(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)

(upbeat techno music) >> From the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas, It's theCUBE, covering HoshoCon 2018. Brought to you by Hosho. >> Hello everyone, welcome to this special Cube coverage. We are here, live in Las Vegas, for HoshoCon. I'm John Furrier, the host of theCUBE, and this is part of our continuing coverage and our initiating coverage of the blockchain crypto world, been doing it since January, covering it on our journal site siliconangle.com since 2011, covering Bitcoin and all blockchain stuff, but this is the first security conference dedicated around block chain and crypto put on by Hosho, and it's called HoshoCon. It's an industry conference, and we are here covering it. And this is an open, small kernel of smart people, really trying to have a top level conversation around security . And our next guest is Christopher Forte He's the CTO of 3BX, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for joining us. >> Yeah, pleasure to be here. >> So, before we get into some questions about security, what do you guys do? What's the company do? You guys have a unique approach. Take a minute to explain what you guys do. >> 3BX is essentially a marketplace. It's a digital asset marketplace. We're trying to build a community around trading digital assets. We're really trying to focus on pulling away from the term 'cryptocurrency,' because we think it'll expand into much a much broader term. So we're structuring our platform on the support of any kind of digital asset, whether it be a cryptokitty or a an e-book, a concert ticket, you know, something that has a digital form that can be traded person to person. >> So, basically, you're expanding the definition, or actually, depositioning crypto, because it's kind of narrow, relative to how you guys see it. >> Yes, it's pretty narrow. >> Digital assets, I mean, look at gaming. >> Yep, absolutely. >> Gaming culture is not new. >> Yeah. >> I mean, they trade stuff all the time. >> Yeah, sure, even like in game tokens, they don't exist on a block chain yet. They're not cryptographically secured, so those are the types of things that I expect to see hitting a lot of these marketplaces soon. >> Well, that's smart, I mean, I think if you look at it, certainly we at (mumbles) blockchain, our entire media company's been moving to blockchain, and crypto, and token economics, but really the blockchain piece has been very limited. It's got very poor functionality, and all the top blockchain implementations are either private block chain, low latency, and fast, and developer friendly. >> Sure. so Ethereum's great for smart contracts, but just as a scale, relative to what most people need. >> Yeah. >> If you're running, you need a million IOPS, you've got a marketplace. >> Yeah. Some of these large scale, hyperscale networks, they're massive marketplaces. >> Yeah, they're huge. >> How do you guys fit in there? What problem are you trying to solve? Let me just start with that. >> You know, we're trying to pull away from the complexities of an exchange. We're trying to give the community a good tool to trade without a lot of knowledge of tokenomics. One of our unique assets, or unique features, is that you can trade with no market impact. You don't have to worry about price slippage, or the complexities behind order books, so we give a familiar interface to trading. Something you'd see on a traditional e-commerce platform. So we're trying to kind of introduce it to a wider range of people. We've talked to a lot of people who have a lot of difficulties, especially with the decentralized exchanges. >> Yeah. What are their problems? Just, like, reliability? >> Reliability. >> Black box- >> Liquidity, there's a lot of issues with liquidity around them, which causes problems when you try to trade any significant amount of coin. So, we're trying to give traders and the coin companies another outlet to trade without having to worry about liquidity. Or the risks of liquidity associated with it. >> So what's the status of the company? How many people do you guys got? What's the size? Do you have any deployments? Are you guys engaging certain communities? >> We are live. We released a kind of invite only beta about two months ago. So we've been out there having traders for about two months. We're a very small team, we're based out of Las Vegas. There's a development team of three people. We're just now broadening into more partnerships, more marketing- >> So you guys are hardening the platform, basically. >> Yep. >> By jamming and coding- >> Yeah, we went kind of product first, and then took a step back and are now approaching the market. So yeah, we're really excited. >> That's smart, you didn't hype it up first. >> Yeah, we didn't hype it up. >> But you could have definitely hyped it up, I mean, a lot of people who are winning right now are quality deals that had opportunities to do an ICO. >> Yeah. >> just, people are throwing money around. Just go back to February, the numbers are just off the charts. The, kind of, bubble burst in February, and certainly the SEC announced today, I'm covering the news, a major crackdown on all those ICOs, on violations right here in the United States, It just causes a distraction. I brought this up with Hartej last time I interviewed him in Toronto at The Futurist, which is exactly what you guys are