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

from the cube studios in palo alto in boston bringing you data-driven insights from the cube and etr this is breaking analysis with dave vellante snowflake's eye-popping ipo this week has the industry buzzing we have had dozens and dozens of inbound pr from firms trying to hook us offering perspectives on the snowflake ipo so they can pitch us on their latest and greatest product people are pumped and why not an event like this doesn't happen very often hello everyone and welcome to this week's wikibon cube insights powered by etr in this breaking analysis we'll give you our take on the snowflake ipo and address the many questions that we've been getting on the topic i'm also going to discuss at the end of this segment an angle for getting in on the ground floor and investments which is not for the faint of heart but it's something that i believe is worth talking about now let's first talk about the hottest ipo in software industry history first i want to say congratulations to the many people at snowflake you know the big hitters yeah they're all the news slootman mooglia spicer buffett benioff even scarpelli interestingly you know you don't hear much about the founders they're quite humble and we're going to talk about that in some future episodes but they created snowflake they had the vision and the smarts to bring in operators that could get the company to this point so awesome for them but you know i'm especially happy for the rank and file and the many snowflake people where an event like this it really can be life-changing versus the billionaires on the leaderboard so fantastic for you okay but let's get into the madness as you know by now snowflake ipod at a price of 120. now unless you knew a guy he paid around 245 at the open that's if you got in otherwise you bought at a higher price so you kind of just held your nose and made the trade i guess you know but snowflakes value it went from 33 billion to more than 80 billion in a matter of minutes now there's a lot of finger pointing going on this is this issue that people are claiming that it was underpriced and snowflake left four billion dollars on the table please stop that's just crazy to me snowflakes balance sheet is in great shape thanks to this offering and you know i'm not sure jamming later stage investors even more would have been the right thing to do this was a small float i think it was around 10 percent of the company so you would expect a sharp uptick on day one i had predicted a doubling to a 66 billion dollar valuation and it ended up around 70. now the big question that we now get is is this a fair valuation and can snowflake grow into its value we'll address this in more detail but the short answer is snowflake is overvalued in my opinion right now but it can grow into its valuation and of course as always they're going to be challenges now the other comment we get is yeah but the company is losing tons of money and i say no kidding that's why they're so valuable we've been saying for years that the street right now is rewarding growth because they understand that to compete in software you need to have massive scale so i'm not worried in the least about snowflakes bottom line not yet eventually i'm going to pay much closer attention to operating cash flow but right now i want to see growth i want to see them grow into their valuation now the other common question we get is should i buy when should i buy what are the risks and can snowflake compete with the biggest cloud vendors i'll say this before we get into it and i've said before look it's it's very rare that you're not going to get better buying opportunities than day one of an ipo and i think in this case you will i remember back in 2015 it was i think it was the first calendar for quarter and servicenow missed its earnings and the stock got hit and we had the opportunity to interview frank slootman then ceo of servicenow right after that and i think it's instructive to hear what he said let's listen roll the clip well yeah i think that a lot of the high-flying cloud companies and obviously we're one of them you know we're we're priced to perfection right um and that's that's not an easy place to be for uh for for anybody and you know we're not really focused on that it's it's this is a marathon you know every quarter is one mile marker you can't get too excited about you know one versus the other we're really pacing ourselves we're building you know an enterprise that's going to be here for for a long time you know and after that we saw the stock drop as low as 50 today servicenow is a 450 stock so my point is that snowflake like servicenow is going to be priced to perfection and there will be bumps in the road possibly macro factors or other and if you're a believer you'll have opportunities to get in so be patient now finally i'm going to make some comments later but i'll give you the bumper sticker right now i mean i calculated the weighted average price that the insiders paid on the the s1 that they paid for snowflake and it came out to around six dollars a share and i heard somebody say on tv it was five dollars but my weighted average math got me to six dollars regardless on day one of the ipo the insiders made a 50x return on their investment if you bought on day one you're probably losing some money or maybe about even and there are some ground floor opportunities that exist that are complicated and may be risky but if you're young and motivated or older and have some time to research i think you'll be interested in what i have to say later on all right let's compare snowflake to some other companies on a valuation basis this ought to be interesting so this chart shows some high flyers as compared to snowflake we show the company the trailing 12-month revenue the market cap at the close of the 16th which is the day that snowflake ipod and then we calculate and sort the data on the revenue multiple of the trailing 12 months and the last column is the year-on-year growth rate of the last quarter and i used trailing 12 months because it's simple and it's easy to understand and it makes the revenue multiple bigger so it's more dramatic and many prefer to use a forward revenue uh but that's why i put the growth rate there you can pick your own projected revenue growth and and do the math yourself so let's start with snowflake 400 million dollars in revenue and that's based on a newish pricing model of consumption not a sas subscription that locks you in for a year or two years or three years i love this model because it's true cloud and i've talked about it a while so for a while so i'm not going to dwell on it today but you can see the trailing 12-month revenue multiple is massive and the growth rate is 120 which is very very impressive for a company this size zoom we put zoom in the chart just because why not and and the growth grade is sick so so who knows how that correlates to the revenue multiple but as you can see snowflake actually tops the zoom frothiness on that metric now maybe zoom is undervalued i should take that back let's see i think crowdstrike is really interesting here and as a company that we've been following and talking about quite a bit in my last security breaking analysis they were at a 65 x trailing 12-month revenue multiple and you see how that's jumped since they reported and they beat expectations but they're similar in size to snowflake with a slower growth rate in a lower revenue multiple so there's some correlation between that growth rate and the revenue multiple sort of now snowflake pulled back on day two it was down early uh this morning as you would expect with both the market being off and maybe some profit taking you know if you got in an allocation at 120 why not take some profits and play with house money so snowflake's value is hovering today it actually bounced back is hovering today you're just under 70 billion and that that brings the revenue multiple down a bit but it's still very elevated now if you project 2x growth let's say 100 for next year and the stock stays in some kind of range which i think it likely will you could see snowflake coming down to crowdstrike revenue multiples in 12 months it'll depend of course on snowflakes earnings reports which i'm sure are going to beat estimates for the next several quarters and if if it's growing faster than these others at that time it should command a premium you know wherever the market prices market's going to go up it's going to go down but we'll look at all these companies i think on a relative basis snowflakes still should command a premium at higher growth rates so you can see also in this chart you've got shopify awesome mongodb twilio servicenow and their respective growth rates shopify incredibly impressive [ __ ] and twilio as well servicenow is like the old dog in this mix so that's kind of interesting now the other big question we get is can snowflake grow in to its valuation this is a chart we shared with you a bit ago and it talks to snowflake's total available market and its expansion opportunity there tam expansion this is something we saw slootman execute at servicenow when everybody underestimated that company's value and i'll briefly explain here look snowflake is disrupting the traditional data warehouse and data lake markets data lake spending is relatively small it's under 2 billion but data lakes they're inexpensive and that's what made them attractive the edw market however the enterprise data warehouse market is it's much much larger now traditional edws they're they're big they're slow they're cumbersome they're expensive and they're complicated but they've been operationalized and are critical for companies reporting and basic analytics but they've failed to live up to their promise of the 360 degree view of the customer and real-time analytics you know i had a customer tell me a while ago that my data warehouse it's like a snake swallowing a basketball he gave me example where a change in a regulation this was a financial company it would occur and it would force a change in the data model in their data warehouse and they'd have to ingest all this new data and the data warehouse choked and every time intel came out with a new processor they'd rush out they'd throw more compute at the problem he called this chasing the chips now what snowflake did was to envision a cloud native world where you could bring compute to massive data volumes on an elastic basis and only pay for what you use sounds so simple but technically snowflakes founders and those innovations of that innovation of separating compute from storage to leverage the flexibility of the cloud it really was profound and clearly based on this week's performance was the right call now i'll come back to this in a bit now where we think snowflake is going is to build a data cloud and and you can see this in the chart where your data can be ingested and accessed to perform near real-time analytics with machine learning and ai and snowflake's advantage as we've discussed in the past is that it runs on any cloud and it can ingest data from a variety of sources now there are some challenges here we're not saying that snowflake is going to participate in all these use cases that we show however with its resources now we expect snowflake to create new capabilities organically and then do tuck-in acquisitions that will allow it to attack many more more use cases in adjacent markets and so you look at this chart and the third layer if that's 60 billion it means snowflake needs to extend into the fourth layer because its valuation is already over 60 billion it's not going to get 100 market share so we call this next layer automated decision making this is where real time analytics and systems are making decisions for humans and acting in real time now clearly data is going to be a pretty critical part of this equation now at this point it's unclear that snowflake has the capability to go after this space as much of the data in this area is probably going to live at the edge but snowflake is betting on becoming a data data layer across clouds and presumably at the edge and as you can see this market is enormous so there's no lack of tam in our view for snowflakes that brings us to the other big question around competition everybody's talking about this look a lot of the investment thesis behind snowflakes snowflake is that slootman and his army including cfo mike scarpelli and what they did at servicenow will be repeated scarpelli is this operational guru he keeps the engine running you know with very very tight controls and you know what it's a pretty good bet snoopman and scarpelli and their team i'm not denying that but i will tell you that snowflake's competition is much more capable than what servicenow faced in its early days now here's a picture of some of the key competitors this is one of our favorites the xy graph and on the vertical axis is net score or spending momentum that is etr's version of velocity based on their quarterly surveys now i'm showing july survey october is in the works it's in the field as i speak on the horizontal axis is market share or pervasiveness in the data set so it's a proxy for market share it's it's based on mentions not dollars and and that's why microsoft is so far to the right because they're huge and they're everywhere and they get a lot of mentions the more relevant data to us is the position of snowflake it remains one of the highest net scores in the entire etr survey based not just the database sector aw aws is its biggest competitor because most of snowflake's business runs on aws but google bigquery you can see there is is technically the most capable relative to snowflake because it's a true cloud native database built from the ground up whereas aws took a database that was built for on-prem par excel and brilliantly really made it work in the cloud by re-architecting many of the pieces but it still has legacy parts to it now here's oracle oracle's huge it's slow growth overall but it's making investments in r d we've talked about that a lot and that's going to allow it to hold on to its customers huge base and you can see teradata and cloud era cloudera is a proxy for data lakes which are low cost as i said and cloudera which acquired hortonworks is credited with the commercialization of that whole big datum and hadoop movement and then teradata is in there as well which of course they've been around forever now there are a zillion other database players we've heard a lot of them from a lot of them this week is on that inbound pr that i talked about but these are the ones that we wanted to focus on today the bottom line is we expect snowflakes vertical axis spending momentum to remain elevated and we think it will continue to steadily move to the right now let's drill into this data a bit more here we break down the components of etr's net score and this is specifically for snowflake over time now remember lime green is new adoptions the forest green is spending more relative to last year than more five percent more uh than last year or or greater gray is flat spending the pink is less spending and the bright red is we're leaving the platform the line up top that's netscore which subtracts the red from the green is an indicator of spending velocity the yellow line at the bottom is market market share or pervasiveness in the survey based on mentions now note the the blue text there that's etr's number one takeaway on snowflake two h-20 spending intentions on snowflake continue to trend robustly mostly characterized by high customer acquisition and expansion rates new adoptions market share among all customers is simultaneously growing impressive let's now look at snowflake against the competition in fortune 500 customers now here we show net score or again spending momentum over time for some of the key competitors and you can see snowflakes net score has actually increased since the april survey again this is the july survey this was taken the april survey was taken at the height of the us lockdown so snowflake's net score is actually higher in the fortune 500 than it was overall which is a good proxy for spend because fortune 500 spends more google mongodb and microsoft also also show meaningful momentum growth since the april survey you know notably aws has come off its elevated levels from last october and april it's still strong but that's something that we're going to continue to watch finally let's look at snowflakes market share or pervasiveness within the big three cloud vendors again this is a cut on the fortune 500 and you can see there are 125 respondents within the big three cloud and the fortune 500 and 21 snowflake respondents within that base of 125 and you can see the steady and consistent growth of share not huge ends but enough to give some confidence in the data now again note the etr callout but this trend is occurring despite the fact that each of the big three cloud vendors has its own competitive offering okay but i want to stress this is not a layup for snowflake as i've said this is not servicenow part two it's a different situation so let's talk about that look the competition here is not bmc which was servicenow's target as much as i love the folks at bmc we're talking here about aws microsoft and google amazon with redshift is dialed into this i've said often that they have copycatted snowflake in many cases and last fall at re invent we heard andy jassy make a big deal about separating compute from storage and he took a kind of a swipe at snowflake without mentioning them by name but let's listen to what andy jassy had had to say and then we'll come back and talk about it play the clip then what we did is because we have nitro like i was talking about earlier we built unique instances that have very fast bandwidth so that if you actually need some of those data from s3 for a query it moves much faster than if you just had to leave it there with without that high speed bandwidth instance and so with ra3s you get to separate your storage from your compute if it turns out by the way on your local ssds that you're not using all the ssd on that local ssd you only pay for what you use so a pretty significant enhancement for customers using redshift at the same time if you think about the prevailing way that people are thinking about separating storage from compute letting people scale separately that way as well as how you're going to do this large-scale compute where you move the storage to the a bunch of awaiting compute nodes there are some issues with this that you got to think about the first is think about how much data you're going to have at the scale that we're at but then just fast forward a few years think about how much data you're going to actually have to move over the network to get to the compute and we so look first of all jassy is awesome he stands up at these events for like reinvent for two hours and it connects trends and business to technology he's got a very deep understanding of the tech he's amazing however what aws has done in separating compute and storage is good but it's not as elegant architecturally as snowflake aws essentially has tiered the storage off the cluster to lower the overall costs but you really you can't turn off the compute completely with snowflake they've truly separated compute and storage and the reason is that redshift is great but it's built on an on-prem architecture that was originally an on-prem architecture that they had to redo so when jassy talks about moving the data to compute what he's really saying is our architecture is such that we had to do this workaround which is actually quite clever but this whole narrative about the prevailing ways to separate compute from storage that's snowflake and moving the data's use the word data's plural to the compute it really doesn't apply to snowflake because they'll just move the compute to the data thank you hadoop for that profound concept now does this mean snowflake is going to cakewalk over redshift not at all aws is going to continue to innovate so snowflake had better keep moving fast multi-cloud new workloads adjacent markets tam expansion etc etc etc microsoft they're huge but as usual there's not a lot to say you know about them they're everywhere they put out 1.0 products they eventually get them right because with their heft they get mulligans that they turn into pars or birdies but i think snowflake is going to bring some innovations to azure and that they're going to get good traction there in my opinion now google bigquery is interesting by all accounts it gets very high technical marks google's playing the long game and i would expect that snowflake is going to have a harder time competing in google cloud than it does within aws and what i'm predicting for azure but we'll see the last point here is that many are talking about the convergence of analytic and operational and transaction databases and the thinking is this doesn't necessarily bode well for specialists like snowflake and i would say a couple of things here first is that while it's definitely true you're not seeing snowflake positioning today as responding at the point of transaction to say for instance influence and order in real time and this may have implications at the edge it's going to have a lot of real-time inferencing but we've learned there are a lot of ways to skin a cat and we see integration