>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Red Hat Summit 2020. brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back. This is theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit 2020. Of course this year instead of all gathering together in San Francisco, we're getting to talk to Red Hat executives, their partners and their customers where they are around the globe. I'm your host Stuart Miniman and happy to welcome to the program Nick Barcet, who is the Senior Director of Technology Strategy at Red Hat. He happens to be on a boat in the Bahamas. So Nick, thanks so much for joining us. >> Hey thank you for inviting me. It's a great pleasure to be here and it's a great pleasure to work for a company that has always dealt with remote people. So it's really easy for us to, kind of thing. >> Yeah Nick. You know it's interesting, I've been saying probably for the last 10 years that the challenge of our time is really distributed systems. You know from a software standpoint that's what we talk about and even more so today number one of course the current situation with the global pandemic but number two the topic we're going to talk to you about is edge and 5G. It's obviously gotten a lot of hype. So before we get into that my understanding Nick, you know you came into Red Hat through an acquisition. So give us a little bit about your background and what you work on for Red Hat. >> About five years ago company I was working for eNovance got acquired by Red Hat and I've been very lucky in that acquisition where I found a perfect home to express my talent. I've been free software advocate for the past 20 some years. Always been working in free software for the past 20 years and Red Hat is really wonderful for that. >> Yeah it's addressing me okay yeah. I remember back the early days we used to talk about free software. Now we don't talk free, open-source is what we talk about you know. Bream is a piece of what we're doing but let's talk about you know, You know, eNovanceI absolutely remember they were partner of Red Hat. I talked to them and a lot at some of the OpenStack shows. So I'm guessing when we're talking about edge, these are kind of the pieces coming together of what Red had done for years with OpenStack and with NFB. So what, what's the solution set you're talking about? Bring us inside, how you're helping your customers with these types of split. >> Well clearly the solution we are trying to put together as to combine what people already have with where they want to go. Our vision for the future is a vision where OpenShift is delivering a common service on any platform including hardware at the far edge on a model where both v-ends and containers can be hosted on the same machine. However there is a long road to get there and until we can fulfill all the needs, we are going to be using combination of OpenShift, OpenStack and many other product that we have in our portfolio to fulfill the needs of our customer. We've seen for example Verizon starting with OpenStack quite a few years ago now going with us with OpenShift that they're going to place on up of OpenStack or directly on bare metal. We've seen other big telcos use that in very successful to deploy their 5G networks. There is great capabilities in the existing portfolio. We are just expanding that simplifying it because when we are talking about the edge, we are talking about managing thousands if not millions of device and simplicity is key if you do not want to have your management parts in Crete. >> Excellent. So you talked a lot about the service providers. Obviously 5G as a big wave coming a lot of promise as what it will enable both for the service providers as well as the end-users. Help us understand where that is today and what we should expect to see in the coming years though. >> So in respect of 5G, there is two reason why 5G is important. One it is-- It is important in terms of edge strategy because any person deploying 5G will need to deploy computer resources much closer to the antenna if they want to be able to deliver the promise of 5G and the promise of very low latency. The second reason it is important is because it allows to build a network of things which do not need to be interconnected other than through a 5G connection. And this simplifies a lot some of the edge application that we are going to see where sensors need to provide data in a way where you're not necessarily always connected to a physical network and maintaining a WiFi connection is really complex and costly. >> Yeah Nick a lot of pieces that sometimes get confused or conflated, I want you to help us connect the dots between what you're talking about for edge and what's happening in the telcos and the the broader conversation about hybrid cloud or Red Hat calls at the open hybrid cloud because you know there were some articles that were like you know edge is going to kill the cloud. I think we all know an IP nothing ever dies, everything is all additive. So how do these pieces all go together? >> So for us at Red Hat, it's very important to build edge as an extension of our open hybrid cloud strategy. Clearly what we are trying to build is an environment where developers can develop workloads once and then can the administrator that needs to deploy a workload or the business mode that needs to deploy a workload can do it on any footprint. And the edge is just one of these footprint as is the cloud as is a private environment. So really having a single way to administer all these footprints, having a single way to define the workloads running on it, is really what we are achieving today and making better and better in the years to come. The reality of... to process the data as close as possible to where the data is being consumed or generated. So you have new footprints to let's say summarize or simplify or analyze the data where it is being used. And then you can limit the traffic to a more central site to only the essential of it. It is clear that with the current growth of data, there won't be enough capacity to have all the data going directly to the central path. And this is what the edge is about, making sure we have intermediary of points of processing. >> Yeah absolutely. So Nick you talked about OpenStack and OpenShift. Of course there's open source project with with OpenStack. OpenShift the big piece of that is is Kubernetes. When it comes to edge are there other open source project, the parts of the foundations out there that we should highlight when looking at these edge loop? >> Oh, there is a tremendous amount of projects that are pertaining to the edge. Red Hat carries many of these projects in its portfolio. The middleware components for example Quercus or AMQ mechanism, Carlcare are very important components. We've got storage solutions that are super important also when you're talking about storing or handling data. You've got in our management portfolio two very key tool one called Ansible that allows to configure remotely confidence that is super handy when you need to reconfigure firewall in mass. You've got another tool that is the central piece of our strategy which is called ACM, Red Hat's I forgot the name of the product now. We are using the acronym all the time which is our central management mechanism just delivered to us through IBM. So this is a portfolio wide we are making and I forgot the important one which is Red Hat Enterprise Linux which is delivering very soon a new version that is going to enable easier management at yet. >> Yeah. Well of course we know that realers you know the core foundational piece fit with most of the solution in a portfolio. That it's really interesting how you laid that out though. As you know some people on the outside look and say, " Okay, Red Hat's got a really big portfolio. How does it all fit together?" You just discussed that all of these pieces become really important when they come together for the edge. So maybe you know, one of the things when we get together summit of course, we get to hear a lot from your customers. So any customers you can talk about, that might be a good proof point for these solutions that you're talking about today? >> So right now most of the proof points are in the telco industry because these are the first one that have made the investment in depth. And when we are talking about various and we are talking about very large investment that is reinforced in their strategy. We've got customers in telco all over the world that are starting to use our products to deploy their 5G networks and we've got lots of customer starting to work with us on creating their strategy for in other vertical particularly in the industrial and manufacturing sector which is our next endeavour after telco yet. >> Yeah well absolutely. Verizon a customer, I'm well familiar with when it comes to what they've been used with Red Hat. I'd interviewed them, it opens back few years back when they talked about that those nav-pipe solutions. You brought a manufacturing so that brings up one of the concerns when you talk about edge or specifically about IOT environment. When we did some original research looking at the industrial internet, the boundaries between the IT group and the OT which heavily lives in manufacturing wouldn't, they don't necessarily talk or work together. So how's Red Hat helping to make sure that customers you know, go through these transitions, pass through those silos and can take advantage of these sorts of new technologies? >> Well obviously you have to look at a problem in the entirety. You've got to look at the change management aspect and for this, you need to understand how people interact together if you intend on modifying the way they work together. You also need to ensure that the requirements of one are not impeding the other on demand, on environment of a manufacturer. Is really important especially when we are talking about dealing with IOT sensors which have very limited security capability. So you need to add in the appropriate security layers to make what is not secure, secure and if you don't do that you're going to introduce a friction. And you also need to ensure that you can delegate administration of the component to the right people. You cannot say, Oh from now on all of what you used to be controlling on a manufacturing floor is now controlled centrally and you have to go through this form in order to have anything modified. So having the flexibility in our tooling to enable respect of the existing organization and handle a change management the appropriate way. These are way to answer this... >> Right Nick, last thing for you. Obviously this is a maturing space, lots of change happening. So give us a little bit of a look forward as to what users should be expecting and you know what pieces will be the industry and Red Hat be working on that bring full value out of the edge and 5G solution? >> So as always, any such changes are driven by the applications. And what we are seeing is in terms of application, a very large predominance of requirements for AI, ML and data processing capability. So reinforcing all the components around this environment is one of our key addition and that we are making as we speak. You can see Chris keynote which is going to demonstrate how we are enabling a manufacturer to process the signal sent from multiple sensors through an AI and during early failure detection. You can also expect us to enable more and more complex use case in terms of footprint. Right now, we can do very small data center that are residing on three machine. Tomorrow we'll be able to handle remote worker nodes that are on a single machine. Further along we'll be able to deal with disconnected node. A single machine acting as a cluster. All these are elements that are going to allow us to go further and further in the complication of the use cases. It's not the same thing when you have to connect a manufacturer that is on solid grounds with fiber access or when you have to connect the knowledge for example or a vote and talk about that to. >> Well, Nick thank you so much for all the updates. I know there's some really good breakouts. I'm sure there's lots on the Red Hat website to find out more about edge in five B's. Nick Barcet thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> All right. Back with lots more covered from Red Hat Summit 2020. I'm Stuart Miniman and thanks for watching theCUBE. (bright upbeat music)

from around the globe it's the cube with digital coverage of Red Hat summit 2020 brought to you by Red Hat welcome back this is the cubes coverage of Red Hat summit 2020 of course this year instead of all gathering together in San Francisco we're getting to talk to red hat executives their partners and their customers where they are around the globe I'm your host Stu minimun and happy to welcome to the program Nick Barr said who is the senior director of Technology Strategy at Red Hat he happens to be on a boat in the Bahamas so Nick thanks so much for joining us hey thank you for inviting me it's a great pleasure to be here and it's a great pleasure to work for a company that has always dealt with remote people so it's really easy for us to kind of thing yeah Nick you know it's interesting I've been saying probably for the last 10 years that the challenge of our time is really distributed systems you know from a software standpoint that's what we talked about and even more so today and number one of course the current situation with the global plan global pandemic but number two the topic we're gonna talk to you about is edge and 5g it's obviously gotten a lot of hype so before we get into that - training Nick you know you came into Red Hat through an acquisition so give us a little bit about your background and what you work on Baretta about five years ago company I was working for involves got acquired by read at and I've been very lucky in that acquisition where I found a perfect home to express my talent I've been free software advocate for the past 20-some years always been working in free software for the past 20 years and Red Hat is really wonderful for that yeah it's addressing me ok yeah I remember back the early days we used to talk about free software now we don't talk free open-source is what we talk about you know dream is a piece of what we're doing but yeah let's talk about you know Ino Vaughn's I absolutely remember the they were a partner of Red Hat talked to them a lot at some of the OpenStack goes so I I'm guessing when we're talking about edge these are kind of the pieces coming together of what red had done for years with OpenStack and with NFB so what what what's the solution set you're talking about Ferguson side how you're helping your customers with these blue well clearly the solution we are trying to put together as to combine what people already have with where they want to go our vision for the future is a vision where openshift is delivering a common service on any platform including hardware at the far edge on a model where both viens and containers can be hosted on the same machine however there is a long road to get there and until we can fulfill all the needs we are going to be using combination of openshift OpenStack and many other product that we have in our portfolio to fulfill the needs of our customer we've seen for example a Verizon starting with OpenStack quite a few years ago now going with us with openshift that they're going to place on up of OpenStack or directly on bare metal we've seen other big telcos use tag in very successful to deploy their party networks there is great capabilities in the existing portfolio we are just expanding that simplifying it because when we are talking about the edge we are talking about managing thousands if not millions of device and simplicity is key if you do not want to have your management box in Crete excellent so you talked a lot about the service providers obviously 5g as a big wave coming a lot of promise as what it will enable both for the service providers as well as the end-users help us understand where that is today and what we should expect to see in the coming years though so in respect of 5g there is two reason why 5g is important one it is B it is important in terms of ad strategy because any person deploying 5g will need to deploy computer resources much closer to the antenna if they want to be able to deliver the promise of 5g and the promise of very low latency the second reason it is important is because it allows to build a network of things which do not need to be interconnected other than through a 5g connection and this simplifies a lot some of the edge application that we are going to see where sensors needs to provide data in a way where you're not necessarily always connected to a physical network and maintaining a Wi-Fi connection is really complex and costly yeah Nick a lot of pieces that sometimes get confused or conflated I want you to help us connect the dots between what you're talking about for edge and what's happening the telcos and the the broader conversation about hybrid cloud or red hat calls at the O the open hybrid cloud because you know there were some articles that were like you know edge is going to kill the cloud I think we all know an IP nothing ever dies everything is all additive so how do these pieces all go together so for us at reddit it's very important to build edge as an extension of our open hybrid cloud strategy clearly what we are trying to build is an environment where developers can develop workloads once and then can the administrator that needs to deploy a workload or the business mode that means to deploy a workload can do it on any footprint and the edge is just one of these footprint as is the cloud as is a private environment so really having a single way to administer all these footprints having a single way to define the workloads running on it is really what we are achieving today and making better and better in the years to come um the the reality of [Music] who process the data as close as possible to where the data is being consumed or generated so you have new footprints - let's say summarize or simplify or analyze the data where it is being used and then you can limit the traffic to a more central site to only the essential of it is clear that we've the current growth of data there won't be enough capacity to have all the data going directly to the central part and this is what the edge is about making sure we have intermediary of points of processing yeah absolutely so Nikki you talked about OpenStack and OpenShift of course there's open source project with with OpenStack openshift the big piece of that is is kubernetes when it comes to edge are there other open source project the parts of the foundations out there that we should highlight when looking at these that's Luke oh there is a tremendous amount of projects that are pertaining to the edge read ad carry's many of these projects in its portfolio the middleware components for example Quercus or our amq mechanism caki are very important components we've got storage solutions that are super important also when you're talking about storing or handling data you've got in our management portfolio two very key tool one called ansible that allows to configure remotely confidence that that is super handy when you need to reconfigure firewall in Mass you've got another tool that he's a central piece of our strategy which is called a CM read at forgot the name of the product now we are using the acronym all the time which is our central management mechanism just delivered to us through IBM so this is a portfolio wide we are making and I forgot the important one which is real that Enterprise Linux which is delivering very soon a new version that is going to enable easier management at the edge yeah well of course we know that well is you know the core foundational piece with most of the solution in a portfolio that's really interesting how you laid that out though as you know some people on the outside look and say ok Red Hat's got a really big portfolio how does it all fit together you just discussed that all of these pieces become really important when when they come together for the edge so maybe uh you know one of the things when we get together summit of course we get to hear a lot from your your your customer so any customers you can talk about that might be a good proof point for these solutions that you're talking about today so right now most of the proof points are in the telco industry because these are the first one that have made the investment in it and when we are talking about their eyes and we are talking about a very large investment that is reinforced in their strategy we've got customers in telco all over the world that are starting to use our products to deploy their 5g networks and we've got lots of customer starting to work with us on creating their tragedy for in other vertical particularly in the industrial and manufacturing sector which is our necks and ever after telco yet yeah well absolutely Verizon a customer I'm well familiar with when it comes to what they've been used with Red Hat I'd interviewed them it opens back few years back when they talked about that those nmv type solutions you brought a manufacturing so that brings up one of the concerns when you talk about edge or specifically about IOT environment when we did some original research looking at the industrial Internet the boundaries between the IT group and the OT which heavily lives lives in manufacturing wouldn't they did they don't necessarily talk or work together so Houser had had to help to make sure that customers you know go through these transitions Plus through those silos and can take advantage of these sorts of new technologies well obviously you you have to look at a problem in entirety you've got to look at the change management aspect and for this you need to understand how people interact together if you intend on modifying the way they work together you also need to ensure that the requirements of one are not impeding the yeah other the man an environment of a manufacturer is really important especially when we are talking about dealing with IOT sensors which have very limited security capability so you need to add in the appropriate security layers to make what is not secure secure and if you don't do that you're going to introduce a friction and you also need to ensure that you can delegate administration of the component to the right people you cannot say Oh from now on all of what you used to be controlling on a manufacturing floor is now controlled centrally and you have to go through this form in order to have anything modified so having the flexibility in our tooling to enable respect of the existing organization and handle a change management the appropriate way is our way to answer this problem right Nick last thing for you obviously this is a maturing space lots of age happening so gives a little bit of a look forward as to what users should be affecting and you know what what what pieces will the industry and RedHat be working on that bring full value out of the edge and find a solution so as always any such changes are driven by the application and what we are seeing is in terms of application a very large predominance of requirements for AI ml and data processing capability so reinforcing all the components around this environment is one of our key addition and that we are making as we speak you can see Chris keynote which is going to demonstrate how we are enabling a manufacturer to process the signal sent from multiple sensors through an AI and during early failure detection you can also expect us to enable more and more complex use case in terms of footprint right now we can do very small data center that are residing on three machine tomorrow we'll be able to handle remote worker nodes that are on a single machine further along we'll be able to deal with disconnected node a single machine acting as a cluster all these are elements that are going to allow us to go further and further in the complication of the use cases it's not the same thing when you have to connect a manufacturer that is on solid grounds with fiber access or when you have to connect the Norway for example or a vote and talk about that too Nick thank you so much for all the updates no there's some really good breakouts I'm sure there's lots on the Red Hat website find out more about edge in five B's the Nick bark set thanks so much for joining us thank you very much for having me all right back with lots more covered from Red Hat summit 2020 I'm stoom in a man and thanks though we for watching the queue [Music]