doing, and this is the core trend and I want to get your thoughts on it. A lot of the alpha entrepreneurs, the ones that are building companies, don't want to get distracted from stuff that's not optimized on building a company. For instance, if I do an ICO, or you get involved in domicile issues outside the United States, you're optimizing all your energy, they're on an airplane, or market dynamics that aren't building a company. Yeah. >> This is kind of, almost a distinction at this point, you can almost look at opportunities, startups, entrepreneurs, inventures, and say, "Okay, we can almost see who's doing what." >> Yep. >> You do agree. >> Yeah, I think it's important to have something before you go and you spend a lot of energy raising money, building a pipe around the company. I think we're going to see a huge trend towards product first, having something, having a development team, a concept, a patent. Not just based on a theoretical white paper, so it'll be very interesting to see how it goes. We decided to go product first, so, no one had heard of us until we went live with our product. >> Good approach, I like it, I think it's solid. Good, we'll see how it turns out. I got to ask you, and I want to dig into the product a little later in this interview, but I want to ask you specifically, around some core trends I'm seeing, and patterns. >> Sure. >> It's pretty clear that when these emerging markets develop, total activity on the entrepreneurial side, a lot of people build and developing, attacking the market, but it's a trend, everyone's throwing out a common thing, I need to have community, and I need a two-sided marketplace. So the common thread's- and people don't have those- you can't just buy a community. >> Yeah. Communities aren't bought. >> Sure. You can't just say, "Hey, I need a community." Put a telegram channel, write some bots, >> Yeah. >> the next thing you know you got 25,000 people in telegram. >> Yep. >> That's not a community. >> That's not a community. >> That is AI bots looking like a community. >> Sure. >> And then a two-sided marketplace, you got to have a value proposition. So these are things that people are putting into their plans. >> Yep. >> That they don't have answers for. >> Sure. >> What's your thoughts on that, around community, 6and about marketplace? What are you seeing in the market, in market developing right now? >> I mean, building a strong community is very difficult. They have to align with your product, they have to align with your vision, they have to understand what you're doing, and at least have a use case for it. So, we're really trying to kind of have the community drive our development road map. So, we've done a lot of outreach, trying to get what people are interested in, what's lacking in the industry currently, what they want to see, what they're unhappy with. And we're trying to build a community around allowing people to have input and influence into the product that we're building. So, we're really early into the process, so it's difficult for me to really say that it's easy or difficult to build the community. >> So you're engaging the community to help. >> We are engaging the community. >> What are the number one things you guys are solving? Problems that you see are immediate, low hanging fruit that you're knocking out right away? What are the core things? >> I think some of the big things are simplicity, the usability of these interfaces. Kind of the knowledge around it, trying to do a knowledge transfer to our customer base. And trying to help people realize that there's a company behind these coins. I think that's a huge thing that we have to kind of push towards, is, it's not just a token. It's a token produced by a company with a cause. >> So how does your product work? >> It's like a basic marketplace that you would see in kind of a eBay or an Amazon, where someone posts an offer, posts a listing, and other people can buy from it. So, it's a buy and sell kind of- >> And you have your own native token? >> We have a native ERC-20 token that we use for fees. Because we're targeting the digital asset generally, we've externalized fees from traded goods. So, we want to make sure we can handle something that may not be divisible by, as Bitcoin is. So if you trade a book, for example, a lot of these exchanges would take a page out of it. If you use the current model of fees, they're kind of coin shaving off of your trades. So we're trying to eliminate that so we can expand into non-fungible, or non-breakable assets. We're also developing a wallet that basically encapsulates cryptocurrency into smaller assets to be traded off chain. So, we plan on kind of revolving around our internal token to handle fees of those assets. >> So it's a blend of on/off chain dynamics. >> Yep. >> So you can do a lot of stuff, and not have to do a lot of writing to the chain, if you're going to be doing a lot of re-re-writes. >> Yeah. >> All right, so the question I want to ask you that I think is important and in everyone's mind is, okay, Hosho Con is the first, inaugural- we love going to inaugural events because, you don't know, it could be the last one. >> Sure. >> Or, it's going to be big. I think this is a big trend, and one of the things we heard last night at dinner was, when we were having a conversation about it was, is no real conference, these conferences don't put security in the