from the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas it's the cube recovering no joke on 2018 brought to you by Osho okay welcome back everyone we're here live here at hosts show con in Las Vegas the first security conference for blockchain its inaugural event and we're here with Gabriel Shepherd VP of strategy at Global Strike for host show they're the hosts of the event although it's an industry conference for the entire community all coming together Gabriel thanks for coming on and spend the time yeah thanks for having me thanks for you know supporting the event and we appreciate your team coming out and covering what we're trying to build here well we think it's super important now so you guys are doing a great service for the industry and stepping up and put in the event together and so props to you guys thank you this is not a hosts show sales like conference you guys aren't selling anything you're doing the service for the community so props to you guys in the team great stuff and we know this is a kernel of all the smartest people and its really an industry event so it shows in the session so appreciate that yes we think it's important because you know we see a lot of trends the queue has a unique advantage in how we cover hundreds of events and yeah so we get to go we see a horizontal observation space from the industry and when you have formation like this with the community this is important you guys have up leveled the conversation focused the conversation around blockchain where security is the top-level conversation that's it no I feel pitches right so for the folks watch and this is really one of those events where it's not a huge number of people here like the thousands and thousands of other blockchain shows that make money off events this is about community and around getting the conversations and having substantive conversations so great job so for the folks watching the content agenda is super awesome host show con-com you go browse it but give us some color commentary on some of the types of speakers here the diversity yeah I think I think the first thing that we wanted to accomplish was with Hojo Khan was we we wanted to put front and center the conversations that were not taking place at other events there are plenty of platforms and opportunities for companies early-stage companies to go pitch there are other great conference organizers that do events and have their own wheelhouse but what we wanted to do was put together a conference that was focused around a type of conference that we ourselves would want to attend as a cybersecurity firm and you know after traveling the world I mean you know you you and artesia spoke many times and hosho has sponsored quite a few events around the world after attending by the end of 2018 will attended something like a hundred plus events in some capacity and so it was clear to us early on that companies weren't our conferences weren't going to focus on security or at least put them on the main stage where I believed that they should be at least with all the hacks happening so what we wanted to do was bring together thought leadership with respect to security technical leadership with respect to developers and security engineers and we wanted to bridge those two what I mean by that is we wanted thought leadership that could get executives to start the non-technical people so start thinking about security in the larger format and how it's applicable to their company but what we also wanted to do is we wanted to connect these non-technical people with the technical people in an intimate setting where they could learn think about the brain power that we have in this hotel for hosho Khan you've got the minds of Andre Assante innopolis Diego's LDR of RSK Michael berkland of shape-shift josub Kuan of hosho we've got Ron stone from c4 you've got an on Prakash a world-class white hat bug bounty hunter consider what he's top-5 bug bounty hunter for our top top bug bounty hunter for Facebook five years in a row the the level of the calibre of technical talent in this building has the potential to solve problems that Enterprise has been trying to solve individually for years but those conversations don't take place in earnest with the non-technical people and so the idea behind hoshikawa was to bridge those to provide education that's what we're doing things like workshops sure we have keynotes and panels but we also have the ability to teach non-technical people how to enable two-factor authentication how to set up PGP for your email how to set up your hardware wallet these things aren't these conversations are not the bridge is a clearly established we interview people from on the compliance side all the way down to custodial services which again the diversity is not a group think events just giving them more props here because I think you guys did a great job worthy of promotion because you not only bridge the communities together you're bringing people in cross functionally colonizing and the asset test for me is simple the groupthink event is when everyone's kind of rah rah each other I know this conditions we got Andre is saying hey if you put database substitute database for blockchain and it reads well it's not a real revolutionary thing and oh all you custodian services you're screwed I mean so you have perspectives on both side that's right and there's contentious