(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome to theCUBE's special showcase with Unstoppable Domains. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE here in Palo Alto, California. And Matt Gould who's the founder and CEO of Unstoppable Domains. Matt, great to come on. Congratulations on the success of your company, Unstoppable Domains. Thanks for kicking off this showcase. >> Well, thank you, happy to be here. >> So first of all, love the story you've got going on here. Love the approach, very innovative, but you're also on the big Web3 wave, which we know that leads into, metaverse unlimited new ways, people are consuming information, content, applications are being built differently. This is a major wave and it's happening. Some people are trying to squint through the hype versus reality, but you don't have to be a rocket science to realize that it's a cultural shift and a technical shift going on with Web3. So this is kind of what's happening in the market. So give us your take. What's your reaction? You're in the middle of it. You're on this wave. >> Yeah, well, I would say it's a torrent of change that got unleashed just over a decade ago with Bitcoin coming out and giving people the ability to have digital items that they could actually own themselves online. And this is a new thing. And people coming, especially from my generation of millennials, they spend their time online in these digital spaces and they've wanted to be able to own these items and you see it from, you know Gaming and Fortnite and Skins and Warcraft and all these other places. But this is really being enabled by this new crypto technology to just extend to a whole lot more applications, from money, which everyone's familiar with, to NFT projects like Board Apes or CryptoBucks. >> You know, I was listening to your podcast. You guys got a great pod. I think you're on 117 episodes now and growing. You guys do a deep dive, so people watching check out the Unstoppable Podcast. But on the last podcast, Matt, you mentioned some of the older generations like me, I grew up with IP addresses and before the web, they called it information super highway. It wasn't even called the web yet, but IP was generated by the United States Department of Commerce and R&D, that became the internet, the internet became the web. Back then it was just get some web pages up and find what you're looking for. Very analog compared to what's now today, now you mentioned gaming. You mentioned how people are changing. Can you talk about your view of this cultural shift? And we've been talking about the queue for many, many years now, but it's at actually happening now where the expectation of the audience and the users and the people consuming and communicating and bonding in groups, whether it's gaming or communities are expecting new behaviors, new applications, and it's a forcing function. This shift is having now, what's your reaction to that? What's your explanation? >> Yeah, well, I think it just goes back to the shift of people's where are they spending their time? And if you look today, most people spend 50% plus of their time in front of a screen. And that's just a tremendous amount of effort. But if you look at how much of their assets are digital, it's like less than 1% of their portfolio would be some sort of digital asset compared to literally 50% of every day sitting in front of a screen. And simultaneously what's happening is these new technologies are emerging around cryptocurrencies, blockchain systems, ways for you to track digital ownership of things, and then kind of bring that into your different applications. So one of the big things that's happening with Web3 is this concept of data portability, meaning that I can own something on one application and then I could potentially take that with me to several other applications across the internet. And so this is like the emerging digital property rights that are happening right now as we transition from a model in Web2, where you are on a hosted service like Facebook, it's a walled garden, they own and control everything. You are the product, they're mining you for data and they're just selling ads, right? To a system where it's much more open. You can go into these worlds and experiences. You can take things with you and you can leave with them. And most people are doing this with cryptocurrency. Maybe you earn an end-game currency, you can leave and take that to a different game, and you can spend it somewhere else. So the user is now enable to bring their data to the party. Whereas before now, you couldn't really do that. And that data includes their money or that includes their digital items. And so I think that's the big shift that we're seeing and that changes a lot in how applications serve up to users. It's going to change their user experiences for instance. >> I think the script has flipped and you're right on. I agree with you. I think you guys are smart to see it. And I think everyone who's on this wave will see it. Let's get into that because this is happening. People are saying, "I'm done with being mined "and being manipulated by the big Facebook "and the LinkedIns of the world who are using the user." Now, the contract was a free product and you gave up your data, but then it got too far. Now people want to be in charge of their data. They want to broker their data. They want to collect their digital exhaust, maybe collect some things in a game, or maybe do some commerce in an application or marketplace. So these are the new use cases. How does a digital identity architecture work with Unstoppable? How would you guys enabling that? Can you take us through the vision of where you guys came on this because it's unique, you had an NFT and kind of the domain name concept coming together, can you explain? >> Yeah, so we think we approach the problem for if we're going to rebuild the way that people interact online, what are kind of the first primitives that they're going to need in order to make that possible? And we thought that one of the things that you have on every network, like when you log on Twitter, you have a Twitter handle, when you log on Instagram, you have an Instagram handle. It's your name, right? You have that name that's on those applications. And right now what happens is