layers and innovative approaches emerging in the cloud that could address this gap and present opportunities for snowflake now the other thing i'd say is you know maybe that thinking misses something altogether with the idea of snowflake in that third data layer that we showed you in our tam chart that data as a service layer or data cloud which is maybe a giant opportunity that they are uniquely positioned to address because they're cloud agnostic they've got the vision and they've got the architecture to allow them to very simply ingest data and then serve it up to businesses nonetheless we're going to see this battle continue between what i've often talked about these integrated suites and converged databases in the case of oracle converged pipelines in the case of the cloud guys versus the best of breed players like snowflake we talk about this all the time and there really isn't one single answer it's really horses for courses and customer preferences okay well you know i know you've been waiting for for me to tell you about the angles on ground floor investing and you probably think this is going to be crazy but bear with me and i got to caution you this is a bit tongue-in-cheek and it's one big buyer beware but as i said the insiders on snowflake had a 50x return on day one you probably didn't so i want to talk about the confluence of software engineering crypto cryptography and game theory powered by the underlying value of blockchain and we're talking here about innovations around a new internet in a distributed web or d-web where many distributed computers come together to form one computer that guarantees trust between two or more users for a variety of use cases not just financial store like bitcoin but that too and the motivation behind this is the fact that a small number of companies say five or six today control the internet and have essentially co-opted the major protocols like tcp http smtp pop3 etc etc and these people that we're showing here on this chart they're working on these new innovations there are many of them but i just name a few here olaf carlson we he started poly chain capital to invest in core infrastructure around these new computing paradigms this gentleman mark nadal is someone who's working on new d apps tim berners-lee who invented the internet he's got a project called solid at mit and it emphasizes data ownership and privacy and of course satoshi got it all started when she invented bitcoin and created the notion of fractional shares and by the way the folks at andreessen horowitz are actively making bets in this space so you know maybe this is not so crazy but here's the premise if you're a little guy and you wanted to invest in snowflake you couldn't until late in the game if you wanted to invest in the lamp stack directly in the late 90s there was no way to do that you had to wait for red hat to go public or to get a piece of the linux action but in this world that we're talking about here there are opportunities that are not mainstream and often they're based yes on cryptocurrencies again it's dangerous there are scams and and losers but if you do your homework there are actually vehicles for you to get in on the ground floor and you know some of these innovations are going to take off you could get a 50x or 100 bagger but you have to do your research and there's no guarantee that these innovations are going to be able to take on the big internet giants but there are people really smart technologists and software engineers that are young they're mission driven and they're forming a collective voice against a dystopian future because they want to level the playing field on the internet and this may be the disruptive force that challenges today's giants and if your game i would take a look at the space and see if it's worth throwing a few dollars at okay a little tangent from snowflake but i wanted to put that out there snowflake wow closes its first trading week as a company worth 66 billion dollars roughly the same as goldman sachs worth more than vmware and the list goes on i mean what's what's more is there to say other than remember these episodes are all available as podcasts so please subscribe i publish weekly on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com so please check that out and please comment on my linkedin post or feel free to email me at david.velante at siliconangle.com this is dave vellante for the cube insights powered by etr thanks for watching everyone we'll see you next time you

(dramatic music) >> Hey everyone, welcome to the special CUBEConversations here in Palo Alto, CA theCUBE Studios. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, founder of SiliconANGLE Media. We are here for some exclusive news around security audits, blockchain smart contracts, and a hot new startup Amber Data we have the Chief Operating Officer Tongtong Gong who's here, Chief Operating Officer of Amber Data, great to see you! You guys, I've interviewed Shawn Douglass, the CEO, founder, before and he was really getting the technology going. Amazing progress, we have some exclusive discoveries here, welcome to theCUBE! >> Thank you, thank you, thanks for having me here. It's awesome, we've done so much in the past couple weeks, and really excited to announce that we have taken security audits, automated that to be able to provide automated at scale security audits for all the smart contracts, Ethereum, through our platform. >> This has been a huge problem, we've been covering it for the past year, with video but also in the blogs, Ethereum specifically has been the developer chain of choice, people are using Ethereum, programming on it, and that's where a lot of the DApps, decentralized apps, which we think there's going to be a tsunami of, we're a bit bullish on it, but the problem is that everyone went in and rushed with these ICO's, and they didn't think about, "Hey we better make sure our token generating event works" because they've got to do a smart contract on that, and then ultimately these marketplaces that will be emerging from these apps through the communities will be a lot of smart contracts, as the transaction of choice. This is what is the benefit of token economics. The problem is, security. The security audits have been a pain in the butt, they've been expensive, and there's been a time lag in getting it done. So you've got a time factor, too slow, too expensive, and it was last minute. >> Right. >> This has been a huge problem. Are you saying that you solved that problem? >> Yeah, kind of! So give you some stats. There are about 7.8 million to 8 million smart contracts on the chain today. On average, there's about 500-600 smart contracts get deployed every day into Mainnet Ethereum. What we've done, we talked to a lot of security teams that's in this space, and at the end of the day everybody use the same tools, set of tools, to preform security audits. What we have done, is we have programatically did that so we can run security audits on every smart contract on the chain. So we launched this feature last Friday, what we did is we picked the top 2000 smart contracts, based on transaction values-- >> On the Mainnet? >> On the Mainnet. And we preformed the audits on those, and last night, yeah three days later, we preformed all 8000 smart contracts that's been created and deployed in the past 90 days. So the top 2000 active ones, and the 8000 recently deployed ones, we preformed security audits on those. >> So this is pretty incredible, so I want to make sure I get this right. If this is the case, this is the first ever automation, or devOPS like approach to smart contract audits and security. So let me just kind of slow down if you don't mind. Today, most people will go in and manually look at code reviews or use some tooling to do that, and then they get a report. Businesses have been doing that, OSHO does that, many more do it, and they're bringing tools to the market, they are too, but I don't think anyone's actually automated at volume. So you're saying, you're automating, ingesting data from the chain-- >> Mhm. We analyze the bytecode as well as the source code to identify vulnerabilities and issues, things like integer overflow into the code, and we actually assign custom, we have our own scoring system to score basically the vulnerability exposure of the smart contract. >> Okay so I want to kind of push back on that because I'm skeptical. So, you do byte review-- >> Bytecode >> Bytecode and source code review, and then it's a black box and you type up a report, or you actually flag the code itself? Do you service it automatically? Does that happen automatically? Take me through what you do manually, and what happens with the computers. What is automated? >> Everything's automated. So we integrated the tools that every expert uses in this space today, to run the security audits on the smart contract and the bytecode and then we flag the particular source code and function calls that's flagged with the issue-- >> That's in the code itself? >> That's in the code itself, in that service, through our website, through our console, and you can actually see it. You can search on any smart contract and the console dashboard will show you the real time live streaming events of your smart contract function calls, as well as the vulnerability-- >> This is amazing. So this means that you can save a lot of time, love this feature, this is exciting. This is actually the first news I've ever hear of this, so I want to make sure I get it right. How many contracts can you do? How fast does it take? So you mentioned you've ingested last week, stuff off the chain, how many contracts was that? >> We did last week, 2000 and then up to last night, we finished 8000 smart contract scans. We're continuing to do that for every smart contract on the chain. >> How fast is this, because I remember back when I was learning how to code for the first time, back in the old days, you had to press a button, you'd have a compiler, and you'd get a bug in the line, syntax error, there it is. That's the normal kind of old school computer science. Syntax, compiler, interpreter, whatever you want to call it. It sounds like you're doing something similar, the same kind of speed. It's code review, analysis to the contracts, security through the tools... How fast is it? I mean, how long does it take to do a review of one smart contract, for instance? >> Actually, I don't know that. I would say minutes. >> Not days? >> Not days. No. Minutes. >> So it's not like it goes out, hourglass... Check your email it'll be there? It happens pretty much on the fly? >> It happens pretty much on the fly, real time. >> So how many contracts can you guys do in a day? >> We've done 8000 in three days, so... A lot! (both laughing) And we have ten machines running right now as we're speaking-- >> So you throw some clout at it, scale up-- >> Exactly, scale up. >> Scaling out is easy to do, you just go... >> Our goal is to basically make it very easy for developers to understand the state and health of their smart contract and then they can go find consultants, experts to fix those vulnerabilities and issues. >> Yeah, this is going to be a rising tide. I think, rising tide floats all boats when you have these emerging markets. You move to the next problem, and you do. Jeff Frick always says that in theCUBE and he's right! You take away security, you're now enabling this tool for these consultants to actually add more value. >> Exactly. >> Is that the focus? Do you guys even know who's going to use this tool yet? Obviously, this is a game changer. I mean, if I'm a data scientist I love this. Also I'm a trader, I might want the data, I'm a risk management, audit compliance person? I mean...you guys-- >> Yeah! At Amber Data our mission has always been providing, enabling infrastructure, enabling tool sets to allow developers, to allow operators, to allow the industry, to allow businesses to adopt blockchain, that's always been our mission and we have built the splunk, you know like search, a feature for blockchain, we have built APM, we have built dissimilar Mixpanel... It's all about providing access to data and to information, to allow everyone to have a better understanding, better transparency into the state and health of the blockchain, the state and health of their smart contracts. So that's you know, in line with-- >> So talk about the scoring thing, because okay, I love this automation I think that that's a game changer. So congratulations, this is the first I've heard of it, and I think this might be the first news in the industry out there. How does it work beyond that? What else do you guys do? Are you ingesting, are you adding overlays to it? What is the focus next? I mean, you're ingesting it, you're doing some security audits... Where does it go from there? >> So, we're actually working with the Web3 Data Foundation. So the Web3 Data Foundation is building a decentralized data marketplace to allow everyone in the ecosystem to list, subscribe, consume, distribute, monetize data assets that's generated by the blockchain and data that's on blockchain. >> So what's the URL for that? Web3... >> Web3data.org >> Three the number or three... >> Three the number, yeah. >> So web3 number data dot org? >> Yeah. >> Okay and is that an open community? Is it a foundation? >> Yes it's a nonprofit foundation, and I believe they're launching a token, Web3 Data token, and Amber Data's working with the Web3 Data foundation as a launch partner to utilize the data ingestion pipeline we have built and to serve up all the data for everyone to have access to it. >> Okay so what's your business model at Amber Data? Are you going to have your own token? Are you going to use the foundation as the token holding place? Can you just take us through the relationship of Amber Data with the foundation? I mean, I get the foundation but what you're doing here is essentially you're building IT operations into the blockchain and scaling things with automation, which certainly is only going to get better with more compute and A.I and other cool things, so I love that. How do you make money? Is it a token model? Is it just, classic, you get paid? What's the relationship? Is the foundation issuing tokens, do you have your own token? Take us through that. >> So the Web3 Data Foundation is the one issuing the token. We are the launch partner, so we are using the bulk diagnostic data ingestion pipeline that we can ingest all the data, and we're building together, building the data marketplace using smart contracts, to enable everyone to list, curate, consume, distribute, monetize the data. You think about it, right? Data on blockchain is just a fraction of the data out there. And as staff development, going on, as a trading application going on, there's a lot of data that's going to be generated by blockchain as well, and those datas aren't getting captured, analyzed, and utilized today. I think today, as a trader, investor, or as a developer, people don't have access to this data, to have data driven decisions, to help them continuously improve. Whether it's application or investment decisions. So the data marketplace will enable everyone to be able to have that access. >> And also it might enable more faster solution of decentralized applications-- >> Exactly. >> Which, Fred Kruger and I were talking on Twitter, I mean Facebook, about this, that we think that's the killer app, it's going to be the tsunami of apps coming. But all these chain problems are out there, so it's a little bit of a resetting going on in the industry. Obviously you see that with some of the pricing and funding and everything, but for the most part we see a big market coming. So I've got to ask you, the obvious question from there is, which chains are you supporting? You mentioned Mainnet which is great for Ethereum-- >> Yeah today we're supporting Ethereum Mainnet, and Rinkeby, the test net. We also support Aion's Mainnet and test net. We also support Stellar, we're working on EOS and TRON as well, so we have open sourced our data collector to allow community to contribute to that and we'll use Web3 Data Token to incentivize the community to contribute, to verify, to enrich the data. >> So I've got to ask you the security question, maybe this might be for more the nerds and the geeks, delving down in the product level, but maybe you can get it. Security is huge, so I'm skeptical. You're doing scoring, can you be hacked? What's the security answer to that? Like, whoa if she's controlling the score, I might want to spoof the code and take over and say it's okay, ya know? >> The code we get is actually on the chain, it's the code that you put on the chain, so good luck spoofing the data on the blockchain. >> That's the whole point of block chain, that's already answered. That's a dumb question, I got that. I always ask dumb questions. Alright, so what's next for you guys? How big are you guys, what's the story? I've been following you guys on Twitter and Telegram, you've been traveling a lot. What's the update on the company, what's the status? >> So we are, as a launch partner for Web3 Data Foundation, right now there's a token sale, we're in the middle of closing our presale. It's a soft offering, and we're building and expanding the team as we're speaking. >> How much are you raising on the staff, can you talk about that? >> No. >> No? Okay you don't have to say the number. Just be careful, it gets hard to raise too much. So the foundation, and you guys. Okay, I want to ask you a personal question, we love women in blockchain, I wear the "Satoshi is female" shirt as much as I can... How did you get into this? Because there's a lot of women coming into blockchain, more than people are advertising. I'm seeing a lot more women in tech, certainly a lot more women in crypto. Blockchain and crypto, you guys are doing almost a cloud devOPs serious venture here. How did you get into this, what's your story? >> I've always been a cloud girl. I started my career building Yatuzi computing, enterprise grid computing. I was 23 years old and working for Axiom in a data center in Arkansas, and I'm the only one that wears high heel6s in data center, and get stuck in a vent you know? That's my background, so it's not a far stretch to understand blockchain and the usefulness of it if you talk about distribute computing, distribute storage. So it's very natural for me, from a technology perspective, get into this space. On a personal note, I really believe in decentralization, and I believe the change it's going to make to our lives and to our offspring's lives in the future. >> It's real, you think? >> It's real. It's here to stay. >> So what's your vision of blockchain? What are people not getting? Obviously there's a lot of scams out there that have kind of tainted on the ICO side, but what are people missing? When you talk to people, you have kind of like, "Oh I get it" and people kind of of like "I don't really see that" ? What's the main thing that they're missing, what's missing? >> I think it's missing that killer Dapp to get people to realize "Oh it's actually easy to use". I don't have to think about the inner workings, and it just works. My mom still lives in Beijing, I talk to her on Skype all the time, she's not worrying about TCPIP, she's not worrying about, how is this phone call getting encrypted or not encrypted? What's my network bandwidth? She just use the phone and call me, like I'm right next to her. I think as we develop building the apps, people don't think about that they're using blockchain, they just use it. >> It's like explaining it to a parent or someone who's not technical.. "Hey how does the internet work? Can't I just "type a keyword in to the browser or a search engine?" Instead today, it's more like "Hey, you know how BGP works?" and "You know how packets move around?" It's so hard to explain, so it's got to be easier. >> Way easier, yeah. >> Totally agree, totally agree. Well Tongtong, thank you for coming on theCUBE, appreciate it, great update, exclusive news. Automation, bringing cloud computing and utility computing, real geeky stuff to the table here. This is theCUBE Conversation and I'm John Furrier. Amber Data COO, Tongtong Gong here, inside theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (dramatic music)