conversation that's right and that to me proves it and as well as the sessions are highly attended or we don't want it we don't want a panel of everybody in agreeance because we know that's not reality i mean that you you bring up the issue of curse of custody a prime example is we had a great talk a four-person panel led by Joe Kelly who's the CEO of Unchained Capital he had a panel with traditional equities custodian Paul pooi from edge wallet Joseph Kwon is the CEO of hosho and there was clear differences of opinion with respect to custody and it got a little contentious but isn't that the point yeah it's to have these conversations in earnest and let's put them out in the public on what's right and what's wrong for the community and let the community to decide the best way forward that's the best is exactly what you want to do I gotta ask you what are the big surprises for you what have you learned what's the big reveal for you that you've super surprised you or are things you expected what were some of the things that went on here yeah I think the biggest surprise to me was the positive feedback that we received you know I understand that we know people maybe looked at how shock on year one and said hosho like they're a cybersecurity firm what are they doing running a conference right but my background is a you know I've produced conferences I have a former employee of South by Southwest I believe a big an experience and so when we started to put this together we thought we knew we would make mistakes and we certainly made mistakes with respect to programming and schedule and just things that we had didn't think about attention to detail but we had plans far in that the mistakes were mitigated that they weren't exposed to the public right there behind the scenes fires that kind like a wedding or a party but no one actually really notices sure we put them out behind the scenes nobody that the our guests don't notice and that was my biggest concern I'm pleasantly surprised at the positive feedback we've yet to get any negative feedback publicly on Twitter telegram anecdotally individually people now they made just being nice to my face but I feel good about what the response that we've got it's been good vibes here so I gotta ask you well sure the DJ's were great last night good experience yeah experience and knowledge and and networking has been a theme to correct I lost him the networking dynamics I saw a lot of people I had I had ran to some people I met for the first time we've had great outreach that with the queue was integrated in people very friendly talked about the networking and that's been going on here yeah I mean this panels are great I'd love to hear from from panels and solo presentations but a lot of work gets done in the hallways and we have a saying in the conference business hallway hustlers right the ones that are hustling in the hallways are those early stage entrepreneurs or trying to close deals trying to figure out how to get in front of the right person serendipitously are at the bar at the same time as somebody they want to meet that is to me conference 101 that is the stuff I grew up on and so we wanted to make sure that we were encouraging those interactions through traffic flow so you'll notice that they're strategically the content rooms are strategically placed so that when you're changing rooms people are forced to cross interact with each other because they're forced to bump into each other and if you look at the programming we purposefully to our demise to be honest year one put a lot of programming that was conflicted with each other we made people make a decision about what talk they wanted to go to because there were two really compelling people at the same time or 10 minutes off yeah and so you had to make a decision vote with your feet you got to vote with your feet and and and from a conference perspective we call that FOMO right we want our guests to FOMO not because we want them to miss a particular talk but because we want them to be so overwhelmed with content and opportunity with networking that they when they walk away they've had a good experience they're fulfilled but they they think I got to go back here too because that thing I missed I'm not gonna miss this yeah we will point out to you guys made a good call on film all the session everything so everything's gonna be online we'll help guys do that yep so the video is gonna be available for everyone to look on demand you also had some good broadcast here we had a couple shows the cubes been here your mobile mention the DJs yeah yeah so good stuff so okay hallway conversations our lobby con as we call it when people hang up a lot on it's always good hallway con so what Gabriel in your mind as you walked around what was some of the hallway culture that you overheard and and that you thought were interesting and what hall would cartridges were you personally involved in the personal conversations I was involved with is why isn't somebody not this station why someone not Gardens but I will tell you i from what I heard from from conference attendees the conversations that I heard taking place were and I hope Jonathan doesn't mind but Jonathan Nelson from hack fund spoke on our main stage and I hope he doesn't mind me speaking out of turn but he came to me said this is one of the best run blockchain conferences I've ever been to and to