if users get kicked off the platform, they lose a 100% of their followers, right? And they also, in some cases, they can't even directly contact their followers on some of these platforms. There's no way for them to retain this social network. So you have all these influencers, who are today's small businesses, who build up these large, you know profitable, small businesses online, being key opinion leaders to their demographic. And then they could be deplatformed, or they're unable to take this data and move to another platform if that platform raises their fees. You've seen several platforms increase their take rates. You have 10, 20, 30, 40%, and they're getting locked in and they're getting squeezed, right? So we just said, "You know what, "the first thing you're going to want to own "that this is going to be your piece of digital property "is going to be your name across these applications." If you look at every computing network in the history of computing networks, they end up with a naming system. And when we looked back at DNS, you know which came out in the 90s, it was just a way for people to find these webpages much easier instead of mapping these IP addresses. And then we said to ourselves, "What's going to happen in the future?" Is just like everyone has an email address that they use in their Web2 world in order to identify themselves as they log into all these applications. They're going to have an NFT domain in the Web3 world in order to authenticate and bring their data with them across these applications. So we saw a direct correlation there between DNS and what we're doing with NFT domain name systems. And the bigger breakthrough here is that NFT domain systems all of these NFT assets that live on a blockchain. They are owned by users. They're built on these open systems so that multiple applications could read data off of them and that makes them portable. So we were looking for an infrastructure play like a picks and shovels play for the emerging Web3 metaverse. And we thought that names were just something that if we wanted a future to happen, where all 3.5 billion people with cell phones are sending crypto and digital assets back and forth, they're going to need to have a name to make this a lot easier instead of these long IP addresses or hex addresses in the case of crypto. >> Yeah, and also people have multiple wallets too. It's not like there's all kinds of wallet, variations, name verification, you see the link tree is everywhere. You know, that's essentially just an app. I mean, doesn't really do anything. I mean, so you're seeing people trying to figure it out. I got a github handle. I got a LinkedIn handle. I mean, what do you do with it? >> Yeah, and then specific to crypto, there was a very hair on fire use case for people who buy their first Bitcoin. And for those in the audience who haven't done this yet, when you go in and you go into an app and you buy your first Bitcoin or Ethereum or whatever cryptocurrency, and then the first time you try to send it, there's this field where you want to send it and it's this very long hex address. And it looks like an IP address from the 1980s, right? And it's like a bank number and no one's going to use that to send money back and forth to each other. And so just like domain names and the D apps system replace IP addresses, NFT domains on blockchain systems replace hex addresses for sending and receiving cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, Ethereum, whatever. And that's its first use case is it really plugs in there. So when you want to send money to someone, you can just instead of sending money to a large hex address that you have to copy and paste, you could have an error, or you could send it to the wrong place, it's pretty scary. You could send it to johnfurrier.nft. And so we thought that you're just not going to get global adoption without better UX, same thing it worked with .com domains. And this is the same thing for Bitcoin and other crypto. >> It's interesting, look at the Web2 or trend one to two, Web1 went to two, it was all about use, ease of use, right? And making things simpler, clutter, more pages can't find things that was search, that was Google. Since then, has there actually been an advancement? >> Hmm. >> Facebook certainly is not an advancement, they're hoarding all the data. So I think we're broken between that step of a free search to all the resources in the world, to which by the way, they're mining a lot of data too, with the Toolbar and Chrome. But now where's that Web3 crossover? So take us through your vision on digital identity on Web2, Google searching, Facebook's broken, democracy's broken, users aren't in charge to Web3? >> Got it. Well, we can start at Web1. So the way that I think about it is if you go to Web1, it was very simple, just text web pages. So it was just a way for someone to like put up a billboard and here's a piece of information and here's some things that you could read about it, right? And then what happened with Web2, was you started having applications being built that had backend infrastructure to provide services. So if you think about Web2, these are all websites or web portals that have services attached to them, whether that's a social network service or a search engine or whatever. And then as we move to Web3, the new thing that's happening here, is the user is coming onto that experience and they're able to connect in their wallet or their Web3 identity to that app and they can bring their data to the party. So it's kind of like Web1, you just have a static web page, Web2, you have a static webpage with a service, like a server back here, and then Web3, the user can come in and bring their database with them in order to have much better app experiences. So how does that change things? Well, for one, that means that you want data to be portable across apps. So we touched on gaming earlier and maybe if I have an in-game item for one game that I'm playing for a certain company, I can take it across two or three different games. It also impacts money. Money is just digital information. So now I can connect to a bunch of different apps and I can just use cryptocurrency to make those payments across those things instead of having to use a credit card. But then another thing that