>>Hi and welcome back to Red Hat. Summit 2020. This is the Cube, and I'm your host. Stew minimum. We're talking so many topics. This event happening globally. We're treating our partners in the red hat executives where they are around the globe. And I guess right now is Nick Carr said, Who's the senior director of technology strategy with Red Hat, And Nic is coming to us. He's early in the Bahamas, speaking to us from his boat, though. Nick, pleasure to see you. And thanks so much for joining us. >>Very nice to meet you. Yeah, remote employees. And I enjoy that a lot. >>Absolutely. So we've been talking your team a lot. Of course. You know, many employees of Red Hat already were remote, but everyone now is working where they are. You're gonna be about a topic, of course, which is even more about riveted solutions. And where things are, we're going to talk about edge and five G before we get into the topic. It's a little bit about your background, how long you've been with red hat. And you know what? Your what your role is. >>So I joined right as a little more than five years ago after the acquisition. Off of all the companies that was working on open stack. Interesting technology. I've been in open source for the past 20 more years. Um, I was, uh, working miss of many distributions of Lennox over the years, so I consider myself in open source veteran. >>Excellent. I I remember that acquisition. We had the Cube at the open stack summit for many years on that, um, you know, new the company before the acquisition >>of the >>brand. And frankly, >>though, let's talk about it. First of all, you know, you talk about edge. Edge means different things to a >>lot of people >>are talking about it >>from a >>career perspective. You know, every customer in the Iot piece. Where does Red Hat into the whole notion of edge on? You know what kind of pieces of the portfolio? Yeah. >>So obviously, edge is about building an infrastructure that goes as far as possible to be as close as possible to where people are either producing or consuming data and building infrastructure as always, being the very heart off what Red Hat has been doing. And we've been growing. That's infrastructure capability. over time. So that means that today we feel the need to fulfill the requirements of those customers that want to extend their infrastructure to there. Because when we say the edge, we have to be countries that we're talking about. Like the layers of an onion more You dig into it. The more layers you find, the more particle case you have. There's no way there is a single. >>Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. So, you know, back in the open stack days, we talked a lot about in it, though Some of the barriers I know I've spoken to prizes. Who's, You know, we are of red Hat, though, you know, Maybe start there and help us understand. You know, where are we with the solution? Uh, talk about how five g fits into it. Of course. Everybody's talking about five feet. Well, that will take time, but help us understand where we are today. >>So, um, obviously for us, the edge years, just an extension of our open ivory clouds. Right? We have always been very vocal in saying that you need to be able to deploy the same workload in any place, and the edges are Justin extensions off these anyplace. So the same strategy that we've been developing first we use open stack, uh then with open shift and making open shift are both our development and our deployment platform for all types of workloads having open shift now, this report normally container based workloads, but also the visualization based workloads are exactly what we are doing at the edge. We want people to be able to deploy a single type of platform on various types of fruit brands managers globally. Ah is complete consistency so that there is no extra cost in maintaining those thousands, sometimes millions off added location into their existing infrastructure off course. In order to do that, we need to develop new tools to do the management to develop new AI or machine learning technology, to help people process not only the data coming from the platform, but also the management of the platform itself. We are reaching such scales that we wouldn't be able to do it. We've out. You are no from the platform yourself. >>Yeah, absolutely. And of course, scale is a relative before rise in. Yeah, I've talked to a couple of times. My understanding you've got news related. This that horizon went off? >>Yeah. This week Horizon has bean announcing ah, reinforce partnership between our two companies to help them heal their edge Platform. Ah, here we are talking about the first step in their edge platform which years? What we call the extension off the board we are talking about developing small data centers are going to be closer to the certainly. Um, And here we are talking about scales that, um can comprise to hundreds of data center, each having to 20 machines or more, um, to do all the processing of their future five g network and further, um, five g years, one off the enabler off edge. But it's also the reason for telcos to start deploying their edge network because the have a requirement to boot treatments off the information closer to where the five g antennas. And this is what we are developing. >>Alright. So, Nick, we talked. You've talked a minute ago about open stack and open fifth, help our audience understand a little bit. We've already talked a lot of customers. You don't. You can have one without the other, or you can layer off of the open stack when it comes to the the solution that you're talking about Verizon or ah, you know, other other service providers out there is it? Is it one is in both eyes that I've been there, Help us understand. >>So currently we have a complete shorts. We can do an edge platform. So Levi's open stack. You've got multiple customer doing that around the world. We can build an edge platform. We is open shift on top of the stack. But if we look at a future as we are, you know, designing it, we are looking at enabling simplicity and simplicity. Means deploying a single seeing open shift on to bare metal and have these bare metal platform deal we both vm and container so that you only have one AP I. You only have one management. You only have one thing to worry about. And since open shift and bark the OS, um, there is extreme simplicity in the methodology for updating or upgrading, and I think this is going to be a key point, making things simple, reducing the number of layers in your set. >>All right, that that really intrigued Nick, help us understand a little bit this ICO, Obviously any red hat doing is open source. It's how you're for that, you know, Red hat does. But you know how you're involved in the industry to help make the word that as edge solutions roll out that customers have flexibility in the first place. >>So you have multiple tee off partnership in this industry, you've got the partnership that are built around community and we are participating in numerous community, like the Lennox Foundation. Edge on many, many more. And this is where we are building the fundamental block off our future solutions we have. Partnership also is multiple vendor. Every time you're dealing with is a specific vertical. You will have a certain number of vendors that are going to be the one enabling 80% of the applications are going to be deployed, and that's okay for the edge. And then you have the partnership we made. We see our customers because the best source off requirements are always our customers. And that's something that we've now made a strong principle, which is to always find early adopters with when we are going to build a solution in a vertical sector on the horizon is one of them has been one of them. For what, a few years now and then replicate this success on to other customers of same sex. And we are reproducing this in the industry and manufacturing sector and in many other virtual. >>Excellent. Uh, you talked earlier about the open hybrid cloud. Obviously talk about they right, Wild help us understand, Nick. You know, edge and cloud. How do they actually go together? Many people. First of all, the people living article that was, you know, edge kills the cloud we've been talking about for a while. We know everything in i t is always additive. But how should customers on the surface but really be thinking about how edge cloud fit together >>in our design? The cloud and the edge is the same thing. You address the edge, you address the cloud, you should address your on premise art where the same way you use the same guy. And this driving FBI ease of communities, FBI, which we deliver through open ship. Um, soon. What is the difference? The difference is going to be who owns the edge, or we also machine running in your cloud who owns the machine running in your private data center. What network you're using, you're going to have Ah, a lot of constrained are going to be a bit more complex when you aren't yet. For example, you are sometimes going to go through the satellite connection. These huge delays in communication you're sometime going to put machines location that are absolutely not secure. So you need to have security layers. You're ensuring that nobody can remember these machines. These are you know it. But overall, once the deployment has done, we really, really on. People should consider that's their edge piece parts of their cloud or vice versa. >>Yeah, Nick, you brought up a lot of good points there. Security, of course. Critical. A one piece that I want to get your honest about. So we're spending a few years really looking at in a worker's process at the edge. What that's brought back core talk about AI work. Both generally understood praying things out at the edge. That's gonna happen. You know more of the core and then get out of the overall devices. What do you seeing where your customers But that overall, when it comes to their data. And >>from a technical perspective, data is the real real motivation about yet they are generating so much data that we are not able to process it anymore in a central location. So we have to process this data locally where it is generated. Or I suppose it's possible to where it is generated before sending, Let's say, a summary of these data or alerts or whatever the business process that pulls for to the center of operation. The use cases that we are demonstrating in this week, uh, that you can watch through the demo booth or you can watch increases. Ah, known presentation. Use the pays off manufacturer, which is installing sensors on many of the machine producing oh stuff. And when you have the right sensors like the vibration sensor or a temperature sensor, you can very easily develop knowledge off. Oh, this machine is going to break in a short amount of time. Maybe I should start scheduling some preventive maintenance on these machines, and you can do that by just actually leading the data and have humans read it. And you can do that a lot more efficiently. Training a machine learning algorithm This is what we are demonstrating that is processing the data and sending the alerts in real part when issues are discovered. Um, all this off course needs to be down in a very scalable fashion. Here we are talking about a use case where the customer may have 50 factories >>around the world. >>Are you updates all these machine learning models in all the factories when you have an update percent to learn about something you so data and data processing and now the eye. But big data are the heart off all of the use cases we, uh, discovered around old verticals for edge. And this is why we are now almost joining forces between the team working on AI. That's right out producing the open data hub and the team marking teams working on our solution. >>Yeah, I'm really glad you brought up manufacturing as the is one of the verticals. Look at their one of the turns and challenges we saw with all of that is yeah, some of the organization, Specifically, if you look at manufacturing, it could be an ot. Um, I'm curious is you're seeing solutions. Roll out your work, Aziz. How Customers are getting beyond those barriers. You know, some of the traditional silos where there was thoroughly collaborate. >>Well, it's always Ah, problem. Every time you introduce a change, you have to manage this in every project off, deploying something you anywhere well, fail if you do not account for the human factor and edge is no different in that. And when you're talking about the factory, if you're not directly talking with the people on the floor well, regarding their needs, you're only talking is a central guy. And you just arrived one day saying, Oh, everything is going to change. It's going to be a failure that the same way is a failure when the government make a decision without going through a consultative process before implementing it. So, um, nothing new, I would say. But as usual, And maybe because of the scale of edge, yeah, we will need to ensure that our customers are aware of those challenges that lay ahead of us. >>Alright, Well, next sounds Sounds like a lot of good progress. Been made definitely further breakout. What? From summit? You learn more. Thank you so much for joining. >>Thank you for having me >>all right. More coverage from the Cube at Red Hat Summit 2020. I'm screaming a man and as always what? Alright, Nick. Good stuff.

from the silicon angle media office in Boston Massachusetts it's the cube now here's your host David on tape the imperative to protect data has never been more pressing as companies transform themselves from businesses into digital businesses the intrinsic value of their data Rises exponentially the problem for infrastructure pros is that everything in IT is additive it seems like nothing ever dies which means more things to manage now think about that when you're protecting data you have bare metal VMs now containers you've got cloud you got to worry about the edge all this data needs to be protected not only does this increase complexity it expands the attack surface for adversaries wanting to steal or ransom your data at the heart of all this is a build out of a massively global distributed cloud we saw wave 1 of the cloud which was public wave 2 was really hybrid and that's evolving now in parallel you're seeing the emergence of multi cloud and as I said these earlier trends are additive they're not replacements and with me to discuss these important issues and how Dell EMC specifically is pivoting toward cloud data protection is Beth Phelan who is the president of Dell emcs Data Protection Division that's great to see you well good to be here again so we know the world is hybrid it's a fundamental the on-prem stuff is part of the fundamental digital digital transformations of these these companies and now you've got data protection for the cloud so what do you see happening in that world yeah let's start with what we're seeing in the market we recently remade on our global data protection index we've been doing it for many years and we've been really using that to help us understand the landscape and what our customers need and first not surprisingly it shows that continued trend of movement and reliance towards cloud environments for business applications continuing to increase on top of that the customers despite that are continuing to struggle with ensuring they have the right data protection for their cloud environments right so they're they're struggling you see that we see that as well what what's going on there well what is the data tell you yeah first of all more than half of the customers don't have a comprehensive data protection solution for their Salas cloud native and multi cloud environments more than two-thirds of the customers who may be relying on their cloud service providers for data protection say that they do not have a solution that covers all of their workloads so whether they're working with a cloud service provider or some other vendor they're being really clear that they do not have a comprehensive approach to cloud data protection yeah so I mean you see the cloud adoption is going like crazy but it seems like the data protection component is lagging how is that affecting the traction in your business yeah you know it's a double-edged sword right on one level customers see the advantages of moving to a cloud on the other hand you know they are really looking for vendors that they can partner with to still have the same confidence that the data is protected that they have on Prem and what we're seeing now is that customers are turning to us to help solve that problem we have over a thousand customers using Dell EMC for their Cloud Data Protection and we're narrowing in on three exabyte the data that we're currently protecting in the cloud so it's happening yeah that's pretty good traction so I want to talk about VMware obviously VMware is the linchpin of many customers hybrid strategy and it's a clearly an important component of Dell technologies talk a little bit about the relationship between Dell EMC data protection specifically and VMware I'm interested in you know they've announced project tenzou and there's kubernetes how are you guys working together to really deliver a value for customers so we are super excited about the opportunity to work so closely with VMware because as they're cut in their domain we're working directly with them and that's an advantage that comes with being part of the dell technologies family and so we were the first company to bring data protection for were kubernetes environments out to market it's available now so you'll see us bring that into the tenzou mission-critical has been moved forward partnering closely with with vmware and of course we're already fully certified for vmware cloud it's really an ongoing regular conversation about how we can work together to bring the best to our customers so Beth I gotta ask you so you're part of your role as the leader of the the division is obviously you gotta get a lot of mouths to feed big division you got to make your plan you got to deliver for customers but strategy is another key component of this how do all these cloud trends shape your strategy so core to our strategy is to be the essential provider of data protection for multi cloud environments so no matter where customers are choosing to deploy their applications they can have the same confidence that they always did that that data is protected and the way they can get it back so that's core and if you want three words to remember for our strategy think VMware cloud and cyber cloud is central to it and you're going to be hearing a lot more about it in the weeks and months ahead okay so I gotta ask you break out your binoculars maybe even the telescope what are the future what are the future's look like when you think about the division and the market so we've been talking about cloud for a long time but we are still in the middle of this journey customers are going to rely on the cloud even more for additional use cases and especially in the data protection space right now we're seeing backup to the cloud dr to the cloud but the future will include cyber resiliency that's leveraging cloud deployments you're also going to see more and more of an emphasis on people leveraging SAS for their software consumption and for us that means not only protecting SAS applications but it also means giving customers the option to consume data protection in a SAS model we already do that today with things like cloud snapshot manager with things like the power protect management and orchestration but you're going to see us do even more of that because they're just incredible benefits of people leveraging sass to consume their software data constantly evolving lamps landscape data protection has to evolve with it Beth thanks so much for thank you and thank you keep it right there we'll be right back right after this short break from world famous cloud Studios Dell Technologies presents the world's number one show on data protection solutions for today's organizations it's proven in modern magazine with Jake and Emmy hello everyone and welcome to the premiere of PM magazine where we cover the proven Dell technology solutions that you've come to rely on and the latest modern innovation driving powerful data protection for the future I recently spent some quality time with one of our customers and I learned a thing or two about Dell proven data protection solutions let's watch the clip we've always relied on tell performance efficiency and scale to help us keep pace with our data protection needs but there's so much more for example we've been crushing it with Dell cloud data protection for backup to the cloud in cloud backup cloud tearing cloud dr uh-huh look at the picture it's a huge business advantage how so our costs are down we spend less time on management we're meeting our service levels and we have peace of mind that all of our data is protected right awesome did you talk about how Dells agile development approach is accelerating the speed at which we deliver customer value yes and how cloud capabilities will continue to grow yes and about VMware protection yes and cyber recovery yes I mean we covered all of that as well as the mega trends that require data protection with a modern approach well modern is exactly what our guests today are here to discuss Jake he is Ken fatale a noted data protection expert and joining us from the field on her vacation in the Bahamas is Barbara Penner of the data management Institute thank you both for being here so Ken what should our viewers think about when they hear the phrase modern data protection they should think new requirements for modern applications cloud native workloads Cubana is multi-cloud and data services to name a few Barbara would you add anything to that list I would add business service recovery on premises or in the cloud autonomous protection to auto detect and protect workloads across edge core and cloud infrastructure and lastly all of this must operate at global scale thank you both this is exactly where we're heading with Dell power protect solutions well it's time for a break but when we come back we've got something special in store for you don't we Jake I was hoping you forgot oh no someone learned how to make cream puffs and it did not turn out well for him yeah my apologies in advance to my mother who tried to show me around the kitchen but as you can see we'll be right back [Music] we're back with Rob and Rob Emslie who's the director of product marketing for Delhi MCS data protection division Rob good to see you hi Dave good to be back so we just heard from Beth about some of the momentum that you guys have from your perspective from a product angle what is really driving this yeah well one of the things that we've you know definitely seen is that as we talk to our customers both existing and new customers cloud journeys is is top of mind for all of the CIOs it's being driven by either the desire to drive efficiency take out costs and data protection is one of the the most common use cases and one of the things that we find is that there's four use cases for data protection that we see long term retention of data cloud disaster recovery backup to the cloud and the emerging desire to stand up new applications in the cloud that need to be protected so backup in the cloud really completes the four major use cases well one of the things I think is really important this market is that you deliver optionality to your customers so how are our customers enabling these use cases yeah so the the first two UK's first two use cases of long term retention and cleitus recovery is is really driven by our software on our appliances both of those are really predicated based upon the assumption that customers are going to deploy data protection on premises to protect their on-premises workloads and then it's here to the cloud or which is becoming more common used to cloud as a disaster recovery target you know it's delivered by our data protection software and that's either in a software form factor or that software delivered in an integrated appliance form factor so let's talk about purpose-built backup appliances I think you know our friends at IDC I think you know coined that they tracked that market for a while you guys have been a leader there the acquisition of data domain obviously put you in a really strong position give us the update there is it's still a vibrant market is it growing what's the size it's it look like yeah so as we look at 2020 you know IDC forecasts the market size to be a little under five billion dollars so it's still a very large market the overall market is growing at a little over four percent but the interesting thing is that if you think about how the market is is made up it's made up of two different types of appliances one is a target appliance such as data domain and the new power protect dd and the other is integrated appliances where you integrate the target appliance architecture with data protection software and it's the integrated appliance part of the market that is really growing faster than the other part of the of the people being market it's actually growing at 8% in fact IBC's projection is that by 2022 half of the purpose-built back to appliance market will be made up of integrated appliance solutions so it's growing at twice the overall market rate but you guys have two integrated appliances what why - how should people think about those yeah so a little under three years ago we introduced a new integrated appliance the called the integrated data protection appliance it was really the combination of our backup software with our data domain appliance architecture and the integrated air protection appliance has been our workhorse for the last three years really allowing us to to support that that fastest-growing segment of the market in fact last year the integrated air protection appliance grew by over a hundred percent so triple digit growth was great you know it's something that you know allows us to address all market segments all the way down to SMB all the way to the enterprise but last year one of the things you may remember at Delta Nadi's world is we introduced our power to protect portfolio you know and that constituted power protect data manager our new software to find platform as well as the delivery of packet there in an integrated appliance form-factor with perfectly x400 so that's really our our new scale out data protection appliance we've never had a scale out appliance in the architecture before in the portfolio before and that gives us the ability to offer customers choice scale up or scale out integrated and target and with the X 400 it's available is a hybrid configuration or it's also our first or flash architecture so really we're providing customers with the existing software solutions that we've had in the market for a long time an integrated form factor with the integrator protection appliance as well as the brand-new software platform that will really be our innovation engine that will be where we'll be looking at supporting new workloads and certainly leaning into how we support cloud air protection and the hybrid cloud reality of the next decade okay so one of the other things I want to explore is we've heard a lot about your new agile development organization Beth has talked about that a lot and the benefit obviously is you're more you're able to get products out more quickly respond to market changes but ultimately the proof is in translating that development into product what can you tell us about how that's progressing yep so certainly with Papa Tech Data Manager and the X 400 that really is the the epicenter of our agile product development activities you know we've moved to a three-month cadence for software releases so working to deliver a small batch releases into the market much more rapidly than we've ever done before in fact since we introduced palpitate Denham manager where we we shipped the first release in July we're now at the third iteration of palpitate Data Manager and therefore the third iteration of the x100 appliance so there's three things that you know I'd like to highlight within the x100 appliance specifically first is really the the exciting news that we've introduced support for kubernetes so we're really the first you know large enterprise data protection vendor to to lean into providing kubernetes data protection so that becomes the vitally important especially with the developments over our partner in VMware with vSphere 7 with the introduction of tan zoo and the reality is that customers will have both these fear virtual machines and kubernetes containers working side-by-side and both of those environments need to be protected soap a patek denim algae and the x400 appliance has that support available now for customers to take advantage of second we talked about long-term retention of of data in the cloud the x100 appliance has just received the capabilities to also take part in long term retention to AWS so those are two very important cloud capabilities that are brand-new with the excellent appliance and then finally we introduced yet 400 appliance with a maximum configuration of four capacity cubes rough-and-tough that was 400 terabytes of usable capacity we've just introduced support of 12 capacity cubes so that gives the customers the ability to scale out the x100 appliance from 64 terabytes all the way to over a petabyte storage so now if you look at our two integrated appliances we now cover the landscape from small numbers of terabytes all the way through to a petabyte of capacity whether or not you pick a scale up architecture or a scale length architecture yeah so that really comes back to the point I was making about optionality and kubernetes is key it's gonna be a linchpin obviously a portability for multi cloud sets that up as we've said it's it's not the be-all end-all but it's a really necessary condition to enable multi cloud which is fundamental to your strategy absolutely alright Rob thanks very much for coming on the cube it's great to have you thanks Dave and thank you for watching everybody this is Dave Volante for the cube we'll see you next time [Music]

