the inter-crypto infrastructure, first time enables humans to transfer value over the wire. So you could represent one as one over the wire, rather than creating like a duplication of one. So you could have your own Bitcoin stored on the network, and you can access it yourself, and you can send that value across. This was never possible in the history of the human race, so that's what a blockchain enables, it's the solution to basically this general problem, and we always thought that it was not possible but for the first time ever we have a means to achieve that. >> I've also been saying at some of these cube events, that every company needs a chief economic officer, you used to have a CGO, now you need a chief economic officer. So I got to ask you, when you see a technology, you got to kind of make sure it marries the right model. So in the token world, putting security tokens aside, which I like by the way. They're very easy to deal with, utility tokens are different you have two types of utility tokens a work-like token, and a burn-mint equilibrium approach. What's your take on the two strategies there, when should some appoint a burn-mint--or a BME strategy versus say a work token which is much more of a utility classic. >> So a burn token is what has been the work, at least in the past, for building actual platforms, so that solution itself is not fully solved. So once we solve that completely, that's when we see much more utility tokens coming on board, but as this point we see more of the remittance problem that's being solved so that, we have a lot of exchanges, and transferring of currency that's being worked on. So you can think of it like the email in the internet era, though we had all these different .coms, only email worked well. So right now the transfer of value, the remittance on the exchange is the only thing that's working, but as we go forward we'll see much more business models coming out. >> So it's really going to evolve. >> Yep. I think this could be the year that's going to be-- Ethereum was moment when, there was the Ethereum moment when you really could start the next generation of the cryptocurrency movement, so I think this year we could see more business. >> And I've heard some of the conversations here at the consensus event around, a lot of people trying to force blockchain and decentralize, specifically with a centralized business model, so a lot of people are poopooing that. Which is, we just call that blockchain washing, white washing, trying to save themselves. So I got to ask you, I mean first of all, I remember having conversations back when the web started, oh my God, AOL and this 14.4 dial up is so slow, so much slower than a mini computer, technically right, mini computer was much faster than dial up modems to web, but web wasn't replacing the mini computers, replacing direct mail, direct response, analog things. So the question I want to ask you is: what is the analog displacement, what apples-to-apples comparison should we be making when people throw out these idiotic comments like, oh my God blockchain's so slow, because it is kind of slow, the web was slow too, but it replaced something old. Is it right, is blockchain replacing something old, and what is the right comparison? >> So the right comparison is that it is, it has solved, theoretically, the problems, the theoretical solution for these problems we are going to solve the decentralization and decentralizing business, theoretically we have solved it, and we have proved it practically, it's possible, but it is not really there for that-- the mass option for real business to onboard, it has not reached that scale yet. As we all know, if Netflix was in business in 1999, it could never succeed. But then a lot of infrastructure was built up on top of it, and Netflix worked, so the same thing is going to happen here. >> So you're not worried about the complains when people say it's slow? >> No, because there's more in IC, each time I go to these conferences, as you have seen, more and more smart people are jumping in, more and more money is flowing in-- >> The web grew too, more people were using the web, so growth was the key. >> Yeah, growth is the key, and more smart people coming, and they're going to figure it out. >> When you look under the hood of a company they come in and say hey I want to get funding, or I have this great business model, or I take an existing business and tokenize it. What are the things you look for in a good ICO candidate, or just someone who's tryna do token economics, with a technology trying to transition, not pivot, transform into token economics? >> So a lot of it, something people call it is conviction-based investing, so that's a lot, they have a lot in this cryptocurrency space. So we look at the technology, underlying technology, how we can solve some of the issues. We look at the broader aspect of the space, how big the space is so it can solve that, and we also look at the team, and if these three things are in good combination we believe in it can be a rival business. And also the partners, or the founders, have to be a little less greedy, like look for smaller raises that's good enough for the next two years, roughly. >> Well I think entrepreneurs can get liquid faster off token economics, I think it's actually better for the entrepreneur, in my opinion. I want to take change gears a second talk about you personally