have somebody like Jonathan say that who has done hundreds of talks and thousands was really meaningful but but what was more important is to talk to him and him feel comfortable enough to sit down with me and just talk generally that's the vibe we want for every attendant we want you to feel comfortable meeting with people in the hallway who you've never met and be vulnerable from a security perspective you know Michael Turpin for example sitting down and talking proactively about being the AT&T hack great these are opportunities for people to really talk about what's happened and be vulnerable and have the opportunity to educate us all how to get better as an industry you know the other thing I want to get your thoughts on is obviously the program's been phenomenal in the content side thank you but community is really important to us we're of a community model to q you guys care about the community aspect of this and as a real event you want to have an ongoing year after year and hopefully it'll get bigger I think it will basically our results we're seeing talk about the community impact because what you're really talking about there is community that's right well I mean Vegas we talk about there's multiple communities right regionally post-show is a Vegas based company we're born here we close I think forty some employees all based here in Las Vegas which is our home so the first thing that we did with respect to community as we created a local local price if you're a Nevada resident we didn't want you to have to invest a significant amount of money to come to something in your own town the second thing we did is we've invited the local Vegas Bitcoin meet up in aetherium meet ups to come and partake and not only participate but contribute to the content and opening day in fact there was so much influx of people from those meetups it wasn't official it wasn't like a program where we had actually a VTEC set up I thought I was gonna be like a meet-up there were so many people that attended we had to on the fly provide AV because we were overwhelmed with the amount of people that showed up so that's a regional community but with respect to the community from blockchain community what we wanted to do is make sure we brought people of all ethnicities all countries we have 26 countries represented in the first blockchain security conference and you had some big-name celebrities here yeah Neil Kittleson Max Keiser you go mama Anan Prakash Yakov Prensky a layer from your side pop popcorn kochenko has some big names yeah I'll see andreas yes here keynoting yeah I'm Michel parkland andreas Diego Zaldivar I mean these lena katina Viren OVA I mean these are big names yeah these big names okay what so so what's your takeaway of you as you know my takeaway is that there's a there's a yearning for this type of event my takeaway is that we're doing something right we have the luxury as hosho and that we're not an events company people think that might be a disadvantage to run a confident you're not a cotton vent company I think it's an advantage yeah because it holds my feet to the fire yeah much closer than an event organiser who doesn't have a company reputation and brand to protect hosho as you know has a good brand in the cybersecurity world with respect to blockchain we don't have the luxury of throwing a poor event giving you a bad experience because that would tarnish house of but also your in the community so you're gonna have direct feedback that's right the other thing too I will say I'm gonna go to a lot of events and there are people who are in the business of doing events and they have a profit motive that's right so they'll know lanyards are all monetize everything is monetized yeah and that sometimes takes away from the community aspect correct and I think you guys did a good job of you know not being profligate on the events you want to yeah a little bit of cash but you didn't / yeah / focus on money-making finding people right for the cash you really needed about the content yeah and the experience for and with the community and I think that's a formula that people want yeah I would like to see the model I would like to see the model changed over time if I'm being honest a majority of crypto conferences today are paid to play so a lot of the content you're getting this sponsored so I'm okay with that but I think it should be delineated between con disclose your disclosure you don't want water down the country but but the conference circuit and crypto is not ready for that it hasn't rest in my opinion hasn't reached that level of maturation yet like I told you I I'm a former South by Southwest guy that like my belief is you create the content and the sponsors will come I don't I don't begrudge conference organizers for for for sponsoring out events because they're really really expensive a cost per attend to manage demand to this hype out there yeah hundreds of dollars per attendee I get it I understand why they do it but what I would like to see is the model change over time whereas as we get more sophisticated as a technology space we should also grow as a vent and conference circuit as well what I mean by that is let's change the model that eventually someday it's free for all attendees to come and those conferences and the costs associated with them are subsidized by companies that want access to the people that are tending them