front. >> Yep. >> They really kind of have it as a side panel. It's always kind of an adjunct to something bigger, pitch competition, you know, big sponsor driven kind of programs. This is a security conference. What is the impact, in your opinion, of this Hosho Con, and security in the blockchain, that's going to shape the industry? What is your opinion? What is your commentary on that? >> I mean, obviously it's important to focus on security. I think a lot of people had a lot of, kind of assumptions that blockchain-specific, or blockchain-based technologies were unhackable. You know, the decentralization of something makes it secure, and I think that's a myth that they're going to have to debug, and we're seeing it with hacks. There's a lot of, I think, assumptions even around the hacks that are incorrect. So, bringing the idea to people that blockchain still needs to be managed, you still need to be careful. The smart contracts still have vulnerabilities and risks involved, it's not- >> Software is software. >> Software is software. It's unavoidable, when you start writing code, that there's going to be- >> You don't want a blue screen of death, certainly, you don't want to have to reboot, I mean, move fast and break stuff was great for webscale, but when you're talking about security and currency, you need rock solid, hundred percent reliability. >> Yeah. >> Otherwise, you lose your cash. Or your e-money. >> Yeah, it's something of value that you're going to lose. >> It's not a social media account, it's not something like that, you know, you're losing money. And it's very interesting, I think the more people know about the security around blockchain, cryptocurrency, the more they're going to realize that it's not an end all solution to everything. It takes time to evolve. Standards will probably have to be put in place. >> There's a lot of people, I remember when I was your age, and the web was coming around, everyone was afraid to put their credit card down on basic e-commerce transactions. >> Sure. >> And that was natural, because like, oh my god, it's online, it almost felt like a black box, and then they got over that pretty quickly, you saw PayPal and those kinds of companies came out. You mention eBay, these online sites are now secure. Crypto, there's almost like an unknown, a lack of education in the mainstream. And so we got to get to that point where, you know, wallets are wallets, and they actually do a good job, and you don't forget, and leave your wallet at the restaurant. There's some hygiene, and practices that are needed. Older generations, maybe, might not get it, but the younger generations, they're getting it, right? >> Yeah >> What's your opinion of this? Because, this is a generational shift. >> Yeah. >> This crypto, blockchain market, it's really generational. >> Sure. Anyone under the age of thirty pretty much loves it. >> Yeah. >> So, it's happening, right? >> Yep. >> So, what is the views around security, generally, in the mainstream? >> I mean, I don't think there are too many. Like I said, I think people kind of put a lot of assumptions in the inherent security of blockchain stuff. And I think they don't realize that we're trying to make it easier through mnemonic sequences, or passwords, so we're hosting wallets online now. It's not necessarily a pure wallet in the sense that it sits on a piece of paper. So we're going towards usability, which we're sacrificing security for. So the more usability we get with a lot of these mainstream products, the more we're going to have to realize we're getting back to a place of existing security vulnerabilities, with passwords, or stuff you would see with your bank account. So it'll be interesting to see the balance between the raw security inherent with Bitcoin, or a traditional cryptographic wallet, and then usability, whether it be cloud based stuff, or these exchanges. >> You know, Chris, one of things you're doing, that I think's interesting, and kind of points to the- if you connect the dots- the trend of, really, levels of granularity getting down to the micro level. >> Yeah. >> It's microeconomics. >> The beautiful thing about this market, is that, you could take a page out of a book, you can track it, and how you use that page like a pay for, all kind of digital rights stuff, digital assets. So you look at the world as a digital asset. This brings up the question of, okay, there's going to be software that's going to have to be written to manage this level of microtransaction, or microassets. So, how do you view, in your opinion, this whole notion of token economics? Because we've used tokens for years on all the stuff we program, on authentication. >> Yep. Tokens are used in computer science- not a new concept. >> Yep. But if you think about tokens as a currency, and as a mechanism for computer science, software, >> Sure. >> do you see a multi-token world? Why wouldn't everyone have their own token? >> Sure. And then there's going to have to be software- >> Sure. to manage the tokens. >> Yes. If you have a token and I have a token called a Cube Coin- >> Yeah. >> and you have your token, there's probably going to have to be some interaction between coins. Do you see that day happening sooner than later, or do you even see it happening? >> It's going to really depend on the use cases that they find. Whether a single platform is going to come out, and kind of take