how did you get here, did you just wake up one day and say I'm going to work for Arcadia Crypto Ventures, were you scratching an itch, did you come from finance, what's your background? >> My background has been in technology and finance, worked with a bunch of Wall Street banks, then private equity firms, then I was running a technology firm when I met Richard, who's very early in the space. So we talked about it and he had a lot of interesting questions about the space so myself and one of my partners we went back and researched on it. So we came back with these answers, he had a little more insight, back in the day, more access to the detail during that time, so we worked with him, and loosely, we worked as some kind of analyst for him and we started working together and then it formalized in a bigger way, now we are working. >> When did you have that moment saying damn this is going to be good? >> I think, so it was once we totally understood the Santoshi Paper, at that point we knew that this is going to change the world. But even I didn't expect that this would be this fast. So what we are seeing today, at that time I thought maybe we'll see that in 2020, 2021, but the space exploded. Ethereum hitting a thousand, which it hit sometime this year I was thinking might happen sometime 2021 or 2022, by then. >> What sector surprised you the most, was it the trading side, the entrepreneur side, what area of the market has surprised you the most? >> What's surprising is the world wide ERD option, and how especially the new generation has kind of lost a bit of interest, not even like they are disillusioned with this other investment model, they are jumping in a big way. And I think this is even ruggedly, everyone has to look for that, these people have come in, so let's get it right for these folks so that they have a belief in the system and they can go forward. >> Madhu I want to get your thoughts on something I think is important for folks to understand, and that is there's a lot of liquidity, Richard mentioned that liquidity is an important part. >> Absolutely. >> So there's a lot of new dynamics and art and science that goes into the trading side of it, much accelerated than a classic IPO or say a hedge-fund kind of deal, where there's always kind of some stuff going on, but here you can get much earlier in on the process. Talk about, for the folks who like now know what a wallet is and might have an account on Coinbase, to the extent that that's their knowledge base. You're so much deeper on some of the trading side, what are the dynamics, how would you break down the trading situation on crypto, give us the crypto trading 101. >> So the idea is that, first of all, there are some huge exchanges, so every cryptocurrency out there wants to be on these exchanges, so these exchanges have much more trading volume, have much more liquidity, that's where you want to be. If you are doing some investment and you want to protect it, you want to be in these highly liquidized ones. And so I would stick to top 10-20 coins for the majority of the portfolio if you want to protect your investment, so that has a lot more liquidity. And then, around I would say 10-20% you would do in sectors that you are interested in, where you really have some kind of idea, that's what I call a conviction-based investment. >> So if I want to convert my crypto to Fiat currency, you're saying stay with the top trading forms, or stay with the sector, what's the advice? >> If you're a regular investor, who's not following the market 24/7 I would say, at least, put like 80% on the top 20 coins where there is much more liquidity and which, you know won't go bust tomorrow. Then you would focus maybe 10-20% of your-- this is, I'm just talking with a crypto portfolio, on something you are going to have some kind of conviction, if you, let's say you are in an automobile space, that's what you understand a lot so any crypto on that, which you think is interesting, you could put your money there. And I'm a tech person, so I would put more money on technology platforms. >> What's your favorite tech coins right now, what're the investments you're putting money into? >> Oh, we've always been long on Bitcoin, Ethereum, so there are a lot of new, exciting stuff coming, like EOS, like we are big on Tezos, it's a very community-driven project, we are very excited about that, what Bloq is bringing, Metronome, I think that's going to be huge. These are very unique in their own ways, you're also offering something as a challenger to Ethereum, Tezos, also in some form, where they're very community-focused. And Metronome, for the first time, offers the ability to do cross-platform transactions. >> Madhu, this space is attracting a lot of young kids, I say kids, coming out of business school, or from a firm like Goldman Sachs, one of these classic firms, kind of bored. They want to do something new. What's your advice to the next generation coming in, jump on the wave, fall down, learn it, get off my wave, get off my beach, I mean what's your advice for the young people? >> If I was in that spot right now, I would just jump in and go with the flow, and you'll figure out what you need to do. At least rather than stick with the traditional companies, this is something new and exciting, and at least the next two-three years, spend on-- >> Get's your hands dirty, don't lose a lot of money. Try not to lose a lot of money. (both laughing) Madhu, thanks for coming on-- >> Thank you! >> Appreciate the commentary. We're here, exclusive coverage, we're at the Block Party, here at the Blockchain Week New York, exclusive continued coverage with theCUBE, we're here in New York City to breakdown all the action inside the ropes of the industry, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (bubbly music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube covering IBM Think 2018. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hello and welcome to The Cube here in IBM Think 2018, I'm John Furrier. It's The Cube, our flagship program, we go out to the events and extract the signal in the noise. We're the number one live event coverage. We're here with The Cube with IBM Think 2018. Our next guess is Jesse Lund who's the vice president of IBM Blockchain. He's in the financial services side. Into blockchain, into crypto, into token economics, seeing the future, how money flows, Jesse great to have you on The Cube, thanks for joining me. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. It's great to be here. >> We were talking before on camera about blockchain, and we love blockchain, IBM certainly put it out there as part of the innovation sandwich. Blockchain, data, AI, kind of making that innovation, but it's really what it enables, and I want to talk to you about. You are involved in payments. We've been saying on The Cube that the killer app is money in this market. >> I agree, yeah. >> You agree, and you talk about it. This is a new market, so a stack is kind of developing. You got blockchain, then you got crypto which as protocols and you got infrastructure, then you got decentralized applications which you could call ICOs up top, certainly a little bit scammy and bubbly, but that's as arbitraging and optimizing the capital markets, you could argue that. But so this is a really big dynamic. Your thoughts on this trend. >> Sure, well so I joined IBM from 18 years at Wells Fargo. I spent really the majority of my career in financial services and when blockchain came along, I sort of immediately saw the impact, the potential for, I'll call it positive disruption, disruption in the positive sense. Transformational paradigm shift kind of stuff in terms of how money moves around the world and how we classify assets and how we transfer ownership of assets, I mean that's just, it's, the possibilities are limitless. And you're right, IBM is the place where I think blockchain has started as a mainstream focus for enterprises around building private networks, but that's really just the beginning. What we talked about earlier was it gets really interesting when data and money are connected together and they move at high velocities together. >> Let's get into that. I mean first let's just address the IBM thing. They got to put a stake in the ground, blockchain, it's a safe harbor to say supply chain stuff because that's their business, they've been building technologies for supply chains for companies, that's what enterprises do, that's IBM. But the game is where the money is and that's where the businesses are going to be transformed. We're talking about disrupting structural industries. This is where the money power comes in. Money's flowing, I mean if you want to move money from China, go to bitcoin. If you want to move it from anywhere, this is what's happening. >> Yeah, so think about bitcoin. It's kind of what started it all. It's a little bit of a bad word in banks and in regulated financial circles, but let's face it, the only real mainstream blockchain application today is still bitcoin, but you know we're only three years in to the blockchain industry, right? I mean think about when we were three years in to the internet industry, where we were still talking about which browser is going to win and then it went on to which application server's going to win, and it wasn't til a decade later we were really focused on what are the applications, the killer apps that are enabled by an interconnected world and that's exactly what's happening now. Other industries have already been completely disrupted. Look at retail, it's just, it's banking's turn. It's financial services turn. >> One of the founders, the co-founders of Ethereum, Anthony Diiorio, who I interviewed a couple weeks ago at the Bahamas, he said "While it is the new browser," to your points, browser wars, if you think about the payment, wallets are now becoming part of the mechanism for money transfer. If you don't have a wallet, if you want to send me some Ripple, you want to send me some Ethereum, I need a wallet. This is a no brainer, right? I mean if you want to leverage any money, that's one thing. The second thing I want to get your thoughts on besides the wallets, the fiat conversion, right? These are two threshold conversations that are going on. Your thoughts, wallet and conversion to fiat. >> Well I mean I think wallets are really important because this whole thing is based on key management, this whole concept is based on cryptography. It only works on a public, private key notion and you got to keep that private key private, but you got to keep it, right? You got to keep it safe and you got to keep it, it's like your wallet. You've got a wallet, you've got cash in your wallet, you lose your wallet, you lose your cash. It's the same kind of analogy, so wallets are really important