Anthony Di Iorio | Blockchain Futurist Conference 2018
(theCUBE theme music) >> Live from Toronto, Canada, it's theCUBE covering Blockchain Futurist Conference 2018. Brought to you by theCUBE. >> Hello everyone, welcome to the live coverage here in Toronto, this is theCUBE's coverage of Blockchain Futurist Event put on by Untraceable and the community here in Canada and around the world. I'm John Furrier with my cohost Dave Vellante, co founders of theCUBE, we're here with CUBE alumni, Anthony Di Iorio, who's the founder and CEO of Decentral and Jaxx, the really cool product we're going to get in to but also the co founder of Ethereum. Anthony, great to see you, thanks for coming back on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me again. >> Great keynote, in typical Anthony Di Iorio fashion no slides, you decide what you're going to talk about before you get up on stage but you really kind of brought it- >> When I get on stage. >> When you get on stage, you come on, you do it. >> Yeah. >> But it's a nice theme, you're talking about the history, you're bringing in the community value. You talk about the key milestones. You're really recognizing what the community's done. But more importantly you're giving a roadmap of where you think the future's going and combined with the fact that you're also running Decentral and you got the Jaxx wallet so really cool. I want to ask you, where is it going and what's going on in the community from your perspective, as of today? >> So where is this entire space going? I think it's going to be revolutionary. I think the infrastructure is being built out now, it's been built out for the last number of years. I think we're seeing more and more the interfaces and the ways that the masses are going to start connecting with these technologies. We're still being hindered by some problems with scalability, some other problems that are stopping these technologies, these decentralized techs from really spreading globally and being able to be utilized in a way that's going to make things faster, better, and cheaper. But those problems will be solved and it's going to lead to revolutionary changes in every sector that you could imagine, every sector that relies on third parties and intermediaries to facilitate things, technology is going to emerge that's going to be able to make things better, make things faster. >> I want to ask you something because I'm seeing a trend happen. Obviously we've seen the cycle of prices drop and crypto prices and a lot of people are focused on the mechanics of coin price and so on and so forth. Also the international growth is pretty massive, but you're starting to see two types of swim lanes. One is get this thing, get this coin out there, get it trading, get token economics going and then you've got builders, building real products and durable companies, you're starting to see a trend now where people are starting to highlight the builders. People really looking at the longer term gain, trying to bring a token economics model but trying to get it right on building and this is kind of a critical kind of inflection point in the industry where it's not just, hey, I want to make some cash, there's actually economic benefits of this revolution. >> Yeah. >> But there's now a focus on the builders, people actually building technology, building companies. This is now the focus, this is what's becoming a legit deal, legit alpha entrepreneurs, real communities are galvanizing around that. Your reaction to that dynamic happening right now? >> It's what we've always tried to to. With my company, with Decentral, we're not banking on a token. There's no raising and taking people's money or token to grow and be the main focus of what we're doing. We may add a loyalty system in what we're doing down the road, but it would never be something that we're collecting money for, to actually make that as a main business. It's all about creating value and our goal is to create the interface for all projects to be able to have that ability to manage and move value in their different platforms. Our goal has always been to not rely on a token based system in order to create value and we're seeing more and more, that, I think, companies are realizing that you can have maybe some part of a token based system but you really have to create value with it and there's way too much idea of a token being the be all and end all and that's how we're going to base things and it's just there's too many of them out there right now and I think that creating a real value and not banking just on that token being where you're going to make money is probably, that's the building step that needs to get done. >> Well it's definitely a theme we've been hearing, "Too many damn tokens" and not enough value being created by those individual tokens. What's your take on the current sentiment? I mean obviously people have seen the crypto prices. Your thoughts on what's going on? >> There's just too much going on right now and that's a good thing. And there's a lot of competition but it's also very difficult to wade through al of the noise and wade through what's actually going to create value. Most of the stuff out there is not going to be valuable, it's not going to really radically- These companies and these projects that are emerging, not all of them are going to be successful and only a very few are actually going to create value so I find it very difficult as the time is passing to identify what is going to be actually good and there's just too much out there and it becomes very difficult to actually identify those things. >> Well somebody made the comment, we were doing a show yesterday here in Toronto and they said, "You know back then "there was really only one Vitalik Buterin "and now there's like zillions of him "and they're all creating amazing ideas "but there's a huge supply of those ideas." And to your point not all are going to succeed. >> It's ideas but it's about execution, too. >> Right. >> And really, can you carry that out? That's the hardest part, is execution and it's very difficult and there's a lot of people out there that struggle with that part. They have an idea, they've got a paper, they build a team and it's like, well how do we actually get it to create value? And then they're backing on their token value and they're not really creating something of substance that's going to be that value but