it sounds like an upstream open source project sure how open source became so popular you don't screw with the upstream yep but you have downstream opportunities so if you create a nice upstream model yep that's the cube philosophy as well we totally agree with you and I think you guys are onto something pioneering with the event I think you're motivated to do it the community needs it yeah I think that's ultimately the self governing aspect of it I think you're off to something really good co-creation yeah I'll see we believe in that and the results speak for themselves congratulations thank you so much I appreciate you guys coming here and investing your time and I hope that all our staff has been accommodated and the hard rock is treated you well you guys been great very friendly but I think again you know outside of you guys is a great company and great brand and you guys and speaks for itself and the results this is an important event I agreed because of the timing because of this focus its crypto its crypto revolution its cybersecurity and FinTech all kind of coming together through huge global demand I mean we haven't gotten into IOT and supply chain yeah all the hacks going on with China and these things being reported this is serious business is a lot on the line a lot and you guys having a clear focus on that is really a service business Thank You staff doing it alright our cube coverage here in Las Vegas for host Joe Kahn this is the first conference of its kind where security is front and center it is the conference for security and blockchain bringing the worlds together building the bridges and building the community bridges as well we love that that's our belief as well as the cube coverage here in Vegas tigress more after this short break

>> Narrator: Live from Nassau in the Bahamas. It's The Cube! Covering PolyCon 18. Brought to you by PolyMath. >> Welcome back everyone, we're live here in the Bahamas with The Cube's exclusive coverage of PolyCon 18, I'm John Furrier with my co-host Dave Vellante, both co-founders of SiliconANGLE. We start our coverage of the crypto-currency ICO, blockchain, decentralized world internet that it is becoming. It's the beginning of our tour, 2018. Our next guest is Hartej Sawhney who's the advisor at Pink Sky Capital, but also the co-founder of Hosho.io. Welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you so much. >> Hey thanks for coming on. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks guys. >> We had a great chat last night, and you do some real good work. You're one of the smartest guys in the business. Got a great reputation. A lot of good stuff going on. So, take a minute to talk about who you are, what you're working on, what you're doing, and the projects you're involved in. >> So first of all, thank you so much for having me, it's really exciting to see the progress of high-quality content being created in the space. So my name is Hartej Sawhney. We have a team based in Las Vegas. I've been based in Las Vegas for about five years. But I was born and raised in central New Jersey, in Princeton. And my co-founder is Yo Sup Quan. We started this company about seven months ago and my co-founder's background was he's the co-founder of Coin Sighter in Exchange out of New York, which exited to Kraken. After that he started Launch Key which exited to Iovation. And prior to this company, my previous company was Zuldi, Z-U-L-D-I .com where we had a mobile point of sale system specifically for high volume food and beverage companies and businesses. So we were focused on Fintech and mobile point of sale and payment processing. So both of us have a unique background in both Fintech and cyber-security and my co-founder Yo, he's a managing partner of a crypto hedge fund named Pink Sky Capital. And he was doing diligence for Pink Sky, and he realized that the quality of the smart contracts he was seeing for deals that he wanted to participate as an investor in, and I'm an advisor in that hedge fund, we both realized that essentially the quality of these smart contracts is extremely low. And that there was nobody in this space that we saw laser focused on just blockchain security. And all the solutions that would be entailed in there. And so we began focusing on just auditing smart contracts, doing a line-by-line code review of each smart contract that's written, conducting a GAS analysis, and conducting a static analysis, making sure that the smart contract does what the white paper says, and then putting a seal of approval on that smart contract to mitigate risk. So that the code has not been changed once we've done an analysis of it, that there's no security vulnerabilities in this code, and that we can mitigate the risks for exchanges and for investors that someone has done a thorough code analysis of this. That there's no chance that this is going to be hacked, that money won't be stolen, money won't be lost, and that there's no chance of a security vulnerability on this. And we put our company's name and reputation on this. >> And what was the problem that is the alternative to that? Was there just poorly written code? Was it updated code? Was it gas was too expensive? They were doing off-chain transactions. I mean what are some of the dynamics that lead you guys down this path? I mean this makes sense. You're kind of underwriting the code, or you're ensuring it or I don't