(lively pop music) >> Live from Mountain View, California. It's the Cube covering DevNet Create 2019. Brought to you by Cisco. >> Okay welcome back everyone, we're here at day two coverage live of coverage at Mountain View, Cube coverage of Cisco's DevNet Create. I'm John Furrier, your host, where all the action is in the creation side of two communities, DevNet, Cisco developers and then the open cloud native world entrepreneurship coming together to create products. Our next guest is Nik Kalyani, co-founder of WhenHub and TryCrypto. He's a builder, he's a creator, he's an entrepreneur. Welcome to The Cube, thanks for coming on >> John, thanks for having me. >> You just gave a long talk so I'll let you breathe a little bit. You're an entrepreneur, you're an inventor, you see things early. You got a lot of your hands on lots of good stuff here. This is the perfect place for you to be giving talks and hanging out. >> Absolutely I love the fact that people are here to learn. They're here to find out about the new innovative things that they can experience hands-on. I just gave a workshop on smart contracts, on the blockchain and I loved the questions I got and the energy that's there. >> What sort of questions were you getting? What was the interest? Where are people going at it? Because networking's a supply chain problem you can almost imagine applying blockchain to networking constructs. >> Yeah absolutely, you know blockchain is one of those technologies that is misunderstood quite a bit and some of the questions I got really helped me, help reinforce that. Ultimately, what I was trying to do is make sure that people understand that blockchain is not a solution for everything. There are certain things where there are scenarios where there are multiple un-trusted parties where blockchain is great, but otherwise it's just a slow database. So you want to make sure that you use it in the right scenarios and supply chain is a very common example where it's used, especially private blockchains. >> If latency's not a concern blockchain might be a solution if other things line up. Great point, I'm glad you brought that up. I want to just ask you because your profile as a person you're a visionary, you see things early. The part of the show here that's interesting is it's not like there's this research kind of thinking, although researchers tends to think about the waves coming. It's about what's here and now and what's coming but it's also making things real and creating. So a lot of the conversations are fun, exploratory, discovery orientated but also there's a lot of reality kind of grounded in it. You know entrepreneurs make some mistakes if you're too early, you're misunderstood for a long time. It's got to be a little bit early at the right time, timing's everything. Talk about the dynamic of timing and building and creating with big waves that are coming. You got cloud, you got blockchain, you got AI, you got machine learning. Talk about this dynamic. >> Absolutely, yeah so timing is so important, especially when you have start-ups right? You could have the greatest technology and maybe the market's not ready for it and so yeah it fails. My first start up was like that. I created something that the market was not ready for but fortunately the stuff I'm working on the market is ready for. So I think one of the things that developers, engineers can do is really look at how not necessarily how a technology is being marketed but what the adoption rate is. If there are more people jumping on it, and a good way to look at that is to look at GitHub and see how many people are creating samples, boilerplates, how many people are writing blog posts et cetera. That I think is a better indicator of whether a technology is ready for prime time or if it's just all vaporware. >> Tell about what you're working on now you're working on some very interesting projects. Where are they? What's the status, size of the team, collaborative open source. What's going on? >> So I have two start-ups I'm working on. the first one is called WhenHub. So we have a product called Interface that allows anyone to be an expert on any topic, and promote themselves through the platform. And allows anyone who's looking for expertise on any topic to find them and then pay for them and do a video call, get their questions answered and the whole transaction is handled via blockchain with either our cryptocurrency or you can use Apple Pay or Google Pay. So we launched a few months ago, we have about 75,000 users, it's growing very fast. We are just at the point right now where we are trying to scale-up. Our crypto token is called WHEN token. It's listed on five different exchanges. So that's one thing. While building that product one thing became very clear to me. Mainstream users have a very challenging time with using anything blockchain or cryptocurrency related. And it's through no fault of theirs, the ecosystem has been created for developers by developers and the tools lack empathy for the users. And that lead me to create an open source project called TryCrypto. The mission is to create free open source content and tools to make blockchain and cryptocurrency more accessible to users. >> To mainstream not the killer dorks and the guys coding. >> Yeah we want it to be like non-technical folks >> Is it the wallet that's the problem or is it just overall too techy? >> You know what John, the very word wallet is the problem. (John laughs) Because it gives this idea that there's something within it. As we were talking earlier, you know about blockchain, there's nothing in a wallet. It's just a placeholder for all of your addresses, right? So in fact, I'm trying to solve that problem with a new tool I've created called Photoblock, where I use a photo and emoji's to replace that. Yes, wallets are problems. The fact that it requires you to have all these parts in place before you can do anything useful, that's a big problem also. People really need to step back and look at the user experience and say what are the friction points and how can we eliminate them and that needs to happen before blockchain and cryptocurrency can have mass adoption. >> Talk about the choice of smart contract language used. Ethereum which was the hottest development oriented the most traction. A lot of ICOs kind of watered that down, it's still under 300. Other ones are emerging, NEO, EO, a bunch of other ones. It seems to be kind of like a NASCAR race, one's in the lead, someone's coming up. How do you look at that marketplace as other developers start to kick the tires? As people start building these real-world apps is that important to have a selector? Does it matter? What's your thoughts on selection? >> That's a great question. I think going back to what I said about how to evaluate a technology. You can see that Ethereum is still continues to be the leader, by far. So while EO and other blockchains have what appears to be a lot of momentum, if you dig down below the surface you don't find as much. So I continue to remain a big fan of Ethereum. Which doesn't mean I don't care for the other blockchains but I find that right now Serenity and Ethereum are a good way to move forward. I think EO is also a good platform to build on but I think their developing tools need to reach some level of maturity. On Ethereum, the folks that have created the truffle stack, the truffle and ganache package, have done a great service for developers because they make them so simple and easy. Something like that needs to evolve. >> Yeah and your point earlier I think it's important to know for the developers out there don't confuse the protocol and the token selection on smart contracts with blockchain. Again, you don't have to anything on blockchain 'cause it's a slow database. You're doing smart contracts which doesn't really require a lot of overhead. I mean it's a contract, it does. You want to have it reliable, but you're not doing zillions of contracts per second. The IOPs are not that high. >> Yeah, actually smart contracts is also a very misunderstood term. In fact, someone asked me is it legal contracts or medical contracts, what is it? A smart contract is really just an application. A programming code that runs on the virtual machines on blockchain. They call it a contract because once it's out there it's immutable. Which means the rules are defined, known and fixed and can't be changed. So when you create a smart contract, really what you're doing is handling a very small amount of data that you want to persist forever that runs with some rules. >> And in a decentralized world, as we call it in our community, it's a digital handshake. You agreed that we would do this, there it is, it's un-hackable. What are the cool things you're working on? What else you got? Opensource project's awesome. You got a lot going on. Life's good. >> Life is good. As I mentioned, Photoblock is the thing that I'm really excited about. Another app that we are building is called Public Record. The problem we are solving there is that in areas where there is strife, or maybe there's dictators et cetera, sometimes when you have people who have photos of some crime occurring or some event occurring, they are reluctant to share it because it could be traced back and have adverse consequences. With Public Record we are building a smart contract driven blockchain app. Where you can just take a photo and it will push that photo on to IPFS. Which stands for the InterPlanetary File System, which is a decentralized file system. It will anonymize the photo. It will strip all the stuff that your camera puts on there like GPS, the camera model et cetera. It'll manipulate that photo and it will then put a hash of that on the blockchain and make it available by location. So you can go to any location look at all the photos that people have taken there that are completely anonymous and impossible to track back to the >> And what about tampering proof? You have origination data, you strip out the real origination data, that's really important for some of these countries where people get killed for sharing or trying to get the backdoor out of the country for political revolution or just simply I don't want anybody to know. How about tamper proof? >> It is, it's on IPFS, which is immutable file system. What we also do is we manipulate the colors and tones of the photo a little bit so it's impossible to even use AI to go back and reverse engineer and figure out who created the photo. The location, the time and the actual content of the photo is not tampered. So Public Record will do that. >> Just a little quick Q and A on your company. Did you do an ICO, did you finance it yourself? >> With WhenHub we did do an ICO, but it was at a time when the market was at its bare things so our ICO was moderately successful. In addition to the ICO funds, we are primarily funded by one of my co-founders, Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert comic strip. We are doing quite well. >> He's a cool guy to hang out with, huh? >> He is. >> Never a dull moment? >> Never a dull moment, I learn quite a bit. >> Congratulations. How do people find out how to hang out with you? You got some good things going on here. Where do you hang out? What do you do for fun? What events do you go to? What's going on with you? >> I'm on Twitter quite a bit. >> Say your Twitter handle. >> It's @techbubble. I'm there. I like to blog. on TryCrypto and also my own personal blog. I go to meet-up events here in Silicon Valley and I do make an effort to speak at least five to six conferences each year. >> Aim it forward. >> Yep. >> A lot more action going on in crypto and token economics not just from an ICO standpoint always been some negative scams out there and global fraud, but generally, blockchain and token economics is real and getting more traction and soon I think it will be clearer. Your thoughts on that, if you could share your perspective in terms of the opportunities around those two areas. >> Like any other new and exciting technology goes through the hype cycle, they've gone through that now. I think there's really two types of people in this ecosystem. The ones that are focused on the cryptocurrency and the pricing around it et cetera. But I'd really like to separate that from the blockchain aspect of it. Blockchain is a very real technology, it's a really different technology that the world has never seen before. Yes, it's very true that not everything is a good candidate for the blockchain. But there are many, many scenarios where there are multiple un-trusted parties that are excellent for blockchain. I think what needs to happen is persons in leadership position need to really evaluate: what are the scenarios where there are un-trusted entities involved? And limit their blockchain involvement, test pilots, all of that they're more likely to see more success. Versus just throwing blockchain into it, replace the database, 'cause that's guaranteed to be a fail. >> Nik, great to have you on. I totally agree with you. The team here we were in Puerto Rico, we've been in the Bahamas, we've been Toronto we've been to all the blockchain events. Consensus is coming up in New York. We might be there, May 14th. Patrick, getting ready to head down to New York. Maybe go down there. Great to have your perspective. Great to see the blockchain conversation coming in here as the emerging tech and the creation here at DevNet Create continues. Thanks for coming out. >> Thank you so much. I appreciate you having me here. >> More Cube coverage here coming live here at Mountain View after this short break. (pop music plays)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering .conf18. Brought to you by Splunk. >> Welcome back to Splunk .conf18, #splunkconf18. You're here watching theCUBE, the leader in live-tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm with my cohost, Stu Miniman, and we're going to take a cruise with the data. Curt Persaud is here. He's the director of IT for Guest Technology at Carnival Cruise Lines. So, he's the ship. And Ariel Molina is here. He's the Senior Director of web development and enterprise architecture at Carnival Cruise Line. He's the shore. Gents, welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you. >> Happy to be here. Very, very. >> Thanks for having us guys. >> Dave, I sea what you did there. (laughs) >> Yeah, Stu, it's pretty good, huh. Well, this is kind of, you know, Splunk is known for a little tongue in cheek. >> Alright, let's keep this interview on course. >> (laughs) Alright, you got it. So Arnold Donald, your CEO, was on stage today with Doug Merritt, a very inspirational individual. You guys have an amazing company. You see those ads and just go "wow." Just makes you want to go. But Ariel, let's start with you, your role, what you guys are doing here. Just kick it off for us. >> So, no, it's fantastic, great to be here. Great energy in the conference today. The keynote was fantastic. It was great to see our CEO up there and really represent our company, really talk about, sort of, where we're heading and how Splunk helps us along that journey when it comes to data. Things are changing, they're moving faster every day, right? We're pressured into delivering more value, delivering innovation at a faster pace, and Splunk is a key enabler of that, for us. >> And Curt, at any one point in time, you guys said you have like 250,000 guests on the seas around the world. Wow! And everybody wants to be connected these days. So that's kind of your purview, right? >> Yeah, absolutely. Five, 10 years ago, what sold cruises was the ability to be disconnected. Right now, people want to be connected more than ever. So what we try to do, beyond just the connectivity, and giving them better bandwidth, and stuff like that, was to try to develop products onboard that helps them be connected, be social, but not miss out on the product that we're actually selling, which is the ship, the people, the crew, and the actual entertainment and the staff onboard. So we're trying to make people social, but not anti-social with some of the technologies that we're bringing onboard, as well. >> Doug Merritt said today, "we're all data emitters." And I think the number was you guys will service 13 million guests in any given year? So a huge, huge number of data emitters. And of course, Ariel, you obviously are analyzing a lot of data, as well. So, how has the use of data changed over the years at Carnival? Maybe you could kind of take us through that. >> Well, ultimately I think it's about personalizing the experience. So, how do we use the data to better understand what folks are looking for in that guest journey? We call the guest journey everything from planning a voyage, purchasing a voyage, purchasing all the auxiliary items that are up for sale, and then ultimately making it into the ship. So, what we're doing these days, is looking at mining this data, and looking for opportunities. On the dot-com side of things, obviously it's about resiliency and personalization. How do we deliver innovation through multiple releases, and then do so in a resilient way? And a lot of those innovations, typically, are around personalization. And we see that move the needle. We're incentivized to have more folks book online. That's ultimately good for the bottom line. So, data's a big part of that. Personalization, resiliency. >> Yeah, it's one of those interesting things we look at. Most people probably think of cruise ships as you're vacation or transportation, everything like that. You're a technology company now. You're tied in, you've got multiple mobile apps, before and during. Maybe bring us a little bit inside what that's like. >> Over the past three years, we've seen a great transformation in terms of the technologies that we're bringing on board. You name it, whether it's very high end tools, like Splunk and other APM tools that we use, to cutting-edge technology like AI, chatbots, facial recognition. We're using the full breadth of all these innovations, in terms of technology, to try to enhance guest experience. And to Ariel's point, the focus is really on trying to be very personal, trying to personalize this information, trying to personalize the guest experience, and using all those data points that we're capturing to really target what a custom experience looks for you. It's really interesting, because one of the things that we try to do in that personalization is try to manage those micro-moments. We're trying to get you what you want, we're trying to get you the feedback that you need in that micro-moment, so that you can do your transaction and move on to enjoying your cruise. >> There's something that you mentioned. You want a balance. You want people to take advantage of what's there. You used to think of a vacation like this, you'd disconnect yourself. Help understand that balance. >> You'd be surprised. We were just recently on a cruise, my family and I, and we don't cruise as often as you would imagine. >> Because you work for the company. >> Even though, when you do, it feels good to be a customer, right? There's so much activity going on on a ship on a given day. It's very hard to understand where to be at a certain point in time, and some people find that overwhelming. What things like the app does is really allow you to curate your day. To say hey, you like music? Let's focus on events that are music-oriented and that's going to be in Location XYZ on the ship. And they're going to be sequenced. So, that's personalizing the experience. But it's also ensuring that folks are really taking advantage of the full product. >> From our perspective, the technology should be in the background. It's more complementary. The real product is really the ship, the crew members, the activities, the entertainment on board. That's the product we really want people to really connect to. The stuff that we do is auxiliary in terms of, let me help you maximize those experiences on board. And that's what we're really trying to do. If we can get that done and accomplished, than we have done our jobs. >> So the app is the digital conduit to the physical experience >> Exactly. >> If you have a good app, it makes all the difference in the world. If you're at Disney, and you're trying to figure out what's next, what do the lines look like? You get a lot of people on a ship, and you want to prioritize. You all call that curating your experience. It's all about the app, as they say. What's the state of the app? The 1.0 probably needed a little work. Where are you know in the evolution? >> We're in a 2.0 release version of it. The original version, we started with what we called the meat and potatoes. The very basic stuff, that hey, where can I get food? What is the entertainment lineup for the day? We started off with some innovation in terms of being able to generate, we did a chat, kind of like, communication, so people could chat with their families onboard without having to purchase a plan or have any bandwidth needs. And then, as we evolved that, then we started to go into things that are more transactional. So, you're able to purchase your photos digitally through the app. We leveraged facial recognition software, so that if a photographer on a ship takes a picture of you, it recognizes that as you and puts your photo in your photo stream and your photo album. So, very, very convenient. We do things like sell shore excursions in terms of transactional stuff. You can sit at the pool and say "oh, tomorrow's a port day, "I'm going to be in the Bahamas. "Let me see what shore excursion I want to do. And you can do it directly from the app without even moving. So now, as we evolve that now, as Ariel said, now we're trying to leverage all that data now, to go beyond the transactions, and make things even more personalized. So, I know that you favor the casino, maybe you're a spa person, you want a facial. We'll target you and say hey, on your previous cruise you did this. Let's target you because we might have something special waiting for you onboard. >> And then carry that across the journey, right. So now they leave our ships. And how do we get them to come back to our ships? How do you create that conversation that's ongoing, notifications about what's going on on our ships. People follow their favorite cruise director. People follow a lot of the unique experiences there. How do you bring that to the online, to the dot-com experience? So that when they're thinking about that next cruise, they can remember what that last cruise was about, and they can know what's happening on each one of