it's also due to limitations that the space has right now and mostly with scalability. >> A big part of your effort is try to reduce some of that friction, right? I mean is that kind of the play? >> Yeah, our goal is to, when you build wallets or a project has to build their own wallet, it takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of effort and it's really not what their focus should be on. That's what our goal is, is to be that interface that projects can use to move and manage their digital currencies and connect them with other projects and other services that their user base needs. What's missing is those interfaces now and that's what has always been my focus. >> You said this, but when we interviewed you in the Bahamas we had a one on one, and also had a CUBE interview, but on the one on one you were basically saying the wallet's the new browser, which we like by the way, thought that was very relevant and we see the wallet dynamic being central. The other thing that we heard yesterday, and this has been a recurring them in the industry, is got to be easier to use. This whole system, it's like the internet. It's hard at first but then there's a chasm that's crossed on ease of use, that really will drive more adoption so the notion of the centrality of why the wallet is critical and also the ease of use because, like you said, entrepreneurs want to optimize their behavior, time to build value, not worry about prices of their coin and their velocity and float and stock prices when the reality is, there's work to be done. >> That's right, yeah. >> This is a real problem and there's opportunity, how is that wallet evolution going to emerge? How do you see it visa-vis potentially competition? What's your view now? Will there be a browser for every webpage or wallet for every- >> Well that's what I, I mean our goal is to be the single interface for all those projects and that's our goal. We want to be able to have and expedite the way that we can bring new projects on board. It's difficult right now because you have a lot of different technologies in the background that we have to integrate and connect with. Things with Ethereum are pretty simple, Bitcoin we've got, ones like Bitcoin but then there's all these new ones that are emerging, too and they require a lot more effort and resources to do. That is our next goal is how to expedite getting all this product in, because we want to be the single thing and it doesn't make sense that I've got a store or manage 20 different crypto currencies and I can only do some of them in Jaxx, I can do some of them across it, I got to use other systems. It's really not a great user experience and that's what we're trying to perfect. >> Yeah, so you really only want, as a user one or two browsers, you don't want- >> I'd say one browser is what you really want and that's pretty much, you would say Chrome is what people are mostly using now and that's what happens over time. >> Maybe a little bit of Safari for some other stuff, whatever, but you don't want four or five browsers. Nobody uses three or four browsers. So the browser is the metaphor that you've used. Some people have said, "Well, the better metaphor is the app". I got gazillions of apps on my phone. So help me understand why it's more browser than it is app. >> I would say that you have browsers that have apps and integrations in them, so Chrome has extensions, those are apps. The browser itself is basically it's an interface where you can see what's going on and allows you to move information. The wallet is what enables you to manage and move the value, and we have integrations so I consider those the apps that we'll have inside of the wallet that'll connect you to service providers that offer different value, different services. So I see it as the way for you to manage your keys and be able to navigate but the apps will be baked into the wallet, that will enable you to connect and buy and sell and trade and pay bills and all these things will be through apps so that's why I see that interface as the wallet, yeah. >> Talk about the dynamic around developers and one of the things that I've been saying on theCUBE and I'll say it here again, I think when you have volatility in pricing, that scares the market or whether it's people speculate whether it's being manipulated or not, doesn't matter. If there's a scare factor, developers are in it for the long game, right? When they pick a platform like Ethereum to work on, they're in it for the long haul so short term fluctuations shouldn't change behavior but there's now some dynamic where it kind of is and people are questioning that. What do you talk to those developers, saying stay the course, because Ethereum has the most developers, okay? By far. >> Yeah. >> What's the message to the developers? Don't worry, settle down, long game? >> Well they got to make their own decisions on that. I think that with, the industry is very market driven right now. Businesses, that are down to a fifth of what they were worth or what they have, you know just in a few months, really does take a toll. >> Yeah. >> And it really does, when you have a lot of growth plans and things you want to do, it really can put restrictions on that, so that's the world that it is in. As for developers, if they're passionate about what they're doing, especially with developers, they're generally going to do it, regardless of the money, I usually find. Some might leave, some might come in, but it's generally what the individual person's going to do. It's whether they should keep going on it but the markets, I mean the markets do really play a factor in a lot of things. How do you plan your 12 month ahead when the markets take you down to have such massive swing where you're now at 10% what you may have had. They really do play. >> You got to pay attention, their runway gets shortened big time >> So Anthony I was struck by your keynote today and other keynotes where I've seen you. You're incredibly humble, such a successful individual. You talk about your humble beginnings, the grassroots meet ups and I was struck by when you first read Vitaliks' "White Paper" you said it was very comp- after two or three pages you're like, "Eh" your eyes are bleeding so you went to Charles and he kind of explained things. >> Yeah. >> A lot of people feel like, okay you've got to be an alpha geek to succeed in this business. Talk about