over the standardization of managing it, or, who knows, you see some of these transactional bridges, like between Dogecoin or Ethereum. So you can see that happening between tokens, or, everything being built on the same chain, or, having these bridges between chains, whether it be like an EOS to Ethereum token chain bridge. I don't know, I mean, we really have no idea. >> (mumbles) multichain, it's interesting, right? This is an interesting conversation. My vision is, I think multichain is a good trend. Why wouldn't you want to have multiple chains, if the use cases are not overlapping? I just don't feel comfortable about a monolithic approach of tokens. I'm just uncomfortable, generally, with that philosophy. >> I think it'll be important, and like you said, it'll be very important to have a good solution to manage them. People aren't going to want a hundred programs on their computer to manage their tokens. They're not going to want multiple apps on their phones. There's going to have to be some kind of standardization so that people can manage it easily. Otherwise, it's going to be impossible to keep up with. And kind of the interchangeability between tokens will be important. >> Chris, final question for you. What's this event like here? Describe for the folks who aren't here, what's the vibe, who are the people, what are some of the conversations in the hallways so far. What kind of person is here? What is this event about? What's the relevance of Hosho Con? >> Well, it seems like it's a lot of technically minded people, kind of hoping to push forward the security in the blockchain world. We've had conversations about everything from educating the masses, so kind of the average person, who doesn't understand the complexities of Bitcoin, and how do you inform them of what we're doing, all the way up to, what's the next step in security auditing. Hosho is really pushing forward, how do audit your code on the blockchain, or on a lot of these platforms, and I think it's really important to have these conversations, cause it's opening up new worlds of new thought habits for each of these companies. Everyone has their expertise, Hosho specializes in smart contract auditing, and we may not have that in depth knowledge of how to audit the contracts, so it's nice to kind of share the knowledge, and see that there's other solutions out there than everyone doing it on their own. >> What do you hope to be known for, for your company? If you could have that vision down the road, three years from now, when you look back, what do you want to be known for? >> I think it would be best if we were known as a platform to bring newcomers into the space. Informing, caring about the community, making sure that they understand what they're doing before they do it. As you know, Bitcoin is very unforgiving. A lot of these cryptos are very unforgiving. So I think it's very important for us to be known as someone who helps bridge that kind of intimidation. >> All right, Chris Forte, for 3BX, CTO, entrepreneur, building a company, doing it the right way, plans to use tokens, You guys, did you raise any money? >> No raised money. We're privately funded. >> Nice. >> So, we're going that route. >> Good. >> Bootstrapping, getting it done. Taking a different approach, which is the classic approach, of building a company the right way. TheCUBE, we are here in Las Vegas for Hosho Con. I'm John Furrier. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break. (upbeat techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello there and welcome to a special Cube conversation here at The Cube's Palo Alto studios, I'm John Furrier. Join with me for this special Cube Conference, Stu Miniman with Wikibon and The Cube co-host as well just up at Amazon Web Services Summit. Stu, great to see you again. Our next guest is Ben Golub, who's the executive chairman and interim CEO of Storj, pronounced storage. So it's a really hot cryptocurrency, blockchain based storage solution. I should say decentralized storage, not necessarily cryptocurrency, but tokens are involved, encryption. Great to see you. >> Great to see you, it's good to be back. >> Formerly Docker CEO and now advising at Mayfield Fund as a venture partner and also interim CEO of a hot-- >> Yeah really exciting company. And I'm really excited to talk to you about it today. >> So let's just jump into it. So obviously the ICO craze is awesome and we've always speculated that the blockchain and the decentralized applications are coming is going to be the real action. But yet it's going to create efficiencies where there's inefficiencies. >> Sure. >> Venture capital is one of them and that's why the ICO craze is going. People are raising a boatload of money that they probably wouldn't have gotten that amount. >> Wouldn't have gotten, yeah no dilution, things like that. It's interesting yeah. >> So give us an update on Storj or storage. How much in ICO did they raised, whitepapers out there? It's peer to peer, give a quick, take a minute to explain what the company's doing. >> Yeah well I guess that I should probably start by saying that I think that blockchain is bigger than just cryptocurrency, and decentralized is bigger than blockchain, and Storj is primarily a decentralized storage company. So we're about decentralized apps and the whole thing would absolutely work even if we were just using dollars. But I think it