Live from New York, it's theCUBE. Covering theCUBE, New York City 2018. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media and its ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE live in New York City for our CUBE NYC event, #cubenyc. This is our ninth year covering the big data ecosystem going back to the original Hadoop world, now it's evolved to essentially all things AI, future of AI. Peter Burris is my cohost. He gave a talk two nights ago on the future of AI presented in his research. So it's all about data, it's all about the cloud, it's all about live action here in theCUBE. Our next guest is David Richards, who's been in the industry for a long time, seen the evolution of Hadoop, been involved in it, has been a key enabler of the technology, certainly enabling cloud recovery replication for cloud, welcome back to theCUBE. It's good to see you. >> It's really good to be here. >> I got to say, you've been on theCUBE pretty much every year, I think every year, we've done nine years now. You made some predictions and calls that actually happened. Like five years ago you said the cloud's going to kill Hadoop. Yeah, I think you didn't say that off camera, but it might (laughing) maybe you said it on camera. >> I probably did, yeah. >> [John] But we were kind of pontificating but also speculating, okay, where does this go? You've been right on a lot of calls. You also were involved in the Hadoop distribution business >>back in the day. Oh god. >> You got out of that quickly. (laughing) You saw that early, good call. But you guys have essentially a core enabler that's been just consistently performing well in the market both on the Hadoop side, cloud, and as data becomes the conversation, which has always been your perspective, you guys have had a key in part of the infrastructure for a long time. What's going on? Is it still doing deals, what's? >> Yes, I mean, the history of WANdisco's play and big data in Hadoop has been, as you know because you've been with us for a long time, kind of an interesting one. So we back in sort of 2013, 2014, 2015 we built a Hadoop-specific product called Non-Stop NameNode and we had a Hadoop distribution. But we could see this transition, this change in the market happening. And the change wasn't driven necessarily by the advent of new technology. It was driven by overcomplexity associated with deploying, managing Hadoop clusters at scale because lots of people, and we were talking about this off-camera before, can deploy Hadoop in a fairly small way, but not many companies are equipped or built to deploy massive scale Hadoop distributions. >> Sustain it. >> They can't sustain it, and so the call that I made you know, actions speak louder than words. The company rebuilt the product, built a general purpose data replication platform called WANdisco Fusion that, yes, supported Hadoop but also supported object store and cloud technologies. And we're now seeing use cases in cloud certainly begin to overtake Hadoop for us for the first time. >> And you guys have a patent that's pretty critical in all this, right? >> Yeah. So there's some real IP. >> Yes, so people often make the mistake of calling us a data replication business, which we are, but data replication happens post-consensus or post-agreement, so the very heart of WANdisco of 35 patents are all based around a Paxos-based consensus algorithm, which wasn't a very cool thing to talk about now with the advent of blockchain and decentralized computing, consensus is at the core of pretty much that movement, so what WANdisco does is a consensus algorithm that enables things like hybrid cloud, multi cloud, poly cloud as Microsoft call it, as well as disaster recovery for Hadoop and other things. >> Yeah, as you have more disparate parts working together, say multi cloud, I mean, you're really perfectly positioned for multi cloud. I mean, hybrid cloud is hybrid cloud, but also multi cloud, they're two different things. Peter has been on the record describing the difference between hybrid cloud and multi cloud, but multi cloud is essentially connecting clouds. >> We're on a mission at the moment to define what those things actually are because I can tell you what it isn't. A multi cloud strategy doesn't mean you have disparate data and processes running in two different clouds that just means that you've got two different clouds. That's not a multi cloud strategy. >> [Peter] Two cloud silos. >> Yeah, correct. That's kind of creating problems that are really going to be bad further down the road. And hybrid cloud doesn't mean that you run some operations and processes and data on premise and a different siloed approach to cloud. What this means is that you have a data layer that's clustered and stretched, the same data that's stretched across different clouds, different on-premise systems, whether it's Hadoop on-premise and maybe I want to build a huge data lake in cloud and start running complex AI and analytics processes over there because I'm, less face it, banks et cetera ain't going to be able to manage and run AI themselves. It's already being done by Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Alibaba, and others in the cloud. So the ability to run this simultaneously in different locations is really important. That's what we do. >> [John] All right, let me just ask this directly since we're filming and we'll get a clip out of this. What is the definition of hybrid cloud? And what is the definition of multi cloud? Take, explain both of those. >> The ability to manage and run the same data set against different applications simultaneously. And achieve exactly the same result. >> [John] That's hybrid cloud or multi cloud? >> Both. >> So they're the same. >> The same. >> You consider hybrid cloud multi cloud the same? >> For us it's just a different end point. It's hybrid kind of mean that you're running something implies on-premise. A multi cloud or poly cloud implies that you're running between different cloud venues. >> So hybrid is location, multi is source. >> Correct. >> So but let's-- >> [David] That's a good definition. >> Yes, but let's unpack this a little bit because at the end of the day, what a business is going to want to do is they're going to want to be able to run apply their data to the best service. >> [David] Correct. >> And increasingly that's what we're advising our clients to think about. >> [David] Yeah. >> Don't think about being an AWS customer, per se, think about being a customer of AWS services that serve your business. Or IBM services that serve your business. But you want to ensure that your dependency on that service is not absolute, and that's why you want to be able to at least have the option of being able to run your data in all of these different places. >> And I think the market now realizes that there is not going to be a single, dominant vendor for cloud infrastructure. That's not going to happen. Yes, it happened, Oracle dominated in relational data. SAP dominated for ERP systems. For cloud, it's democratized. That's not going to happen. So everybody knows that Amazon probably have the best serverless compute lambda functions available. They've got millions of those things already written or in the process of being written. Everybody knows that Microsoft are going to extend the wonderful technology that they have on desktop and move that into cloud for analytics-based technologies and so on. The Google have been working on artificial intelligence for an elongated period of time, so vendors are going to arbitrage between different cloud vendors. They're going to choose the best of brood approach. >> [John] They're going to go to Google for AI and scale, they're going to go to Amazon for robustness of services, and they're going to go to Microsoft for the Suite. >> [Peter] They're going to go for the services. They're looking at the services, that's what they need to do. >> And the thing that we'll forget, that we don't at WANdisco, is that that requires guaranteed consistent data sets underneath the whole thing. >> So where does Fusion fit in here? How is that getting traction? Give us some update. Are you working with Microsoft? I know we've been talking about Amazon, what about Microsoft? >> So we've been working with Microsoft, we announced a strategic partnership with them in March where we became a tier zero vendor, which basically means that we're partnered with them in lockstep in the field. We executed extremely well since that point and we've done a number of fairly large, high-profile deals. A retailer, for example, that was based in Amazon didn't really like being based in Amazon so had to build a poly cloud implementation to move had to buy scale data from AWS into Azure, that went seamlessly. It was an overnight success. >> [John] And they're using your technology? >> They're using our technology. There's no other way to do that. I think the world has now, what Microsoft and others have realized, CDC technology changed data capture. Doesn't work at this kind of scale where you batch up a bunch of changes and then you ship them, block shipping or whatever, every 15 minutes or so. We're talking about petabyte scale ingest processes. We're talking about huge data lakes, that that technology simply doesn't work at this kind of scale. >> [John] We've got a couple minutes left, I want to just make sure we get your views on blockchain, you mentioned consensus, I want to get your thoughts on that because we're seeing blockchain is certainly experimental, it's got, it's certainly powering money, Bitcoin and the international markets, it's certainly becoming a money backbone for countries to move billions of dollars out. It's certainly in the tank right now about 600 million below its mark in January, but blockchain is fundamentally supply chain, you're seeing consensus, you're seeing some of these things that are in your realm, what's your view? >> So first of all, at WANdisco, we separate the notion of cryptocurrency and blockchain. We see blockchain as something that's been around for a long time. It's basically the world is moving to decentralization. We're seeing this with airlines, with supermarkets, and so on. People actually want to decentralize rather that centralize now. And the same thing is going to happen in the financial industry where we don't actually need a central transaction coordinator anymore, we don't need a clearinghouse, in other words. Now, how do you do that? At the very heart of blockchain is an incorrect assumption. So must people think that Satoshi's invention, whoever that may be, was based around the blockchain itself. Blockchain is pieced together technologies that doesn't actually scale, right? So it takes game-theoretic approach to consensus. And I won't get, we don't have enough time for me to delve into exactly what that means, but our consensus algorithm has already proven to scale, right? So what does that mean? Well, it means that if you want to go and buy a cup of coffee at the Starbucks next door, and you want to use a Bitcoin, you're going to be waiting maybe half an hour for that transaction to settle, right? Because the-- >> [John] The buyer's got to create a block, you know, all that step's in one. >> The game-theoretic approach basically-- >> Bitcoin's running 500,000 transactions a day. >> Yeah. That's eight. >> There's two transactions per second, right? Between two and eight transactions per second. We've already proven that we can achieve hundreds of thousands, potentially millions of agreements per second. Now the argument against using Paxos, which is what our technology's based on, is it's too complicated. Well, no shit, of course it's too complicated. We've solved that problem. That's what WANdisco does. So we've filed a patent >> So you've abstracted the complexity, that's your job. >> We've extracted the complexity. >> So you solve the complexity problem by being a complex solution, but you're making and abstracting it even easier. >> We have an algorithmic not a game-theoretic approach. >> Solving the scale problem Correct. >> Using Paxos in a way that allows real developers to be able to build consensus algorithm-based applications. >> Yes, and 90% of blockchain is consensus. We've solved the consensus problem. We'll be launching a product based around Hyperledger very soon, we're already in tests and we're already showing tens of thousands of transactions per second. Not two, not 2,000, two transactions. >> [Peter] The game theory side of it is still going to be important because when we start talking about machines and humans working together, programs don't require incentives. Human beings do, and so there will be very, very important applications for this stuff. But you're right, from the standpoint of the machine-to-machine when there is no need for incentive, you just want consensus, you want scale. >> Yeah and there are two approaches to this world of blockchains. There's public, which is where the Bitcoin guys are and the anarchists who firmly believe that there should be no oversight or control, then there's the real world which is permission blockchains, and permission blockchains is where the banks, where the regulators, where NASDAQ will be when we're trading shares in the future. That will be a permission blockchain that will be overseen by a regulator like the SEC, NASDAQ, or London Stock Exchange, et cetera. >> David, always great to chat with you. Thanks for coming on, again, always on the cutting edge, always having a great vision while knocking down some good technology and moving your IP on the right waves every time, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Always on the next wave, David Richards here inside theCUBE. Every year, doesn't disappoint, theCUBE bringing you all the action here. Cube NYC, we'll be back with more coverage. Stay with us; a lot more action for the rest of the day. We'll be right back; stay with us for more after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Toronto, Canada, it's theCUBE! Covering Blockchain Futurist Conference 2018. Brought to you by theCUBE! >> Hey, welcome back, everyone, we're live here in Toronto for the Blockchain Futurist Conference put on by Untraceable, Tracy and her team doing a fantastic job, so shout out to the team at Untraceable for another great event. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, my cohost's Dave Vellante, and we're here with CUBE's friend, CUBE alumni, from the CryptoChicks, Nataliya Hearn, director, good to see you, great to have you back. >> Thank you. (laughs) >> Okay, good to see you, we're laughing, we've got some great funny stories we've been telling, since PolyCon, but really, some great things going on, so give us the update, you had a hackathon recently, you got new things happening here in your organization, take a quick minute to explain what it is for the folks that don't know, what do you guys do, and what's going on? >> Good, well, CryptoChicks is a organization focused on educating women in blockchain and cryptospace. We started because at meetups there would be one or two women out of hundreds of men, who would be afraid to ask stupid questions, so we said, Oh, okay, there's no stupid questions, come and join us, and we'll show you how to open a wallet, what blockchain is all about, so we've been doing that. We've actually grew quite a bit, we are now have chapters in all over the world, in Pakistan, in Bahamas, in Moscow, we just teamed up with She Codes in Israel, which is 50,000 women, so, we're doing really well. >> Congratulations, a great mission, we totally support it, and, you know, I'm proud to say that I love my shirt that says, Satoshi is Female, thanks to Nyla Rodgers, who gave it to me, at Consensus in Blockchain Week in New York, but this is really beyond women in tech, it's beyond that, it's a really, you're doing some innovative things around onboarding, new talent and education, this is a really important, because the Internet is bounded on discovery, learning. >> Absolutely. >> What's the new thing? >> Well, you know when you hear, when you go to the blockchain conference and events, and we hear again and again about the chasm. How do we bridge the chasm, right? That's just the, like, big word that you hear like every third presentation, because the blockchain community needs it. But I think globally, blockchain represents something that's quite unique, and it's an opportunity not just to make money and speculate, or to develop new technology, it's technology that can liberate. But how do we get that message across? And I think we have to start with kids. Kids are our future, but they're also the ones who spend most of their time on social media, so that's a good thing, but if you ask their parents, that's not such a good thing necessarily. So how do we convert them, some of their time from social media to learning? So we've put, we're putting together this program that focuses on children to earn to learn. >> Earn to learn, like they earn coins or money, or? >> That's right, basically they can earn swag, so basically we're creating the marketplace that rewards children for learning. >> All kids, right? >> All kids, well we're focusing on -- >> On girls. >> No, not on girls, we're going to high schools, so immediate next generation. >> So girls, boys, everybody's welcome? >> Absolutely. Yep. >> Awesome. >> Next generation, and they're the next generation that has to solve the problems that we, and opportunities that can be captured, that's coming right to their front door. >> Absolutely, we have a lot of question marks in the blockchain community. Which blockchain, how do we do it, there is going to be multi-chain tokens, we're talking about, next generation is the one who's going to provide solutions for us. So we got to open their minds, and to show that blockchain is a tool like potentially calculus is a tool. To create something that hasn't been there before. >> You know, I have a lot of conversations in Silicon Valley and Nataliya, recently at the Google Cloud event, Google's been very much a great change agent, especially with women in tech and underrepresented minorities, but Aparna Sinha, who's one of the senior people there, dual degrees from Stanford, she's got a PhD, she said we're losing the girls early, and what came out of it was a conversation that, when you have these new market movements like blockchain, AI, these are new skills that you can level up, so the ability to come from behind and level up is an opportunity for people who have traditionally been behind, whether it's women or other minorities, to level up. So it's a huge opportunity now to put the naysayers down to rest, and saying, Screw you, we're going to level up and learn. >> Absolutely, and it's global, the thing is -- >> There's nothing stopping anyone from learning. >> Absolutely, and trust, and the borderless system that blockchain potentially can provide is at a global advantage. As long as you have a cell phone, you can be in a village, an old village, like at our last hackathon, we actually were streaming women hackers from Zimbabwe. So there you go, it's doable. >> So how are you, how are you scaling your message globally? >> So we're starting, one thing is that education today, is basically the bill is being paid either by the government or by parents. The reason I would call that a marketplace, I would like companies to be involved. And it could be local companies, or it could be global. What about creating ARVR classrooms, and providing the information to kids, via a completely new way that they would actually move away from swiping or just looking on some random YouTube videos, to something that they can get a phone, some shoes, mascara, focusing on girls, right? And to understand what that borderless economy really means by experiencing, what does it mean to have tokens that you can trade globally? You are used to your parents giving you some dollars, you go to a corner store. What about if you learn something, you go to a bakery, in Kenya, and for the work that you've done, you get a bun, right, or a meal? >> So this democratizing access, it's bringing education to the masses? >> And it's also uniting the blockchain community, 'cause we would be building this governance platform on blockchain, we would tokenize it, and there will be many elements of it, reward programs, smart contracts that reward content, some level of AI in terms of analysis of what we're doing, so I think this is why I was looking at multi-chain tokens. Maybe that would be a solution to kind of, to deal with -- >> Explain that, what does that mean? >> Well, we've got different chains right now, right? You've got Hyperledger, you've got Ethereum, and all this good stuff. How do you bridge all this, right, instead of having to choose one, you're now saying, I can work in all of them, because each one potentially can offer something unique. Maybe you don't have to choose one. We don't know. Only time will tell, as this, this is such a young industry, and this is why it's so exciting. >> Well, Nataliya -- >> It -- >> Oh, go ahead. >> No, I was going to say, and you're giving the kids examples, so a lot of times kids ask me, Well, what's the difference between crypto and Venmo? I'm like, okay, you know, let's talk about the different things you can do with crypto that you can't do, but they're closer than the older generations are to transferring, you know, money, at least, so now you're applying different use cases and expanding their minds in ways that, perhaps -- >> Absolutely, and I'll give you my example. I mean, I got into blockchain early before Ethereum was launched, and partly I was into public markets, and then I kind of stopped because that project ended, or I stopped and I actually reentered it, because my fifteen-year-old who started mining. But he started mining because I was in that field already, so there you go, it kind of, you know, what comes around. >> Good job. I hope he gets all his Bitcoin. >> Yeah, he did. (laughs) >> So, I want you to tell a story, of what you've seen that's been high impact from your work you've done. You had, again, that whole Pakistan thing going on, you've got all these hackathons, what is a good story you could share? >> You know, the good story we can share, I think the part that we were able to do, the hackathons that we are doing are local, but they're also global, it really is, there's this sense of empowerment, and you know what I think the best story, this is the best story: best story was, at the hackathon that we ran, it was women, over 100 women, that participated. But all our mentors were young, geeky programming guys. Sorry guys. But you really knew they really knew their stuff, so there was technology transfer, and we had a 48 hour hackathon, these guys stayed 48 hours, they didn't go to sleep, they didn't have to as mentors, and there was this amazing technology transfer that happened, and I think some relationships were formed too. >> Yeah, some serious bonding went on, right? >> Yeah, absolutely. >> It's actually a good thing that you're including people. It's not just a certain thing, you got this inclusion. >> Absolutely, and actually all it is is about inclusion, all it is is we are giving a platform for women not to be afraid, I mean, I'm an engineer, so I've been working with men all my life, so for me to ask difficult questions, or stupid questions, it's like natural now, because it's been what my life, but for women, for many, it isn't. So we just wanted to kind of cross that divide, it's not a chasm, it's just a little divide that we're bridged. >> So when you say stupid questions, do you mean like, Why do you do it that way? (laughs) Why don't you do it this way? >> Or, what's a wallet? Like, what's a private key? What's a public key? And asking that not once, but twenty times until you got it. That's okay too. >> That's called learning. >> Yeah. >> Last question, okay I got to ask you, the most important question is, how do someone get a CryptoChicks shirt? >> I think you can order it on our website, sizes are a problem, I know we've discussed this, so we need to -- >> Extra-large. >> Well, CryptoChicks is a not-for-profit organization so there are, we'll have to order this in bunches, so I'll figure this out, but what I wanted to say is that we have another hackathon that's coming up. And the hackathon is in New York, October 5th to 8th, and we have three streams, so if you're a developer, and this is for women, so if you're a developer, we have a stream. If you're not a developer, or you've never coded in your life, but you have a business mind, and you think you have a really good idea that you can put on blockchain, you're welcome to join as well, and now with all the news and regulations, we also have a regulatory stream. >> So for entrepreneurs and for business-minded people, that want to get involved, that they can come too? >> Absolutely. >> Okay, and their website is cryptochicks.ca, that's where you can get access to the information, that's great. >> October 5th to 8th, you said, right? >> That's right. >> And anybody can go? >> Anybody can register. >> And where in New York? >> It's going to be at University of New York, and at their School of Law. >> Great. >> Blockchain Educational Fun Hub. That's what it says on the website, love your website. Looking forward to getting some shirts, and putting it out there, and promoting your mission. Great job, good to see you again. >> You guys are awesome. Thank you so much. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, Nataliya. >> Thank you. >> This is crypto for good, a lot of education, and this opportunity, and our role is to share that, as a community, and I think this is a great example of the kind of community that crypto is. Education people can level up and move fast through and get proficiency, and change their lives. This is what this is all about, glad to bring us this CUBE coverage live, stay with us! Day One continues, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, we'll be right back from Toronto Blockchain Futurist Summit. Thank you. (techno music)

>> Live from Toronto Canada, it's The Cube, covering Global Cloud and Blockchain Summit 2018, brought to you by The Cube. >> Hello, everyone welcome back to The Cube's live coverage here in Toronto for the first Global Cloud and Blockchain Summit in conjunction with the Blockchain futurist happening this week it's run. I'm John Fourier, my cohost Dave Vellante, we're here with Cube alumni, Bradley Rotter, pioneer Blockchain investor, seasoned pro was there in the early days as an investor in hedge funds, continuing to understand the impacts of cryptocurrency, and its impact for investors, and long on many of the crypto. Made some great predictions on The Cube last time at Polycon in the Bahamas. Bradley, great to see you, welcome back. >> Thank you, good to see both of you. >> Good to have you back. >> So I want to just get this out there because you have an interesting background, you're in the cutting edge, on the front lines, but you also have a history. You were early before the hedge fund craze, as a pioneer than. >> Yeah. >> Talk about that and than how it connects to today, and see if you see some similarities, talk about that. >> I actually had begun trading commodity futures contracts when I was 15. I grew up on a farm in Iowa, which is a small state in the Midwest. >> I've heard of it. >> And I was in charge of >> Was it a test market? (laughing) >> I was in charge of hedging our one corn contract so I learned learned the mechanisms of the market. It was great experience. I traded commodities all the way through college. I got to go to West Point as undergrad. And I raced back to Chicago as soon as I could to go to the University of Chicago because that's where commodities were trading. So I'd go to night school at night at the University of Chicago and listen to Nobel laureates talk about the official market theory and during the day I was trading on the floor of the the Chicago Board of Trade and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Grown men yelling, kicking, screaming, shoving and spitting, it was fabulous. (laughing) >> Sounds like Blockchain today. (laughing) >> So is that what the dynamic is, obviously we've seen the revolution, certainly of capital formation, capital deployment, efficiency, liquidity all those things are happening, how does that connect today? What's your vision of today's market? Obviously lost thirty billion dollars in value over the past 24 hours as of today and we've taken a little bit of a haircut, significant haircut, since you came on The Cube, and you actually were first to predict around February, was a February? >> February, yeah. >> You kind of called the market at that time, so props to that, >> Yup. >> Hope you're on the right >> Thank you. >> side of those shorts >> Thank you. >> But what's going on? What is happening in the capital markets, liquidity, why are the prices dropping? What's the shift? So just a recap, at the time in February, you said look I'm on short term bear, on Bitcoin, and may be other crypto because all the money that's been made. the people who made it didn't think they had to pay taxes. And now they're realizing, and you were right on. You said up and up through sort of tax season it's going to be soft and then it's going to come back and it's exactly what happened. Now it's flipped again, so your thoughts? >> So my epiphany was I woke up in the middle of the night and said oh my God, I've been to this rodeo before. I was trading utility tokens twenty years ago when they were called something else, IRUs, do you remember that term? IRU was the indefeasible right to use a strand of fiber, and as the internet started kicking off people were crazy about laying bandwidth. Firms like Global Crossing we're laying cable all over the ocean floors and they laid too much cable and the cable became dark, the fiber became dark, and firms like Global Crossing, Enron, Enron went under really as a result of that miss allocation. And so it occurred to me these utility tokens now are very similar in characteristic except to produce a utility token you don't have to rent a boat and lay cable on the ocean floor in order to produce one of these utility tokens, that everybody's buying, I mean it takes literally minutes to produce a token. So in a nutshell it's too many damn tokens. It was like the peak of the internet, which we were all involved in. It occurred to me then in January of 2000 the market was demanding internet shares and the market was really good at producing internet shares, too many of them, and it went down. So I think we're in a similar situation with cryptocurrency, the Wall Street did come in, there were a hundred plus hedge funds of all shapes and sizes scrambling and buying crypto in the fall of last year. It's kind of like Napoleon's reason for attacking Russia, seemed like a good idea at the time. (laughing) And so we're now in a corrective phase but literally there's been too many tokens. There are so many tokens that we as humans can't even deal with that. >> And the outlook, what's the outlook for you? I mean, I'll see there's some systemic things going to be flushed out, but you long on certain areas? What do you what do you see as a bright light at the end of the tunnel or sort right in front of you? What's happening from a market that you're excited about? >> At a macro scale I think it's apparent that the internet deserves its own currency, of course it does and there will be an internet currency. The trick is which currency shall that be? Bitcoin was was a brilliant construct, the the inventor of Bitcoin should get a Nobel Prize, and I hope she does. (laughing) >> 'Cause Satoshi is female, everyone knows that. (laughing) >> I got that from you actually. (laughing) But it may not be Bitcoin and that's why we have to be a little sanguine here. You know, people got a little bit too optimistic, Bitcoin's going to a hundred grand, no it's going to five hundred grand. I mean, those are all red flags based on my experience of trading on the floor and investing in hedge funds. Bitcoin, I think I'm disappointed in Bitcoins adoption, you know it's still very difficult to use Bitcoin and I was hoping by now that that would be a different scenario but it really isn't. Very few people use Bitcoin in their daily lives. I do, I've been paying my son his allowance for years in Bitcoin. Son of a bitch is rich now. (laughing) >> Damn, so on terms of like the long game, you seeing the developers adopted a theory and that was classic, you know the decentralized applications. We're here at a Cloud Blockchain kind of convergence conference where developers mattered on the Cloud. You saw a great developer, stakeholders with Amazon, Cloud native, certainly there's a lot of developers trying to make things easier, faster, smarter, with crypto. >> Yup. >> So, but all at the same time it's hard for developers. Hearing things like EOS coming on, trying to get developers. So there's a race for developer adoption, this is a major factor in some of the success and price drops too. Your thoughts on, you know the impact, has that changed anything? I mean, the Ethereum at the lowest it's been all year. >> Yup. Yeah well, that was that was fairly predictable and I've talked about that at number of talks I've given. There's only one thing that all of these ICOs have had in common, they're long Ethereum. They own Ethereum, and many of those projects, even out the the few ICO projects that I've selectively been advising I begged them to do once they raised their money in Ethereum is to convert it into cash. I said you're not in the Ethereum business, you're in whatever business that you're in. Many of them ported on to that stake, again caught up in the excitement about the the potential price appreciation but they lost track of what business they were really in. They were speculating in Ethereum. Yeah, I said they might as well been speculating in Apple stock. >> They could have done better then Ethereum. >> Much better. >> Too much supply, too many damn tokens, and they're easy to make. That's the issue. >> Yeah. >> And you've got lots of people making them. When one of the first guys I met in this space was Vitalik Buterin, he was 18 at the time and I remember meeting him I thought, this is one of the smartest guys I've ever met. It was a really fun meeting. I remember when the meeting ended and I walked away I was about 35 feet away and he LinkedIn with me. Which I thought was cute. >> That's awesome, talk about what you're investing-- >> But, now there's probably a thousand Vitalik Buterin's in the space. Many of them are at this conference. >> And a lot of people have plans. >> Super smart, great ideas, and boom, token. >> And they're producing new tokens. They're all better improved, they're borrowing the best attributes of each but we've got too many damn tokens. It's hard for us humans to be able to keep track of that. It's almost like requiring a complicated new browser download for every website you went to. We just can't do that. >> Is the analog, you remember the dot com days, you referred to it earlier, there was quality, and the quality lasted, sustained, you know, the Amazon's, the eBay's, the PayPal's, etc, are there analogs in this market, in your view, can you sniff out the sort of quality? >> There are definitely analogs, I think, but I think one of the greatest metrics that we can we can look at is that utility token being utilized? Not many of them are being utilized. I was giving a talk last month, 350 people in the audience, and I said show of hands, how many people have used a utility token this year? One hand went up. I go, Ethereum? Ethereum. Will we be using utility tokens in the future? Of course we will but it's going to have to get a whole lot easier for us humans to be able to deal with them, and understand them, and not lose them, that's the big issue. This is just as much a cybersecurity play as it is a digital currency play. >> Elaborate on that, that thought, why is more cyber security playing? >> Well, I've had an extensive background in cyber security as an investor, my mantra since 9/11 has been to invest in catalyze companies that impact the security of the homeland. A wide variety of security plays but primarily, cyber security. It occurred to me that the most valuable data in the world used to be in the Pentagon. That's no longer the case. Two reasons basically, one, the data has already been stolen. (laughing) Not funny. Two, if you steal the plans for the next generation F39 Joint Strike Force fighter, good for you, there's only two buyers. (laughing) The most valuable data in the world today, as we sit here, is a Bitcoin private key, and they're coming for them. Prominent Bitcoin holders are being hunted, kidnapped, extorted, I mean it's a rather extraordinary thing. So the cybersecurity aspect of if all of our assets are going to be digitized you better damn well keep those keys secure and so that's why I've been focused on the cybersecurity aspect. Rivets, one of the ICOs that I invested in is developing software that turns on the power of the hardware TPM, trusted execution environment, that's already on your phone. It's a place to hold keys in hardware. So that becomes fundamentally important in holding your keys. >> I mean certainly we heard stories about kidnapping that private key, I mean still how do you protect that? That's a good question, that's a really interesting question. Is it like consensus, do you have multiple people involved, do you get beaten up until you hand over your private key? >> It's been happening. It's been happening. >> What about the security token versus utility tokens? A lot of tokens now, so there's yeah, too many tokens on the utility side, but now there's a surge towards security tokens, and Greg Bettinger wrote this morning that the market has changed over and the investor side's looking more and more like traditional in structures and companies, raising money. So security token has been a, I think relief for some people in the US for sure around investing in structures they understand. Is that a real dynamic or is that going to sustain itself? How do you see security tokens? >> And we heard in the panel this morning, you were in there, where they were predicting the future of the valuation of the security tokens by the end of the year doubling, tripling, what ever it was, but what are your thoughts? >> I think security tokens are going to be the next big thing, they have so many advantages to what we now regard as share certificates. My most exciting project is that I'm heavily involved in is a project called the Entanglement Institute. That's going to, in the process of issuing security infrastructure tokens, so our idea is a public-private partnership with the US government to build the first mega quantum computing center in Newport, Rhode Island. Now the private part of the public-private partnership by the issuance of tokens you have tremendous advantages to the way securities are issued now, transparency, liquidity. Infrastructure investments are not very liquid, and if they were made more liquid more people would buy them. It occurred to me it would have been a really good idea if grandpa would have invested in the Hoover Dam. Didn't have the chance. We think that there's a substantial demand of US citizens that would love to invest in our own country and would do so if it were more liquid, if it was more transparent, if the costs were less of issuing those tokens. >> More efficient, yeah. >> So you see that as a potential way to fund public infrastructure build-outs? >> It will be helpful if infrastructure is financed in the future. >> How do you see the structure on the streets, this comes up all the time, there's different answers to this. There's not like there's one, we've seen multiple but I'm putting a security token, what am i securing against, cash flow, equity, right to convert to utility tokens? So we're starting to see a variety of mechanisms, 'cause you have to investor a security outcome. >> Yeah, so as an investor, what do you look for? >> Well, I think it's almost limitless of what these smart securities, you know can be capable of, for example one of the things that were that we're talking with various parts of the government is thinking about the tax credit. The tax credit that have been talked about at the Trump administration, that could be really changed on its head if you were able to use smart securities, if you will. Who says that the tax credit for a certain project has to be the same as all other projects? The president has promised a 1.5 trillion dollar infrastructure investment program and so far he's only 1.5 trillion away from the goal. It hasn't started yet. Wilbur Ross when, in the transition team, I had seen the white paper that he had written, was suggesting an 82% tax credit for infrastructure investment. I'm going 82%, oh my God, I've never. It's an unfathomable number. If it were 82% it would be the strongest fiscal stimulus of your lifetime and it's a crazy number, it's too big. And then I started thinking about it, maybe an 82% tax credit is warranted for a critical infrastructure as important as quantum computing or cyber security. >> Cyber security. >> Exactly, very good point, and maybe the tax credit is 15% for another bridge over the Mississippi River. We already got those. So a smart infrastructure token would allow the Larry Kudlow to turn the dial and allow economic incentive to differ based on the importance of the project. >> The value of the project. >> That is a big idea. >> That is a big idea. >> That is what we're working on. >> That is a big idea, that is a smart contract, smart securities that have allocations, and efficiencies, and incentives that aren't perverse or generic. >> It aligns with the value of the society he needs, right. Talk about quantum computing more, the potential, why quantum, what attracted you to quantum? What do you see as the future of quantum computing? >> You know, you don't you don't have to own very much Bitcoin before what wakes you up in the middle of the night is quantum computing. It's a hundred million times faster than computing as we know it today. The reason that I'm involved in this project, I believe it's a matter of national security that we form a national initiative to gain quantum supremacy, or I call it data supremacy. And right now we're lagging, the Chinese have focused on this acutely and are actually ahead, I believe of the United States. And it's going to take a national initiative, it's going to take a Manhattan Project, and that's that's really what Entanglement Institute is, is a current day Manhattan Project partnering with government and three-letter agencies, private industry, we have to hunt as a pack and focus on this or we're going to be left behind. >> And that's where that's based out of. >> Newport, Rhode Island. >> And so you got some DC presence in there too? >> Yes lots of DC presence, this is being called Quantum summer in Washington DC. Many are crediting the Entanglement Institute for that because they've been up and down the halls of Congress and DOD and other-- >> Love to introduce you to Bob Picciano, Cube alumni who heads up quantum computing for IBM, would be a great connection. They're doing trying to work their, great chips to building, open that up. Bradley thanks for coming on and sharing your perspective. Always great to see you, impeccable vision, you've got a great vision. I love the big ideas, smart securities, it's coming, that is, I think very clear. >> Thank you for sharing. >> Thank you. The Cube coverage here live in Toronto. The Cube, I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, more live coverage, day one of three days of wall-to-wall coverage of the Blockchain futurist conference. This is the first global Cloud Blockchain Summit here kicking off the whole week. Stay with us for more after this short break.