your particular skillset and maybe share with the audience some of the skillsets that they can tap to succeed in this industry. >> I hire a lot of developers, I am not a developer. I need to interface with them but I don't need to know a lot of the nitty gritty and if you have good people working for you on that end they don't want to be usually the ones that are leading stuff, they want to code and they want to do it so I've always been the person that can bring the team together and build a team that's going to be able to carry that out without me necessarily being the person that's doing that. You can't do everything. I am a generalist in a lot of different things. I am not very good at math. When Vitalik would write articles back in the day for Bitcoin Magazine, I would really read them and then he gets into his formulas and stuff and I'm, it's just not something I can do. I'm a generalist that does a number of different things and I can put the teams together and I can figure out ways to monetize and I can figure out ways to gather the right people together but I'm not a developer, I'm not a coder, and that's fine. I think it's the entrepreneurs that really are the ones that lead the things. I've always found I can hire developers. I think to have developers that are running projects? That's generally not their specialties, to be able to manage the whole operations or whole team and I think that's what Ethereum has suffered from since 2014. I think there was a, you know, we had eight founders split between developers and business people. It lead to a divide that eventually was turned into more of a developer focused project and that's where it's been since. What's that enabled is people such as myself, Joseph Lugen, Charles Hoskinson to do our own things and be able to do great things. And I think that you need a mixture of people with different sets of skills. And I think at the end of the day though, it's the vision of the entrepreneur, of the person that tasks the risks and is able to bring together all facets of something, not just necessarily the technical side or the developer side of things. >> What are the conditions that have made Toronto such an epicenter for blockchain development? >> I think it's mostly community. I think very early on, from the start of the meetups that I did and them growing and continuously doing them from 2012, 2013, 2014 to having people such as Vitalik being from here. Other entrepreneurs, there's just been a culture here blockchain here, that people have recognized and you're starting to see a lot of VCs a lot of people taking their trips up here and you're getting comments like, "Somethings happening "here in Toronto" and what's caused that and I think honestly a lot of it has to do with the meetups. I think be central and creating a physical hub that allowed the community to grow and start thinking about ideas and bringing people together, I think can put a lot of impact in it, has played a lot of that factor. >> A lot of talent, too, in here, too. >> And I think the talent, yeah, there's talent, but it's not just developers though, too. It's entrepreneurs. >> Yeah. >> Developers are one part of this animal and they're an important part but it's the idea that sparks risk taking and it's about putting together many pieces of the puzzle and developers are one aspect of it. I think it's more of the entrepreneurship that has actually created that. >> Yeah, cause there's a lot of talent in a lot of places. You know? >> I mean, I've been living in Silicon Valley for 20 years now, I moved from the east coast and it's a striking difference between the classic venture capital, Silicon Valley was where the action was in venture because of the ecosystem, the money capital formation, risk taking capabilities and people have tried to replicate Silicon Valley. Silicon Beach, Silicon this, Silicon that. But with blockchain and crypto token economics, for the first time the capital formation's different. The teams are forming in a different way where you're starting to see a re imagination of entrepreneurial epicenters and it's not trying to be Silicon Valley but the results still the same but that's what blockchain's all about, is re imagining something that can be done better, more efficiently. So you're starting to see Toronto, you're starting to see outside the United States with a lot of capital formation, lot of entrepreneurial energy, blockchain and crypto certainly has community. >> Yeah. >> Again, that's the perfect storm. This is impacting the entrepreneurial- >> It's also regulatory stuff as well. I think for Toronto, Canada to be doing what's it's done, in unregulatory uncertainty, like we don't know really what's going to happen here and that, I think, has stifled things to where it really could be because you do have a lot of companies here that will set up in a Caribbean country or set in Europe, they're setting up in Switzerland because they don't know the playing field of what they have to deal with here and that's something that's hindered things. It's the countries that figure that part out along with how do they spark and bring the entrepreneurs in and I think the regulatory climate plays a massive factor in that. We've been able to do in Toronto, Canada what we've been able to do, despite having the clarity and certainty in that space. >> That's a red flag I think that people should pay attention to, don't lose the entrepreneurial energy to another domicile, location. Alright, final question, at least for me, Dave might have one. As someone looking out over the landscape, certainly you've been involved on the business end and putting teams together on Ethereum, communities as well as your own company, looking out at the landscape, we spoke in February, at Poly Con, and going forward, what's the state of the union, in decentralization of applications and token economics and blockchain, what's your view of the current situation as the market is what it is now and certainly it's going to continue to evolve, what's the state of the union from Anthony Di Iorio's perspective? >> It's just keep doing what we're doing. Keep building things, keep building out infrastructure. I've toned down a lot of investments, I've toned down a lot of things to focus on that just because, A, it's very, very difficult now to distinguish between projects, it's very hard. B, I have a lot of investments which are