does make it a whole lot more exciting. And so the company, kind of unique in the crypto space in that we actually had a running service that was providing real value, before we did the large token sale. And the token sale raised about $30 million. Fortunately they took about 10 of that in Ethereum and Bitcoin which rose up. So there's a good deal more than that in the bank account right now. >> John: Hopefully they converted to fiat currency. >> And then they converted to fiat along the way. >> It's at an all-time high of $20,000 right now. It's like $7,000, something like that. >> Yeah, so you know, didn't sell everything at the peak, but didn't sell at the-- >> Yeah, so we've been having many blockchain and crypto or token-based economic kind of things. But the real question is what's happening? Now we know the action's been on the infrastructure side. We look at all the top hedge funds, Polychain, amongst others. They love these deals because it's infrastructure. Is that where the action is and how are you guys looking at that because at the same time, there's a wave of decentralized applications also known as Dapps coming on. So there's a relationship going on between how fast the infrastructure can go, and then how applications are going to work with either on chain or off chain dynamics. >> Sure, sure. So maybe it would be helpful to give you a sense of what it is that we do. 'Cause I think that if you do that, then I think it makes sense in the context of decentralized infrastructure, decentralized apps, but also actually traditional infrastructure as well. I've always been searching for a company that I could describe at Thanksgiving. I've never succeeded, so I always end up saying that I'm in computers, and fixing somebody's printer. (laughing) But I guess if I were to describe Storj at Thanksgiving, I'd say it's basically the Airbnb of storage, or the Airbnb of disc drives. So Airbnb, people have lots of condos or vacation properties that aren't being used all the time, and so Airbnb brings them together with people who want to rent those, and they're the largest hotel company in the world, without owning a single property. And we're kind of doing the same thing with Storj, in that there is, first of all, this explosion in the amount of data that's getting created. It would fill a stack of CD-ROMs to Mars and back this year. Yet the price of cloud storage hasn't come down. And 90% of all the disc drives that are out there are only about 10% utilized. So seems like a problem that needs a solution. And that's what we've done. We've basically brought together a very large network of individuals and companies that have spare storage capacity and matched them up with people who need storage. The really cool aspect, there are many cool aspects about it, but one of them is that basically if you want to store on the Storj network, we take your file, you encrypt it, so we never hold the keys. You encrypt it, it's all scrambled up, we break it up into between 20 and 80 pieces, and we spread those out across 150,000 or so nodes that we have in our network. So it's super cheap, but it's also super secure. Great performance because the data's way out at the edge. And super available because there's no storm or power outage or idiot tripping over a power cord that can take out your storage. >> So, Ben, you touched on, first question I was going to ask, of course, trust and security. Storage I absolutely have to worry about, so it sounds like that's at the core, but there's a number of dynamics going on in the industry. Object storage was great, let's spread it out, let's make it more decentralized, but most of the core storage industry is speeds and feeds and latency's super important, and even when you start getting to distributed architecture, I worry about that latency. So what are kind of the use cases, what are some of the key customer issues? Is price a big piece of it? Or what solutions does Storj solve that others can't? >> I always said when I was at Cluster, which was a storage company that there were four things that mattered in storage. There's certainly price; there was security; as in I don't want anybody to be able to access it; there's availability, I never want to drop or lose files; and finally there's performance, how fast I can get it. And so for a huge range of use cases that involve files, basically everything that object storage is kind of used for today, the design of our system is actually much better because we've encrypted it locally and then spread it out, you really can't attack it. First of all, you'd have to figure out... So a would-be attacker who wanted to find one of your files in the storage network would have to figure out which of the 80 or the 20 nodes out of 150,000 it's located on. If they found one of those, and they got the small portion of the file that's there, they wouldn't be able to do anything with it 'cause it's encrypted. Even if they were somehow able to decrypt it by stealing the key from you, not from us... >> So encryption and immutability... >> And immutability, right. So you get all of that. So for the security piece, it's great. For the availability piece, I never lose a file. It's really, really good, because if you just look at the math, the chances that somehow... You can basically lose 10 out of 20 nodes and still be able to recover your files. And all of our nodes are run by different people, different power supply. >> So let's take a step back. How many nodes are on the network now, you said? >> 150,000 now, run by 70,000 farmers, is what we call them. They're not miners, 'cause they're not just solving that problem, they're just producing something of value. 