and you're going to want to turn to providers who have made their business in encryption, who have made their business in security, I mean-- >> And cold storage, old school is kind of coming back, people are taking their keys and they're spreading them across multiple lock boxes, multiple states. People are getting broken into their house or their PCs are getting broken into. >> Right, yeah. >> I mean security, going old school. >> And why not? I mean, it works. >> Because if someone knows you got 100 million dollars in your house, they're going to get it if you don't lock it. Okay back to the reality of the money transfer. We were talking before you came on, I've been saying on The Cube, token economics really is where the action is, at least in my opinion. I want to get your thoughts because really the business model innovation is on the table because whoever can innovate the business model has more of a chance to disrupt an existing industry. This is where tokenization becomes part of the money piece of it, so how do you convert that value into capture? Is that token? Is that where you see it? What's your thoughts? >> Yeah so well first of all, I mean if you think of tokens as another form of currency, and by the way, I think we have to be careful about what we say, cryptocurrencies, the industry talks about thousands of cryptocurrencies out there where there's really not. There's maybe dozens and they're all derivatives of just a few models, bitcoin being one prominent model and there's a lot of offshoots off of that. But the rest of what we call cryptocurrencies are really tokens that represent primarily securities, which is why the SCC's getting involved. But the really interesting thing about this is these tokens move at high velocity because they're digital and so, but these digital things represent a claim on real world value, and that's where it becomes really interesting. IBM's built and launched as kind of its first foray into the solution space of financial services where IBM is an investor in this technology, a cross-border payment solution that inherently re-engineers this whole correspondent banking, this international wire process, and where FX, foreign exchange, becomes a real time capability in a series of operations that execute as an atomic unit. That's novel today. When you want to send money from here to somewhere else in the world, you go to your bank, your bank sends an instruction to another bank, and they respond and say "Yeah you know it's okay "because the person you're sending it to is not a terrorist, "is not on a some sort of sanctions list," great, now the bank has to actually go settle and it settles through another network, so the novelty is why can't the messages and the data and the value itself, the digital asset, why can't they exist and move together at the same time? That's what we've really built. But as we've built and deployed that and are getting banks and non-bank financial institutions to sign up for it because the cost of moving money goes way, way, way down and the user experience goes way, way, way up because instead of taking two or three days and you don't know how much it's going to cost until it gets there, it takes 10 or 15 seconds and you know before you even press send how much it's going to cost to get there. It all boils down to this notion of digital assets, that's what it all comes down to, is the way to settle value with finality in real time is for one party to exchange a digital asset with another party. Today, initially, the only form of negotiable digital assets are cryptocurrencies which has banks a little scared, but as we start talking through what we've learned in the enterprise blockchain space, we realized that we can tokenize all sorts of other asset classes, commodities, securities, and even fiat currencies where central banks or commercial banks can issue a token that represents a claim on deposits held at some financial institution and that's, that's a-- >> So you see tokenization as a big deal. >> It's a huge deal. I mean it's everything, I think it's-- >> It's the economic value of the ... >> I think it's the tipping point for blockchain. The irony is it goes back to bitcoin kind of started this all. You know we said "Well we like the idea of the technology "underneath bitcoin, but we want to focus on blockchain," I mean forget for a second blockchain is actually terminology that's invented by the bitcoin primer that was published nine years ago by Satoshi, so yeah it's their, whoever they are, it's their terminology, and it's kind of coming back full circle where you're seeing the convergence of all of these cool optimization capabilities, you know, immutability and workflow optimization, supply chain management-- >> And there's a lot of work to be done on performance and whatnot, but the concept of decentralized immutability data is fine, store the data. Now there's, it's got to get fixed, but I think that what that enables and I think you agree that tokenization's critical. So for a company that wants to token their business or raise money via tokens or get involved in this new economic value creation, innovation trend, how do they do it? And by the way are there tools available? You mentioned banking, and the banking business got to where it was because you had to build the picks and shovels to make it happen, you had to do a swift and you had to have this stuff go