going to grow over the next few years and my focus is now on doing my business stuff. I think we are going to weed out a lot of the people that aren't creating value in the space and that aren't going to be along for the ride so when they see the markets go down they're going to disappear but then they come back in and things are going to thrive. We've seen this before, it's not a new thing in this space. Things are going down, then they go higher then they go down, then they do higher again and it's been on generally a pretty good incline. We're just in the down thing right now, and that's okay, let's keep plugging away and keep building out infrastructure. >> Yeah and that's a clear theme you see here and other events, meetups. Unpinning optimism, right? It's still there, the innovation is still there. People are very excited. >> Do you think there's an emphasis on builders? I mean obviously you're just basically saying the value creators are going to be the center of the action. You think that the industry globally recognizes that the legit players creating value are the ones that are going to be rewarded and recognized? Are we not there yet, close enough? >> I don't know, that's an interesting question. I think eventually that's what's going to happen. >> Yeah. >> But I think right now there's a lot of people trying to make a lot of quick money. I think those people will be weeded out and I think it will come down to those value creators, those people that are really building things up that will be the ones that last, just like we saw with the internet, same type of thing, you have the hype, you have it grow, you have it blow up and then you have the slow, steady value added producers will be the ones that actually are going to be able to represent. >> Like you said, we've seen it before, it's jut a lot faster, a lot more compressed. >> All that happens over time, yeah. >> You determine how many cycles you live in this industry, you know we've talked about that before. Dave and I have been through many waves, as have you. Thanks so much for taking the time to come on. Give a quick plug on what's happening with Jaxx. Decentral, you had an amazing New York trip, your exclusive boat party was well talked about. You had the two cars you gave away but you laid out the future, 3.0, there's Jaxx wallet, you got some other projects. What's the status of Jaxx? How's it going and when can people get their hands on it and how are you onboarding customers? Give the update on the Jaxx wallet. >> Sure, so the Jaxx 2.0, called Jaxx Liberty is out in beta right now, you can download it on different platforms. What it is is an interface that does much more than just being a wallet. It's your charts, your graphs, your news, you portfolio, apps, it's gamified with leveling up experience points. We're going to connect you with our partners, all these different services, really to be the center point for that one single interface that you're going to have for everything, for your digital life. That's the goal for that, where you can be in control of your money, your identity, your communications and Liberty is coming out in the next couple weeks, the full release and that's really going to be our flagship product and I think it's going to be the thing that's going to create a single place for people to use in our space. >> Are developers going to be able to tap into this capabilities, as we as developers, will we be able to not only use the wallet will there be APIs and interfaces into the wallet? >> Yeah, so right now when we put integrations in what'll be coming over the next many months, will be us actually integrating with our partners but eventually our goal is to have STKs where you could use our back and infrastructures, our connections to blockchains, that we can give the tools to people, create their own utilities and their own applications inside of Jaxx. >> Well we certainly want to continue the conversation. Great to have you on, of course theCUBE token that we want for our media business, we want Jaxx on the wallet. >> Anthony Di Iorio, industry leader, pioneer, also running a great business, Decentral and Jaxx, here on theCUBE giving us the straight scoop, a shortcut to the truth. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. Live coverage here in Toronto, part of Untraceable's flagship event here with all the best people in the blockchain industry, the Futurist Conference, we'll be right back with more after this short break. (theCUBE theme music)
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Brought to you by theCUBE. and the community here in Canada and around the world. and combined with the fact that you're also and it's going to lead to revolutionary changes I want to ask you something This is now the focus, this is what's becoming and our goal is to create the interface I mean obviously people have seen the crypto prices. Most of the stuff out there is not going to be valuable, And to your point not all are going to succeed. that the space has right now and mostly with scalability. and it's really not what their focus should be on. but on the one on one you were basically saying I mean our goal is to be the single interface and that's pretty much, you would say Chrome So the browser is the metaphor that you've used. and allows you to move information. and one of the things that I've been saying on theCUBE that are down to a fifth and things you want to do, it really can put restrictions and he kind of explained things. and maybe share with the audience and build a team that's going to be able and I think honestly a lot of it has to do with the meetups. And I think the talent, yeah, and they're an important part but it's the idea Yeah, cause there's a lot of talent in a lot of places. and it's not trying to be Silicon Valley Again, that's the perfect storm. I think for Toronto, Canada to be doing and certainly it's going to continue to evolve, and that aren't going to be along for the ride Yeah and that's a clear theme you see here are the ones that are going to be rewarded and recognized? I think eventually that's what's going to happen. and then you have the slow, steady value added producers Like you said, Thanks so much for taking the time to come on. and I think it's going to be the thing that's going to but eventually our goal is to have STKs Great to have you on, of course theCUBE token a shortcut to the truth.