(bright orchestral music) >> I'm Peter Burris and welcome to another Cube Conversation from our beautiful studios here in Palo Alto, California. Not a great show today. First off, being joined by my colleague at SiliconANGLE Wikibon, Dave Vellante. >> Peter >> But the real star of the show, Nick Curcuru with MasterCard. Welcome to The Cube Nick. >> Thanks for having me. >> So Nick, MasterCard, 165 million transactions an hour. A financial juggernaut. Blockchain, interesting technology, a lot of applications. How are they going to come together? >> Well, the biggest thing that we look at when we look at those two technologies: our world which is the network and you look at blockchain, is they're the challenge. And I think we have the opportunity to actually meet the challenge and those challenges are speed, transparency of the transaction itself, and actually even trying to reduce the cost of those transactions, especially when you talk cross border. You know when you're going from country to country right now blockchain has a big cost in order to let that happen. The other component is that transparency. I need to know who I am dealing with on the other side and create an auditable trail to understand how that transaction is going through, and again this is something that we do within our core business and again, we're trying to make that meet and then work on the speed. Again, one of the things we pride ourselves are on that 165 million transactions per hour, making it a smooth flow, making it seamless, making it frictionless, that we can do. So again, can we do the same now with blockchain. You know, and for us, we're experimenting now with our B2B, but we hopefully will be able to move that right into individuals as well, to the consumer level. >> So, we're a decade into when Satoshi, whoever he or she was created Bitcoin. >> Or them. >> Or them and yeah, was it the Russians? People are asking that question, so who knows? But, of course a lot of people have been facing negative comments in the press, et cetera. What was your motivation for exploring blockchain, starting to experiment with it? Take us through that if you would. >> Well you know part of what we started to see is that it started to gain traction. That was the biggest thing, and as you start to take a look at more and more people that started to use that technology, it's one of those items that in the beginning we're like okay it's nice it's a hobby right as it started to come out. But as you started to see some more heavyweights come into the place to use it and actually utilize what that technology can provide, we're like, there is something here. Again, MasterCard, our CEO has been very good to say, we need to always be thinking outside of our core. What else do we have to be able to include to allow our MasterCard stakeholders, our banks, our issuers, and everyone, the opportunities that we can continuously expand. So our CEO has been really good about that. And when blockchain started to gain some momentum, he goes, we need to actually take a look, so our guys in the labs, our smart people that sit there in O'Fallon and New York City started to explore how do we take what we know, apply it here to help with that particular way a transaction is being done, and then, can we really allow ourselves and blockchain to grow? So, that's pretty much where we started. Again, it was a little hobby, we started to see it pick up momentum, and about three years ago we were like, there is something here. We need to actually begin to think about how we can interact with this form of payment. >> So what are you actually doing? Are you experimenting, kicking the tires, trying to figure out the use cases? >> That's actually everything that we're doing. Right now, we've actually got a few patents that have just come out, which is very good for what we are trying to accomplish. Right now, we're in the B2B space because that's what we're watching mostly is being used right now is in that business to business space. So we're out there piloting. We actually have set up a whole bunch of APIs to allow people to actually put the blockchain inside, whether it's a mobile device that you want to use, or within the Internet of things. So we have developed a set of APIs that we have got out there that we are allowing our different people within B2B to use, to experiment, to start to say, hey give us feedback on how are they operating. Is it seamless, is it frictionless, are we reducing that operational time, making it efficient, reducing those costs. So that's what we're beginning to roll out. And again, our goal is, if we can do it in B2B, how do we finally get it to the consumer? Because again, that's going to be a big part of what people are going to want to do, to be able to do those transactions amongst themselves. >> When you think about things like AML and Know Your Customer KYC, do you see blockchain as having a role there or does it sort of accentuate your need to understand different ways to know your customer and fight money laundering. >> Well that's actually a big part of it. That's the whole thing we talk about being able to authorization and authentication. So there is a big thing, again, when you deal with blockchain, people, you got the wire in transit right? And there are people trying to skim off that, trying to find a way to get into your bank account, basically, because that's really what you're exposing because you're making a payment. So the question for us is okay, again, that's a core competency of ours is data in motion and securing the transaction while it's in motion before that. So for us, when you start to take a look at the way we can do the authorization and authentication becomes a big deal. And our core competency is to do that, to make sure that you can't have anti-money laundering, to make sure that you can't have fraud existing because we can verify it's you who is transacting with Dave, that you are the two people transacting, just like we do with a card, right? And when you do the pin, chip, we know it's you. Even with our new products like new data with biometrics, we know it's you. We can validate and verify and authenticate it's you. That's where we think we can provide tremendous value with the blockchain. >> So blockchain is kind of a hot new technology, but there's got to be more than just the fact that it's a hot new technology. Give us some examples of some use cases that you're envisioning that will be made possible and will be sustained with the blockchain approach. >> A lot of it is actually, if you take a look at the supply chain, the ability to make sure that when I need goods and services, not only, I don't have to wait for it. I think actually one of the best stories that we heard when it came down to the blockchain is how, actually the Defense Department has used it. So for example, if you can imagine, on an aircraft carrier, there's a plane that went down, right? That needed a part. Or I think it was a helicopter, sorry. And it needed a part. Well the question was it's in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. So how do you get the part there? Well if you go through the normal channels, to get that helicopter up and running, it's going to take you two to three months to get it there. But using blockchain, because it's anonymous and you have some privacy within it, being able to say, can you send me the specs? This particular ship had a metal 3D printer on it. So not only were they able to send the specs via blockchain in an anonymous manner so no one else could pick it up, they could actually put it on the ship. They could actually create the part, and what's really kind of cool is they actually put a flaw. They put a scratch across the part itself so that you knew the guys who sent it are the guys that you are getting it from and no one else picked it up along the way. So that's one way to be able to do it, to actually create the parts that you need when you need them in a secure manner. The other part, if you believe it or not, I was just at a sports conference, and the other thing was is can I actually use blockchain to transfer my tickets? So you're in Palo Alton. I got 9ers tickets. I'm a season ticket holder, and what I want to be able to do is send you my tickets, but you need to know it's me who has the tickets, not a fraudster, right, that's going up there saying I got two tickets for sale or whatever it may be. So I can use blockchain in an anonymous transaction You send me the funds, you know it's me, and I can send you the tickets because I am a verified, valid ticket holder. So there is another case where it is consumer to consumer. >> But coming back to the B2B examples, there are a lot of circumstances when a business realizes that entering into a transaction is signaling an enormous amount of information other than just the part that they're getting or the business activity that they're performing, and so it has the potential to be a great technology to dramatically focus the characteristics of the transaction just on the transaction and keep all the other signaling that might otherwise be picked up on out of the equation. Is that right? >> Yeah, that's absolutely correct. The other part is it creates that efficiency in that transaction itself. We're always worried about can you reduce paperwork? We did that, that's the 80's and 90's, right? And then it became into now we got these electronic transfers. But what blockchain is allowing you to do is almost in real time to be able to order those goods and services and get them delivered when you need them and be able to run those transactions. That's a big part to it. Now we're getting faster and better at what we're doing. We're not letting antiquated processes and procedures really bog us down. And again, the blockchain allows you to do that, allows an easier transfer of cash amongst the providers, a lower cost in many cases on that transfer when you're talking about the funds, more of the ability to actually interact with the consumer itself, especially if you've got artificial intelligence, because one of the other use cases in the supply chain is the auto-ordering. Right, so this thing is learning, it's understanding what's coming off the shelves, what's going on the shelves, where it needs to be. Can I actually that to help me distribute my products amongst my warehouses, amongst my stores? Blockchain is doing that. It's automating that and allows those transactions, both I need this and you sent it to me as well as actually going through and making the financial transaction happen. >> So you guys must be having some mind-melting conversations inside your company. (laughing) When you think about the examples that you gave those transactions, I presume, the ticket transaction, doesn't require a trusted third party to validate that transaction because the technology of blockchain is doing that and then yet, but MasterCard is a trusted third party. So how are you thinking about, this might change your business? You've still got amazing assets. You've got a brand, you've got a network, you've got your partnerships, you've got the relationships that you have with the suppliers and customers and consumers, et cetera. So how do you think about that notion of when you talk to the world of crypto. Oh let's find where there's a trusted third party and we can disintermediate that. So what do you think all this means for the future of financial services and companies like MasterCard? >> Well, you know for us it's not the ability to say that one is going to... for a lot of folks, their complaint is, what we hear is, blockchain is going to take over everything. Cryptocurrency is going to... no it's how you actually have to live within that, because you're going to have to have multiple ways to do that. So that's how we feel we can make that help those folks in the transition. So that trusted third party, okay you can have five trusted third parties take care of your credit cards, your debit cards, your blockchain, your cryptocurrency. Our goal is, just come to us. Let's get you that solution. We can help embed that API. We can give you some flexibility. We can give you the reach of being able to have you know 22,000 banks and issuers worldwide at your disposal if you need that. So again, that's where we see ourselves really playing a good role, and that's how it's going to change our business. >> But it's, related to that, it's we can bring the scale, we can bring your operational certainty, we can bring you all the things because at the end of the day, it's still a computer, right, and it has to stay up and it has to be auditable and it has to be backed up and that's something that there's not a lot of companies that know how to operate at the kind of scale you guys do. >> Technology platform is critical. >> Absolutely >> Yes, absolutely. And again, that's when you look at quadruple and quint- types of redundancy, not just primary and secondary. I mean we are running four or five types of redundancy to make sure those networks are up and running. >> So Nick, I got a question because one of the things that I find interesting about all this and I know that you and I have talked about this, Dave, is that a blockchain presumes that there's some sort of contract in the middle of all this, but the processes of running contracts are complex. The design of the blockchain is crucial ultimately to the behavior and the success of the blockchain. Not a lot of tools to do that. How do you think the future of blockchain design is going to evolve so that issues like scale, technological, operational certainty, et cetera, come into play? >> Well, it's almost, as you take a look at it, it's almost the way that you have to be interacting today. So you've got the edge where the transaction is happening right and you've got the core part of the business where you're using that machine learning, the artificial intelligence to help you make better decisions. And then of course, you've got the deep learning. So as you look at those technologies, it's how you're handling within that contract, where things need to be done. Right, so again, if you're looking at how we supply a shelf, well that's not going to be done potentially at the edge. That's potentially in your core. It could be part of deep learning, but then how do you bring it to the edge to make that transaction go through to make that part of blockchain? So as you think about the contracts, something that's real important with blockchain is picking the right partner to go to market with because, again, you're looking at those technologies you want to make sure are in place. >> So, you're adding to a notion of scale and operational certainty, the expertise associated with how do you design these things well so that they can be put in an operation and you don't have to, you know, the immutability issue doesn't come and bite you in the butt in six months. >> Yeah, absolutely. So again, what you're looking for is, what we always look for are those people that have the right ability for scale, have the global experience that we really need, because again, when you think about it, you're in a global economy, so you're really looking to see how those people interact and can they do it. You're looking for that partner. You're not looking for the guy who's got the coolest, latest technology. Those are always fine to know about, but again, you're always worried about scale at this point. You're looking at flexibility. You know, how do I, how can I be flexible in the way I'm making those contracts and those contracts always change. It's not like there's a template, all right? Almost with blockchain, it's almost individual companies and B2B are coming back with their own types of contracts. >> Sure. >> And that's the part that you also have to have make sure is available to you, both from a technology standpoint and being able to you know actually operationalize it. >> Peter, at the top, talked about the transaction volumes being you know limited, you were talking about Bitcoin transaction volumes. Obviously, in the near term anyway, limits some of the use cases, but I wonder how you guys are thinking about solving that problem. Do you see that as MasterCard's role or is that, is Google, a Google-like company going to solve that? Is it going to be a partnership? How do you see that shaking out? >> It is going to be, it's a collaborative partnership, so again, we have conversations with people like, the Googles of the world, the Microsofts, the Dells, and people like that. It's a collaboration now. So just like four years ago. Remember Hadoop's community? >> Yeah. >> So we see it, there is a blockchain community because we are all seeing the same issues, but what's nice is, because of the experience that we're having through being part of a community, we're helping each other solve those particular problems. Because again, Google sees a different part of blockchain. Right, we see a different part of blockchain. And when you start to bring those resources together and you start talking to them and the Microsofts and the Dells and even the Amazons of the world. When you start putting everybody into a room, we're frenemies at that point. Because we're all trying to solve the same problem. We all have different interests within the major issue, but if we can do it together, tide rises all boats, right? >> The best innovations are combinatorial. >> Correct. >> Taking a lot of folks with expertise and mature technology and bringing it together and creating something new not just because you're creating something new but because you have the social reach to actually have it happen in the marketplace. >> Absolutely. >> Nick Curcuru, MasterCard, thanks very much for being on The Cube and talking about blockchain. >> Appreciate it. >> Thank you for having me, thanks guys. (orchestral music fading out)

>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering Informatica World 2018. Brought to you by Informatica. Okay, welcome back everyone, this is theCUBE, live here in Las Vegas at The Venetian, this is Informatica Worlds exclusive coverage with theCUBE, Informatica World 2018, I'm John Furrier, with my co-host Jim Kobielus, analyst at Wikibon, SiliconANGLE, and theCUBE, our next guest is Tracy Ring, Vice President at Deloitte Consulting, great to see you again. >> You as well! >> So, love havin' you on, last year, you know, we go through all the interviews and, you know it always comes up, and this is important, you know we are passionate about women in tech, inclusion and diversity, huge topic, the job's never done, in fact, I was in New York last week for a blockchain event, and I wore a shirt that said: Satoshi's Female. (Tracy laughing) And I literally was getting so many high fives and, but it's not just women in tech, there's a role that men play, this is, sort of an ongoing conversation so. What's the state of the industry, from your perspective, how do you see it? Obviously the data world is, indiscriminate data is data, >> Tracy: Absolutely. >> It should be 50/50. >> Yeah, you know I think that the, the opportunity is multi-faceted, right? So we're in a place where technology is changing unbelievably fast, we're graduating nearly as many men as women in, fields of science, data analytics, computer engineering, etc. But what we're not seeing, a combination of women in leadership roles as much as we would expect, we're not seeing the retention of women in those roles. And for me, I'm really passionate about the fact that supporting, attracting, and keeping women in those roles, is really critical, right? There's an interesting facet to how this all really, really plays together, Deloitte for 20 years has a women initiative, right? 