on. Now developers don't necessarily have the tools, so there's a picks and shovel market and there's also the real innovation. >> Yeah and that's I think the value contribution that IBM brings. I mean we bring 107 years of credibility in developing and operating mission critical, transactional, and financial systems, and I could do just an ad for a second, that's what the IBM blockchain platform is all about and as the industry evolves, as our platform offering evolves, what we want to be able to bring to small business, medium sized businesses, large businesses is the ability to develop solutions using our toolkit. >> So Jesse I want you to put your financial hat on and at the same time put your payments hat on and your token economics hat on, three hats. Hey I want to tokenize my business, I really want to get in. So we have an innovative team, we're seeing new business model formulas and logic that we want to disrupt, what do I do? I got an existing, growing business that I know has assets and I'm not a startup, but I'm not trying to pivot like Kodak, so I'm not dying, throwing the hail Mary, or I'm not a startup and got to build a whole product. I'm a real business, I'm growing, and I see tokenization as a way for me to be successful. What do I do? What's your advice? >> Well I think you look at it from all potential angles. If you look at any business, they're always looking to improve the bottom line by shrinking costs, right? They're also looking to improve the bottom line by increasing the top side, increasing revenue, and I think as a mid-sized business or a growing business, you have the opportunity to use tokenization, to use blockchain and digital currencies to do both of those things. You have the ability to accelerate the adoption of whatever your good or service or product is by if it's tokenizable, and most things are whether it's a utility, access to some service you provide, or whether it's an asset, some widget that you sell, you enable primary and secondary markets by creating a digital asset that can be bought by anybody anywhere around the world. I mean that's one way to do it and so I think getting people to realize the potential there-- >> You got programs, they call up IBM or get some developers, make it happen. Okay so killer apps money, that's going to be a 30 plus year trend and certainly this highlights that, but the other thing that's happened, it's coming out of either, in the open source community as well as cloud, the notion of marketplaces and communities so marketplaces and communities become a very important role in the token economics piece. What's your thoughts and opinion on that narrative? >> Well again for me, it goes back, I always go back to digital assets. We in the U.S. and around the world, when we start talking about financial instruments, we classify assets differently, but when it comes to an ecosystem and a community that becomes inherently peer to peer and inherently democratic, it's about an asset class agnostic distributed exchange where I can sell you my security token in exchange for your fiat token, or I can sell you my commodity token or utility token for the same. I think the ecosystem gets built automatically by way of new assets coming to a common network or interoperable set of networks, and that's what's missing today by the way, same in capital markets, right? The holy grail in the capital market space today is how do I shrink the time between trade and settlement? There's this whole t plus three and we're spending billions of dollars to go to t plus two, we gain a day, so the trade day and the settlement date are two days apart. I mean you just think about kind of the absurdity of that. If you just say well if the security that you're buying is a digital asset, and the money that you're buying it with is a digital asset, and they both exist on either the same network or an interoperable network, the transfer of ownership and the transfer of value happen together as two operations or a single operation in one atomic transaction, you've solved the problem. >> Speed of light can make it happen. >> Right, delivery versus payment, that's what the capital markets industry is trying to optimize for, right? Because it improves the balance sheet of all sorts of finance-- >> You had a phrase you mentioned before we came on camera, something about money, the future of money. What was that phrase? >> Programmable money? >> Programmable money. >> Yeah, right, right. >> I want you to take a minute to explain. Love this concept, Miko Matsumura, thought leader friend of ours, has a vision called open source money which is more of an open source, this hey money's flowing, it's open, it's out there, but you have a different perspective which I like too which is programmable money. What does that mean? Describe the concept and take a minute to unpack that. >> The concept of programmable money comes out of a paper that I jointly authored with Jed McCaleb who is the founder of Stellar and was the co-founder of Ripple and is a really smart guy so I feel like I have a small brain when I'm around him but we really wrote it in the context of central banking and the ultimate issuer of an asset because central banks are the issuers of currencies. Right now the primary dealers, if you will, for currencies are commercial banks and so that whole commercial, central, fractional reserve banking model has been replicated