know what you call it, but essentially verifying it. What was the problem? And what were some of the use cases of problems? >> I would say that the underlying problem today in this whole industry, of the blockchain space, is that the most commonly found blockchain is Ethereum. The language behind Ethereum is called Solidity. Solidity is a brand new software language that very few people in the world are sufficient programmers in Solidity. On top of that, Solidity is updated, as a language on a weekly basis. So there are a very limited number of engineers in the world who are full-stack engineers, that have studied and understand Solidity, that have a security background, and have a QA mindset. Everything that I just said does exist on this Earth today and if it does, there's a chance that that person has made too much money to want to get out of bed. Because Ethereum's price has gone up. So the quality of smart contracts that we're seeing being written by even development shops, the developers building them are actually not full-stack engineers, they're web developers who have learned the language Solidity and so thus we believe that the quality of the code has been significantly low. We're finding lots of critical vulnerabilities. In fact, 100% of the time that Hosho has audited code for a smart contract, we have found at least a couple of vulnerabilities. Even as a second or the third auditor after other companies conduct an audit, we always find a vulnerability. >> And is it correct that Solidity is much more easy to work with than say, Bitcoin scripting language, so you can do a lot more with it, so you're getting a lot more, I don't want to say rogue code, but maybe that's what it is. Is that right? Is that the nature of the theory? >> Compared to Bitcoin script, yes. But compared to JavaScript, no. Because Fortune 500 companies have rooms full of Java engineers, Java developers. And now the newer blockchains are being written, are being written on in block JavaScript, right? So you have IBM's Hyperledger program, you have EOS, you have ICX, Cardano, Stellar, Waves, Neo, there's so many new projects that are coming, that all of them are flexing about the same thing. Including Rootstock, RSK. RSK is a project where they're allowing smart contracts to be tied to the Bitcoin blockchain for the first time ever. Right, so Fortune 500 companies may take advantage of the fact that they have Java developers to take advantage of already, that already work for them, who could easily write to a new blockchain, and possibly these new blockchains are more enterprise grade and able to take more institutional capital. But only time will tell. And us as the auditor, we want to see more code from these newer blockchains, and we want to see more developers actually put in commits. Because it's what matters the most, is where are the developers putting in commits and right now maximum developers are on the Ethereum blockchain. >> Is that, the numbers I mean. Just take a step there. So the theory of blockchain. Percentage of developers vis-a-vis other platforms percentages-- >> By far the most is on developed on Ethereum. >> And in terms of code, obviously the efficiencies that are not yet realized, 'cause there's not enough cycles of coding going on, it's evolution, right? >> Yes. >> Seems to be the problem, wouldn't you say? So a combination of full-stack developer requirements, >> Yes. >> To people who aren't proficient in all levels of the stack. >> Yes. >> Just are inefficient in the coding. It's not a ding on the developers, it's just they're writing code and they miss something, right? Or maybe they're not sufficient in the language-- >> It's a new language. The functions are being updated on a weekly basis, so sometimes you copied and pasted a part of another contract, that came from a very sophisticated project, so they'll say to us, well we copied and pasted this portion from EOS, so it should be great. But what that's leading to is either A, they're using a function that's now outdated, or B, by copying and pasting someone else's code from their smart contract, this smart contract is no longer doing what you intended it to do. >> So now Hartej, how much of your capability is human versus machine? >> Yeah I was going to ask that. >> ML, AI type stuff? >> So we're increasingly becoming automated, but because of the over, there's so much demand in the space. And we've had so much demand to consistently conduct audits, it's tough to pull my engineers away from conducting an audit to work on the tooling to automate the audit, right? And so we are building a lot of proprietary tooling to speed up the process, to automate conducting a GAS analysis, where we make sure you're not clogging up the blockchain by using too much GAS. Static analysis, we're trying to automate that as fast as possible. But what's a bit more difficult to automate, at least right now, is when we have a qualified full-stack engineer read the white paper or the source of truth and make sure the smart contract actually does it, that is, it's a bit longer tail where you're leveraging machine learning and AI to make that fully automated. (talking over each other) >> But maybe is that, I'm sorry John. Is that the long term model or do you think you can actually, I mean there's people that say augmented intelligence is going to be a combination of humans and machines, what do