20 years of supporting women, embracing them, helping them support leadership roles and, and I think that the time is now. If not, it's long overdue, to really support them within this field. I also think that women in data, an initiative that we're launching this year, and having our launch event today, is sort of super timely because women in data is not women who only become CIOs, or will only become CDOs, these are women that will be the Chief Marketing Officers, the CHROs, and using data to tell their stories. >> You know, we had a guest on earlier, who was a man, but he was the head of the CDO for the Ireland Bank, and Peter Burris asked the question, said hey, where did you come from technical? No, he came from the business side, who knows technology, this is what you're getting at, and I think this is something that we've been seeing as a pattern that you don't rise up through the ranks and be super nerdy, although that's cool too, and there's a lot more STEM action but there's also multiple vectors into the field. You can come from business, and know tech, and a lot more tech is consumable, and learnable, either online, or through some sort of other proficiency so, this is a big story and so, how do you guys, looking at that, at Deloitte, I know Deloitte's got the track record, but this all scales beyond Deloitte, right? It's an industry thing. >> Tracy: Absolutely. >> How are you guys seeing this? How are you looking at helping people, either connect the dots, or support each other? What's some of the latest and greatest? >> Yeah, I mean I think Informatica is part of what has created the case for change, right? We've democratized data integration, we have, you know, made self-service analytics, we've put data in the cloud in everyone's hands, right? So technology is out there more, every single day, and I think the unique part is, is that, when we think about diversity wholistically, and I think of diversity from ages, and geographic, and gender, etc. I think really being able to take all of that diverse experience, and be able to listen to business user's requirements in a way that they can hear it! And listen for something different, right? And brings skills to bare, that aren't necessarily there. I think if we can build better technology, that's more future-proofed, based on having a diverse crowd listening, and trying to build something that's far more compelling than, you know, I asked for X, build me X. I think when we really do our clients, and the world of justice is when we, you know, someone asks for X, and you ask them 10 more questions, and heavy--what about this? And what, and what, and what? And I think really being much more inquisitive, giving people the ability to be inquisitive, and bringing more opinions to the table to be inquisitive. >> And bringing more diversity of practice, makes the applications better, so that's clear. We see that in some of the conversations we have, but I got to ask about the question of roles, what are you seeing, kind of, you look at the trends, are there certain roles that are, that are being adopted with women in tech more than others? Less, trending down, up? What are some of the trend lines on, either roles in tech, for women? >> Yeah, you know, I think that over all, when I had the opportunity, so when we decided, we're going to launch a program within Informatica. We want the women who are going to be the Chief Data Officers of tomorrow. And it was a great question because, actually what we ended up saying is, the Chief Data Officers of tomorrow could be so many different current roles right now, right? And how do we really, kind of, attract the right women into this cohort, support them for a long year and, provide them the forum to network, connect with others, understand different career paths. You know, looking at what we're seeing, you know, with GDPR, and regulations, and all these other things happening, you know, the concepts and roles that didn't even exist years ago, right, so data governance leads and, Chief Analytic Officers, and all of these-- >> James: Or Chief AI Officers! >> Exac--(laughing) >> How do we bring women into the hottest fields like AI, deep learning? If you look at the research literature, out of, both the commercial and the academic world, many of the authors of the papers are men, I mean, more than the standard ratio of men to women in the corporate space, near as I can tell, from my deep reading. How do you break women into AI, for example, when they haven't been part of that overall research community? That's just a, almost like a rhetorical question. >> Yeah, how do you not, you know, it's just impossible to not bring them to bear, the skills, the talent, the ingenuity, I think it's absolutely mandatory, and someone said to me, they said well, why are the men not invited to this event? Why are they not in the cohort? And I said, you know, because there's a component of all this, that we want to grow and foster and support, and create opportunities. You know, one of the women that sat on our board today said, you know, I'm not somebody who's going to golf, I'm not someone who's going to go to a sports game, I'm going to meet you in the board room, and we're going to talk about compelling topics there. And so I think it's about, encouraging and fostering a new way of networking that's more aligned with what women are interested in, and what, you know, sometimes we do best and, I think creating an opportunity for a different type of everything, in the way that we operate is important. >> I think self-awareness, for men, and this also, creating a good vibe, right? Having a good vibe is critical, in my opinion, and also, you know, not judging people right, you know, based upon, you have some women say, hey I like to get dressed up and that's what I am, some people who don't want to go to sports and, some guys want this, so I think generally, there needs to be, kind of a reset, like hey, let's just have an open mind and a good vibe. >> It's like lunch and learns, you know, lunch and learns are, are a great enabler for centers of confidence, to get together on a regular basis, to talk about business and technical-related things, but also it's a social environment. How can you build more of those kinds of opportunities into the corporate culture, where, they're not skewing, the actual socializing, to traditionally male-dominated hobbies or interests, or traditionally female-dominated hobbies or interests? How can you have, sort of a balance, of those kinds of socialization opportunities in a professionally appropriate environment that also involve a fair amount of shop talk? 'cause that's what gets people bonding, promoted in their careers is that they do deep shop talk in the appropriate settings. >> Yeah, it's interesting, one of the women that I personally consider a mentor, she said if it wasn't for data, I wouldn't be where I am today. And she said, you know, I grew up in and industry where, unfortunately, I really didn't have a voice at the table, and my voice at the table came from data, it came from my ability to see connections, patterns, and detect things, and also for my ability to create networks of people, and make connections and pull things together in a way that my colleagues weren't doing. And, you know, when she tells that story I think that's, that's the template, right? >> John: That's the empowerment. >> We want to say, use everything at your bevy to bring the best value to your business end-users, and she's connecting the dots in a way that no one else had, and is using data as really, the impetis to really, solidify everything that she's saying, it's inarguable. >> That's a great story, it's a phenomenal story. >> It's just amazing. >> Once she got into power she really drove that hard, that's awesome. Well, let's take that to the next level, so, you know, I have a daughter as a junior at UCAL Berkeley, and she's a STEM girl, and so she's got a good vibe in there >> James: STEM girl, I have a stem girl too, mines 28 now. >> You know, and so, kind of aside, but she, turned away from computer science because, at, you know, in middle school the vibe wasn't there, right? And it was kind of a social thing, we mentioned social. You're advice to young women now? Because we're seeing people with the democratization, you see YouTube, you see all these tools, you got robots, you got makers, of course, you got data, you've seen a lot more touch points where people can, you know, ingratiate in unthreatened, un, you know, just, getting immersed in tech. So you have, you're starting to get people the taste of not being tracked into it. So, what's the advice for young folks trying to navigate? And is it networking groups, is it mentoring? What's the playbook in your mind? >> Yeah, I think it's a combination of everything that you've mentioned, right? I absolutely think that your network, and what one of my mentors calls your sleeper network, right? The network that's out there, the people that I worked with five years ago, and we worked, and were in a war room til two a.m. and you know, then I, I just got busy, right? And reactivating your sleeper networks, you know, having the courage to kind of, keep people apprised, using social media, in a way that people, you know, the number of people that say, oh I didn't know you were up to this, that, or the other, thank goodness you posted. And so, I think using all of the technology to your advantage. And I also think there's a component of someone, I mean, I had an MIS degree for undergrad, and I started out as a developer. >> You might have to explain what this is for the younger generation. (laughing) >> Oh, I know, how crazy is that! Oh my gosh, >> Is that in the DP department, was that in the DP department? >> Can you imagine. But I wasn't interested in technology that much, it was what was going to get me a job and, and I thought I would become a business analyst, I've stayed with it, and now really passionate about tech, but, I think there's a component of all this that, every job, you know, the CHROs, the CAOs, all of the roles that roll up, you know, every finance person I know that's exceptional, is phenomenal with data! Right? And so, I think, not only creating a network of people that are in the industry, but I think it's about telling the stories outside the industry, and telling the oh my gosh, you'll never believed what we learned today. And I think that's the magic of the stories, and being transparent. >> Well Tracy, you're an inspiration, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, really love the story. I got to ask, what are you up to now? Tell us what's up with you, obviously you've moved on from MIS, Management Information Systems, part of the DP, Data Processing department, that's many computer days. >> Tracy: Oh my. >> Oh my God, we're goin' throwback there. >> Tracy: Absolutely. >> What're you up to now? What are you havin' fun with? >> Yeah, so my day job, I have the luxury of working across our cognitive analytic, and our PA alliances, which is an insane mouthful, but it means I get to work with some of our most exciting alliance partners that Deloitte is building solutions, and going to market, and getting really great customer stories under our belt. And I think really kind of blowing the doors off of, of what we did three years ago, five years ago, and 20 years ago, when MIS degrees were still being handed out, so. >> A lot more exciting now, isn't it. >> (laughing) It's way better now! So. >> I wish I was 23 again, you know, havin' a good time. (Tracy laughing) >> Yeah, so, really wholistically, seeing what we consider ecosystems and alliances, is, that's my day job. >> Tracy Ring, Vice President at Deloitte, great story, fun to have on theCUBE, also doing some great work, super exciting time, you got cloud, you got data, it really is probably one of the most creative times in the tech industry, it's super fun to get involved. This is theCUBE, here out in the open, at Informatica World in Las Vegas. I'm John Furrier with Jim Kobielus, be back with more, stay with us! From Vegas, we'll be right back. >> Tracy: Thank you. (bubbly music)

>> Announcer: From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCube! (bright music) Now here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody, welcome to this special presentation in the Marlborough offices of theCube. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with a friend, a colleague, a mentor of mine, David Moschella who is an author and a Fellow at Leading Edge Forum. Dave, thanks for coming in. It's great to see you. >> Hey, great to see you again. So we're going to talk about your new book, Seeing Digital: A Visual Guide to Industries, Organizations, and Careers of the 2020s. I got it here on my laptop. Got it off of Amazon, so check it out. We're going to be unpacking what's in there today. This is your third book I believe, right? Waves of Power and... >> David: Customer-Driven IT. >> Customer-Driven IT which was under the '03 timeframe coming out of the dot-com, and to me this is your most significant work, so congratulations on that. >> Well, thank you. >> Dave: I know how much work goes into it. >> You bet. >> So what was the motivation for writing this book? >> Well it's a funny thing when books are a lot of work, and during those times you wind up asking yourself why am I (laughing) doing this because they put in so much time. But for the last seven or eight years our group, the Leading Edge Forum, we've been doing a lot of work mostly for large organizations and our clients told us that the work we've been doing in consumerization, in Cloud, in disruption, in machine intelligence was really relevant to not just them but to their wider audiences of their partners, their customers, their employees. And so people are asking can we get this to a wider audience, and really that is what the book is trying to do. >> Yeah, you guys have done some great work. I know when I can get my hands on it I consume it. For those of you who don't know, Dave originally came up with the theory of disintegration to kind of explain the shift from centralized mainframe era to the sort of open distributed competition along different lines which really defined the Wintel era. So that was kind of your work really explaining industry shifts in a way that helped people and executives really understand that. And then the nice thing about this book is you're kind of open-sourcing a decade's worth of research that yourself and your colleagues have done. So talk about the central premise of the book. We're entering a new era. We're sort of exiting the Cloud, Web 2.0 era. We're still trying to figure out what to call this. But what's the central premise of the book? >> Yeah, the central premise is that the technologies of the 2020s will indeed define a new era, and the IT era industry just evolves. We had the mainframe era, the mini era, the PC and the Internet era, the mobility era, and now we're going in this era of intelligence and automation and blockchains and speech and things that are just a entire new layer of intelligence, and that that layer to us is actually more the powerful than any of the previous layers we've seen. If you think back, the first Web was founded around technologies like search and email and surfing the Web, quite simple technologies and created tremendous companies. And then the more recently we have sort of the social era for Facebook and Salesforce. And all these companies, they sort of took advantage of the Cloud. But again, the technologies are relatively simple there. Now we're really looking at a whole wave of just fundamentally powerful technology and so trying to anticipate what that's going to mean. >> So going from sort of private networks to sort of public networks to a Cloud of remote services to now this set of interrelated digital services that are highly accessible and essentially ubiquitous is what you put forth in the book, right? >> Yeah, and we put a lot of emphasis on words. Why do words change? We had an Internet that connected computers and a Web that sort of connected pages and documents and URLs. And then we started talking about Cloud of stuff out there somewhere in cyberspace. But when we look at the world that's coming and we use those words, pervasive, embedded, aware, autonomous, these aren't words that are really associated with a Cloud. And Cloud is just a metaphor, that word, and so we're quite sure that at some point a different word will emerge because we've always had a different word for every era of change and we're going into one of those eras now. >> So a lot of people have questions about we go to these conferences and everybody talks about digital disruption and digital transformation, and it's kind of frankly lightweight a lot of times. It doesn't have a lot of substance to it. But you point out in the book that CEOs are asking the question, "How do I get digital right?" They understand that something's happening, something's changing. They don't want to get disrupted, but what are some of the questions that you get from some of your clients? >> Yeah, that first question, are we getting digital right sort of leads to almost everything. Companies look at the way that a Netflix or Amazon operates, and then they look at themselves and they see the vast difference there. And they ask themselves, "How can we be more like them? "How can we be that vast, that innovative, that efficient, "that level of simple intuitive customer service?" And one of the ways we try to define it for our clients is how do they become a digital first organization where their digital systems are their face to the marketplace? And most CEOs know that their own firm doesn't operate that way. And probably the most obvious way of seeing that is so many companies now feeling the need to appoint a Chief Digital Officer because they need to give that task to someone, and CDOs are no panacea but they speak to this need that so many companies feel now of really getting it right and having a leadership team in place that they have confidence in. And it's very hard work, and a lot of our clients, they still struggle with it. >> One of the other questions you ask in the book that is very relevant to our audience given that we have a big presence in Silicon Valley is can Silicon Valley pull off a dual disruption agenda? What do you mean by that? >> Yeah, if you look at the Valley historically you could see them essentially as arms merchants. They were selling their products and services to whoever wanted to buy them, and companies would use them as they saw fit. But today in addition to doing that they are also what we say is they're an invading army, and they are increasingly competing with the very customers they've traditionally supplied, and of course Amazon being perhaps the best example of that. So many companies dependent on AWS as a platform, but there's Amazon trying to go after them in health care or retail or grocery stores or whatever business they're in. Yeah, content, every business under the sun. And so they're wearing these two dual disruptions hats. The technologies of our time are very disruptive, machine intelligence, blockchains, virtual reality, all these things have disruptive technology. But that second disruptive agenda of how do you change insurance, how do you change health care, how do change the car industry, that's what we mean, those two different types of disruptions. And they're pursuing both at the same time. >> And because it's digital and it's data, that possibility now exists that a company, a technology company can traverse industries which historically haven't been able to be penetrated, right? >> Yeah, absolutely, in our view every industry is going to be transformed by data one way or another. Whether it is disrupted or not is a second question, but the industry'll be very different when all of these technologies come into play, and the tech companies feel like they have the expertise and the vision of it. But they also have the money, and they're going to bet heavily to pursue these areas to continue their growth agenda. >> So one of the other questions of course that IT people ask is what does it mean for my job, and maybe we can, if we have time, we can talk about that. But you answer many of these questions with a conceptual framework that you call the Matrix which is a very powerful, you said words matter, a very powerful concept. Explain the Matrix. >> Okay, yeah. If we start and go back they have this idea that every generation of technology has its own words, Internet, Web, Cloud, and now we're going to a new era, so there will be a new word. And so we use the word Matrix as our view of that, and we chose it for two reasons. Obviously there's the movie which had its machine intelligence and virtual worlds and all of that. But the real reason we chose it is this concept that a matrix as in matrix mathematics is a structure that has rows and columns. And rows and columns is sort of the fundamental dynamic of what's going on in the tech sector today, that traditionally every industry had its own sort of vertical stack of capabilities that it did and it was sort of top to bottom silo. But today those horizontal platforms, the PayPals, the AWSs, the Facebooks, they run this, Salesforce, all these horizontal services that cut across those firms. And so increasingly every industry is leveraging a common digital infrastructure, and that tension between the traditional vertical stacks and these enormously powerful horizontal technology firms is really the structural dynamic that's in play right now. >> And at the top of that Matrix you have this sort of intelligence and automation layer which is this new layer. You don't like the term artificial intelligence. You make the point in the book there's nothing really artificial about it. You use machine intelligence. But that's that top layer that you see powering the next decade. >> Absolutely, if you look at the vision that everybody tends to have, autonomous cars, personalized health care, blockchain-based accounting, digital cash, virtual education, brain implants for the media, every one of those is essentially dependent on a layer of intelligence, automation, and data that is being built right now. And so just as previous layers of technology, the Web enabled a Google or an Amazon, the Cloud enabled AWS or Salesforce, this new layer enables companies to pursue that next layer of capabilities out there to build that sort of intelligent societal infrastructure of the 2020s which will be vastly different than where we are today. >> Will the adoption of the Matrix, in your opinion, occur faster because essentially it's built on the Internet and we have the Internet, i.e. faster than say the Internet or maybe some other major innovations, or is it going to take time for a lot of reasons? >> I think the speed is actually a really interesting question because the technology of the 2020s are extremely powerful, but most of them are not going to be immediate hits. And if you look back, say, to search, when search came out it was very powerful and you could scale it massively quickly. You look at machine learning, you look at blockchains, you look at virtual realities, you look at algorithms, speech and these areas, they're tremendously powerful. But there's no scenario where those things happen overnight. And so we do not see an accelerating pace of change. In fact it might be people often overestimate the speed of change in our business and consistently do that. But what we see is a sort of fundamental transformation over time, and that's why we put a lot of emphasis on the 2020s because we do not see two years from now this stuff all being in place. >> And you have some good examples in the book going back to the early days of even telephony. So it's worth checking that out. I want to talk about, bring it back to data, Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook, top five companies, public companies in terms of market cap. Actually it's not true after the Facebook fake news thing. I mean Berkshire Hathaway is slightly past Facebook. >> It'll be back (laughs). But I agree, it'll be back, but the key point there is these companies are different, they've got data at their core. When you compare that to other companies even financial services industry companies that are really data companies but the data's very bespoken, it's in silos. Can those companies, those incumbent companies, can they close that gap? Maybe you could talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah, we do a lot of work in the area of machine