our ships in real-time. It's a journey. And technology definitely is a huge enabler for us and the experience. >> So what's the data architecture look like on there? We always talk on theCUBE about the innovation sandwich of the future. It used to be Moore's Law, doubling every two years. Okay, great. Now, it's data, plus machine intelligence, and you scale with the cloud. What's your data architecture look like? >> Well, I think it's early days. I think it's, I mean, they're all over the place, right? I think there's silos within the enterprise that are really maximizing data. I think that that trend continues to happen. But I think there's got to be, and the enterprise architecture world is sort of about wrangling that, and figuring out how data from different dispersed touch points affect that. So, it's early days. I do think that you're starting to see that machine learning algorithms do play a part. I'm seeing it personally, more in the operations side of the world. So all these systems, at the end of the day, they need to be resilient and they need to have high service levels. So, what I'm seeing now is tools, and at Splunk, you saw that today, being able to be really predictive about where the anomalies are. Traditionally, you were having to log errors and then interpret errors, and then that would be the way you action some of these things. The predictive nature of some of these tools are such that you're being proactive. So when you talk about data there's so many different places you can go. If you think about our technology stack, and that guest experience point of view, it's all about really maintaining that SLA's, resolving issues as quickly as possible. And there's a ton of data in that space, right? I mean, it's everywhere, there's a ton of signals. >> Well you guys know, we tend not to throw stuff away in technology. You sort of have to figure out how to integrate. >> A signal via the customer is probably one of those, as well. So at the end of the day, what more information are we collecting about our guest to ultimately personalize that experience? It's centered around that. >> And that's challenging, I mean, look at the airlines. And your app, which you love the airline apps. I mean, you're not, like, tethered to them. But the phone experience, and even the laptop experience, are a little bit different. Because of the data, it's very, very challenging. Have you figured that out? Or are you sort of figuring that out? >> That's API's, right? It's that experienced API layer. Being able to activate that data which is sitting in distinct silos and then do so across those experience apps, the experience channels, which is dot-com, the app, the chatbot, there's so many interfaces out there. But, yeah, it's a solid, mature API strategy that's going to get us there. >> And I think one of the things that our challenge is, as technology partners, is the ability to build those platforms so that the next wave of conversions, as you mentioned, there's some disjointed experience across the desktop view versus the mobile view, is to try to bring those conversions together. And in order to that, like Ariel said, maybe making some API extraction layers figuring out how to mine the data better, figuring out how to leverage insights from different tools or machines and sensors, we have a ton of sensors on these ships as well. And bringing all those things together to be able to put us in a position that when we do finally get a seamless conversion, we're ready for it from a technology and a platform perspective. >> It's obvious why data is important for your business. You actually did a press release with Splunk. Maybe explain a little about how Splunk Cloud fits into this discussion that we've been having? >> Well, Cloud really removes the barriers of experimentation. How do you right-size a problem you don't understand very well? I think Cloud really helps with that. We're looking forward to being able to be flexible. Flexibility in architecture, flexibility in infrastructure. So that's absolutely the use-case I think security's got a number of use-cases. You see it every day in the news. So yeah, more opportunities, I would say, it scales that flexibility that's taken us the cloud route. >> When you think Splunk, you think security. You got guys in the Knock. That's not where you guys are. You're kind of closer to the business. And so you're seeing Splunk, as I said before, permeate into other parts of the organization. You kind of expected somebody else to do that. I don't know, the Hadoop guys. And it's interesting, Splunk never used to talk about big data. Now that the big data era is, sort of, behind us, Splunk talks a lot about big data. It's kind of an interesting flip. >> I would say it's democratizing the data. That's the stuff I liked, that I heard today. How do you get these tools away from the IT operators that are writing these complex queries to get insights? And how do you elevate that up to the analysts, and the product managers? And how do they get access to those interfaces? You know, drag-and-drop, whatever you want to call it. But I think that where I see this happening more so than, machine learning, that's great and predictive. But just empowering others to really leverage that data. I would say Splunk is leading there and it's good to see some of that stuff today. >> Absolutely. It's putting the power where it really needs to be, where it's the end users, the guys making decisions, it's the product owners, the product managers, that are making those slight tweaks to that interface, or to that design, or to that experience, that makes a difference. And that's what we're trying to do, and leverage with tools like Splunk, as well. >> Even the simple visualization, right, the stuff that's out of the box is really important for the business user, right? >> The out of the box part's another thing that I saw today, which is more, sort of, curating for particular use-case, and saying hey, we're going to build that end-to-end and really turn it on and activate it a little sooner. So that infrastructure product we saw today, I think that's a big step forward. Where you're a platform, but at some point you're going to have to start being a little more vertical in the way that you bring to market, the way that they did with security. >> And Doug talked about, you know, Doug Merritt, that is, talked about data is messy, and the messiest landscape is the data. And then he talked about being able to organize that data in the moment. So, I think about, okay, just put it in the, we like to call data ocean, right, and just capture it. But then having the tools to be able to actually look at it in whatever schema you want, when you want it, is a challenge that people have. My question is, did he describe it accurately? I think yes. But then, can you actually do that with this messy data? >> I think it's a great concept. I'm interested to see how that plays out going forward. But I think in our world, we have several use-cases where that makes sense. We have a very captive audience for seven to 10 days. So we really have a very limited amount of time to make a really good impression. So, it's not only about attracting first-time cruisers; it's trying to get a repeat cruiser. So that limited time frame that we have to leave a really lasting impression is very limited. So things like recovery, in terms of getting metrics or data real-time, and being able to act on it immediately. Say you had a bad experience at the sushi bar. If we're able to grab that information, whatever data points that allow us to understand what happened, and then do a quick recovery, we may have a guest for a repeat cruise. Those are the things that we're trying to do. And, if what Doug is saying is something that they've kind of solved, or are able to try to solve in a good way, that is very powerful for us as well, and we definitely see leverage in that. >> Last question, Ariel, you're saying off-camera it's kind of early days. What's the future hold? I mean, that's going to blow our minds. Blow our minds! >> Oh, it's the predictive thing, right? It's bringing you your favorite drink before you're ready to have it, or something. I don't know. The cruise line business, the travel and hospitality space is a very fun space to work in. We get to really see our guests enjoy the product. And us, as technologists, we get to see how technology moves the needle. Continued innovation, right? If you're in the development side of the world, challenging yourself to deploy more often, to deliver more value more often. And if you're on the data side, how to get aggregated, compile all this this data, for ultimately what we're looking for, which is to enhance the guest experience. >> I mean, that real-time notion that you were talking about Curt, you can see that coming together and completely transforming the guest experience. So guys, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It was great to have you. Congratulations on all your success and good luck. Alright keep it right there everybody, we'll be back at Splunk .conf18. You're watching theCUBE. Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. we'll be right back! (upbeat music)

>> Live from Toronto, Canada, it's theCUBE, covering Blockchain Futurist Conference 2018. Brought to you by theCUBE. >> Hello everyone and welcome back to theCUBE's exclusive coverage here in Toronto, Canada, in Ontario. We are here live breaking down what's going on in the Blockchain world. It's the Untraceables event here, Tracy and team doing a great job of Untraceable. They're putting on the Blockchain Futurist conference. This is about the future, bringing the industry together. All the luminaries are here; Bounds of Ethereum, Ackerson Ecosystem influencers, original gangsters- OGs-are here, of course theCube, we got 2018 coverage breaking it down, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Wrapping up day one Dave, I know you got to take off and head back on a flight home, let's break down and analyze what's going on in the industry. Yesterday we had the first annual ever, first inaugural Cloud and Blockchain summit, global Blockchain and Cloud summit, two worlds coming together. Here it's a little bit different this is all about cryptocurrency, it's all about blockchain. Big movements, speculators versus builders is my theme and everyone's recognizing the trend of price shifts billions lost in market gap that were gained last year but still some are up. But the focus is about entrepreneurship on a global scale, this is the focus here, right? It's a lot of VIPs, a lot of players coming together. I don't see people crying in their wine about the prices- although you can see it on Anthony Di Iorio's face, probably a setback or the Ethereum community on the price but still, the long game is what they're going after. Your thoughts and analysis? >> Well you definitely seeing a lot of talk about the boom and bust cycles. And we're hearing a lot from people -but by the way, there are a couple of guys who went big, maybe hedge fund guys or other fund guys that are taking a bath, maybe they got in big in January, December, not the best time to get in. So you are seeing some long faces there, but generally the sentiment is: hey, these boom and bust cycles they come and they go we've seen them before, now's the time to hunker down and innovate, execute, and figure out how to add substance and value. Now, first of all, I would say a couple things. One is those guys probably have... a store of fiat currency that they cashed out, number one, so they're feeling pretty good. Two is, the big difference to me John, is in 2018, crypto is much more in the mainstream news. You see it on CNBC, you see it in every medium po- every day you get a medium post, everybody's blogging about it, whereas obviously we've been blogging about bitcoin for five, six years but the mainstream media has picked up on it. >> Seven years. >> Seven years, there you go. So the mainstream media has picked up on it so it's much more front and center than it ever has been in the past. So I think that's a different dynamic. There seems to be still a lot of opportunistic sentiment, people are sanguine about the future and I think that's because we're seeing some real hardcore innovation going on in real use cases. Now, having said all that, the other scenario is there's just a lot of competition for quality projects, we're hearing too many coins out there, you're seeing all these ICOs tied to Ethereum in an oversupply right now, and you're clearly seeing that affect the price of Ethereum, which has dropped, on a percentage basis, much more than bitcoin. It's down considerably this year, whereas bitcoin actually is still up. Ethereum's trading about where it was last September, Bitcoin's up considerably since last September. So you know, a lot of cycles, a lot of instability still, but a lot of optimism. >> The bottom line for me is that the big question that's coming out of this event and this whole week here in Toronto is why do cryptocurrencies matter, the mass influence and adoption of Blockchain technology, where is that on the progress bar? This is the topic, and again, a lot of people that are "poo pooing" this revolution and I'm seeing on my Facebook feed all the time, "bitcoin's at zero," there's a lot of nonbelievers. Here's what I would say, here's my analysis. I think that the comparisons to the dot-com bubble with all the irrational exuberance that was part of that phase, this ICO phase, is crashing. No doubt about them. The ICOs in the United States are down, almost to nill. Certainly a lot of action going outside the United States, still unregulated, still wild, wild, east- or west depending how you call it. So yeah, that's happening and a lot of the bad stuff's being filtered out there's an emphasis on build which you mentioned. But here's the thing that no one might not see in the mainstream. During the dot-com bubble, there was all this companies that were started to it public and that was because the market wanted it. That's what happened with the cryptocurrency ICOs, the market wanted more products, then just manufactured it and then they realized, oh shit too many tokens. But if you look at the internet revolution, and I think this is the comparison with blockchain and crypto. You got blockchain technology, cryptocurrency, which is token economics are absolute gamechangers and the demand for that is very high and there are more people coming on every day in a mass adoption basis. The internet actually never stopped, if you looked at internet penetration rates, Mary Meeker would point out at Morgan Stanley, now she's at Kleiner Perkins, that the internet adoption rate of the internet during the bubble and then post-bubble continued to accelerate. That means more people got on the internet. So therefore the population of users became larger and larger every day. That really level-setted the reality that this was not a fad, not going away. I see blockchain and token economics having the same trajectory where there'll be more people adopting the technology then putting it into use than ever before. That's the tell sign. If that trend line continues to grow, the corrections will all take place, cycles will happen, but the entrepreneurs will follow the money, they're going to follow the user experience, they're going to follow the demand for opportunity. That to me is going to be the major tell sign. I think that's the general sentiment that I'm feeling here is screw the price of the tokens, yes there's too many tokens, clear out the dead wood, get back down to building companies, that's validated by the fact that there are more deals being done from a financing standpoint that are starting to look like traditional funding structures. Security tokens, equities, starting to see people talk and fundraising, lower rounds, not the big mega rounds. Money that's going to be around 7 to 30 million, 30 to 50, 50 to 100, 100 plus. This is going to be traditional structures, not the land grab utility token which gets you into the tailspin of basically managing coins distribution, managing all these things. There'll be a balance, but that's really kind of what's happening. >> So that's great analysis John, I would add to that that the fundamentals are still in place, blockchain attacks inefficiencies. Where there's a middle man and there's inefficiencies and there are waste, blockchain is being applied to attack those inefficiencies. I think the second thing is that new capital-raising vehicles have catalyzed massive investments and are catalyzing innovation and a whole new breed of developers. The third point is a global phenomemon. You don't have to be in Silicon Valley, or New York City, or Boston, or Austin, in the United states, or from an Ivy League school, it's happening around the world, you're seeing non-US countries and island countries invite developers in, giving them tax havens, and as a result, it's becoming much more of a global phenomenon than a lot of the internet startups were. There are a lot of adoption barriers. I mean you have the cyclicality and the volatility, you've got industries that are essentially entrenched: financial services, healthcare, lots of defense and aerospace industries, very much entrenched, it's going to take a long time for that collaboration to come together. And you also have a lot of scams. >> Yeah >> There's going to be a shake out, we predicted that I think in February in the Bahamas, we predicted the flight to quality, people are trying to figure out where that quality is right now. And to your point, you're also seeing more hybrid models, more traditional equity models combined with token models, and that's not a surprise. You're going to see more and more of that as a hedge. The token model still gives people the potential for liquidity, and as long as that fundamental remains in place, I think that dynamic will- is here to stay. >> And also, you and I have seen many cycles of innovation you talk about in the industry, many waves. The people that we talked to that have been through multiple waves like Brailey Rodder, (mumbles) and others, experience, they all know what's going on. The difference here that I think is interesting is that the smart contrast, the flight to quality, the companies that have buildable products, are going to get the attention. Now the difference now in this community that I think is interesting that makes the funding dynamic different is you have now community dynamics. You've got open source software, Cloud computing, and new technology with new capital formation dynamics. I think those three things are the perfect storm of innovation that's being overlooked. and the interplay between that is going to give us a look and feel of an industry that we've never seen before. So we can compare and contrast waves "oh, BC, Client-Server, blah blah blah," I don't think this is going to look like any of those waves, it's going to look different. And that's going to be really the shake out between the pundits who claim they know what's going on, or... predictions whatnot. Talking to the people, putting the ear to the ground in the communities, that's key. And for the companies, the ones that are going to win are the ones that can build community, tap into communities, and grow communities because they're now part of the ecosystem. It's not just selling products to them, they got to be a bidirectional, symbiotic relationship between communities at large, in this ecosystem. I think these are going to be new dynamics they're going to be- impact valuation, it's going to impact time to market, time to value, and ultimately give the entrepreneurs and the investors what they need, which is good outcomes in the process. >> You know it's interesting you were saying about the waves. And the waves in the past, and certainly looking back, were quite easy to identify, they tended to be architectural, you know centralized mainframe, and they went to client server, then you went to the sort of public internet, and then this cloud of remote services. The next wave is maybe not ... blatantly architectural, but it's this blending of digital services that's ubiquitous across all industries. And I think the key is, there's an automation layer on top of these digital services, which is powered by AI and machine intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning, and blockchain is part of that automation layer. And people are building new businesses on top of that and disrupting existing industries. I think there's no industry that's safe from disruption as I put it before, there are some entrenched, high-risk industries like financial services, healthcare, defense, aerospace, education, that are going to take longer but ultimately there's waste in all of those businesses and I will say I think a lot of the incumbents are going to hop on this trend and do very well picking up blockchain and defending against the disruptors. Not all will make it, but a lot of the big guys are going to put some serious resources into this and they're going to lead in to blockchain in a big way. >> Yeah and just to kind of wrap up, I think you're the fact that what we're seeing here is that engineering-led dynamics are happening, blockchain's going to lay down the plumbing, it's got to be stable, desensualized applications over the top with token economics is the business model of innovation. We got technology theater booming with innovation with engineering-led initiatives, that's got to accelerate, that's infrastructure, that's got to be more cloud-like, that's got to be much more stable, that's got to get laid down, got to put the roads down if you will, and then the business model innovation coming from the software this is the game changer so you're looking at all the smart money, smart money is saying okay, we see guys building product, let's see some unique IP, let's see some token economics that are nobel and different for what's happening, that to me is going to be the new investor algorithm if you will, for vetting. And it's been that way in a way, the smart money follows the smart engineers, what are you building? And then they vet that with other stands so again, big engineering-led focus. >> So what would you do now- okay, soyou were hearing this week, too many damn tokens, everything's tied to Ethereum, most ICOs, what would you do now if you're an entrepreneur, you have an idea, you have a potential to build a community, where would you focus, would you just try to float another token? Would you go overseas? What would you do in that situation? >> I would look at the regulatory frameworks as a way, as a guidepost to risk management, right. I think you're going to see some regulatory regimes try to manage the bridge between slow changing, old guard, to new fast, and loose. Crypto-'Cause look at it. It's fast and loose, but there's real people that are working on it. I would focus on the real people that have builders, I'd look at the mechanisms where they're domiciling, and what they do with the economics or the tokens. One thing I will tell you that is that, as an entrepreneur, this is like, a golden rule, your focus is everything: focus, focus, focus. If you're focused on managing distribution of coins, and the arbitrage of coin pricing, that takes away form the focus of engineering and building. I think that's going to be an easy binary test for an investor to say, "what are these guys working on?" Is the token working for the venture, or is the venture working for the token? That is a fundamental mindset, if that is... Not in the right position, it should be: the token works for the venture, not the venture working for the token. That to me, I would run for the hills, if I see someone working for the token, I'd say, "I don't want to fly at all at that deal." Because you could maybe pass up some money right in the short term, but you're going to miss the long game. That's the way I look at it. >> And again, I would add to that, I mean, yeah, okay, so there are a bunch of crypto-billionaires that got minted, and they got in early and good for them, but that doesn't mean there's not more opportunities. And when I think of a company like Dell Michael Dell wasn't the first in PC's, you know? Compact was the first, you know, Rod Canion, the back of the napkin, that urban legend. But what Michael Dell did is he improved on the system. He took inefficiencies out of the supply chain, and became the dominant player! So first move advantage, yes, okay, great, you missed being a billionaire potentially. But the wave tends to get bigger after the market matures. And as a result, I think my focus would be on building, to your theme, building that community, demonstrating value, and then, eventually, I think you're going to be able to use Block Chain, Crypto currencies, tokenization, crypto economics to power your business. But figure out a way to actually execute today and prove value; that's what I would do. >> Again, all great stuff, great analysis, Dave, Good to see you here, where again: this is theCUBE's coverage in Toronto for Block Chain Futurist Conference. Again, this is part of our 2018 initiating coverage of the Block Chain Industry with our video presence. Engaging the community is an upstream content project sharing the data with you, so you can make your decisions, and understand who to connect with. That's our model, we're going to do it. We've been covering BitCoin and Block Chain since 2011, on siliconangle.com, that's our journalism site. Go to theCUBE.net, that's where we have all the videos, and soon to be our CUBE token coming out, be part of our network. Join our community if you wannna get engaged, we're happy to have you. Thanks for watching Day 1 of the Futurist Conference here in Toronto, Ontario. Thanks for watching.