you think? >> I think it's going to be a combination for a long time. Every single day that we audit code, our process gets faster and faster and faster because once we find a vulnerability, finding that same vulnerability next time will be faster and easier and faster and easier. And so as time goes on, we see it as, since the bundle of our work today is ICOs, token generation events, there are ERC 20 tokens on the Ethereum blockchain. And we don't know how long this party will last. Like maybe in a couple years or a couple months, we have a big twist in the ICO space that the numbers will drastically go down. The long tail of Hosho's business for us, is to keep track of people writing smart contracts, period. But we think they are going to become more functional smart contracts where the entire business is on a smart contract and they've cut out sophisticated middle men. Right and it may be less ICOs, and in those cases I mean, if you're a publicly traded company, and you're going from R&D phase where you wrote a smart contract and now actually going to deploy it, I think the publicly traded company's going to do three to five audits. They're going to do multiple audits and take security as a very major concern. And in the space today, security is not being discussed nearly as much as it should. We have the best hedge funds cutting checks into companies, before the smart contract is even written, let alone audited. And so we're trying to partner with all the biggest hedge funds and tell the hedge funds to mandate that if you cut a check into a company that is going to do a token generation event, that they need to guarantee that they're going to at least value security, both in-house for the company and for the smart contract that's going to be written. >> How much do you charge for this? I mean just ballpark. Is it a range of purchase price, sales price? What's the average engagement go for, is it on a scope of work? Statement of work? Or is it license? I mean how does it work? >> So first it depends is it a penetration test of the website or the exchange? Penetration testing of exchanges are far more complex than just a website. Or if it's a smart contract audit, is it an ICO or is it a functional smart contract? In either case for the smart contract audit, we have to build a long set of custom tooling to attack each and every smart contract. So it's definitely very case-by-case. But a ballpark that we could maybe give is somewhere around the lines of 10 to 15 thousand dollars per 100 lines of functional code. And we ask for about three weeks of lead time for both a smart contract audit and a penetration test. And surprisingly in this space, some of the highest caliber companies and high caliber projects with the best teams, are coming to us far too late to get a security audit and a penetration test. So after months of fundraising and a private pre-sale and another pre-sale, and going and throwing parties and events and conferences to increase the excitement for participating in their token sale, what we think is the most important part, the security audit for a smart contract is left to the last week before your ICO. And a ridiculous number of companies are coming to us within seven days of the token sale, >> John: Scrambling. >> Scrambling, and we're saying but we've seen you at seven conferences, I think that we need to delay your ICO by two or three weeks. We can assure you that all of your investors will say thank you for valuing security, because this is irreversible. Once this goes live and the smart contract is deployed. >> Horse is out of the barn. >> It's irreversible. >> Right right. >> And once we seal the code, no one should touch it. >> It's always the case with security, it's bolted on at the last minute. >> It's like back road recovery too, oh we'll just back it up. It's an architectural decision we should have made that months ago. So question for you, the smart contract, because again I'm just getting my wires crossed, 'cause there's levels of smart contracts. So if we, hypothetical ICO or we're doing smart contracts for our audience that's going to come out soon. But see that's more transactional. There's security token sales, >> Yes. >> That are essentially, can be ERC 20 tokens, and that's not huge numbers. It could be big, but not massive. Not a lot transaction costs. That's a contract, right? That's a smart contract? >> People are writing smart contracts to conduct a token generational event, most commonly for an ERC 20 token, that's correct. >> Okay so that's the big, I call that the big enchilada. That's the big-- >> Right now that is the most important, the most common. >> Okay so as you go in the future, I can envision a day where in our community, people going to be doing smart contracts peer-to-peer. >> Sure. >> How does that work? Is that a boiler plate? Is is audited, then it's going to be audited every time? Do the smart contracts get smaller? I mean what's your vision on that? Because we are envisioning a day where people in our audience will say hey Hartej, let's do a white paper together, let's write it together, have a handshake, do a smart contract click, click. Lock it in. And charge a dollar a download, get a million downloads, we split it. >> I envision a day where you can have a more drag and drop smart contract and not need a technical developer to be a full-stack engineer to have to write