70,000 farmers, and then we have on the network right now, over 50 petabytes of data, which is a really large amount, and yet, we don't run a single data center. >> Have you guys raised any venture at all, or is it all ICO proceeds? >> There was a small seed round that was done, before the ICO craze. But other than that, it's all-- >> And how many people are working on the company? >> 25. >> So you guys are a classic startup. The working product, how does that look now? Is it on the blockchain, is it off the chain, how's it working, Bitcoin? >> So I've described to you what the product does. So far nothing I've described to you involves blockchain. The way the economics work is that as a user, somebody who wants to store on our network, we quote a price in dollars. You can either pay us in dollars or in the Storj token, and as a farmer, you get compensated with a Storj token. And that's done, of course, using blockchain we're actually part of Ethereum. >> Is that ERC-20 token? >> ERC-20 token, yeah. There are also interesting things that we are working on using blockchain for things like you just mentioned, data integrity, so I can make sure that if I'm doing a snapshot of a database, and I want to make sure that it's exactly what it is, nobody can tamper with it, et cetera, then that's a perfect use of blockchain. But using blockchain for the stuff I was talking about before, like figuring out where the shards are and making sure that they're uptime and reliable, that's actually stuff where blockchain isn't the best answer. >> Ben, tell us a little bit about the customers that you find there, 'cause storage administrators, that role's been changing a lot, but the typical storage administrator, if you tell them, "Oh yeah, I'm doing some distributed thing, "somewhere else, and paying in crypto-currency," they'd be like, are you kidding me? I want this thing that I can lock and hold and guard with a gun. >> This is like anything else, there's an adoption curve, and right now it's clearly very much early adopters. And actually similarly to Docker and similar to the cloud in general, it's developers who are leading the way. Developers are saying, oh, wow, I can write to the storage network in the same way that I would have written to S3, only it's cheaper, for many use cases, more performing, and not centralized, so I'm not trusting one cloud provider. So for certain use cases, this is fantastic. >> Are there certain cloud native apps that you're finding have strong affinity here? >> Yeah, so basically what we have affinity with right now, and let's be clear, this is early days. I wouldn't recommend that people store their most sensitive data on this, but-- >> Not Oracle certified yet, is what you're saying? >> We're not Oracle certified, no. (laughing) Basically anything involving a large file that you're not writing to very frequently, but you're reading a lot, or that's getting read by lots of people around the world, we're a really good solution. It's one of the things I think I mentioned to you. So we've got 150,000 nodes. They're located in I think it's now 180 countries, and all over the U.S. So if you want to get your data close to the edge, the people who are consuming your data are really close to the edge, this is actually really good. And because it's spread across so many, you get the benefit of parallelism, so it's super fast, in addition to being super safe and super secure. >> How does it work for the farmers? Because we have video files, so we would love to spread our video files on the Storj network. So let's just say... >> I'd do a special deal for you, too, you know. >> Of course, yeah, get a little token action going on both sides, Cube coins. But the availability thing is concerning. Whose computers is it being stored on? Is it extra capacity? Is it servers? Is it people's home computers? What's the, is it that kind of model? >> Sure, so basically yeah, we, just as Airbnb measures reputation, we measure reputation, too. And so if you don't have a good reputation, certain characteristics, we won't send data to you. What it basically means is you've got to have dedicated hardware and a dedicated connection. So we do have people who are running things in their home, but it's not a laptop, it's not on your phone. But if you have a disc drive that's connected with reasonably high capacity and reasonably well connected, then you'll establish good reputation. But what we are seeing is we are seeing a lot of universities, a lot of small businesses, some data center operators who have spare capacity or just want to use us as like, be both a farmer and a user. So backup and get stuff on their capacity as a good idea. And interestingly enough, we also are getting a lot of people who were Bitcoin miners and bought equipment, which is good quality equipment, but there's such an arms race in doing that. >> So they abandoned, because it was too hard for them to get coins. >> It's too hard to make money, right, and very expensive, specialized equipment, and in our case, basically general high quality equipment works well. >> What's the profit model? How do the