intelligence, artificial, whatever you want to call it. And one of the things you see immediately is this ridiculously large gap between what these leading companies do versus most traditional firms because of the talent, the data, the business model, all the things they have. So you have this widening gap there. And so the big question is is that going to widen or is it going to continue, will it narrow? And I think that the scenario for narrowing it I think is a fairly good one. And the message we say to a lot of our clients is that you will wind up buying a lot more machine intelligence than you will build because these companies will bring it to you. Machine intelligence will be in AWS. It'll be in Azure. It'll be in Salesforce. It'll be in your devices. It'll be in your user interfaces. It'll be in the speech systems. So the supply-side innovations that are happening in the giants will be sold to the incumbents, and therefore there will be a natural improvement in today's situation where a lot of incumbents are sort of basically trying to build their own stuff internally, and they're having some successes and some not. But that's a harder challenge. But the supply side will bring intelligence to the market in a quite powerful way and fairly soon. >> Won't those incumbents, though, have to sort of reorganize in a way around those new innovations given that they've got processes and procedures that are so fossilized with their existing businesses? >> Absolutely, and the word digital transformation is thrown around everywhere. But if it means anything it is having an organization that is aligned with the way technology works. And a good example of that is when you use Netflix today there's no separate sales experience, market experience, customer service, it's just one system and you have one team that builds those systems. In a typical corporation of course you have the sales organization and the marketing organization and the IT organization and the customer service organization. And those silos is not the way to build these systems. So the message we send to our clients if you really want to transform yourself you have to have more of this team approach that is more like the way the tech players do it. And that these traditional boundaries essentially go away when you go in the digital world where the customer experience is all those things at the same time. >> So if I'm hearing you correctly it's sort of a natural progression of how they're going to be doing business and the services that they're going to be procuring, but there's probably other approaches. Maybe it's force, but you're seeing maybe M&A or you're seeing joint ventures. Do you see those things as accelerating or precipitating the transformation or do you think it's futile and it really has to be led from the top and at the core? >> It's one of the toughest issues out there. And the reason people talk about transformation is because they see the need. But the difficulty is enormous. Most companies would say this is a three- or four-year process to make significant change, and this in a marketplace that changes every few months. So incumbent firms, they see where they want to go and it's very hard, and this is why this whole thing of getting digital right is so important, that people need to commit to significant change programs, and we're seeing it. And my parent company, DXC, we do a lot of this with clients and they want to embark on this program and they need people who can help them do it. And so leading a transformation agenda in most firms is really what digital leadership is these days and who's capable of doing that which requires tremendous skills in soft skills and hard skills to do right. >> Let's talk about industries and industry disruption. When you looked at the early disrupted industries whether it was publishing, advertising, music, one maybe had the tendency to think it was a bits versus atoms thing, but you point out in the book it's really not the case because you look at taxis, you look at hotels. Those are physical businesses and they've been disrupted quite substantially. Maybe you could give us some thoughts and insight there, particularly with regard to things like health care, financial services which haven't been disrupted. >> And there's a huge part of the work that I've been doing for years. And as you say, if you look at the industries that actually have been disrupted, they're all relatively low-security, low-risk businesses, music, advertising, taxis, retail. All these businesses have had tremendous changes. But the ones that haven't are all the ones where the stakes are higher, banking, insurance, health care, aerospace, defense. They've been hardly disrupted at all. And so you have this split between the low-risk industries that have changed and the high-risk ones that haven't. But what's interesting to me about that is that these technologies of the 2020s are aimed almost directly at those high-risk industries. So machine intelligence is aimed directly at health care and autonomous systems is aimed directly at defense and blockchains are aimed directly at banking and insurance. And so the technologies of the past if you look at Internet and the Web and the Cloud eras, they were not aimed at these industries. But today's are, so you now have at least a highly plausible scenario where those industries might change too. >> When to talk to companies in those industries that haven't been disrupted do you get a sense of complacency that ah well, we haven't been disrupted, We're going to wait and see, or do you see a sense of urgency? >> No, complacency is baked in for years of people saying, "We've heard all this before. "We're doing just fine. "Maybe it's their industry but not ours." >> Dave: You don't buy it. >> Or the main one is, "I'll be (laughing) retired "before any of this stuff matters for the senior execs." And the thing about all four of those is they're probably true. They have heard all this before because there was a lot of excessive hype. Many of them are doing just fine. Well the one about the other industries is a wrong one, but and many of them will be retired before the things really bite if executive's in their late in their career. So the inertia and the complacency is an enormous issue in most traditional companies. >> So let's do a little lightning round if we can. Oh, actually I just want to make a point. In the book you lay out disruption scenarios for each industry which is really worthwhile. We don't have time to go through that here, but let's do a little lightning round here, some of the questions that you ask that I'd love to get your opinion on of which of course there are no right answers but we can maybe frame it. Let's start with retail. Do you think large retail stores are going to disappear? >> Well the first I say is that disruption is never total. There are still bookstores, there are still newspapers, there are still vinyl records. >> Dave: Mainframes, saving IBM. >> (laughing) Indeed, indeed, but real disruption means that the center of gravity is just totally moved on. And when you look at retail from that point of view, absolutely. And will large ones totally disappear? No, but Wal-Mart is teetering. If you go into a large, Best Buy, a company that strong hero locally, you go into there, there's hardly anybody in there. And so those stores are in tremendous trouble. The grocery stores, the clothing stores, they'll have probably a better future, but by and large they will shrink, and the nature of malls will change quite substantially going forward. People are going to have to find other uses for those spaces, and that's actually going on right now. >> It's funny, it is, and certainly some of the more remote malls you find that they're waning. But then some of the higher-end malls, they seem, you can't find a parking space. What's your sense of that, that that's still inevitable or it's because it's more clothing or maybe jewelry? >> And there's some parts of America that have a lot of money, and therefore they fill up malls. But I think if you look at what's going on in the malls, though, they're becoming more like indoor cities full of restaurants and health clubs and movie theaters and sometimes even college courses and health care centers, daycare centers, air conditioning. Think of them as an indoor environment where you might have the traditional anchor stores but they're less necessary over time. Quite a bit less necessary. >> You mentioned college courses. Education's something we haven't talked about which is again ripe for disruption. Machines, will they make better diagnoses than doctors? >> Yeah, you see this already in image processing, anything that has to do with an image, X-rays and mammograms, cancers, anything, tissues. The machine learning progress there has been tremendous and to the point where schools now should be seriously thinking about how many radiologists do they really want to train because those people are not going to be needed as much. However they're still part of the system. They approve things, but the work itself is increasingly done by machines. And it means increasingly that it's not just done by machine, it's done by one machine somewhere else rather than every hospital setting up its own operations to do this stuff. And health care costs are crazy high in every country in the world, especially here in America. But if you're ever going to crack those costs you have to get some sort of scale, and these machine learning-based systems are the way to do it. And so it is to me not just a question of should this happen, it's that this is so what needs to happen. It's really the only sort of economic path that might work. >> You make the point that health care in particular is really ripe for disruption of all industries. The next one's really interesting to me. You talked about blockchain being sort of aimed at banking and financial services and as an industry that has not really yet been disrupted. But do you think banks will lose control of the payment systems? >> Banks have been incredibly good at keeping control through cash and paper checks and credit cards and ATM machines. They've been really good about that and perhaps they will ride this one too. But you can see countries are clearly going to, they're getting rid of cash. They're going to digital currencies. There's the need to be able to send money around as simply as we send emails around, and the banking industry is not really supporting (laughing) those changes right now. So they are at risk, but they are very good at co-opting stuff, and I wouldn't count them out. >> And the government really wants to get rid of paper money. You've made that point, and the government and the financial services-- >> Work together, and yeah. >> They always work together, they have a lot to lose. >> Yeah, and way back when Satoshi Nakamoto, whoever he or she is or it, they, whatever it is, said that bitcoin would either be very, very big or it would vanish altogether. And I think that statement is still true, and we're still in that middle world. But if bitcoin vanishes, something doing a similar thing will emerge because the concepts and the capabilities there are really what people want. >> Yeah, the killer app for blockchain is for right now it's money. (laughing) >> Yeah, it's speculation, (laughing) I mean it's, (laughing) and no one uses it to buy anything. (Dave laughing) That was the original bitcoin vision of using it to go buy pizzas and coffees. It's become gold, it's digital gold. I mean it's all it is. >> The value store... >> It's digital gold that is very good in the dark Web. >> And if anybody does transact in bitcoin they immediately convert it to fiat currency. (laughing) >> Perhaps someday we'll learn that the Russians actually built bitcoin (Dave laughing) and it's Putin's in control. (David and Dave laughing) Stranger things have happened. >> It's possible. >> Hey, why keep it anonymous? >> They are the masters of the dark Web. (Dave laughing) >> Could be Russians, could be a woman. >> David: Right, right, nobody has any idea. >> Robotic process automation is really interesting with software robots, robots. Do you see that reversing sort of offshoring, offshore manufacturing and other services? >> Not really, I think in general people looked at robotics, they looked at 3D printing and said, "Maybe we can bring all this stuff back home." But the reality is that China uses robots and 3D printing too and they're really good at it. If anything's going to bring manufacturing back home it's much more political pressures, trade strategies, and all the stuff you see going on right now because we do have crazy imbalances in the world that probably will have to change. And as Ben Stein the economist once said, "Well if something can't go on forever, it won't." And I think there will be some reversals, but I think they'll be less about technology than they will be about political pressures and trade agreements and those sort of changes. >> Because the technology's widely accessible. So how far do you think we can take machine intelligence and how far should we take machine intelligence? >> Well I make a distinction right now that I think machine intelligence for particular purposes is tremendous if you want to recognize faces or eventually talk to something or have it read something or recognize an activity or read images and do all the things it's doing, it's very good. When they talk about a more general-wise machine intelligence it's actually really poor. But to me that's not that important. And one way we look at machine intelligence, it's almost like the app industry. There'll be an app for that, there'll be a machine learning algorithm for almost every little thing that we do that involves data. And those areas will thrive mightily. And then sort of the bottom line we try to at that as who's got the best data? Facebook is good at facial recognitions because it's got the faces, and Google's good at language translation because it has the books and language pairs better than anybody else. And so if you follow the data and where there's good data machine learning will thrive. And where there isn't it won't. >> The book is called Seeing Digital: A Visual Guide to the Industries, Organizations, and Careers of the 2020s, and part of that visual guide is every single page actually has a graphic. So really a new concept that you've... >> Yeah, and thanks for bringing that in. And the reason the book is called Seeing Digital is that the book itself is a visual book, that every page has a graphic, an image, a picture, and explains itself below. And just in our own work with our own clients people tell us it's just a more impactful way of reading. So it's a different format. It's great in the ebook format because you can use colors, you can do lots of things that the printed world doesn't do so well. And so we tried to take advantage of modern technologies to bring a different sort of book to the market. >> That's great. So Google it and you'll find it easily. Dave, again, congratulations. Thanks so much for coming on theCube. >> David: Thank you, a pleasure. >> All right, and thank you for watching, everybody. We'll see you next time. (bright music)

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

>> Announcer: Live from San Juan, Puerto Rico, It's The Cube! Covering Blockchain Unbound, brought to you by Blockchain Industries. (upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to The Cube's exclusive coverage here in Puerto Rico. We are on the ground covering Blockchain Unbound, Restart Week, Coin Agenda, a variety of events happening here in Puerto Rico, where the world is converging from Silicon Valley, New York, across the globe, here for a long week of bitcoin, blockchain, cryptocurrency, the decentralized internet. We're here for two days, wall to wall coverage. Here with me, kicking off, and special guest Miko Matsumura, who's the founder of Evercoin, also a venture partner at Bitbull Capital, influencer. Been around the block in the industry, seen many waves. Miko, great to have you on The Cube. >> Terrific, great to be here. >> So one of the things I want to get with you, we've had many conversations off camera over the past year, about what makes this wave super different than others. I've been saying, with Dave Allant and our team, that it feels like all the waves combined. I mean, look at all the major inflection points in the industry. The PC revolution, the mini computer revolution, the PC revolution, inner-networking with TCPIP, the internet revolution. You kind of had a web 2.0 thing going on, with the beginning of democratization. But now, major inflection point with infrastructure change with blockchain, cryptocurrency, and decentralized applications, which is disrupting the developer community. So you have an entire stack being disrupted, and at the center of it is an opportunity. >> Miko: Yeah, I think what you described earlier in our conversation, about this notion of a killer app, right? There's a bunch of people kind of clowning around, saying like, "Oh what's the killer app for blockchain?" It's under our noses, it is open source money, right? So if you look at what happened with open source software, for the past 25 or more years, we've watched software eat the world. Software has eaten the world. We all know this. Mark Andreasen said it famously, right? So the point is, is that open source has eaten software. Right? So now, what do you think is going to happen next with open source money? Open source money is going to consume proprietary money. >> I completely agree with you, and you look at all the tell signs in the industry, a lot of people putting the brakes on Google banning ads on Google, you're seeing the SEC putting signals out there, but the problem is this is a global money marketplace. So you have a global ecosystem now, connected via the internet, you have disruptive technology that kills the gatekeepers and any central authority, and you have money. So you can put the big rock in the river and try to hold the stream, but the thing is just moving so fast that the dam can be broken no matter what's put in place, because moving money faster, running money, whatever you want to call it, makes a difference. And today, breaking news is that Coinbase got a license to support the UK's faster payment scheme, which will speed up time for faster payments. So essentially the UK is taking a pre-emptive move against the US government, this is a game changer. They could kind of go to the top of the pack in terms of sovereignty leadership in the financial world, because how they handle the money situation. If they tap the software market, if they make the open source money work, this is again, the game is on. This is a real data point, the UK government. This isn't some underground economy, this is a nation. >> Well, and there's no question that domicile competition creates an open playing field for a planetary establishment of protocol, right? So the thing that's amazing about it is absolutely that there's no national regulator that has a global footprint. And so at the end of the day, the thing that's fascinating about what's happening is that the reason why I'm so confident about open source money is that it competes for consent, right? So it's really trying to acquire users by providing better services. And what government entity can resist, for the long term, something that's actually trying to provide a better and better and better financial infrastructure? >> Miko, I've got to ask you, because I've seen your presentation, and we've talked many times about open source money. I want you to take a minute and describe, what is open source money? Also you mentioned software eating the world, that's the seminal Wall Street Journal article that Mark Andreasen wrote about around the 10X engineer, and how software, cloud, computing, all these big data technologies, can change the nature of enterprise competitiveness. You're kind of teasing that out with software and money, open source. What is open source money? >> So, if you go to the bitcoin.org website, you're going to see the title of the website, and it basically, title tag says "peer to peer open source money." So those aren't even my words, those are the words of Satoshi Nakamoto. Open source money. Open source money basically just means, So let's say that money is software, and it is software, so if you buy something with a credit card, what do you think is happening? It's all software. So money is already software. There's some money now, paper money, that's not software, but that's all going to become software. Once you accept that money is software, then what kind of software should it be, right? And what has happened is open source software has always eventually won with respect to closed source software. So proprietary money is probably back on its heels because open source money is coming, and I think that's really the power of developers and the power of consent. >> I think one of the nuanced points, just to kind of highlight that, to kind of take it one step further, is if you look at proprietary, you mentioned the word proprietary. If you look at the open source revolution with software, everything that was proprietary essentially got dismantled, down to either some irrelevant point, or a smaller role in whatever that system would be, whether it's a mini computer or a mainframe, or software. Open source always seemed to grow into the primary, first tier citizen of the mechanism. So there's history on our side. What, in your mind, makes this movement, with open source money, different? Is it the reshaping of the internet infrastructure stack? Is it the decentralized application developer? Is it the role of the currency? Because you now have three dimensions of change. >> Yeah, so to me, I love your mindset about this kind of combination, and I just want to characterize my position properly, which is that I'm not a crypto anarchist or even a crypto libertarian. And when people talk about proprietary money being back on its heels, if you watch what happened to open source and proprietary software, the proprietary software industry is larger and more valuable than it's ever been. So I'm not saying proprietary money goes away. It doesn't go away, it continues to grow and become valuable but what happens is open source money will essentially take over all of the commodity functions and become the platform. >> And certainly the alpha geeks, everyone that I know that's an entrepreneur, that I would call kind of pure entrepreneurship, whether they're old or young, are gravitating to this magnet of opportunity. What are you seeing? Obviously you're in a lot of advisory boards, and you really can't do all of them, but you're getting a lot of requests. We just had a conversation with some entrepreneurs here in the hallway. What are some of the conversations that you've had that really kind of point to the energy and the relevance of this new ecosystem that's emerging? >> I think one of the things that's extremely exciting to me is that there seems to be a race going on between basically three parties. I'd say one party is sort of what I call the blockchain for good. So there's actually a tremendous amount of NGOs, there's non-profits, there's the United Nations getting involved. Tremendous amount of folks working on beneficial foundation backed projects, ripple works. There's a tremendous, huge open source foundation feeling that's happening. Second party is really more of the commercial cryptocurrency and blockchain, represented in large part now by the ICO movement, about six billion dollars. But the third arm, which is actually the negative side, is that there actually are a lot of scammers, and a lot of, like, dark forces inside of the cryptocurrency movement. So that's why I think we welcome, kind of, more regulatory influence. Because, you know, none of us want to see bad actors in the space. >> And what's the coolest project you're involved in? Pick a favorite child. >> Well, at the moment, you know, the sponsor of this conference is actually lottery.com, which is tremendously exciting. A couple of others to mention that I think are exciting are Celsius Network, so that's a large scale lending platform, and then Hub Token. So Hub Token is building essentially a problem. It's a protocol that solves a problem of second party trust in the internet of value. >> Well, Miko, great to have you on. I really appreciate your friendship, and I really appreciate the feedback you've had for The Cube team so we can be better with our open content model, we're open sourced content, as everyone knows. Thanks for sharing your perspective in the data with the crowd. People can find you online, what's your twitter handle, how do they get ahold of you? >> So you can follow me on MikoJava on twitter, but my website is miko.com. Miko.com. >> Great URL, obviously an early pioneer of the domain name, land grab, great job. Miko.com. Miko Matsumura, thought leader, influencer, investor, advisor. Really in the front lines of this movement, this revolution. Legitimate revolution in the changing of the world for good and for businesses. This is The Cube coverage from Puerto Rico, we're back with more live coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)