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Anthony Diiorio, Ethereum | Polycon 2018
>> Announcer: Live from Nassau in the Bahamas. It's the Cube! Covering Polycon 18. Brought to you by Polymath. >> Hello everyone. Welcome to a special exclusive cube conversation here in the Bahamas for Polycon 18. It's a cryptography, cryptocurrency I should say, show with blockchain. It's a great event. It's brought securities tokens and token economics, the value economy that's changing the world is certainly in play. It's the beginning of a massive wave that's coming. We've reported on the Cube and SiliconANGLE before. We're here with the co-founder of Ethereum and the CEO of Decentral and also maker of Jaxx. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having me. >> So we've been covering a lot of emerging waves and I got to say that I've seen some waves in my days but this one's a tsunami. You can see the water pulling out and you see the exposed clams and crabs out there. A complete shift of value, data, users, decentralized impacts of business models to industries. I mean it's just mind-blowing and it's intoxicating. But a new community is evolving. I mean it reminds me of the early days of the personal computer combined with all the inter-networking and the internet kind of rolled up into one massive shift. How do you see it from your perspective being on the inner core of this community? What's your take? >> Definitely the biggest thing of those things that you mentioned is yeah the tsunami. We started with information, when the internet was started, ways to be able to move information globally. Disrupting everything to do with publishing companies, with postal service, anything to do with information transfer. And I've been around since the BBS days, way back there before the internet even came about. So when the internet came about it was my first instinct and I'm like, "Wow. This is going to just change the way information moves." And then when I got into this in 2012 into the crypto-space, into bitcoin at the time, I'm like, "Wow this is beyond the internet. This is value transfer now without needing intermediaries and the disruption that's going to happen is going to just completely change finance, the way that currencies are handled." It's going to touch every single sector. So this is much bigger and it's bigger because the everyday person can get involved with it. >> You know one of the things that we were just commenting this show, Polycon 18 put on by Polymath which makes a securities token model for companies to use, sets up kind of a growth and funding model. We're going to talk more about that in our live feed. But I noticed a lot of Canadians are here. Besides having ice hockey, one of my favorite sports being from the east coast in the U.S., I remember in the 80s a lot of PKI stuff being done in Canada. A lot of really important cryptography work was done in Canada. There's a lot of amazing computer science programs in Canada. There's a lot of progressive things going on in Canada. Can you share your thoughts on that? >> Sure. >> Because I think you're starting to see that wave coming down. I won't call it a cold spell, I'll call it like innovation spell coming from the north and into the U.S. and then all around the world. >> Yeah it's a real disproportionate amount of Canadians in this whole scene which is really interesting. I was at an event called the Satoshi Roundtable about a month ago in Cancun. And it was about 20% were actually from Canada and this was a global event. And what I think it is is a community basis. In 2012 I showed the Toronto Bitcoin Meetup Group. And that was like what are we like six years ago. And the amount of people that have come through Decentral and come through the meetup group that we started, started just sparking so many different things. That's where Ethereum came from. Polymath from Toronto here. Trevor and I go back, way back to 2012. So I think it's a matter of the community being built that really early on in Toronto and Canada that have led to the spark of what's going on. And now with things like the public markets and the way Canada is is kind of being a good fertile ground for companies actually going live on different-- the TSX in Canada. And that's helping to facilitate things. So ton of talent, ton of amazing things that I think hopefully Canada can prove itself to be the global headquarters. However, there's also regulatory things. Since you have a lot of Canadian companies that are saying we're going to set up offshore because we don't know how Canada is treating things. That's also a counterbalance. But in general there's tons of good things coming out from Canada and from Toronto. >> You know we were early on the cloud wave going back to 2000, you know late 2000s. And now you're starting to see with cloud computing some visibility. I'll see Amazon web services kicking ass and they're just blowing away their numbers. But you're seeing kind of a clear visibility between infrastructure as a service and sass. And just to kind of use a metaphor for kind of what's going on here is the whole platform as a service never happened. So you got infrastructure and you got application. So this community is emerging. It's still small, it's growing, it's dynamic, it's robust. Very intimate. But there's some things going on at the infrastructure level that are super important. And there's certainly a tsunami of new kinds of software developers coming in. So comment on those two things because you know it's kind of moving train is happening in parallel at the same time. >> Definitely. >> Can you share some color on the dynamics between the infrastructure progress and innovation and speed scale, tech, and then the tsunami of these decentralized application developers which are coming in from 13-year-olds to 65 and older. I mean across the gamut. >> We're building infrastructure. That's what it's about. I've always had a very long-term thing with everything whether I invest in things or-- I'm super long-term in the whole space. So 2012 everything was bitcoin for me. 2013, started developing wallets. I realized that the wallets is the browser for value transfer. You got the internet browser, that's what moves information. Now we're in the age of value and then the wallets is what enables people to manage and move digital assets. So I started building wallets for bitcoin. When we started Ethereum I'm like, "Okay there's beyond bitcoin now." Started Ethereum. Did that for about a year and then went back to building the interface, the actual platform for all these technologies to be able to utilize to manage and move digital assets. So that's what I focus on is the infrastructure play of connecting to all these blockchains and providing the user experience