farmers make money? Take our Cube videos, as an example, so I'm paying you guys, and you're distributing those tokens? >> You're paying us and you're paying us either in dollars or tokens. And then farmers get compensated in tokens. Right now, about 60 cents on every dollar goes to farmers. And farmers get more storage based off of their reputation. We charge people based on both how much you're storing as well as how much bandwidth egress that you're doing, and we compensate farmers exactly the same way. >> It's handled through a consensus protocol that you guys have? >> Yeah, yeah, so the payment and assessing reputation we actually use good distributed blockchain as well there, right, so you're not counting on Storj to be in the middle there. Now, with the remaining 40 cents, which I think is actually the really interesting part, we keep some of that, we put some back into the network, but what I'm really excited about is that this is now a way for us to economically empower demand partners as well. The first thing we announced was FileZilla, but we have lots of other open source projects waiting in the wings, and we're happy to share with them. So as opposed to centralized cloud, where it's really hard to make money as an open source company, we're not an open source project in our case, right? We're happy if you're sending us users and data, to give you a really meaningful percentage. >> Any kind of freemium model you guys are playing with? I can imagine this being pretty interesting, because S3 democratized and lowered the cost barrier, obviously with cloud. >> S3 has been great for many things. >> How low are you in terms of the disruption? You guys are probably going to have to come in and undercut S3, is that the strategy? Or is that the price value? >> I think what I learned from my time in storage, is price is important but you have to be really safe and available and reliable, 'cause people's data is really important. But we looked across a pretty broad set of use cases, in comparing us to the traditional cloud providers we're probably a third. And we could go lower. What I think is really interesting in our case is that the economics just work really well. So from our perspective, if you're a farmer, you've already got, it's spare capacity, you don't need any more electricity to run this thing, you've got bandwidth, right? You don't need to hire any more people. So it's almost pure margin for a farmer, which is great for them. And so we can give economic value to farmers, we can give economic value to our customers, we can give economic value to partners. >> Any kind of economic models you can share in terms of what someone would make? Let's just say that I had this big music library that's not being used anymore, and I had a-- >> Well, as a customer of course, if you've got data that you want to store on our network, you'll save a lot of money, and it's probably a third of what you might pay. >> But is there any kind of, if I'm a farmer, I want to join the network? >> But if you're a farmer. >> How much am I going to make? >> It really depends on how much you're storing and how good your connection is, but as a farmer, I think you can make decent money. This could probably be I don't know off the top of my head, $20, $30 a month per drive, which isn't bad, and certainly much easier than making money-- >> So it kind of depends like the Airbnb model, depends how well you're using-- >> How well you're used. So some people earn less, some people earn more. And again, for most of the farmers, this is pure margin. >> Great, we got a couple back to back rooms, Stu. We should get some drives up there and get on board. We could pay for the cameras. >> And look, I think for videos, you guys would actually be a perfect use case with a lot of the stuff that's going to be coming out later this year. You get both storage and CDN like things for free, in the sense that because-- >> I'm really glad you brought that up, 'cause I want to ask you about Videocoin, 'cause Halsey Minor has Videocoin, another ICO, he raised $50 million. We covered that on Silicon Angle. But he's trying to democratize Acromi. Is that similar to what you guys are doing? >> I guess you could say yeah, we're further democratizing object storage, democratizing S3, but I think we can also democratize Acromi, we can democratize Isilon, there's certain other really exciting things that are-- >> What other services, you mentioned CDN, so it's not just storing the information, but that global dispersion, what does that enable? >> It used to be that people had a really big difference between archival which is slow, hard to get at, and CDN, right? And but actually, given the way that we're doing this thing, we can be pretty seamless. Pay archival for stuff that's staying in archival, but go up market if you're going to be having a lot of people read it. >> So I got to ask you about the, obviously, security. You're looking at it for additional services around redundancy, I can see that being a nice headroom for you. On a personal note, you've been involved in a lot of industry companies that have done very well, entrepreneurial success. >> Ben: Why am I doing this? (laughing) >> I can tell you're having fun. How could you not have fun, it's a whole 'nother generation of innovation, disruption coming, a whole 'nother price point. So what's it like, are you having fun? And if you