your smart contract. Yes I totally envision that day. >> John: But that's not today. >> We are very far from that today. >> Dave, kill that project. >> We're so far, we're very far from that. We're light years far from that. >> Okay well look. If we can't eliminate the full-stack engineers, I'm okay with that. Can we eliminate the lawyers? At least minimize them. >> We can minimize them possibly, but we have five stacks of lawyers for our company, I don't see them going anywhere. We need lawyers all the time. >> I see that in the press sometimes, yeah it's going to get disrupted. I don't see it happening. Okay we were having a great conversation off-camera about what makes a good ICO. You see, you have a huge observation space. And you were very opinionated. A lot of companies are out there just floating a token because they're trying to raise money. And they could do the same thing with Ethereum or Bitcoin. >> That's correct. >> Your thoughts? >> My thoughts are that it's very important for companies who are sophisticated, I think, to start by giving away a little bit of equity in the business. And that if you want to be in the blockchain space, and you really firmly believe you have a model to have a token within a decentralized application, I would still start by finding quality investors in the space, in the world. They might be still in Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley didn't just disappear overnight now that the blockchain is out. I am all for the fact that Silicon Valley no longer has as much of a grip on tech because of their blockchain world. And they're not seeing as much deal flow, and there's not as much reliance on venture capitalists, that's exciting to me. But let's not forget the value, that top-tier VCs like Andreessen Horowitz and Vinod Khosla. and Fintech VCs like Commerce Ventures and Nyca Partners in New York, Propel VC, these are good Fintech VC arms that continue to time and time again add immense value to companies. >> And they have networks. They add value. >> They have strong-valued networks, but they're just not going to disappear. And those VCs, if they've invested into a company, took a board seat, fostered their growth, taught them what it means to actually be a real business that's growing at 7-15% week over week, maybe two years down the line, after they've given away a board seat to someone like Nyca Partners, I would be interested in understanding what your token economics look like. Now that you have a revenue generating business, how you've placed a token model into this already running business that makes 25 to 50 grand a month and you have a team of 10, self-sustaining themselves off of revenue. Much more intriguing of a conversation. What's happening today in the space is, hey my buddy Jim and Steve and I came up with an idea for this business. There's going to be a token, and we're starting a private pre-sale tomorrow. I'm going to give you 300% bonus and will you be my advisor? And they're going to start raising capital because of an idea. You know what we used to say in the Silicon Valley startup world, you can raise on just a PowerPoint. I think in the blockchain world, you could raise on just an idea? And then maybe a white paper? And the white paper is one page? And so you've raised a bunch of capital, you have a white paper. >> Now you got to build it. >> Now you got to build, you got to write a smart contract, you got to build it, you got to do it, and then everyone loses excitement and it goes back to our previous conversation the development talent. So, another thing not being discussed in the space is company employee retention, right? So if you have a growing number of ICOs, that have very large budgets because investors have found a way to sink millions of dollars into a company early, you've got $5 million in the hands of a company to start, well this company can afford to pay someone a very ridiculous salary to come join them to write the smart contract now. So they could offer an engineer 500 Eth a month to come join them for three months. So you have good engineers just bouncing from one ICO to the next and as soon as the ICO goes live, they quit. This is a problem to companies who are-- >> It's migration, out migration. >> How do you retain, even capital? >> Companies like Hosho, ShapeShift, companies that are selling picks and shovels of the industry, that want to be household names in the space, we have to really think about how we're going to retain our employees in the space. >> So the recruitment and bringing on the new generation, we were also talking off camera about Bill Tye and the younger generation and kind of riffing on the notion that, because there is a new set of mission-driven developers and builders, on the business side as well. Your thoughts and reaction to what you see and what you see that's good and what you see that we need more of? >> So the most powerful thing in the blockchain space that I think is so exciting is that you have a lot of people between the age of 25 and 35 that don't come from money, that didn't go to Stanford, didn't go to Y Combinator, they're probably not white, from-- >> John: Ivy League schools. >> Ivy League schools. I'm not trying to make it about race, but if you're a white male and went to Stanford and went to Y Combinator, chances of you raising VC money on sand hill are a lot higher, right? And you have