>> 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)

(theCUBE theme music) >> Live from Toronto, Canada, it's theCUBE covering Blockchain Futurist Conference 2018. Brought to you by theCUBE. >> Hello everyone, welcome to the live coverage here in Toronto, this is theCUBE's coverage of Blockchain Futurist Event put on by Untraceable and the community here in Canada and around the world. I'm John Furrier with my cohost Dave Vellante, co founders of theCUBE, we're here with CUBE alumni, Anthony Di Iorio, who's the founder and CEO of Decentral and Jaxx, the really cool product we're going to get in to but also the co founder of Ethereum. Anthony, great to see you, thanks for coming back on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me again. >> Great keynote, in typical Anthony Di Iorio fashion no slides, you decide what you're going to talk about before you get up on stage but you really kind of brought it- >> When I get on stage. >> When you get on stage, you come on, you do it. >> Yeah. >> But it's a nice theme, you're talking about the history, you're bringing in the community value. You talk about the key milestones. You're really recognizing what the community's done. But more importantly you're giving a roadmap of where you think the future's going and combined with the fact that you're also running Decentral and you got the Jaxx wallet so really cool. I want to ask you, where is it going and what's going on in the community from your perspective, as of today? >> So where is this entire space going? I think it's going to be revolutionary. I think the infrastructure is being built out now, it's been built out for the last number of years. I think we're seeing more and more the interfaces and the ways that the masses are going to start connecting with these technologies. We're still being hindered by some problems with scalability, some other problems that are stopping these technologies, these decentralized techs from really spreading globally and being able to be utilized in a way that's going to make things faster, better, and cheaper. But those problems will be solved and it's going to lead to revolutionary changes in every sector that you could imagine, every sector that relies on third parties and intermediaries to facilitate things, technology is going to emerge that's going to be able to make things better, make things faster. >> I want to ask you something because I'm seeing a trend happen. Obviously we've seen the cycle of prices drop and crypto prices and a lot of people are focused on the mechanics of coin price and so on and so forth. Also the international growth is pretty massive, but you're starting to see two types of swim lanes. One is get this thing, get this coin out there, get it trading, get token economics going and then you've got builders, building real products and durable companies, you're starting to see a trend now where people are starting to highlight the builders. People really looking at the longer term gain, trying to bring a token economics model but trying to get it right on building and this is kind of a critical kind of inflection point in the industry where it's not just, hey, I want to make some cash, there's actually economic benefits of this revolution. >> Yeah. >> But there's now a focus on the builders, people actually building technology, building companies. This is now the focus, this is what's becoming a legit deal, legit alpha entrepreneurs, real communities are galvanizing around that. Your reaction to that dynamic happening right now? >> It's what we've always tried to to. With my company, with Decentral, we're not banking on a token. There's no raising and taking people's money or token to grow and be the main focus of what we're doing. We may add a loyalty system in what we're doing down the road, but it would never be something that we're collecting money for, to actually make that as a main business. It's all about creating value and our goal is to create the interface for all projects to be able to have that ability to manage and move value in their different platforms. Our goal has always been to not rely on a token based system in order to create value and we're seeing more and more, that, I think, companies are realizing that you can have maybe some part of a token based system but you really have to create value with it and there's way too much idea of a token being the be all and end all and that's how we're going to base things and it's just there's too many of them out there right now and I think that creating a real value and not banking just on that token being where you're going to make money is probably, that's the building step that needs to get done. >> Well it's definitely a theme we've been hearing, "Too many damn tokens" and not enough value being created by those individual tokens. What's your take on the current sentiment? I mean obviously people have seen the crypto prices. Your thoughts on what's going on? >> There's just too much going on right now and that's a good thing. And there's a lot of competition but it's also very difficult to wade through al of the noise and wade through what's actually going to create value. Most of the stuff out there is not going to be valuable, it's not going to really radically- These companies and these projects that are emerging, not all of them are going to be successful and only a very few are actually going to create value so I find it very difficult as the time is passing to identify what is going to be actually good and there's just too much out there and it becomes very difficult to actually identify those things. >> Well somebody made the comment, we were doing a show yesterday here in Toronto and they said, "You know back then "there was really only one Vitalik Buterin "and now there's like zillions of him "and they're all creating amazing ideas "but there's a huge supply of those ideas." And to your point not all are going to succeed. >> It's ideas but it's about execution, too. >> Right. >> And really, can you carry that out? That's the hardest part, is execution and it's very difficult and there's a lot of people out there that struggle with that part. They have an idea, they've got a paper, they build a team and it's like, well how do we actually get it to create value? And then they're backing on their token value and they're not really creating something of substance that's going to be that value but it's also due to limitations that the space has right now and mostly with scalability. >> A big part of your effort is try to reduce some of that friction, right? I mean is that kind of the play? >> Yeah, our goal is to, when you build wallets or a project has to build their own wallet, it takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of effort and it's really not what their focus should be on. That's what our goal is, is to be that interface that projects can use to move and manage their digital currencies and connect them with other projects and other services that their user base needs. What's missing is those interfaces now and that's what has always been my focus. >> You said this, but when we interviewed you in the Bahamas we had a one on one, and also had a CUBE interview, but on the one on one you were basically saying the wallet's the new browser, which we like by the way, thought that was very relevant and we see the wallet dynamic being central. The other thing that we heard yesterday, and this has been a recurring them in the industry, is got to be easier to use. This whole system, it's like the internet. It's hard at first but then there's a chasm that's crossed on ease of use, that really will drive more adoption so the notion of the centrality of why the wallet is critical and also the ease of use because, like you said, entrepreneurs want to optimize their behavior, time to build value, not worry about prices of their coin and their velocity and float and stock prices when the reality is, there's work to be done. >> That's right, yeah. >> This is a real problem and there's opportunity, how is that wallet evolution going to emerge? How do you see it visa-vis potentially competition? What's your view now? Will there be a browser for every webpage or wallet for every- >> Well that's what I, I mean our goal is to be the single interface for all those projects and that's our goal. We want to be able to have and expedite the way that we can bring new projects on board. It's difficult right now because you have a lot of different technologies in the background that we have to integrate and connect with. Things with Ethereum are pretty simple, Bitcoin we've got, ones like Bitcoin but then there's all these new ones that are emerging, too and they require a lot more effort and resources to do. That is our next goal is how to expedite getting all this product in, because we want to be the single thing and it doesn't make sense that I've got a store or manage 20 different crypto currencies and I can only do some of them in Jaxx, I can do some of them across it, I got to use other systems. It's really not a great user experience and that's what we're trying to perfect. >> Yeah, so you really only want, as a user one or two browsers, you don't want- >> I'd say one browser is what you really want and that's pretty much, you would say Chrome is what people are mostly using now and that's what happens over time. >> Maybe a little bit of Safari for some other stuff, whatever, but you don't want four or five browsers. Nobody uses three or four browsers. So the browser is the metaphor that you've used. Some people have said, "Well, the better metaphor is the app". I got gazillions of apps on my phone. So help me understand why it's more browser than it is app. >> I would say that you have browsers that have apps and integrations in them, so Chrome has extensions, those are apps. The browser itself is basically it's an interface where you can see what's going on and allows you to move information. The wallet is what enables you to manage and move the value, and we have integrations so I consider those the apps that we'll have inside of the wallet that'll connect you to service providers that offer different value, different services. So I see it as the way for you to manage your keys and be able to navigate but the apps will be baked into the wallet, that will enable you to connect and buy and sell and trade and pay bills and all these things will be through apps so that's why I see that interface as the wallet, yeah. >> Talk about the dynamic around developers and one of the things that I've been saying on theCUBE and I'll say it here again, I think when you have volatility in pricing, that scares the market or whether it's people speculate whether it's being manipulated or not, doesn't matter. If there's a scare factor, developers are in it for the long game, right? When they pick a platform like Ethereum to work on, they're in it for the long haul so short term fluctuations shouldn't change behavior but there's now some dynamic where it kind of is and people are questioning that. What do you talk to those developers, saying stay the course, because Ethereum has the most developers, okay? By far. >> Yeah. >> What's the message to the developers? Don't worry, settle down, long game? >> Well they got to make their own decisions on that. I think that with, the industry is very market driven right now. Businesses, that are down to a fifth of what they were worth or what they have, you know just in a few months, really does take a toll. >> Yeah. >> And it really does, when you have a lot of growth plans and things you want to do, it really can put restrictions on that, so that's the world that it is in. As for developers, if they're passionate about what they're doing, especially with developers, they're generally going to do it, regardless of the money, I usually find. Some might leave, some might come in, but it's generally what the individual person's going to do. It's whether they should keep going on it but the markets, I mean the markets do really play a factor in a lot of things. How do you plan your 12 month ahead when the markets take you down to have such massive swing where you're now at 10% what you may have had. They really do play. >> You got to pay attention, their runway gets shortened big time >> So Anthony I was struck by your keynote today and other keynotes where I've seen you. You're incredibly humble, such a successful individual. You talk about your humble beginnings, the grassroots meet ups and I was struck by when you first read Vitaliks' "White Paper" you said it was very comp- after two or three pages you're like, "Eh" your eyes are bleeding so you went to Charles and he kind of explained things. >> Yeah. >> A lot of people feel like, okay you've got to be an alpha geek to succeed in this business. Talk about your particular skillset and maybe share with the audience some of the skillsets that they can tap to succeed in this industry. >> I hire a lot of developers, I am not a developer. I need to interface with them but I don't need to know a lot of the nitty gritty and if you have good people working for you on that end they don't want to be usually the ones that are leading stuff, they want to code and they want to do it so I've always been the person that can bring the team together and build a team that's going to be able to carry that out without me necessarily being the person that's doing that. You can't do everything. I am a generalist in a lot of different things. I am not very good at math. When Vitalik would write articles back in the day for Bitcoin Magazine, I would really read them and then he gets into his formulas and stuff and I'm, it's just not something I can do. I'm a generalist that does a number of different things and I can put the teams together and I can figure out ways to monetize and I can figure out ways to gather the right people together but I'm not a developer, I'm not a coder, and that's fine. I think it's the entrepreneurs that really are the ones that lead the things. I've always found I can hire developers. I think to have developers that are running projects? That's generally not their specialties, to be able to manage the whole operations or whole team and I think that's what Ethereum has suffered from since 2014. I think there was a, you know, we had eight founders split between developers and business people. It lead to a divide that eventually was turned into more of a developer focused project and that's where it's been since. What's that enabled is people such as myself, Joseph Lugen, Charles Hoskinson to do our own things and be able to do great things. And I think that you need a mixture of people with different sets of skills. And I think at the end of the day though, it's the vision of the entrepreneur, of the person that tasks the risks and is able to bring together all facets of something, not just necessarily the technical side or the developer side of things. >> What are the conditions that have made Toronto such an epicenter for blockchain development? >> I think it's mostly community. I think very early on, from the start of the meetups that I did and them growing and continuously doing them from 2012, 2013, 2014 to having people such as Vitalik being from here. Other entrepreneurs, there's just been a culture here blockchain here, that people have recognized and you're starting to see a lot of VCs a lot of people taking their trips up here and you're getting comments like, "Somethings happening "here in Toronto" and what's caused that and I think honestly a lot of it has to do with the meetups. I think be central and creating a physical hub that allowed the community to grow and start thinking about ideas and bringing people together, I think can put a lot of impact in it, has played a lot of that factor. >> A lot of talent, too, in here, too. >> And I think the talent, yeah, there's talent, but it's not just developers though, too. It's entrepreneurs. >> Yeah. >> Developers are one part of this animal and they're an important part but it's the idea that sparks risk taking and it's about putting together many pieces of the puzzle and developers are one aspect of it. I think it's more of the entrepreneurship that has actually created that. >> Yeah, cause there's a lot of talent in a lot of places. You know? >> I mean, I've been living in Silicon Valley for 20 years now, I moved from the east coast and it's a striking difference between the classic venture capital, Silicon Valley was where the action was in venture because of the ecosystem, the money capital formation, risk taking capabilities and people have tried to replicate Silicon Valley. Silicon Beach, Silicon this, Silicon that. But with blockchain and crypto token economics, for the first time the capital formation's different. The teams are forming in a different way where you're starting to see a re imagination of entrepreneurial epicenters and it's not trying to be Silicon Valley but the results still the same but that's what blockchain's all about, is re imagining something that can be done better, more efficiently. So you're starting to see Toronto, you're starting to see outside the United States with a lot of capital formation, lot of entrepreneurial energy, blockchain and crypto certainly has community. >> Yeah. >> Again, that's the perfect storm. This is impacting the entrepreneurial- >> It's also regulatory stuff as well. I think for Toronto, Canada to be doing what's it's done, in unregulatory uncertainty, like we don't know really what's going to happen here and that, I think, has stifled things to where it really could be because you do have a lot of companies here that will set up in a Caribbean country or set in Europe, they're setting up in Switzerland because they don't know the playing field of what they have to deal with here and that's something that's hindered things. It's the countries that figure that part out along with how do they spark and bring the entrepreneurs in and I think the regulatory climate plays a massive factor in that. We've been able to do in Toronto, Canada what we've been able to do, despite having the clarity and certainty in that space. >> That's a red flag I think that people should pay attention to, don't lose the entrepreneurial energy to another domicile, location. Alright, final question, at least for me, Dave might have one. As someone looking out over the landscape, certainly you've been involved on the business end and putting teams together on Ethereum, communities as well as your own company, looking out at the landscape, we spoke in February, at Poly Con, and going forward, what's the state of the union, in decentralization of applications and token economics and blockchain, what's your view of the current situation as the market is what it is now and certainly it's going to continue to evolve, what's the state of the union from Anthony Di Iorio's perspective? >> It's just keep doing what we're doing. Keep building things, keep building out infrastructure. I've toned down a lot of investments, I've toned down a lot of things to focus on that just because, A, it's very, very difficult now to distinguish between projects, it's very hard. B, I have a lot of investments which are going to grow over the next few years and my focus is now on doing my business stuff. I think we are going to weed out a lot of the people that aren't creating value in the space and that aren't going to be along for the ride so when they see the markets go down they're going to disappear but then they come back in and things are going to thrive. We've seen this before, it's not a new thing in this space. Things are going down, then they go higher then they go down, then they do higher again and it's been on generally a pretty good incline. We're just in the down thing right now, and that's okay, let's keep plugging away and keep building out infrastructure. >> Yeah and that's a clear theme you see here and other events, meetups. Unpinning optimism, right? It's still there, the innovation is still there. People are very excited. >> Do you think there's an emphasis on builders? I mean obviously you're just basically saying the value creators are going to be the center of the action. You think that the industry globally recognizes that the legit players creating value are the ones that are going to be rewarded and recognized? Are we not there yet, close enough? >> I don't know, that's an interesting question. I think eventually that's what's going to happen. >> Yeah. >> But I think right now there's a lot of people trying to make a lot of quick money. I think those people will be weeded out and I think it will come down to those value creators, those people that are really building things up that will be the ones that last, just like we saw with the internet, same type of thing, you have the hype, you have it grow, you have it blow up and then you have the slow, steady value added producers will be the ones that actually are going to be able to represent. >> Like you said, we've seen it before, it's jut a lot faster, a lot more compressed. >> All that happens over time, yeah. >> You determine how many cycles you live in this industry, you know we've talked about that before. Dave and I have been through many waves, as have you. Thanks so much for taking the time to come on. Give a quick plug on what's happening with Jaxx. Decentral, you had an amazing New York trip, your exclusive boat party was well talked about. You had the two cars you gave away but you laid out the future, 3.0, there's Jaxx wallet, you got some other projects. What's the status of Jaxx? How's it going and when can people get their hands on it and how are you onboarding customers? Give the update on the Jaxx wallet. >> Sure, so the Jaxx 2.0, called Jaxx Liberty is out in beta right now, you can download it on different platforms. What it is is an interface that does much more than just being a wallet. It's your charts, your graphs, your news, you portfolio, apps, it's gamified with leveling up experience points. We're going to connect you with our partners, all these different services, really to be the center point for that one single interface that you're going to have for everything, for your digital life. That's the goal for that, where you can be in control of your money, your identity, your communications and Liberty is coming out in the next couple weeks, the full release and that's really going to be our flagship product and I think it's going to be the thing that's going to create a single place for people to use in our space. >> Are developers going to be able to tap into this capabilities, as we as developers, will we be able to not only use the wallet will there be APIs and interfaces into the wallet? >> Yeah, so right now when we put integrations in what'll be coming over the next many months, will be us actually integrating with our partners but eventually our goal is to have STKs where you could use our back and infrastructures, our connections to blockchains, that we can give the tools to people, create their own utilities and their own applications inside of Jaxx. >> Well we certainly want to continue the conversation. Great to have you on, of course theCUBE token that we want for our media business, we want Jaxx on the wallet. >> Anthony Di Iorio, industry leader, pioneer, also running a great business, Decentral and Jaxx, here on theCUBE giving us the straight scoop, a shortcut to the truth. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. Live coverage here in Toronto, part of Untraceable's flagship event here with all the best people in the blockchain industry, the Futurist Conference, we'll be right back with more after this short break. (theCUBE theme music)

>> 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.