from the western world to everywhere else in the world and you can't get access to central bank money as they say. But if the central banks were to issue digital currencies which is essentially a token of fiat currency, so you own the token, you own a claim of fiat deposits held on the balance sheet of the central bank, now you have the ability to move that around. You can actually program the movement of money because it's a digital thing, it's a digital asset that's as good as cash and if you are working with a central bank who's issuing it, not only is it electronic money, it's actually legal tender because if the central bank issues it, it becomes legal tender which means everybody who accepts it has to accept that form of payment. That's pretty profound if we can get to that point and we're working with-- >> And software's a big driver in that because you need software to manage digital assets. >> Oh yeah, absolutely. >> The software's driving it. Bill Tai is an investor, I interviewed him, and he had an interesting topic and I made a highlight of it. He said after World War II, we talked about the oil situation when the dala was pegged to OPEC, that was essentially tokenizing oil. Then okay that's good, so that was their ICO. >> Right, right, yeah, essentially. >> That's what you're saying, you can actually put fiat to the digital token and take advantage of the efficiencies of digital. >> Right, yeah, okay-- >> Taking down all the structural inefficiencies that were built prior to digital. Is that ... >> It is. You fast forward a little bit and think where that takes us. It's no secret that the U.S. dollar is the trade currency of the world, and I want to be careful what I say because, you know, I'm an American patriot here but there are other large G20 nations who wouldn't mind dethroning the U.S. dollar as the trade currency of the world and so as you see central banks starting to get involved in the issuance of digital currency, you create a situation where all of a sudden well maybe oil could be traded heresy in other currencies besides the U.S. dollar which is all it's traded in today. Goes back to your ecosystem question. >> This is a great point. We could riff on this stuff, let's riff on this. The UK just signed a deal with Coinbase, this is a major signal. >> Sign, yeah. >> You got a legitimate country saying we're going to give a license to Coinbase, now they have Brexit to deal with so they're looking at it as an opportunity. Outside of the UK coming in and doing that deal with Coinbase, it's on the web, look up Coinbase in the UK, you'll see the deal. You have other companies trying to jockey for who's going to be the Wall Street for crypto? Meaning I want to convert crypto to fiat, where do I go? Do I go to Estonia? Do I go to Dubai? Bahrain? Armenia? China? There is no place yet. Your thoughts, what's going to happen? What shoe will drop first? Is there a domino effect? >> Yeah, well there's a couple things as it relates to the UK and kind of the extension to Coinbase of access to the national payment system which is really what enables them to then convert fiat to crypto and back. That's pretty interesting. Going back to the programmable money thing, though. If you have a central bank issued token, you've essentially extended the real time gross settlement system which has been only accessible by commercial banks to anybody that holds that token, right? It's a trend, I think the UK sees it coming, I think the Federal Reserve sees it coming. It's going to happen. >> Is it winner take all or winner take most? >> I think it creates a much more purely efficient market. It's a democratic system so I don't think there is going to be a new Wall Street, I think it's going to be-- >> John: Decentralized. >> Exactly, I mean that's the beauty of it. It's scary though for establishments like Wall Street to look at this and it-- >> I mean are the banks scared? You're dealing with the banks right now. >> Yes, they're scared. I mean I've actually read a recent article that Bank of America, the headline was "Bank of America's afraid of digital currency." You've seen Jamie Dimon who came out with a kind of a hard stance against bitcoin and has since kind of backed away from that. >> Of course you probably bought in when it dropped and now it's back up again. >> Well I think part of the bank was actually facilitating their clients and trading bitcoin so that might've been it. There's a natural reaction to it, especially if you're part of the mainstream establishment. >> There's no proof of that, I'm just saying we're posting on Reddit and whatnot. >> No we're just joking around. Jamie's a, he's a good guy, right? >> Can I get your thoughts on digital nations? We've been talking about this. Just a few years ago, smart cities, IoT was kind of the narrative, oh be a smart city, control the traffic lights, and instrument the physical goods and services. Now with crypto and blockchain front and center conversation is digital nations with sovereignty around their cash. This is kind of your point earlier. How are you seeing that? What's your view? Are you seeing that trend? Are there dots connecting for you? Because again, people are jockeying for a position on the global digital backbone to be a major part of the money flow, the fiat conversion, what is the goods and services? Who's going to clear the values? All digital, it's a perfect storm. >> Well I