a guy looking like me who didn't go to Stanford, doesn't come from money, running up and down sand hill, I have personally faced that battle and it wasn't easy. And we were based in Vegas and so being based in Vegas, I'd also have to deal with so why do you live in Vegas? When are you going to move to Silicon Valley? And if we invest in you, you're going to open an office in sand hill right? And now in the blockchain world, what's exciting is you have so many heavy-hitters running as founders, some of the most successful companies in the space, who don't come from money and a big prestigious background, but they're honest, they're hard-working, they're putting in 12 to 15 hours of work every single day, seven days a week. And to space, six weeks is like six years. And we all have a level of trust that goes back to times when we were all running struggling startups. And so our bond is, to me, even more significant than what must have been between Keith Rabois and Peter Thiel in the PayPal Mafia. We have our own mafias being formed of much stronger bonds of younger people who will be able to share much more significant deal flow so if the PayPal Mafia was able to join forces to punch out companies like eBay and Square, wait 'til companies in this space, we have young, heavy-hitters right now who are non-reliant on some of the more traditional older folks. Wait 'til you see what happens in the next couple years. >> Hartej, great conversation. And I want to get one more question in. We've seen Keiretsu Forum, mafias, teams more than ever as community becomes an integral part of vetting and by the way trust, you have unwritten rules. I mean baseball, Dave and I used to do sports analogies. >> Self-governance. >> Reggie Jackson talked about unwritten rules and it works. If you beam the batter, the other guy, your best star, your side's going to get beamed. That's an unwritten rule. These are what keeps things going, balanced through the course of a season. What are the unwritten rules in the Ethos right now? >> Honesty, transparency, and that's the key. We need self-governance. This is a very unregulated market. There's rules being broken by people who are ignorant to the rules. The most common rule I've seen being broken is by people who are not broker dealers, running around fundraising capital, they don't even know what an institutional advisor license is. They don't know what a Series 7 and a Series 63 is. I asked a guy just last night, he said I'm pooling capital, I'm syndicating, let me know if you want in on the deal. And I said when did you take your Series 7? He goes what's that? Get away from me. You're an American, you need to look up what US securities laws are and make sure that you're playing by the rules and if someone who doesn't know the rules has entered our inner circle of investors, of advisors, of people sharing deal flow, we have a good network of people that are closing the loop for companies, whether it's lawyers, investors, exchanges, security auditors, people who write smart contracts, dev shops, people who write white papers, PR marketing, people who do the road show, there's a full circle-- >> So people are actually doing work to put into the community, to know your neighbor if you will, know the deals that are going down, to identify potential trip wires that are being established by either bad actors or-- >> KYC, AML, this is a new space that's also attracting people that have a criminal background. Right? And that's just a harsh reality of the space. That in the United States if you have a felony on your record, maybe getting a job has become really difficult and you figured let's do an ICO, no one's going to check my record. That is a reality of the space. Another reality is the money that was invested into this entire ICO clean. Right, that's a massive issue for the US government right now. It's been less than 15 hours since the SEC has issued actually subpoenas to people on this exact topic, today. >> This is a great topic, we'd like to do more on. >> Dozens of them. >> We'd like to continue to keep in touch with you on The Cube. Obviously you're welcome anytime, loved your insight. Certainly we'd love to have you be an advisor on our mission, you're welcome anytime. >> For sure, let's talk about it. Come out to Las Vegas. Hosho's always happy to host you. >> John And Dave: We're there all the time. >> The Cube lives at the sands. >> It's our second home. >> Come by Hosho's office and let us know. Vegas is our home. We are hosting a conference in Vegas after DEFCON. So DEFCON is the biggest security conference in the world. You have the best black hats and white hats show up as security experts in Vegas and right on the tail end of it, Hosho's going to host a very exclusive invite-only conference. >> What's it called? Just Hosho Conference? >> Just Blockchain. It'll be called the just, it'll be by the Just Blockchain Group and Hosho's the main backer behind it. >> Well we appreciate your integrity and your sharing here on The Cube, and again you're paying it forward in the community, that's great. Ethos we love that. That's our mission here, paying it forward content. Here in the Bahamas. Live coverage here at PolyCon 18. We're talking about securitized token, a decentralized future for awesome things happening. I'm Jeff Furrier, Dave Vellante. We'll be back with more after this short break. (upbeat music)