from New York it's the cube covering blockchain week now here's John furry hello everyone I'm John Frey here on the ground actually on the water in the majesty boat here in New York City part of blockchain week New York City I'm here at Maggie's ooh who's he whose abyss development a decentralized launched a huge party here we're on a four story boat it's like the Titanic but it's in New York you can see hopefully we won't hit me icebergs but no icebergs ahead in blockchain thanks for joining me here on the water thank you John it's actually really funny you mentioned Titanic first time we came and saw the bow we're like oh my gosh this boat look exactly like Titanic let's really do something about it because see Centro is really about technology both being forward and so yeah we I think we pulled a very crazy party right now so tell us about the event this is a really cool event how big is the book just give us the details you ran the event so I know it's hard to run these kinds of events a lot of moving parts you're giving away two aston martin cars on a bracelet that's gonna light up and turn off based upon if you want or not so is it how's it work okay so this boat has a thousand people on here right now plus our team member plus a boat people so we have about eleven hundred people here and this whole event was run in the last five weeks the team has been working so hard and right now this bracelet that you see it syncs with the music so beats per second it syncs the colors and everything with the music and 11:45 today we're going to be giving away to Aston Martin's the bracelet will dim down one by one and the five bracelets that remaining will go on the stage everyone's gonna cheer out the crowd we're really gonna get everyone you know cheered up and this is not just like you know us giving away Aston Martin's this is really about bring the whole blocking community together we want to be say hey this is a small community let's all get United the cars are just a way for us to thank our partners and everyone I found about you know and I get a little nervous when I see these kind of launch parties because it reminds me that comm bubble but what's different about what's going on with you central is you guys have a business that's up and running this is not an ICO there's no fundraising going on you guys are actually executing and this is important because you guys are doing this as a community take a minute to explain the role of the blockchain community for you guys how important that is right so if you think about a blocking community right now we have the different coins we have the different exchanges the community is very fragmented and that is unfortunate because you know someone like my mom doesn't really understand the term blockchain or cryptocurrency but at the same time it's kind of like Internet 2.0 where you know these technologies are so new there's a lot of people who are so passionate on one of them and just like we just want to spend every day trying to make this better so the central role is really a bell okay let's do all these partnerships so we have over a hundred partnerships almost 200 now all signed and these are the people that we work with like every single day and what kind of partnerships are they they code development together as an open source or they're using the Jax platform you guys made some significant announcements today yeah I'm the Jax Liberty cube ice cube for cold storage I like the cube name not be confused with the cube as in the media cube us but this is a unification strategy talk about the news what did you guys announce tonight all right so today we announced two things we announced at Jax Liberty renounced Jax unity and then we announced the other things but that are part of that whole essential project so the Jax Liberty is the platform it's kind of like an app store all of our partners are gonna be part of this app store and we're just gonna have over 200 partners and more going on onward and every single the apps and integration will be here and we'll make it kind of like a game for the new users what's the bet value proposition for people to join the network it's a free platform we're not charging anyone anything and you know we're probably gonna do that forever so for us the model here is really about bringing all of these different projects together whether it be exchanges whether it be cryptocurrency Wallis whether it be different new sites encrypted messaging all of these things that touch every part of our life we want to say hey we want to bring freedom and power back to you and freedom to us is really your ability to control the information you know I'm very impressed with anthea see I interviewed a couple times in the Bahamas and he's got a great vision and one of the things that he talked in the presentation was kind of not will say buried but I think is the most important notable thing is that he talked about a new Internet infrastructure okay and the wallet is central to this new Internet infrastructure you guys are doing something really pioneering where you're actually creating a unification around infrastructure in network effects with currency this is a super important thing do you guys is this part of your mission or is this part of a just part of the product in your mind our mission like I said is really about brain freedom back to everyone right now if you think about you know how Facebook has their social data how Google has our browsing data all these different entities have our data and we feel like that's really the only way so what descent who is doing is we're saying that we want to create a one platform where we can bring all these different partners together and in doing so we're able to allow people to you know just being able to take control of your life that that is our mission we want to empower people so your pitch basically is join dee central if you joined essentials platform you join the community that wants to unify that's pretty much sounds like the pitch yes we want to empower people and we want to unified whole block G and a world community now you talk about your background how did you get here I mean like you just wake up one day and say hey I'm gonna get in the blockchain I mean what's your background got a legal background how did you give so my background is in business and then business law so I practiced for two years as a business lawyer I may not look like one but you check my record and they were covering lawyers that's okay exactly recovery and then so what I really want to do is all about impact I went into law school because I wanted to do a lot of impact I realized a lot of it is one-on-one not really doing it going to technology and I saw I found my passion and then I found blockchain I was like oh my gosh like this is it does this really you know we are sitting at the forefront of a technology that might be able to just change millions or billions of people's life and a lot of it people are talking about it if we're not really explaining it properly or building things properly I fell decentral is really at a forefront to make sure that is being done that's awesome what are some of the partners you guys have that are notable can you share some of the names and what they're working with you guys on so we're from Toronto Canada proud Canadian and internal we have a all new Co you're a into probability blocking space we have poly mas they do security platform we also have Bri the blockchain Research Institute that's led by Tapscott you know he wrote a very famous book we also have a shift that's you know just doing the KYC AML we also have the big ones like hoeing base like just a lot like block that's the consulting firm we have a lot of different partners that are just like all to cure one ones because of Anthony's background because of our experience in the space for the last four years people trust us people trust our wallet people want to be part of our sea and be part of our mission while we're on the water gonna get you go back to all the partying and schmoozing that's going on great event thank you for putting it on and and I think the community is very very robust out there right now we're having a good time yes outside is like a zoo and I'm really excited that you're here and we're able to meet some of the really great people and you can interview them Maggie thank you for coming on the cube on the water okay with the new cube product with the central unified essential has a new offering on cube is here covering and I'm John Fourier your host thanks for watching [Music]

(techno music) >> Announcer: Live, from New York, it's theCUBE. Covering Blockchain Week. Now, here's John Furrier. (techno music) >> Hello and welcome back. this is the exclusive coverage from theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, the co-host. We're here in New York City for special on the ground coverage. We go out where all the action is. It's happening here in New York City for Blockchain Week, New York, #BlockchainWeekNY Of course, Consensus 2018 and a variety of other events, happening all over the place. We got D-Central having a big boat event here, tons of events from Hollywood. We got New York money, we got Hollywood money, we got nerd money, it's money everywhere, and of course great deals are happening, and I'm here with two friends who have done a deal. Al Burgio is a CEO of DigitalBits co-founder, and Nithin who's the partner at Arcadia Crypto Ventures. You guys we've, you know, we're like family now, and you're hiding secrets from me. You did a deal. Al, what's going on here? Some news. >> Yeah, well first John, thanks for having us. We always love coming on the show, and really enjoy spending time with you and so forth. We, you know previous conversations that we've had, we were not out there fundraising. But really had the opportunity to meet a lot of great people Nithin and his firm being definitely one of them. And as a result of that, really building this, say, following, these relationships within the venture community, more specifically the crypto venture community. When we were ready to actually go out and do, let's say a first round, for us it happened very quickly, and it was a result of being able to leverage those relationships that we had. For me, it was kind of remarkable to see that support come and happen so quickly. Normally venture, it's just a process. Many many months. >> John: Long road. >> Then a month to close. >> John: Kiss all the frogs. >> Yeah, here it's like, you know, people can do due diligence on the fly, You have an opportunity with events like this. >> John: They're smart. >> They're smart, and and there's an opportunity to really foster these relationships in this really tight-knit community. And, you know, Nithin and his firm being obviously one of those. And so when we were ready to go out and do our first round, it happened quickly, and I'd like to think that in a lot of ways, it happened amongst friends. >> Well, you're being humble. We've been covering you, you've been on theCUBE earlier, when you just started the idea, so it's fun to watch you have this idea come to fruition, but you're in a, you're hitting a TAM a Total Available Market that's pretty large. And that's one of the secrets, to have a TAM. Aggressive bold move, we'll how it turns out for you, but you know, you got to have the moonshot, you're going after the loyalty market, which is completely run by the syndicate, what do you want to call it, the mafia of loyalty. >> Yeah, well, I would say that in some cases, those that are supporting us see that as really just one use case. Because we built this general-purpose blockchain, one of the use cases and one of the first use cases that were out there to support, happens to be the loyalty space. >> John: Big. And it's massive, highly fragmented but massive market, and we can solve a lot of liquidity issues with our technology. But then it goes beyond that. So it's a big market at the start, and then that can scale even greater from there. and I think that's part of what, I mean obviously, I'm not going to speak for Nithin. >> Nithin, let me weigh in here, pass the mic over. Nithin talk about the deal, why these guys? I know you met 'em, you like Al, and the feedback I've heard from other folks is he's a classic entrepreneur and that obviously, the entrepreneur gets the deal, but obviously you don't just give money 'cause you like someone. What about this deal is it that you guys like? You guys been there early, you got some great people on your team, what about this deal is it that you like? >> Sure, for us, Al met pretty much most of, almost all the criteria that we had, okay. That we had when we go, the thesis before we go fund someone. We don't get so many deals like that. Usually we get you know, they made 50% of the criteria, we might still put money because you can't get the 100%. So one thing, Al as a founder, he's experienced, he has done it multiple times before, he sold companies. Tech guy, which is very key for us. A tech project is very key. Okay, second thing, he's built the whole thing. It's not like he's raising the money to go and build it. He built it, now he's raising money to go for go to market strategies, which makes sense. He's shown it, and we tested it out. So like, we were completely blown away. He has a team behind 'im. He's built a team on every side, on the marketing side, on PR, events. And the idea, this is a general blockchain, but he's addressing a very specific issue. It is a real problem. Loyalty points, or rewards points, or gift points. Or whatever you call them. It is segmented, it's fragmented, and this is a chance. And there might be many people who are trying to solve this problem, but I think Al has the greatest possibility, or probability, of becoming the winner. >> You and I have talked on theCUBE before, both of you guys are CUBE alumni, I know you both, so I'll ask you, 'cause I'll just remind everyone, we've talked about token economics. One of the things that's coming up here at the Consensus 2018 event in New York, onstage certainly, and some fireworks in one of the sessions, is like if you're not decentralized, why the hell are you doing a decentralized model? So one of the criterias is, the fit for the business model, has to fit the notion of a decentralized world, with the ability of tokens becoming an integral part. What about this deal makes that happen? Obviously, fragmentation, is that still decentralized? So, how are you sorting through the nuances of saying, okay, is it decentralized the market for him, and this deal? Or does it fit? >> See no, decentralize is one thing okay, in here, more than decentralized, I would say there was the platform, so that all the companies can come in, use this common platform, release it, and as a user you're getting a chance to atomically swap it if you don't like something. Most of the reward points or loyalty points go waste. Maybe the companies want it to go waste, I don't know if that is. >> It's a natural burn at equilibrium going on anyway right? Perfect fit! >> So that is the only, that was the only doubt that we had. Would companies want this, because do they want their customers' loyalty points going waste rather than swapping it for something else? That was the only question that we had. Well, that's a question that will get answered in the market. But otherwise we hadn't seen something like this before. >> What's your take of the show so far? We saw each other in the hallway as we were getting set up for theCUBE, for two days of coverage, in New York, for Blockchain Week, New York, what's your take? Obviously pretty packed. >> Oh my god, it's so packed, and it's great, the show is going on. It is bringing a lot of money in, it's bringing all the investors in a new money, old money, traditional money, nerd money as you said. >> It smells like money! >> Everybody's coming in. See the beauty about those things coming in is, you're going to get a lot of people from other fields that are going to come into this field to solve problems. 'Cause earlier, if there is no money coming in, you're going to have very smart people, or very intelligent people stick with physics or whichever was their field. Now, they're going to look into the space because they're getting paid. See that brings more people who are intelligent, and who can solve problems. That is very key for me. >> Al, I want to ask you as an entrepreneur, one things you usually have to struggle with, as any entrepreneur, is navigating the 3-D chess you got to play, whether it's competitive strategy, market movement, certainly the market's moving and shifting very quickly, but you've got growth, big tailwind for you. What's your takeaway? Because now you have new things coming on. Every every day it seems like a new shoe is dropping. SEC's firing a warning on utility tokens, security tokens are still coming, are now coming online, but that looks very promising, and then ecosystems become super important. You guys just announced news this morning around the ecosystem. >> Yeah, tomorrow we have some. We had some news today, but we have more tomorrow. >> John: Well talk about the news. >> Yeah, so we have a multi-tiered go to market strategy. Obviously in the loyalty space, again I want to emphasize, it's just one use case, but it's a massive one. You have brands, the enterprise. And many of those those enterprises or brands may operate their loyalty program internally, in terms of like back offices systems, in some cases they're outsourcing the app to a SAS provider, some application provider, that's kind of hidden in the background. But let's just say like Hilton. I use Hilton, it's the location for the event, but Hilton, you have this user experience using this app, but maybe that technology, the SAS application that's powering that, is actually not Hilton technology. And so let's just say, there's 30 million people in the Hilton program and there may be 30 million of them on the Marriott, coexisting on some SAS application. And so that's another important category for us. SAS providers and so forth, supporting that industry. And then last but not least, today, whether enterprise or SAS company, many cases not touching their own hardware, right? They're using the cloud. >> So they're outsourcing the backend. >> Yeah, and so you have managed cloud providers. >> So what does it mean for the market? I don't understand, I'm not following you. >> Well, I guess what I'm saying is that there needs to be a common standard, across enterprise application provider, in global cloud community, cloud is the new hardware. >> True. So horizontally scaling loyalties as we were (mumbles). >> Exactly, so we have, we're basically securing partnerships on all three levels, to make sure that, if you want to use new technology, you want to ensure that it's widely supported, across a variety of partners you may want to work with if you're an enterprise. Whether, a software company, cloud company, and so forth. You want to be able to ensure that it can back up the truck. So we've basically signed partnerships at all of these tiers. You're going to see news in the morning. It's late here on a Monday evening. So tomorrow 9:00 a.m, major cloud company, one of the major cloud companies, and there's more to follow, making an announcement that they've joined our ecosystem partner program, and supporting this open source technology in a number of different ways. Which we're really excited about. >> You see ecosystem as a strategic move for you. >> Absolutely, this is, for us, this is, it's all about helping the consumer, but it's not about one consumer at a time for us. It's very much an enterprise play. It's one enterprise at a time. And with each enterprise we basically add to the ecosystem millions if not tens of millions of consumers instantly. >> Nithin I want to ask you a question, because what he just brought up is interesting to me as well. As a new thing, it's not new, but it's new to the crypto world, new to the analog world, that's not in the tech field. Tech business, we all know about global system integrators, we know about ecosystems, we know the value of developer programs, and community, all those things, check, check, check. But now those things are coming to new markets. People have never seen an ecosystem play before. So it's kind of, not new, it's new for some people, it's a competitive advantage opportunity. >> True, it is. See the whole thing is so new, that you can't even define it at this point. It's very hard to define. It's like, see, as an example I would say, none of us thought that when the iPhone came, there would be a 60 billion dollar taxi sharing economy that comes out of it, right? Same thing. Blockchain comes, we just don't know. And it's very hard to predict. >> New brands are going to emerge, I mean if you look at every major inflection point, I point to a couple that I think are relevant, TCP/IP was created, internetworking. >> Yep. >> That essentially went after proprietary networks, like IBM, Digital, Stacks, but it didn't replace, it wasn't a new functionality, it was interoperability. >> Yes. >> The web, HTTP, created a whole new functionality. >> Yep. >> Out of that emerged new brands. >> Yeah. >> So I think this wave's coming is a, new brands are going to emerge. >> Here, what's the brand, I don't know what's going to emerge. There it was interoperability. >> John: Well, new players. >> It's here, it's more, the collaboration. The collaboration is so huge, it's the scale is so huge, in the sense you can collaborate across the world. You're cutting those borders, there are no borders that can hold you. Even though interoperability happened in internet, There were the Googles, and the Facebook, that still had those borders. >> Well, don't put it, Cisco came out of that, 3Com, and those generations, but the hyper-scalers came out of the web. >> Yep. >> So I'm saying, well I'm saying, I want to get your reaction to, is I think that is such a small scale relative to blockchain and crypto because it's global, it's every industry, it's not just tech it's just like everything. So there's got to be new brands. Startups going to come out of the woodwork, that's my point. >> It's not yet time for the brands to come in. See that's the whole thing. So let's put it this way, the internet was there from 1978, if you really look at it, ARPANET or DARPA, those things were there. Email was there, but it was by 1997, or by the time we all came to know Google it was 2001. There is that gap between the brand forming, because it has to permeate first, more people have to use it, like what is the user-- >> Everything was was a bubble, but everything happened. I got food delivered to my house today, right? It happened, people were saying that's a crazy idea. >> It's now it's going on, right. So it's the timing and they know the time for it to permeate so here, how many people are using Bitcoin, and to do what? Most of them are just speculating right? There's very few real use case of remittance or speculative trading, that's what's happening. See that's what I said. The other use cases, it has to permeate. And that comes with more user adoption. And the user adoption initially is going to come from the speculation. >> I think it's a good sign, honestly I think it's a tell sign, because I remember when the web was new, I was in coming out right and growing in the industry. People were poo poo, oh that's just for kids. The big company's said, we wouldn't, who the hell is going to use the World Wide Web? Enter the search engines. >> I remember that like it was yesterday. I forget that I'm not a kid anymore, and I had the opportunity to be an entrepreneur during that era. One of the things I want to add is that, we had, I think what Nithin is really pointing out, it started with the infrastructure, you had network engineers and ISPs, you know, and email. But what was the enterprise application here? What was that consumer application, and that followed right? So it started infrastructure, then it evolved. Once we saw these applications, enterprises started to go crazy. Whether it was the Ubers of the world surfacing, or enterprises reinventing themselves, that's kind of the next wave. >> Well, this is why I think you're a good opportunity. 