to be able that the masses like my dad to be able to actually have the browser moment. Like, "Oh, now I know what I can do with this." And that's what's been missing and that's what I've been focusing on. And then in there is where you have the apps start getting built on to stuff. So that's always been my play is to build the single interface for every blockchain, support the entire ecosystem, not focus on one technology because who know what's going to actually live now for a long time. And that's what I'm doing is building that single interface that my dad can use to understand how to move and manage his digital assets, and then partner with companies projects. The Polymaths, the Eons, all these companies from the space that are offering value in different areas and we want to be that single interface that brings it all together. So definitely infrastructure play, but also applications that can be built on top of that infrastructure. >> Yeah I mean infrastructure needs to be enable and you think about the browser, right? I mean the browser created the internet to be usable. And the web was born because of it. And of course HTP protocol. But interesting on the infrastructure side. I fought the wars back in the days you know SNA, Decknet, TCPIP was emerging into the OSI models. I remember you know TCPIP was one those moments-- and people use that as an example. I hear it all the time and you know I even use it here and there. But that created a galvanizing moment where hey we can inter-operate together with the standard stack and not fill all seven layers. But you know it made things happen. The question that people are asking is it's kind of a TCPIP moment in this industry but is there 40 versions of it? Is that an issue? Is that reality? >> I think it's actually-- I always equate it to there being websites. And what I'm doing is I'm building the browser so that actually the websites can actually interact with the technology. So they're focusing on different sectors and they're making different plays in all these different areas that are going to touch with value transfers. And value transfer is amazing. That's what's going to disrupt things beyond information. And then with smart contracts and this thing we did with Ethereum it's like okay this all coming together to touch law, insurance, gaming, all the different sectors are going to be actually changed. I don't want to say disrupted, I don't like that word. But changed and evolved into great amazing things. But these protocols that are being developed are choice and the ones that actually are the ones that are going to create the most amount of value and great user experience were the ones that actually we're going to carry on. So it's amazing to see the amount of competition, the amount of new projects. And the ones that are creating the value is what's going to actually survive. >> And that dog will hunt, basically. >> Yeah. >> Okay the wallet question. Love this simplicity model. What's your vision on the wallet because you could say okay there's multiple wallets, there's a diversity of wallets. I could have a brown wallet, black wallet, leather wallet, all kinds of different wallets. Are you looking at it as a technology enabler that you're doing or is it an actual wallet? Because again what we learned in open source is why build something when someone else already has it? So that's the ethos of most developers. So are you looking at the wallet as saying I'm going to provide a wallet capability end to end or is it base code? >> It's interface. The wallet's the engine. The wallet is what's needed in order to connect with all the different block chains. That's what we've been building over the last two years is actually the infrastructure to connect to all the different blockchains. It's the interface that we built on eight platforms. So you can have a single interface on all the platforms that ties yourself in a with a 12 word key that enables you to derive keys for all the blockchains. So the key system that we offer, the interface to all the connections which is the browser, and then the back end AWS almost like structures to all the different blockchains is our value add to all of our partners. And we're all about driving partner interaction. >> So simplicity's a big part of it. >> Super-- yeah definitely. >> And ease of use. Ease of integration. >> Yeah we need the interface. You can't be using 10 different wallets for all the different things you're trying to manage. So we're trying to create that single interface across all the things it supports and drives the whole community forward. >> Dave Alanta who you just met and I always talk about this all the time. You know it's like you built-- if people want to sell a certain technology a certain way but it reminds me of the gaming industry. There became a market for game engines but that only because someone built a successful game and someone said, "Hey I want a game engine!" You have an engine and I don't want to have to build an engine I'll just use a game engine because someone did it and that became an industry. You can't sell a game engine if there's no gaming. So you have to have an application that might have some core technology. Is that what's happening in the wallet world right now? Are you kind of doing that? >> So for us that's exactly the same way. We build the infrastructure and now we have partners that create apps and tap into our back end. So they don't have to worry about all that stuff. An example is Coinbase. So Coinbase and us came to an agreement last year where we'll start helping them to-- they have a service where you can use your credit card to buy litecoin, bitcoin, and Ethereum. Well inside of Jaxx you'll be able to add that integration, connect them to all the chains. So their users can actually still buy that, but we can flip it using another partner and give them Polymath. That's the thing. It's about creating value with the different apps and we want to be the store that connects all these different apps to the blockchain so they don't have to worry about that. Bitpay is another example. They enable you to pay invoices in bitcoin. But they only want to deal with bitcoin. Well in Jaxx you can pay with any currency. We flip the bitcoin with one of our partners, send them bitcoin, they don't have to worry about all the back end. >> So you're creating inter-operability of money and value. >> And value. Yeah definitely. >> Or-- buy yeah money. Well bit-- you know. Crypto money. >> And the experience that my dad's going to use to understand this whole space. >> They don't have to write code to integrate. The user can just use it. Alright talk about the developer community. What's your advise to developers that are onboard and looking for guidance in navigating