(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.

>> Announcer: Live from San Juan, Puerto Rico, it's theCube! Covering Blockchain Unbound. Brought to you by Blockchain Industries. (lively music) >> Welcome back to theCube's live special coverage here in Puerto Rico for Blockchain Unbounded which is the global event where people from around the world are coming from Silicon Valley, New York, Miami, all over the globe, Moscow, all over the world here to talk about blockchain decentralized internet, and of course, cryptocurrency. Your next guest is Olga Petrunina with Adara.IO. Welcome to theCube. >> Hi, happy to be here. >> Thanks for coming on. So you're from Moscow which it's cold there right now. What's it like? >> It's minus 15. (laughs) It's much better here in Puerto Rico. I'm happy. >> It's so exciting to have you. Thanks for coming on. So the global conference, this is really a global phenomenon. Take a minute to explain what you're working on, what the product is, what it will become, is it launched yet, what's the company about. Take one minute to explain. >> Okay. We are building intelligent blockchain ecosystem which consists of exchange and crypto wallet with artificial intelligence mechanism inside. We are providing access to the crypto for Main Street investors who have no idea about crypto, want to invest, just put their money in our wallet, pick up the strategy, and just get money. (chuckles) >> So you're targeting mainstream investors, not like the insiders? >> No, no, of course we have professional players on our platform because we're going to educate our investment mechanics with strategy of professional groups of traders. >> So are you going to have an exchange and software behind it? Explain the architecture of the solution. >> All right, we are based NEM. It's our core partner. We are early adapter surveying their protocol, Catapult. We integrated it in our exchange because they have really good new features like aggregated transactions when you can send a pool of different currencies in one transaction. That's a really great idea. Also, they implemented the centralized exchange in their protocol. So our exchange right now is centralized. We're going to build the decentralized part of our exchange based on Catapult. >> Are you worried about the centralized portion because of recent hacks? How are you thinking about doing that? >> Yeah, in case we are using a NEM protocol, they have like four layers of security. As for me, it's the most secure and most scalable protocol. Of course, we are using the cold wallets connected to our platform so we are not storing anything on hot wallets. It's like 95% storing on the cold wallets. >> What's your biggest fear? >> Oh, (laughs) spiders. (laughs) No, I just-- >> Is that a cryptocurrency I don't know about yet? (laughs) >> As for me, the biggest problem for crypto is regulation. Now, we have to... Like they're building the structure for obtaining different licenses in different countries. So we have bought update for licenses in Dubai, in Estonia, and also we are going to apply in Switzerland. So it's really hard to negotiate, everyday the new news regarding regulations. >> So talk about where the exchange will be. You mentioned Dubai. Are you having one in one nation or you having multiple countries participating? How does it work? Does everyone have to participate? >> In case of that in Dubai, there is no legal structure, for example, bank licenses in crypto, so we're going to have to invent licenses in crypto in Switzerland. In Dubai, we obtained for license trading crypto into commodities because Dubai, they're focused on commodities base. In Estonia, we received a payment system license and brokerage license. >> So one of the big news this week is Coinbase, one of the most popular exchanges, had done a deal with the UK government. I don't know if you saw that, the Financial Conduct Authority, the FCA, just now gave them a license for their fast-payment service for Fiat. So a new government move, really interesting. Are the governments that you're talking to thinking the same way? >> Yeah, we talked to Central Bank of Dubai. They're also going to legalize all the crypto and involve their blockchain and cryptocurrency with companies to set up in their legal structure in Dubai, the same with Estonia also. Everybody want to be like the "crypto alien." (chuckles_ >> The crypto Wall Street. >> Yeah, the crypto Wall Street. >> And every country wants to do it, Puerto Rico, Armenia, Bahrain wants to get in on the action. >> Yeah, the same with Russia. We are members of Russian Blockchain Association. We are working on laws for Russian government regarding crypto. It's going to be pretty good regulation. We'll publish in this summer, like July. So I hope that the-- >> Olga, talk about the entrepreneurial landscape in Russia right now. How vibrant is it? We know they have technology savvy. >> About me? >> And Russia in general. >> And Russia in general. >> In Russia, in Moscow. >> Yeah, a lot of good blockchain developers. >> And the young kids. >> Vitalik is Russian. (laughs) >> I interviewed his mom, by the way. >> Our developers based in Moscow, that's why I'm also based in Moscow. Everybody like crazy about crypto in Moscow because I think we have a lot of good tech background in Russia so why not use it for blockchain expansion. >> Great Russian expertise. I know a lot of Russian developers are good, but also in Estonia, there's some great developers, too, all over the world. >> Right, but Russia has >> It's a global revolution. >> In blockchain. Vitalik Buterin is Russian, so it makes a lot of sense. (laughs) >> When we get him on theCube, we'll grill him. What do you hope to do in the next? What's next for you? >> We're going to be public in June. Now we already developed our exchanges for (mumbles) and security check. After that, we're going to build our artificial judges of investment mechanisms, so we need like one year and a half for educated. Our next step, we are thinking about taking utilization real assets also because we already have all these elements which is necessary for the organization in our core partners technology, NEM. So I think we will move in this year also. >> What is the main thing that you're going to use in your exchange that's going to make you different? >> What's different about your exchange? >> We have a lot of expertise from different traders around the world. All of them are claiming about their unstable APIs of exchange, and we are focused on high scalability and like best technologies in API building of exchange because we need a lot of traders on the platform. We have development that APIs for follow trade. So it's like our best feature, I guess. >> What kind of partnerships are you looking to do with other people? >> We're looking for traders, of course, because we need them to bring our platform, to bring forth great entity to our platform. We are looking for companies which going to list on our exchange. Looking for investors, also. >> Olga, what do you think about this conference here? >> Oh, it's pretty amazing. Our first time in Puerto Rico. I was really surprised. It's amazing country, amazing island, and a lot of good connections. So, I'm happy to be here. >> It's a global landscape right now. >> Yeah right, it's global, peer-to-peer economy. (laughs) >> Well, Olga, thank you for coming on and sharing, theCube. We learned something today. You don't like spiders. >> (laughs) Right. (laughs) Thank you for inviting me. >> You're afraid of spiders. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you. >> All right, more of Cube coverage here in Puerto Rico. I'm John Furrier, the host of theCube. Extracting the signal from the noise here in Puerto Rico. It's theCube's continuing coverage of the blockchain, cryptocurrency, and the decentralized application revolution. We'll be right back after this short break. (lively music)