'Cause I remember licking stamps and sending out envelopes to get people to come to a seminar, held at a hotel. That's how you did it in the old world. The web replaced that with direct response. >> But there's some, there's something else-- >> The mainframe ran faster than the web. You're replacing an old loyalty, that's like licking the stamps. It's not about comparing what you're doing to something else. >> There's also something that helps, that we're not acknowledging, that really helped take internet from 1.0 to 2.0, it's Linux. You know I remember websites were insanely expensive. It was Windows servers, it was Sun Solaris, all of this crazy, expensive, server systems, that you needed to have, so the barrier of entry was extremely high. Then Linux came along, and you still needed to have your own data center space, and so still high, but the licensing fees kind of went away. >> And now with containers and Kubernetes-- >> Exactly. >> I made a bet I was going to get Kubernetes in a crypto show. >> Anybody from a bedroom could start a company, right? You could do it with your pajamas still on. >> John: Well orchestration's easier. >> Absolutely. So this has started, this really, revolution. Now you have blockchain and you start to introduce enterprise-grade blockchain technologies, it's the next wave, you know, it's not VoIP, it's value over IP. >> Okay, I'm going to ask both you guys a final question, to end this segment here at the block event. I know you guys want to get back, and I'm taking you anyway from the schmoozing and networking and the fun out there, deejay. Predictions, next year this time, what are we going to be? What's the we're going to look like? What's going to evolve? I mean we had a conversation with Richard, who partnered with you guys at Arcadia Crypto Partners, saying the trading things interesting, the liquidity has changed. What's your take? I want you guys both to take a minute to make a prediction. Next year, what's different, who's out, who's in, what's happening, is it growing? >> So I, you know, I would say this, surprisingly, CTOs, I love CTOs, but many CTOs, I would say that well above 50% of CTOs, still can't spell blockchain. Really, and what I mean by that, really understand the transformational power what this is, in terms of how this is really web 3.0. This is going to change so many industries, create so much value for consumers, help businesses and so forth, and we're going to cross that 50% mark. >> Next year. >> With CTOs-- >> 50% of what? Be clear on-- >> Basically, we're going, in terms of the net, that blockchain's going to capture, and really enterprises and not just enterprises, service providers and so forth-- >> 50% of the mind share or 50% of the projects? >> Yeah no, I'm talking it's, people aren't going to be saying, oh, blockchain, isn't that Bitcoin? They're going to really understand, and they're going to understand that impact. And over the course of the next 12 months, we're going to see that. And it starts, obviously in many cases, with the CIO, CTO of many companies. There are definitely a lot of CIOs and CTOs on the forefront of innovation that get it, but what I'm saying is that more than 50% don't. >> So you're saying-- They're very busy in doing what they're doing today, and it hasn't hit them yet. >> To recap, you're saying by next year, 50% of CTOs or CTO equivalents, will have a clear understanding of what blockchain is-- >> Absolutely. >> And what it can do. >> Absolutely. >> Nithin, your prediction, next year, this time, what's different, what's new, what's the prediction? >> So, one of the key things that I think is going to happen is there's going to be a lot more training, and knowledge that's going to spread out, so that a lot more people understand, what blockchain is and what bitcoin is. Even now, as Al said, he was telling about CTOs, if the CTOs are, that's the state, that they can't spell blockchain, imagine where the real common man is. You've got people like Jamie Dimon coming on TV and saying he doesn't like Bitcoin, but he likes blockchain. I'm like, what the heck is he saying? That he likes a database? >> He was selling it short 100% (chuckles) >> Yeah, he likes a database. And then you have Warren Buffett coming over there-- >> Rat poison. >> And then this is rat poison. And like my question is, does any of his funds buy gold? Do they buy gold? He was telling that this is only worth as much as the next buy buying at a higher price. >> What's Warren Buffett's best tech investment? >> I don't know, I think he bought Apple, he started buying Apple now, right? When it's reached a thousand bucks? Or it reached a trillion dollars or close to that, or 750 billion? >> The Apple buy was 2006. If you were there, then you were good. >> Yeah, but-- >> So, your prediction? >> Market wise I don't know, what's going to happen? I'm expecting this, the crypto, the utility token, or the crypto market, to be at least a six trillion dollar business. But it'll happen next year? Definitely not. But I've been proven wrong, like I was expecting it to happen by 2025, but then it went to 750 billion by December. Well, it's not too far. >> You did get the prediction right, in the Bahamas at POLYCON18, about the drop around the tax consequences of the-- >> Right. >> People slinging trades around, not knowing the tax consequences. >> Right, right. We don't know because, who knows? Because what is going on over there, is IRS is still saying it's a property. That's what the last (slurs) is. SEC is saying it is all equity, and the CFTC was saying it's commodity. So what tax do I pay? >> Okay, lightning round question, 'cause I want to, one more popped in my head. The global landscape, from an investor standpoint, the US, we know what's going on in the US, accredited, SEC is throwing, firing across, bullets across the bow of the boats, kind of holding people in line. What percentage of US big investors will be overseas by next year? >> Percentage of-- >> Having, meaning having deals being done, proxy deals being down outside the US, what percentage? >> It's still going to be low though. That is going to be low, because that, I don't think the US investor, means the large scale of those investors-- >> You don't think the big funds will co-locate outside the US? >> There will be some, but not enough. >> Put a number, a percentage. >> Percentage-wise I think it's still going to be less than 10%. >> Al, your prediction? >> In terms of investment? >> Investment, investors saying hey, I got money here, I want to put it out there. >> Outside of the United States? >> Share money, not move their whole fund, but do deals from a vehicle. >> Do deals outside. I think I agree with Nithin. >> Throwing darts at the board here. >> No, I'm going to clarify. There's definitely massive investment happening overseas. In some respects probably bigger than the United States. So that's not going away. If anything that's going to grow. But your question is, in terms of US entities, making abroad investments, overseas investments, versus just domestic? I think that trend doesn't necessarily change. You have the venture community, there are certain bigger venture funds that can have global operations 'cause at the end of the day, they need to have global operations, to be able to do that, and most venture funds aren't that massive, they don't have that infrastructure. So they're going to focus on their own backyard. So I don't necessarily think blockchain changes the venture mindset. It's just easier for them logistically to do due diligence on their own backyard and invest in those. >> Guys, always a pleasure. Great to see you. You guys are like friends with entourage here, great to get the update here at Blockchain Week. We get to Silicon Valley week, we'll connect up again. I'm John Furrier, here in New York, theCUBE's continuing coverage of crypto, decentralized applications, and blockchain of course, we're all over it. You'll see us all over, all of the web, all the shows. Thanks for watching. (techno music)

>> Voiceover: From New York, it's theCUBE, covering Blockchain Week. Now, here's John Furrier. >> Hello and welcome to exclusive CUBE coverage here in New York City for Blockchain Week, NY Blockchain Week New York City. CUBE's coverage continues with cryptocurrency, decentralized internet, the applications of blockchain. Our next guest is Richard Rofe, who's the co-found partner of Arcadia Crypto Ventures. Welcome to this CUBE conversation. >> Thanks, good to be here. >> So when you're in that neck of the woods, New York City, obviously Wall Street, you know, they traded across the wall in the old days, and then it became now the Wall Street, it's changing. We're seeing crypto and token economics really driving the entrepreneurial energy, both on start-ups, as well as in the capital market. And you guys are on the front end of that, with some awesome investments advisory. And what's the craze all about? I mean, you have more practical view, your firm, conservative and also aggressive. What's your take? >> Well, first off, I'm a little older than most of the guys in the space, so I have a different perspective. I did come from Wall Street prior to this, I ran a hedge fund for 12 years, and before that I was basically an entrepreneur my whole life, software and other things. So, I looked at this a little differently, than probably some of the younger guys do. I've kind of seen this before? I think I saw it with the internet. And I think it's a world-changing shift, and we're an early part of it. We've been in for a while, actually in this space forever. Cause, you know, this space isn't that old. So, six years out of 10, we've been in it from the beginning, basically. >> You know, us old guys look at the waves, these waves of innovation, we're like hanging ten on the old big surfboards, and the young kids are ninjaing up on the small board. What is the younger generation looking at? Cause they're certainly, I wish I was 20-something, this is the best wave I've seen in tech revolution coming, all the ingredients are there, the capital markets are changing radically, the technology product market is changing radically, the global landscape's changing radically, the regulatory landscape, and everything else, is a perfect storm for innovation. >> Rapid change, I got involved early around 2012, just to give you a, you know, since we're at a conference this week, and see how crowded and incredibly busy it is, takes up an entire giant hotel, and bursting into the street, when I, in 2012 when I went to the very first conference, that I attended anyway, you could fill a small room with every single person at the conference. So the growth has been insane. It is driven by younger people, but the beauty of this is it's driven by people all over the world. This is not just an American thing. This is a worldwide thing. This is a shift, a technology shift that I don't think we've seen since basically the advent of the internet itself. >> You know, there's an old expression, both sides of the table, you've been an entrepreneur, you've been an investor. A hedge fund is almost the third side of the table, it's like 3D chess almost, you are now playing in the crypto world. Being an entrepreneur, you've been there, done that, hedge fund you had to run money and make great investments. Now, with this new crypto phase, how are you looking at it? Because you have the experience, you can see the growth in the younger generation, new disruptive people literally just flying blind, just going crazy with some good stuff. How are you managing that? How do you look at the marketplace, how do you make your bets? >> Good question. It's difficult. First of all, the barrier to entry is low. At this time, anyone who understands technology is really getting involved, and for good reason, but therefore you have, hundreds and hundreds of deals that come your way on a weekly basis. So you have to really pick and choose through the ones that are interesting. And you apply the same techniques that you applied as an entrepreneur and an investor prior to that, you look at the underlying business, the area that the blockchain will disrupt, change, shift, how it will do it, how long it will last, and how many people will be interested in it. And if you find the ones that are attractive and interesting, then you find the team that's attractive and interesting. That's the big point, is that you really want to have a very good team, you care so much about their background, their technology background, as well as their business background. If you can put those things together, you have a winning investment, and then you try to do it. >> You and I were talking before you came on camera... crowd sales and Kickstarter, Gofundme, as great ways to get capital. But now there's really no liquidity there. Talk about the dynamics because I think, you know, traditional investors in this market say "hmm", and there's so much more coming that'll create more stability obviously. We see some of that, I'll get to that in a second. But I want to get your take on, from an investor standpoint, the notion of liquidity, and also an entrepenuer's standpoint, access to capital. Talk about the dynamics between access to capital and liquidity for the investors and for the entrepreneurs. >> Also great points. I mean, right now, we have something that is giving both things, right? Access to capital, worldwide access to capital, from the smallest investor to the biggest investor, everybody has an opportunity, where before it was really limited, and then you have liquidity in that if you have a token or a coin, that's tradable, whether it's on an exchange, or private trade, you can actually liquidify your investment. Where if you were in a private company in the past, and I've done many of those, you're locked in. You're kind of at the mercy of the organizers of the company, whoever they are, the people that run the business. And you're kind of stuck there, good or bad. In this case, you have the ability to trade in and out, just as you would with a public stock. >> So you can get some liquidity in the front end, while private still, so it's kind of like a little liquidity market. I want you to address a question that's come up, an observation that we've made on theCUBE. We were at the Bahamas at Polycon 18, Puerto Rico. Not in the US, is New York or New York City the capital, you know, of money, that's where money never sleeps, so to speak, Gordon Gekko would say, in the old Wall Street quote. But this is a global phenomenon. We're outside of the United States, there's a lot of action. Let's talk about the role of global money. >> Well, that's part of the excitement of the whole thing. It's not just the United States. It's all over the world, so it's really democratized investing, it's democratized finance, it's changing the landscape completely. And I think that it's unstoppable. I do think that regulation, and I know we talked about that earlier too, is a good thing. I think that regulation is necessary, because you can't just have a rogue environment completely, but on the other hand too much regulation kills things. So there has to be a happy medium and hopefully they'll find that. >> I love the invisible hand strategy, and certainly let capital take, but you want to have some signaling, SSC's been doing that. I just don't think it's stoppable in my opinion. But I want to go shift to where entrepreneurs are looking at the capital markets. Today the choices are bootstrap, friends and family, small sized business, cash flow business if you will, or go venture capital or private equity, if you have the kind of multiples that would warrant that, assuming the sector is in vogue at the moment. Which, you know, always a coin flip. Here, with token economics, there's a huge access to capital. Bubble we're seeing certainly is reflected in that. What are you looking for, when you see that kind of behavior? How do you manage the risk, how are entrepreneurs navigating that world? >> First of all, managing the risk, it's tough obviously. Especially as I mentioned earlier, there's so many deals coming at you at all times, so you have to choose wisely, that's the first way to manage risk. Always was the way to manage risk. People used to ask me in the hedge fund business, how do you manage your risk? Well, I only try to invest in the things that I think have the best upside, and the smallest downside, it was pretty simple. And it's the same here. It comes down to at the end of the day, what businesses are you choosing? The other thing is that, you know, first of all there's inherent risk. You can never get around that fact. But if you really believe in the long-term future, and you're willing to go through some ups and downs, and there are going to be, and there have been, as we know, over the past 10 years, and there will be more in the future. You have to be willing to ride those waves. And if you can do that, then I think your risk will just mitigate over time, as long as you're a smart, wise investor, and of course spreading it around. You don't want to be in, you know, all your eggs in one basket, then you'll take a giant risk. >> Yeah, it's one of those things where you don't want to zig when you should have zagged, with all this going on. It's certainly a turbulent landscape, I've heard phrases like, it's like wet cement, you don't know when it's going to form, all these kinds of phrases. So the question I want to ask you is, what do you look for? What are you looking at, what signals are you trying to synthesize, what's the tea leaves that you're reading, what're you looking at? What's concerning you, what are some tell signs that are going to help you navigate the investment side and advisory side? >> With regard to the entire space, we're looking very much at regulation, we want to know what the regulators want. I'm not sure they know what they want. We speak to them, we keep them pressed on the situation from our end, and we hear back from them on with their thinking. We'd like to see some regulation over time, but it's complicated because they don't even know what they're looking at yet. That's a big part of it. They're not sure how to regulate something that they don't understand. And there are very few people in this space, and this is one of the biggest risks. There are very few people that even do understand it, and are in this maze. >> I was telling an entrepreneur just here today, and then last week, it's in the Bay Area in California, they're more progressive than their suppliers, their law firm, and some of their accounting help. They're more progressive on the front end, they're actually advising the law firm on deals. >> And that has happened, that's happened with us, in fact we've recently put a structure together, where we taught the law firm how to do it, the law firm was impressed with it. They had to go study it, they spent a few weeks, and they came back and said "Hey, this is a great idea, we're going to do this with everybody else going forward." And that basically came from us backwards. >> Did they bill you for those hours, or did you charge them? >> Great question, I really hope not. I'm going to ask my partner if we got billed for anything. >> Rich, I want to ask about blockchain, we got to see Consensus 2018, it's happening here in New York, big event, part of CoinDesk too, they're doing a great job, content program's been solid. It's been super crowded, they need a bigger venue obviously, the demand was high and sold out. And I know there's a lot of side events going on, a lot of activity. What is your take away, what do you look this as saying? Is it like, wow, what's your take on the impact of the momentum? >> Well, first of all, as I mentioned before, I saw this thing with my own eyes, right, from a little tiny room in Las Vegas, was the entire conference, to what we saw today. With people in the streets who can't even get in, thousands and thousands of people in one hotel, which is probably not even cut out for that many. I think it's incredible, the momentum says a lot, by the way, talking about mitigating risk, there's not just so many people, there's so many smart people, that are figuring this out, one by one, and getting involved early. And that really gives me a lot of confidence, in terms of the long-term strategy. If this thing grew by, you know, two or three times, four or five times what I saw in 2012, I would not be nearly as excited. What I'm seeing here, this mass load of people, who are fighting to get into an event, right, into a venue, and the intelligence, and the kind of people they are, and how educated they are, it really gives me hope. And it reminds me, of early days in the internet, where we saw the super smartest people, kind of broke away from the crowd, did their own thing. We saw guys leaving traditional firms, going and starting companies, the Amazons, the Googles, the Facebooks, and things of that nature, which became the largest companies in the world. >> And there were problems there too. You had back-dating stock options, you had all these deals where revenue is revenue, and then accounting issues, but again all that is just a symptom of a growth market. Final question for you, when you look at what you guys are doing, and how you're investing, how you're getting involved in companies, you're also an advisor to Bloq which is having an event here in New York City. How are you navigating the hiring, the partnership, the community aspect, as in the financial community, like the entrepreneurial community, there's a tight-knit bond. How is it evolving, how are you guys shaping that, what are some of the things you can share around the financial community? >> Well, we do advisory work, so we work with a lot of different clients that want to get into the space. We work with some very traditional clients, that are not really technologists, and those are the most interesting ones. They're difficult, because they don't understand a lot of it, and I don't blame them, I come from that world too. So, we have to really hold their hand, and we deal with a lot of very smart tech people who come from a whole other, but don't know the business side so well, so we kind of work with both. In terms of our own hiring, and who we bring on to our company, we really look for a very unique person, which is, usually in this case a younger, because of the space itself, we look for everybody, but we don't find that many people my age and older, that even want to spend time, let alone understand it. >> Some smart kid "I don't want to work at Goldman Sachs, they're old." >> Listen, and again, we saw this in the internet, you could not get a smart kid out of college to get a regular job back in the Nineties. They were all going to Web startups. Kind of same thing here. So we have a great pool to choose from, we try to pick people that are on the cutting-edge, but that also want to work hard. Because, again, it's a start-up industry, right? So, think about the hours, you know, you're really going to put in a lot more than you would at a nine-to-five job. Your weekend, nights, you know, the phone, you're connected 24/7. But the hiring's been, uh, we have a staff of about six people, and I think they're great, but we do hand-pick them and it takes a while. >> Take a minute to explain what you guys do, how many investments you've made, you've been there early, the year 2012 you mentioned, early on. >> I started in 2012 in terms of in just the space itself, due to my friend Matt Roszac at Bloq, who was really early, a year ahead of me there, and he got me involved, but I didn't really start making serious investments. My first investment was in 2014, we invested in a settlement and clearing house company, that's now one of the fastest growing banks in the country, and then we got into some of the coins, and some of the platforms, that's where we invest the most, and a few deals here and there. And then we started to do advisory work, because let's face it, we knew what we were doing, we were ahead of the curve, we certainly understood it, and so many people want to get into something that they don't know, they're going to need someone to hold their hand all the way through. So, our advisory business is our main stable business, and then we invest into certain deals that we think are interesting, a lot of them are platforms. >> Yeah, and token economics is driving all that. Richard, thanks for coming on, appreciate taking the time to come on CUBE, I'm John Furrier, we're here at New York City for Blockchain Week New York, and this is theCUBE exclusively continuing coverage of the cryptocurrency craze, token economics, obviously blockchains enabling technology underneath it, and the whole new Internet infrastructure is transforming with cloud, everything behind it's really exciting. Thanks for watching.