through. And people are learning really fast. You're seeing people come into the industry literally with some background that might not be related to tech but have natural math skills, natural coding skills. They're coming in and actually making a difference joining communities. What's your advice to these developers who want to build decentralized applications? >> So there's two separate kind of devs. There's ones that can be really good devs that can be onboarded into the space. They're not working on protocol level stuff. And then there's the devs that actually are working on the protocol stuff. And they're hard to find. They're hard to secure because you need the experience of number of years in order to do that. For us we actually look for good devs that we can bring in and onboard into what we do which not necessarily solving major problems. It's working with protocols that are solving it and integrating those protocols in. So the protocol level is very difficult to find developers right now. So I would suggest as much experience on that is going to be what you can do to get ahead. But in general if you're a good dev don't be scared of the space. And if you're going to align yourself with a company that can help teach you how to get in, that's what we want. We don't actually target blockchain devs. We target good devs, and we let them know-- we don't even advertise blockchain. Because sometimes they go, "Blockchain? I don't have that." But if you get good devs, we can actually teach them on our end. So it's actually-- we did a job fair about a week ago. We had 100 devs come out, pre-qualified devs, that we spent about a month trying to pre-qualify them. They came in, already had the experience. And we had 100 of them come in because they're interested in the space and we marketed as you don't need to know blockchain. Good devs, we'll get you into it. >> You know we was talking last night, we were having some cocktails with some crypto guys and gals and it was funny we talked about two things. And I want to get your thoughts and reaction to both of them. One was latency kills and the other one was women in the ecosystem. This event here has a lot of women on the agenda and so you're seeing a lot of great diversity going on. So what's your reaction? Latency kills and the roll of latency is something to watch and design against. And then the diversity angle. >> Can you first clarify what you mean about latency kills? I'm not sure what you mean by that. >> Yeah in terms of networking. So like for round-trip times, where you have a decentralized network. You're writing to the blockchain. >> Oh you just mean the slowness with decentralized network and how that's been impacting? >> Yeah decentralized networks and people throwing-- >> That's definitely a major issue with just scalability. There's a major issue which will be solved. And that will be solved. I don't really think too much about it except the problem solvers are dealing with that and they will get past to the point where we can use it and scale these technologies globally. And because of the competition with the systems-- >> You're not worried about it. You see it as just a problem space. >> No I try not to worry about anything. This will happen. It's coming. The second thing, I like to look at individuals. So I don't really look at the gender thing with it. It's more about individuals. I don't want to say I'm going to start now focus on encouraging women in the space. It's hopefully they will start taking initiative just like everybody else does. So I tend not to look at the two types of the things. >> Well I bring it up because The New York Times wrote a really negative story about women not being in the space. And I was just pilot lighting that this event, Polycon, that Polymath-- >> But it's just the way it is. And why even think about it. It's just it is what it is. >> I hope we won't have to have these conversations anymore. >> We want the best of the best people and I've got a number of girls that work for me and they're fantastic. But I don't necessarily head a job and say, "Well we got to bring in more women to do this." That doesn't make any sense. >> And that conversation should be just assumed. Alright so I want to get your thoughts on what you're working on. What are you working on right now? You got your company, you've done some great things. We know the Ethereum story and that's continued to evolve in a great way. Attractive to developers. And I saw Charlie up on a panel in with Bill Tye in Dubai and really commenting on he's long on Ethereum. He thinks he said it's going to be more valuable than bitcoin. Little haymaker for the young gun there on stage. Really important for developers. And you're pioneering with the wallet. What's the key things that you're working on both on the technical product side and on the business front for Decentral. >> So the technical side has been for the last year and a half building the back end infrastructure to be able to support 10 million, 50 million users. We haven't been advertising. We haven't been marketing what we've been doing because we think it's the wrong approach to actually go and try to just look for user growth when your infrastructure's not ready to grow. So our focus has been fully on being able to support 15, 20 million users. We're at about one million right now. All organic without advertising. So if you can't support that why do you want to be advertising? So we've been focusing the last year and a half to ensure that we are scalable and that we can grow when we hit the go button. So this year is all about hitting that go button. It's infrastructure's now in place. We are set to support 10 million users. And now it's the announcement which we did just recently about Jaxx Liberty, which is our new platform Jaxx 2.0. Which is everything you need for the blockchain space. It's your explorer, it's your charts, your graphs, your portfolio, your news directed on what your portfolio is. It's the one browser. You won't be using 10 different browsers to go to different websites. We've always had the goal to create the engine which is the wallet, and then the interface which is the single thing that the masses can use to understand the technology. So our focus is on partnerships into the app store of our products that connects to all the back ends. And basically supporting every company, creating wins for everybody, helping to push every product that actually has value, incentivizing people to create better valuable projects because then you'll get more support from us, and creating wins for everybody. I'm not about Ethereum, I'm not about bitcoin, I'm about the whole ecosystem. >> Yeah. You're about the growth. Rising tide floats all boats. But what's the value proposition that you're