think there's always going to be the need for trusted entities to be the issuers of these assets because it all comes down to trust at the end of the day. The thing with bitcoin is that it's purely autonomous and people are a little bit skeptical of it because they're like, "Well who's controlling "the monetary policy?" and the answer is the market, you know, the users of the network are controlling it and that's why you see such volatility, right? Because the traders love it, they can go in and trade the up trends and the down trends. As long as there's volatility, traders are making money. I think there is still going to be a place for central authorities to add value, but that's going to be the pressure, is for them to prove that they're adding value not, you know, bureaucracy masquerading as process. >> I was reading an article that Telegram, which is doing a huge ICO, just got shut down by the Russian government, they went to turn over their keys, their private keys of their users. Say goodbye to the-- >> Jesse: I didn't read that, that's crazy. >> It's really crazy, so that's going to put a damper on their ICO but regulatory and then government issues around countries becomes a big deal. In your experience as Wells Fargo, at a bank, looking forward in the new digital world, is it one of those situations where path of least resistance, the countries that go more friendly get around that in a sovereignty where you domicile, where you start your company, where you do your banking. I mean I could start a company in Gibraltar and bank in Switzerland. >> Well transparency is part of the benefit or the downside of this, right? I think there may be advantages that pop up but I think they will equalize over time. I've been around the world now for IBM talking to 20 plus central banks, and I had a really interesting conversation with one of them recently in Asia. We're in the room with deputy director level people who are responsible for things like the NA money laundering policy and the economics and monetary policy and things like that and one person said, "You know, we're really torn "between two equally unacceptable decisions. "One is to ignore cryptocurrencies altogether, "and the other end of the spectrum is "to make them illegal, to ban them." I thought it was poignant that they see those as unacceptable, they have to do something in the middle. >> Do they weigh or ban? I mean look, the banning's happening. >> But okay so you saw that Trump used the executive order to prevent Americans from using or trading in the Venezuelan crypto that was issued on Ethereum, right? I saw that Venezuelan thing as a publicity stunt more than anything, an active of global defiance. So there's precedent now for, and the Russia thing with Telegram-- >> The United States of America has to step up its game because look at it, we have a lot of, I mean I remember back in the crypto days when I was just getting into the business, late 80s, early 90s, you couldn't even do it in the U.S., you go to Canada, that's why Canada's got a lot of innovation up there. We're risking our country, and I had one guy tell me in Puerto Rico, he's from South Africa, and he shouldn't be throwing any stones either but his point was, he says, "America's becoming Europe. "There's a shrinking middle class "while other emerging markets have a growing middle class," so the global impact of blockchain, cryptocurrency, and these applications are significant and have to be factored into policy decision making for governments. The U.S. can't just think about itself anymore in a vacuum. >> Right, not anymore. >> Because there's implications otherwise the U.S. will turn into Europe, regulated, all these rules, byzantine stuff. It's a real problem. Your thoughts on that. >> It is. It's cliche, but we live and work in a global economy. The flow of information globally in real time has been around now for a while and it's about time it came to money. The internet of money is a term I've heard. It's just, it's unavoidable. >> Jesse Lund here inside The Cube. Great guest, great conversation. >> Yeah, thanks. >> How do people get ahold of you on IBM's, you mentioned you got some great stuff going on, you've written a paper, you've got a lot of content, where does someone go to discover some of the stuff that you're working on they could get involved with you guys? >> Yeah well I mean the best place to go is IBM.com/blockchain, that'll tell you a lot about what we're doing and the different industry-- >> And the programmable money paper you wrote, is that there? >> It's out there as well, there's a link to that. >> On IBM.com? >> You can get me directly on LinkedIn, I try to be pretty responsive with that because I really enjoy the dialogue. This is a revolution of the peoples, man, it's all over the world, so it's great, it's great to be a part of it. >> And people tokenizing their business, there's real opportunities to change the game to bring consensus, data driven, new kind of supply chain whatever to the markets you're in, great opp-, and you need banking. >> Yeah of course. >> You need to have money. Money, marketplaces, and communities, that's my mantra. >> I subscribe to it. >> Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> Jesse Lund. I'm John Furrier here at IBM Think 2018. Cube coverage continues after this short break. (upbeat music)

(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)