live from Las Vegas it's the cube covering IBM think 2018 brought to you by IBM hello everyone welcome back to the cube coverage here at IBM think 2018 in Las Vegas Nevada the Mandalay Bay it's a cubes exclusive covers three days of wall-to-wall interviews thought leaders experts entrepreneurs people making an impact and our next guest artists ani who's the co-founder of hosh io h OS h o de Ojo kayo advisor at the pink sky capital he's a cube alumni a walk in off the streets cuz he lives in Las Vegas but very instrumentals are connected to this community because of his pioneering work in in crypto blockchain and the future of money architects great to see you thanks for coming by thank you for having me it's good to be back on the cube great second time and second time yeah only couple we just saw each other the Bahamas the first security token conference yeah I bike on I I be on IBM's really big on supply chain this is their visitor old school you know generations of providing software for businesses b2b and now blockchains their big thing but blockchains yeah pretty straightforward yeah you know you get efficiencies but they're not talking about token economics because they talk about something execs here they're like well that implies the general public in their world thinks cryptocurrency they think Bitcoin so I want to connect the networks together our network IBM's network your network because the melting pot of this trend is really about blockchain cryptocurrency in the sense of the value around tokens and how tokens can be harnessed to capture the values I want to get your perspective as these worlds collide so I think that IBM is doing a great job by spearheading a blockchain movement and they're very they're focusing on the fortune 500 and the key with Fortune 500 companies right now is that they have rooms full of Java developers Java engineers and aetherium is the protocol right now that is most commonly found the majority of icos and token generation events that have occurred to date have all been on etherium x' network and etherium is the most and they found in blockchain however the etherium blockchain the language to build and launch token generation events on aetherium you have to write in a language called solidity and solidity is a new language and iBM has made a smart move by doing everything in Java and JavaScript similar to a lot of the new block chains that are aiming to compete with aetherium and the key distinction just to kind of put it out there when I get your reaction to and get some commentary around is IBM is not competing with public block chains they're looking at a in a different way they're saying hey you know you can have I guess private blockchains I mean it's not a really a dirty word they because they have a different use case correct I think it's very important especially when it comes to things like healthcare you look at the health care industry healthcare records will not be going on public block chains and so the hyper ledger fabric framework may make sense for things that need to be HIPAA compliant for example so reliability is key so what's their jannat like say hashed crafts got a lot of traction in their performance and their speed they got time stamps that's not a native blockchain yet that's kind of getting some traction IBM's got something similar for those markets that require the reliability the performance and the security so help the audience understand IBM's moves here because IBM's conservative so they don't really want to throw the word cryptocurrency out there because it might be misunderstood but this is gonna end up in token economics how are you explaining what the moves ibm's making to the average person that might not know the inside nuances in baseball for say the crypto market I think what's interesting is that iBM has a more mature focus on this space and you know they have direct ties historically to the fortune 500 companies the way others do not and so they've taken a much more sophisticated and a much much more conservative approach you don't see IBM throwing around the word cryptocurrency and that's a smart move because it's about the cryptography that secures block chains in a decentralized ecosystem and it's that the discussion of just tokens and token sales and leveraging tokens as a currency it's a premature time in this entire industry to be having that discussion so although it's going on it's a distraction for IBM you saying yeah because we but it's more interesting for smart contracts to be written that our functional smart contracts that for the first time ever white collared middlemen are being cut out of the picture in a new trustless decentralized ecosystem so talk about where IBM could take this with token economists obviously do you think that it's all leads to some sort of tokenization is that gonna be where the value capture is gonna be how does IBM get there in your mind I think they get there by having fortune 500 companies launch legitimate decentralized applications on their blockchain and that's just what Java JavaScript it's because most fortune 500 companies already have a plethora of Engineers globally that they can simply have start working on IBM's blockchain whereas you don't see that as a risk for IBM no that's that's IBM's advantage because today if the fortune 500 companies aren't building on aetherium whose blockchain mainly because of the learning curve it takes for a current full stack engineer to become a solidity engineer what's the etherium future now obviously they have they're working on lightning seeing some things going on that area the Lightning is Bitcoin is plasma yeah plasma sorry I got them confused so they got to go through the work this and some real work that's got to get done the theory of childs a big developer community the biggest the biggest so do those merge with the IBM communities downstream at some point or is it okay to be separate and does it matter I think they'll remain separate and in this case I I highly doubt that a theory IBM hyper ledger will go down the route that route stock has gone root stock essentially is the etherium virtual machine sidechain to the Bitcoin blockchain enabling smart contracts on the Bitcoin blockchain for the first time and rootstock is a very interesting project however IBM is its own ecosystem and the way in which they're catering to the fortune 500 is extremely intriguing and from Hojo's perspective we want to be auditing smart contracts that are functional that are written by more sophisticated players in the industry centralized ecosystem our main focus is just security auditing and there's gonna be a lot more smart contracts written by more sophisticated players on IBM's blockchain then possibly the other ones right now we have we have not seen a plethora of Fortune 500 companies by any means launching smart contracts on the theorems blockchain and blue chips banks or whatever as they try to disrupt themselves need to get us to partner governments okay so how about for a minute I just take a second to talk about your business I know we covered this at polycon and the Bahamas but for the sake of the context to IBM yeah talk about what you guys are doing we're specifically in the marketplace of partners would you sit if you were parting with IBM and and your role that you could possibly take with IBM so to take a step back quick host show the word itself hosho and means security in japanese and we started this company eight months ago my co-founder yo Kwon and I and our laser focus is blockchain security and being the global leader within the blockchain security space so as far as we see there's new blockchains being made new protocol tokens being launched as well as new tokens being launched as well as do smart contracts being written that are functional for the entire business and no matter what blockchain a smart contract is written on that smart contract is code that has been written and that code has to be audited by a professional third party and we are that professional third party that there's a line-by-line code review of the smart contract and finds all security vulnerabilities and we've been building proprietary tooling to find vulnerabilities faster and faster and faster we do a gas analysis to make sure that that blockchain is not being clogged we conduct the static analysis to find any hidden functionality within the framework of the smart contract and the last part which is very crucial is that yeah very uniquely qualified full stack engineer with a unique QA mindset and a security background who knows the language in which this is coded which currently most projects that were auditing our aetherium ERC 20 tokens written in solidity someone has to marry the source of truth which in the case of an ICO is a white paper and marry the white paper to the smart contract and make sure is the smart contract doing what the white paper says codify the white paper basically this process of auditing is gonna be ever more crucial within the the business that IBM does with Fortune 500 businesses because when a publicly traded company launches a smart contract for a decentralized application security is the highest priority and abilities is where the hackers could come in just be on a time to market getting those smart contract codes written it was fully baked it's irreversible once the smart contract is launched and millions of dollars are gonna go through this smart contract it's been regular practice in the cybersecurity world to type up code and to have it reviewed by a third party auditor we're simply applying the exact same logic to the blockchain space and it's exciting to see more blockchains by sophisticated players like IBM come to fruition and we're looking forward to actual projects from big players around the world launch on IBM's blockchain and hosho is looking to be a preferred partner of IBM's to do all their security work whether it's smart contract auditing or penetration testing and real quick on penetration testing that's our other core service that we provide and penetration testing is both for websites and for crypto currency exchanges in which we're making sure there's no security vulnerabilities within your website and finding every way possible to penetrate your website or your exchange and every time code is changed you open up the doors to more vulnerabilities and so in the crypto currency exchange space right now we're seeing that new exchanges are being made but sophisticated investors don't know if this is a safe place to trade hundreds of millions of dollars or not yeah and so when you got commerce being John I mean IBM as folk as you mentioned is legit and they're doing a great job by the way props to IBM for doing what they're doing they've been in for multiple years now and they're supporting the Apache project they're putting their their weight behind it but these are real-world examples granted supply chain might be boring to some audiences but not to others I mean you're moving real product around this is commerce with digital fingerprints and code and potentially tokens that's a highly gonna accelerate the payment process I mean the notion of clearing goes away it's instant yes this is a highly accelerated money transfer value capture value Tran for environment you can't take me chances yes and security is primal concern and we're excited that companies like IBM value security and this space is one that the dust has yet to settle and what's gonna help the dust settle within the blockchain ecosystem is more priority on security so what's your take if you are gonna give a talk here we're doing talking here in the cube so it's awesome it's gonna be alive and on-demand as well your advice to people saying you know we got a tokenizer our business I need to start with blockchain I can see some areas to create some efficiencies around some inefficient processes and create new business models I got to get started your thoughts my thoughts are take a step back and first evaluate do you have a business what problem are you solving once your business is actually generating some revenue and you've evaluated why the concept of a blockchain could be interesting for your business then pick a blockchain and stick to it and then when you start building on that block chain you've figured out that a token could actually be leveraged within this decentralized application that you're building then you can start figuring out what the token economics of it would actually be I think what people are doing nowadays is rushing to create a token because of their excitement about the fundraising mechanism that an ICO is and an ICO is democratizing to some extent at least global capital raising and I think that fundraising mechanism is not going anywhere that that fundraising mechanism is here to stay however the majority of ICO projects that we're seeing occurring today I don't think these companies will be around in the next couple of years which shows how immature to some extent the industry actually is whereas maybe the projects that are built and launched on IBM's block chains that they develop maybe they're more sophisticated and will be companies that have gone through a more rigorous process of making sure security was a primary concern and they wrote quality code for quality businesses that are actually leveraging decentralization in the appropriate way not the other way around of we want to raise capital so let's invent a reason to have a token or you have a big case right now in Silicon Valley at least is you have companies that are very serious a and B and decided let's do an icy overseer you see and that that's tricky it's not always the right solution when you're saying is don't confuse the ico crazy fundraising arbitrage and new new model to applying supply chain tokens and blockchain to a durable business agreed and on the same token we have people in the space whether they're investors they're lawyers PR firms exchanges they all need to mitigate their risk by keeping security as a concern for them both in-house and for the companies that they're working with yeah lawyers don't want to be doing lawyer work for a company that will turn out to be a scam coin and someone has to do a security audit of that token the same goes for a PR firm a marketer and in exchange exchanges should not be listing tokens that have not gone through a smart contract audit well it's good to know we got a cube alumni here in the cube to help us with our security audit yeah well the answers the life were in a cube interview so do we got one right here I want to just get into in topic you and I were talking of dinner the other night when we had we saw each other a few nights ago about the problem of picks and shovels and tools and maturity in this new emerging area can you um can you just take a minute to explain what that we were talking about there and I thought you had a good point I mean maturity of the space is not mature it's growing it's embryonic but moving fast and there's need for tools let's unpack that just share your thoughts vision so I think that a lot of people have been more excited to join in an IC o---- a token generation event and do more quick money grabs but to me what's more exciting is the infrastructure that's needed for this industry to actually grow and mature an infrastructure is infamously known as picks and shovels because when the gold rush happened the people who made the real money or the people selling the shovels to the gold diggers and what's included in that is businesses like our own hosho which is selling security audits of smart contracts doing penetration testing bringing maturity and making making things less risky for for everybody in this space so we start we see ourselves as selling picks and shovels on the other hand I'll give you an example Goldman Sachs has a trading desk today it's not 24/7 stock market Oh at 9:00 closes at 5:00 what happens tomorrow when a 24/7 crypto currency trading desk is turned on at Goldman Sachs do the traders that are now 24/7 have the appropriate tools and the governance built into software to manage a team of 24/7 traders at Goldman Sachs today when you have traders trading in the stock market they have a plethora of tools that make them snipers and you have certified market technicians telling hedge funds that this isn't gonna go up two points here in three points they're reading candlesticks in the cryptocurrency space it's like poking a stick you go from being a sniper to having a stick find by Wars like a blind man so companies there's a dozen companies that can be made building the infrastructure for just what I just said the governance with four trading floors this is a really good point and I wanted to bring it up because in these emerging markets these white spaces for tools and technology to help the overall trend grow faster has always been a successful man however you mentioned something about the goldman sachs trading this and that is it literally could be turned down overnight right so that's the problem you can accelerate things too fast and not be prepared that seems Oldman honest I'd know Goldman's done a great job at being very much forward-thinking they've been at every money 20/20 since the beginning of that FinTech conference and they're definitely in this pickle this exercise the analogy is a company can turn on a new model fairly quickly faster than the old days which we're taking months and then now you can do it really on a much shorter timeframe that means they potentially could be exposed if they go too fast yeah this is where the ecosystem has to help yeah I think the bulge bracket banks are treading the water very carefully JPMorgan is doing things they're involved with aetherium Z cash - JPMorgan has a lot going on on this front but these are publicly traded monster banks they're not going to take any risks these are they have a they have stockholders to to answer to they have the US government we have over 150 regulatory arms just regulating the finance industry in the United States and so I think it the American citizen citizen is quick to point fingers to bulge bracket banks and those banks are answering to too many regulatory arms this is one of the downsides of the United States right now in general is the increasingly coercive environment of the government ybm certainly got the blue chip company got the the fortune 500 but they also have a marketplace and that's where they could really kind of change the game feeling in those white spaces yeah IBM's marketplace sounds very exciting and my mind just goes to who's handling the security for everything to do with IBM blockchain we're hoping at Osho arch edge thanks for joining us thanks for sharing your your insight here in the queue with an IBM think conference breaking down all the top news that's really around blockchain at AI would date at the sin of the value proposition all being disrupted by new decentralized technologies blockchain being the beginning and a lot more is happening and certainly we're in and bring it to you on the cube no matter where it is will be there I'm John furrow here and Las Vegas for IBM think coverage we'll be back with more coverage after this short break [Music]