(energetic electronic music) >> Narrator: Live, from Nassau, in the Bahamas it's theCUBE covering POLYCON18. Brought to you by, Polymath. (attendees chatting indistinctly) >> Crew Member: So, go, we're live. >> Okay, we're live, welcome back! This is day two of our exclusive CUBE coverage of the Bahamas' POLYCON18 It's a security token conference. It's where the world of cryptocurrency, Blockchain, Bitcoin and everything comes together around powering a new value economy. A new kind of decentralized internet. This is the biggest wave that I've seen in my lifetime. It's really bigger than all the other waves, combined. I'm here with Dave Vellante. We have two days of wall-to-wall coverage. And the bottom line is, Dave, we are seeing historic, massive, wealth creation. We're seeing crypto-billionaires here. I mean, people are new money, they're old money and a massive new landscape is emerging. And the tell-sign of this is, institutional money is coming in, real professionals are coming in. It's moving from a culture of Burning Man and cult of the personalities to real industry formation. You see that with companies coming out with real commercial opportunities. You're seeing ecosystems developing, and you're starting to see biz dev. And it's been probably at least a couple decades since I've gone to a conference where this kind of computer-industry movement is happening where the players are doing deals in the hallways. You're hearing people having substantive conversations around how they can work together to create tons of value. This is a dynamic that is absolutely happening. And we're seeing a lot of wealth involved, from people who have made tons of money, billions of dollars in Bitcoin, to kind of, new migration coming into the sector from Wall Street, from other global markets. We're seeing a sea change of democratizing, with an open-source ethos. To me, this is something that we've never seen before. It has all the elements of the modernization, business model modernizations, technology modernizations, real, disruptive, enabling, technology at the heart of it. And some people ask questions like, "How do we make money?" Bottom line is, there is money being made. How and with who, is the real question. So Dave, day one's over. We were out 'til one in the morning last night, working the hallways, having great conversations. I probably talked to at least six whales as they're called, billionaires in the business, and the vibe is the same. We're here to play the long game, we love this market. There's a culture of ethos, of partnership, and openness, and unwritten rules, and tons of activity. Sure there's bad actors! But there's a lot of great players here, and they are starting to crack down on behavior that's not right, because this is a funding dynamic. It's a funding growth companies dynamic. It's a liquidity dynamic. All these things, classic, business model modernization, happening with a massive wave, your take. >> So, let's share with our audience. Well, first of all, this is an investor conference. It's the first conference built around the topic of security tokens. And we can, maybe, explain that in a moment. But, I have, John, I have never seen at an investor conference, which I guess this is, but it's more than that, Blockchain, technology, etc. But, I've never seen such diversity. Like you said, there's new money, there's old money. There's tons of millennials. 100% of the people here are doing deals. >> Yeah. >> And the conversations in the hall, it's all about ICO's, security tokens, utility tokens, protocols, white papers, business models. So, a lot of diversity. Some super smart millennials. Developers that really understand this stuff, and a lot of money. >> And, more women in tech here than I had thought. >> Yeah, I think it's slightly higher proportion. But, you're also seeing, just really interesting, you're seeing VC's who aren't going to sit back and wait and get disintermediated. You're seeing developers who have made a ton of dough, that are now sprinkling the wealth. You're seeing private equity, you're seeing hedge funds. You're seeing, like I say, traditional VC's, new types of VC's. And, very importantly, you're seeing a major diversity in cultural impact, nationalities. And this is a heavily Canadian show, because the organizers of POLYCON, the folks who started Ethereum. But, a lot of diversity in terms of where people are coming from. It's not just U.S. based, you know, MBA's-- >> Silicon Valley. >> Yeah. >> I mean, the game's changing. The other thing I observed is, we're seeing validation of my premise, a couple weeks ago when I was in Washington D.C. with Theresa Carlson, the most powerful woman in D.C. She's also the chief, and head of, Amazon Web Services' global public sector. Is that the global national stage, the nation building, the digital nation transformation, is part of it. Two, the validation that societal change and entrepreneurship, that was used to be involved in non-profits that never went anywhere, you know, these philanthropy projects. Social entrepreneurship, or societal entrepreneurship, as I call it, is absolutely real. And, in this culture, you're seeing people with Bitcoin, and crypto-currencies funding mission based activities. Now, the younger demographics, I think, lean towards that. That's pretty clear in our reporting and our data. That the younger generation wants to work for companies and communities that have an ethos of mission base. But, mission base is not about changing the world, it's about saving the world. And, this is real, you're looking at Blockchain ventures that track water supply. You're looking at Blockchain ventures that track, you know, food supply. You're looking at solving world hunger kind of challenges. And I think the tell here is, Blockchain is used to identify markets and incumbents, or opportunities where there's idle resource. So, whether that's using compute in a P2P way or solving the world hunger problem, anywhere there's an opportunity to be efficient, Blockchain is being used to solve those problems. And, the creative talent is the technology providers. This is a completely new dynamic. One that Silicon Valley pays lip service to. 'Cause they don't actually do societal change. They say they do, but, they build apps and platforms. So, I think this is a nuanced, but an important game changer for the industry, and the global economy and global entrepreneurship, because you can do things now that can be global impact based investing, and technology investing, in one shot. So, you get a double down effect for change. This is not just cloud computing, have more power, faster, better apps, more monetization. Sure, but now you have over the top, impact to users. The community dynamic, and the societal change is very, very real. That's a big driver of this ecosystem in terms of market selection, human capital, technology, leverage, and now financial. So, it is pretty intoxicating here. People are geared up, they're energized, and it's just pretty phenomenal. >> So, many people in our audience are still probably saying, I just don't get it. So, let's go back to 2008 when Satoshi, whoever that person was, writes this, I think it was an eight page white paper. And, remember what 2008 was like, banks were blowing up, too big to fail, the economic system was melting down, and guess who paid for it? The taxpayers. So, some libertarian minded people said, screw that, we're going to change the world. We're going to create a virtual currency and we're going to take back what the government is taking from us. Essentially, okay. So, that started people like, what, I don't really get it. That has formed a whole new, and people often say, it's not about Bitcoin, it's about Blockchain. Blockchain is building out this whole new internet. And we've talked about that all week. But, what you're seeing now is this concept of a value store a virtual value store, and people leveraging that in so many different ways to build out this new internet. And, they're building protocols, they're building apps, they're building new capabilities that we haven't seen before. That brings state to the internet, a state of communications. Now, let's talk about the investor profiles that we see here. I want to start with developers. So, developers built the internet, and most of them didn't really get paid huge money. Here, many of the developers are like multi, multi-millionaires flying in on private jets. Okay, so why? Because they've developed a new token that they, basically, invested in with their sweat and their money, and the price has gone through the roof. Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc., VC's. VC's, you know, they elbowed out, well they're elbowing their way back in. Private equity, hedge funds, big money. And there's two paths there, one is, guys that read white papers, real hard core technical guys who say, I'm going to invest in just this infrastructure token, utility token. Other guys who say, You know what, I've got big money, I don't really understand the technology, but, I'm going to sprinkle my money around and try to get a big hit. You got angels, you got entrepreneurs, you got superstars that have become billionaires, that are mission based. All these, and here's the thing John, and I want you to sort of explain this to the audience. You have these investor ecosystems forming. It's like the PayPal Mafia, and they're basically buying up all the tokens early, elbowing other people out. You know, one investor told us, We're fighting steel with steel. Steel beats steel, you have to form, it's like Survivor Baha Mar, right? And they're forming groups, and they're eyeing each other, attacking opportunities, elbowing each out, and it's really interesting. >> I mean, it's happening, big time. And, this is healthy, I think, in my mind. Emerging ecosystems have this behavior. The early days of Silicon Valley was very much the same. And it became very much war, now in Silicon Valley. See, people don't syndicate deals as much as they used to. Some are and some aren't, but the notion of teamwork has always been part of Silicon Valley. The old saying is, venture capital is a team sport. That is very much what's going on here. Now, they team up because they have to, but, steel on steel implies art of war. You know, we're going to take more allocations down. That's because the new pro persona of the investor, Dave, is the billionaire developer who captured value from the technology that they built, not someone else, not some central organization, they're the players. Developers, and or the actors who were making money in the early days of Bitcoin, cryptocurrency and Blockchain actually are also starting funds themselves. So, that is a new dynamic. We've never seen that before, where you see a wealthy developer become rich and then also start investing at the same time. You have a smarter investor there, but they're doing it in packs and herds. You have a tribe mentality and people are starting to recognize that, okay, this group here loves Burning Man, this group here is more commercial oriented, this group here, like Polychain is much more technical, and BlockTower's much more Goldman Sachs like. So, you're starting to see the formation of categorical roles in the ecosystem. This is very healthy. Now, in the short term there's some jockeying, right? So, you're starting to see people syndicate together. You buy my coin, I'll buy your coin. So, there's a healthy, robust equilibrium going on where the market of insiders is very much the story. The insiders of this industry are the players. They are the ones, not just building the technology, they're funding technology, they're also recruiting, the talent issue, human capital role, mission based. These are all new dynamics. This is going to be a hard nut to crack if you're an incumbent, venture capitalist, or hedge fund, trying to walk into this ecosystem, throw your weight around and compete on a frontal basis, money for money, steel on steel, if you don't play by the rules of engagement that's emerging. Such as, open source communities, unwritten rules, certain kinds of syndications, eliminating bad behavior. This is a dynamic that's real, and you'll either win or lose if you're an investor, win or lose if you're an entrepreneur if you don't recognize that, kind of, big picture. So, you get down and dirty, you got to pull back and say, okay, what's going on, how do I engage? This is where the true money making is going on. >> That's great analysis, John. You mentioned the word dynamics several times. The other underpinning dynamic is, we are going to take control of our own destinies. I've heard things all week like, I might move out of the U.S. Ya know. (laughs) Do you have a bank account overseas? (laughs) >> Estonia's looking good right now. >> Right, because I'm going to move to a place that's more friendly to this kind of concept. And the U.S. is anti-competitive. And this is the ethos of this community, We are going to control our own destiny. And we're going to go live in places and work in places that are friendly. >> This, to me, is perfect capitalism at work. You know, some would criticize Barack Obama or other folks that might have more of a socialistic bent around having government do redistribution of wealth. This is actually an example where I see redistribution of wealth going on in a capitalistic way. Where the enabling technology, Blockchain, and or new business models with cryptocurrency, which is money, basically open sourced money, as Miko Matsumura would say, and that is the dynamic. That is actually creating real value and redistribution of wealth. And the premise of Blockchain and cryptocurrency, although Bill Tighe pointed out, investor, and leader in the area, money's a concept, right? A dollar's a dollar, it has money value because it's a concept. But, if you look at things like what we learned in business school, the value chain of a organization, value chain, Blockchain, cryptocurrency money, is that this redistribution of wealth is going on in context to redefining business, redefining how people work. And again, I said earlier, the human capital component is very much a real dynamic, it's not just machines taking over the world. Some poopoo AI, some poopoo all this technology, but, human capital, a big force in this market. And, it is a big issue, and you got to learn protocols. We're all developers. So, again, zoom out, opportunity is right there. I think I'm long on this sector. I'm long on this game because the actors are going to self organize, Steel on steel turns into handshakes, or, steel on steel in the right areas, eliminating bad actors. FCC makes some regulations, that's only in the U.S. What about the opportunities for digital nations to say, hey, we're going to be the Wall Street of crypto. There are country opportunities right now where whoever builds that system, taking in crypto, converting it to fiat, will win everything. It's like, I'm surprised no one's done that yet. >> Yeah >> This is coming. >> I can't tell you what the price of Bitcoin is in August, but I agree with you, longterm, there's no question in my mind that this is going to be a key contributor to the digital economy. The build out of the next internet. Remember the fundamentals, you got Bitcoin, it's essentially, you know, a virtual Fort Knox. You got Ethereum, which is a horizontal infrastructure that's much more easily programmed by developers. And then you've got a zillion other protocols and tokens. I want to talk about risk factors. Like what could blow this up, what have we heard? Tax exposure, all these people, all these Bitcoin millionaires and billionaires that think, I don't have to pay taxes, well, guess what? (laughs) You do have to pay taxes. And so, one theory is that's why the price has moderated lately, 'cause people are saying, Wow, it's like I exercised the option, but I don't have cash to pay my taxes. 'Cause we saw a pullback recently. Regulation's the other one we heard. Too much regulation could put some brakes on the momentum here, your thoughts. >> Talent, talent. >> Yep, skill sets, and developer talent, right? >> Yeah, well, the top talent, in the protocol area is going to be at a premium. This is a global issue, so, you know, the old days when cloud, old days, when cloud computing came around, full stack developers were all the rage. Now protocol developers are all the rage. So, if you're a full stack developer and a protocol developer, you can have a lot of leverage. So, the danger, in my opinion is the job hopping nature of some of these ICO's. Hey, I made a bunch of dough on this ICO, they paid me in Ether and or Bitcoin whatever, I'm off to the next one and make a couple million bucks there, and move on to the next one. And so the job hopping factor for top talent is an issue. We heard that loud and clear. The tax thing, I'm bullish on Bitcoin, post April 16th. I think, buy Bitcoin right now and look for it to pop in April. Because I think people are going to realize, Oh shit, I should have sold some and had a tax carry over. >> Well, be careful, be careful. They might have to sell more to meet their tax bill. They might be holding on for a little bit, but I don't know. >> File the extension. (laughs) But anyway, I love the opportun-- >> No, you owe your taxes on the date. Extension doesn't remove you from paying the taxes. >> Yeah, but the issue Dave, is, that what's a scam and what's not a scam? So, you know, if you ask Joe Six Pack on the street, throw crypto and Bitcoin, it's a scam. There's a lot of stuff going on. This industry is absolutely, acutely aware of that dynamic. The risk on the wealth creation opportunity. They know it, so they're creating mechanisms to kind of weed that out. You're seeing PR firms having internal, called, in baseball and in sports it's like, clubhouse issues. There's a clubhouse issue going on in this industry. And they're going to take it amongst themselves. And I think that is going to be the tell sign if this ecosystem succeeds or not. >> Do you think there's more scams, or less scams going on there? >> There'll be less scams because, obviously there's too much money to be made right now. >> Right, and in terms of the percentage of the activity that's going on, in my opinion, the smallest percentages is the scams. The challenge is, anyone could be a scam so you have to sort that out, you got to do-- >> Due diligence. >> As always, you got to do homework. >> Alright, well, day two Dave, we're going to drill into. We got a great line up of guests. We'll be talking to investors, entrepreneurs, some whales coming on, we're going to get their opinion on the future of this market. What's the liquidity, how do you get paid? Who's making the money? How is the value that's being created ultimately captured? And, who's going to get that value? It's theCUBE coverage, from the Bahamas, exclusive coverage of the cryptocurrency, tokenization, here at POLYCON18. We'll be right back. (electronic music)

>> 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.