could talk to your 22-year-old self right now, 'cause I wish I was 22 right now in this market-- >> Are you saying I'm not 22? >> How do you explain this? And when you go to parties, even in the Valley, and people say, "Man, you're crazy, it's a fricken' "scam out there," how do you explain to 'em this revolution? Because this is like a special, unique wave. How would you talk about that? >> Actually I describe it the same way to people in the Valley the same way that I described at the beginning, which is that blockchain is bigger than cryptocurrency, and decentralized is much bigger than blockchain. And Storj is first and foremost decentralized. It's about decentralized computing, decentralized storage, supporting decentralized apps, keeping the internet from ending up in the hands of just three people, three companies, which I think is really important. But also I feel very good that, to the extent that Storj does touch on cryptocurrency, that we've done it the right way. We had the service working first before we did the token sale. We raised what now appears to be a modest amount in the token sale, tried to be very transparent and at the forefront. >> You probably could've gotten more if you wanted to. >> Probably, right? But we were trying to be forefront in terms of governance and transparency, and I think that it'll probably be a good thing, just as it was kind of a good thing that the bubble burst in the late '90s and you got rid of a lot of such not great companies and not such great operators. I think that the current corrections, or whatever, in the crypto market I think will-- >> Like pets.com is gone, but DogeCoin still exists. (laughing) >> So I'm sure that somebody has a crypto base pets.com or webvan lurking in the wings somewhere. Kodak just did it. >> I got to ask you, you're super smart. You went to some really good schools, I think Princeton, Harvard Business School. So you got a good education, so I got to get your take on the whole token economics vision. 'Cause this is, if you look at outside the tech trends, there's actually new economic models that are coming out. Have you looked at token economics? New liquidity on the one side, you've got sovereignty, you've got consensus. These are not just tech issues, these are society issues. What's your vision around that? How are you viewing it? What's the upside? How is this shaping the future? >> Yeah, I think if you're a token network, you sort of have to have some central bank chops as well, right? And we actually have a central banker. >> John: So you have a chief economic officer? >> So we don't, no, we have an advisor-- >> John: Public policy. >> I actually had a degree in public policy at one point. But we need to think about the token supply in the same way you'd think about the money supply. We're backed by something real, so it's sort of like having currencies backed by gold. We need to make sure that the market grows and the network grows. And my fundamental belief is that the more the network grows, the more people use it, the more value that we're able to provide, that'll be good for token economics in the long run. In the short run, though, what we've done, is again, we price based off of dollars, and we compensate farmers based off the token based off of the spot price. So for farmers, we've tried to remove any need to worry about volatility or things like that. >> So I want your reaction-- >> Or the price. >> I've said on The Cube multiple times that in the old days of venture startups, the CTO was everything. You had to have a great CTO or VP of engineering and great senior executive team on the entrepreneurial team. Now it's almost like the chief economic officer is a critical piece, 'cause you've got public policy intersecting with economics. You've got new kinds of math that's not technical algorithm but it's kind of business algorithms. >> It is, business algorithms. Just like any economy, the money supply matters. And people's trust in that money matters. And the supply matters. All that stuff like that, and stability matters. So I think absolutely this new breed of network based token companies will have to worry about that, and probably should think about a chief economics officer, but it doesn't mean that you don't also have to have a great CTO and great technology, 'cause that's how you make the network valuable and grow. And one of the reasons that gave me both excitement and comfort about going to Storj is that the economic model works, fundamentally, even if the crypto's not there. >> John: 'Cause technology is decentralized. >> Decentralized storage makes sense even if you're buying and selling it with dollars or pounds or rubles, or whatever. >> Ben, great to see you, thanks for coming in and sharing the Ben Golub School of Economics, Public Policy for Tokens. You can give a class at Stanford on that soon, although that's the competition's school. >> Maybe, yes. Slightly different. We still like them. >> Great to see you, congratulations. Storj, pronounced storage. Great, successful ICO, hot startup, really, an example of the infrastructure opportunities of a new decentralized infrastructure that can be and will soon, we think, it will be critical infrastructure in a whole new way. Great to see you. >> Ben: Really good to see you, great to be back with you. >> It's the Cube Conversation, I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)