offering to partners on the integration? Is it speed to deployment, speed to value, all those things? >> So getting your token inside of Jaxx now gets you on eight platforms. And you don't want to worry about having a wallet for your separate platform. It doesn't make any sense. So what we do is we charge for integrations to come inside of our product, and then we have separate things. That's integration partners, or token partners. Then we have service partners. That's the Bitpays, the Coinbase, the-- all those guys that have apps or have integrations inside where we can expose our users to their services and they pay us. So our proposition to them is more users and more service on a single interface so that we can direct their users. And we don't charge users any more. We get paid through our integration. So think about us being paid for every website visit. >> Yeah. That's good value Okay so now you're going to give a keynote on stage here at the Polymath event called "Polycon 18." What are you going to be talking about? What's the vibe? What's the script? Are you going to wing it? Do you have an agenda? You're laid back, you're cool. Is there a talk format? What are you going to do? >> I never plan anything before I walk up on stage. Literally I like to look at the audience. Any preparation stuff for me doesn't make any sense. So I literally go up on stage and I always wing it from there. So it could be a little bit about just people working together. There's a lot of this versus that mentality. There's the whole thing of if you're not this then you're that. >> It's the if you're not Trump then you're-- I don't like that. I think there's a lot of in between. There's a lot of things that-- it's about working together. It's creating great synergies. Creating things that help the whole thing grow. And we've seen that. Especially a lot of companies in Toronto. There's so many synergistic relationships of gaps being filled in from companies just in Toronto that add value. So Polymath, securities tokens. It was needed. It was something I talked with Trevor about a year ago and he's taken it and flown with it. We support Polymath. But I also invest in other securities platforms as well. tZERO is something that I'm looking to get in. I've got about 45 different projects right now. It's spreading the love. It's saying let's all work together. As long as there's no scamming going on, I'm good. Let's work together, let's all come together. >> You know Anthony I did some checking around on you before the interview and I got to say, you know community. You know open source. You've been around and you've seen the formulas that work. I mean you talk about an open source ethos that's now going totally mainstream. It's not a second (mumbles) by a long shot. That's an old story. This cryptocurrency and blockchain and this new decentralized community has a mission. I've noticed a pattern, right. And you're seeing folks like yourself doing amazing work and pioneering and also the hard work. You're putting the work in. There's a mission. Take a minute to explain what the mission is. Because there are a lot of people that are aligning with this mission globally. Not just on the technical front. You mentioned this diversity and that's a good thing. What is the mission that really brings everyone together? Because that seems to be the magic that's going on here. >> Well I can't speak for other people but for me the mission is to improve life, reduce suffering, create value, create wealth in both knowledge and other things that can enable you to carry out those things. So my end game is improving life. Haven't fully baked out what that's going to be but my step now is to create wealth of value, wealth of knowledge, wealth of resources to be able to then tackle that afterwards. So it's all about-- I don't accept money. I don't take people's money. It's all self-funded. We're about creating value. The fact that I don't have any partners, I can move really quickly and I don't like to take people's money or hold people's money. I want to empower people with a tool. Or at least give them the tools so they can decide whether they want to be empowered or not. And I want to be able to just create stuff that's just going to create amazing value, user experiences, mind-blowing experiences, and just help improve things and drive technology forward. >> You know we align with that. We love that culture. We believe it's a pay it forward world. We've made our business at the Cube on paying it forward. Really appreciate you taking the time to pay it forward with us and share your content here. And I want to say congratulations for all the amazing work you've done. You've worked hard. You've made a great dent in the universe. And it's just getting started so congratulations. >> One of the best interviews I've ever done. Thank you so much. >> Thanks. Appreciate it. Take care. >> Appreciate it.
SUMMARY :
Brought to you by Polymath. and the CEO of Decentral and also maker of Jaxx. of the personal computer combined with and the disruption that's going to happen is going to just You know one of the things that we were just commenting and into the U.S. and then all around the world. and the way Canada is is kind of being a good fertile ground going back to 2000, you know late 2000s. I mean across the gamut. that the masses like my dad to be able to actually I mean the browser created the internet to be usable. and the ones that actually are the ones So that's the ethos of most developers. the interface to all the connections which is the browser, And ease of use. and drives the whole community forward. but it reminds me of the gaming industry. We build the infrastructure and now we have partners And value. Well bit-- you know. And the experience that my dad's going to use You're seeing people come into the industry is going to be what you can do to get ahead. and the other one was women in the ecosystem. I'm not sure what you mean by that. where you have a decentralized network. And because of the competition with the systems-- You see it as just a problem space. So I don't really look at the gender thing with it. And I was just pilot lighting that this event, But it's just the way it is. and I've got a number of girls that work for me and on the business front for Decentral. We've always had the goal to create the engine Is it speed to deployment, speed to value, all those things? So our proposition to them is more users What's the vibe? There's the whole thing of It's the if you're not Trump then you're-- before the interview and I got to say, but for me the mission is to improve life, to pay it forward with us and share your content here. One of the best interviews I've ever done. Take care.
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