happens is I can bring unlimited amount of additional information about myself when I plug in my wallet. And as an example, when I plug into Google search, for instance, they could take a look at my wallet that I've connected and they could pull information about me that I enable that I share with them. And this means that I'm going to get a much more personalized experience on these websites and I'm also going to have much more control over my data. There's a lot of people out there right now who are worried about data privacy, especially in places like Europe. And one of the ways to solve that is simply to not store the data and instead have the user bring it with them. >> You know, I've always thought about this and always debated it with Dave a lot and my co-host, does top down governance privacy laws outweigh the organic bottoms up innovation? So what you're getting at here is, "Hey, if you can actually have that solved "(laughing) before it even starts." It was almost as if those services were built for the problem of Web2. >> Yes. >> Not three. >> Right. >> What's your reaction to that? >> I think that is right on the money. And if you look at it as a security, like if I put my security researcher hat on, I think the biggest problem we have with security and privacy on the web today is that we have these large organizations that are collecting so much data on us and they just become these honeypots and there have been huge breaches. Like Equifax, you know a few years back is a big one and this all your credit card data got leaked, right? And all your credit information got leaked. And we just have this model where these big companies silo your data, they create a giant database, which is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions, to be attack. And then someone eventually is going to hack that in order to pull that information. Well, if instead, and you can look at this at Web3. So for those in the audience who have used, a Web3 application, one of these D app, to trade cryptocurrencies or something, you'll know that when you go there, you actually connect your wall. So when you're working with these web, you connect, you bring your information with you and you connect it. That means that the app has none of that stored, right? So these apps that people are using for crypto trading cryptocurrency on apps or whatever, they have no stored information. So if someone hacks one of these defi exchanges, for instance, there's nothing to steal. And that's because the only time the information is being accessed is when the user is actively using the site. And so as someone who cares about security and privacy, I go, "Wow, that's a much better or data model." And that gives so much more control of user 'cause the user just permissions access to the data only during the time period in which they're interacting with the application. And so I think you're right and like we are very excited to be building these tools, right? Because I see it like if you look at Europe, they basically pass GDPR and then all the companies are going, "We can't comply with that." They keep postponing it or like changing it a little bit and trying to make it easier to comply with. But honestly we just need to switch the data models. So the companies aren't even taking the data and then they're going to be in a much better spot. >> And GDPR is again a nightmare. I think it's the wrong approach. I always said it was screwed up because most companies don't even know where stuff is stored and nevermind how they delete someone's entry in a database. They don't even know what they're collecting. Some at some level they become so complicated. So right on the money there good, good call out. There question for you. Is this then? Okay, so do you decouple the wallet from the ID or are they together and is it going to be a universal wallet? Do you guys see yourselves as universal domains? Take me through the thinking around how you're looking at the wallet and the actual identity of the user, which obviously is important on the identity side, wallet is that just universal or is that going to be coming together? >> Well, I think so. The way that we kind of think about it is that wallets are where people have their financial interactions online. And then identity is much more about, it's kind of like being your passport. So it's like your driver's license for the internet. So these are two kind of separate products we see longer term and actually work together. So, if you have a domain name, it actually is easier to make deposits into your wallet because it's easier to remember to send money to mattgloud.crypto. And that way it's easier for me to receive payments or whatever. And then inside my wallet, I'm going to be doing defi trades or whatever. And that doesn't really have an interaction with names necessarily in order to do those transactions. But then if I want to sign into a website or something, I could connect that with my NFT domain. And I do think that these two things are kind of separate. I think we're going to... Still early, so figuring out exactly how the industry is going to shake out over like a five to 10 year time horizon and maybe a little bit more difficult and we could see some other emerging... What you would consider like cornerstones of the crypto ecosystem. But I do think identity and reputation is one of those. And I also think that your financial applications of defi are going to be another. So those are the two areas where I see it. And just a note on this, when you have a wallet that usually has multiple cryptocurrency addresses, so you're going to have like 50 cryptocurrency addresses in a wallet. You're going to want to have one domain name that links back to all those, because you're just not going to remember those 50 different addresses. So that's how I think that they collaborate and we collaborate with several large wallets as well, like blockchain.com and another 30 plus of these to make it easier for sending out and receiving cryptocurrency. >> So the wallet basically is a D app, the way you look at it, the integrated. >> Yeah. >> Whatever you want, just integrate in. How do I log into decentralized application with my NFT domain name? Because this becomes okay. I got to love the idea, love my identity. I'm an my own NFT. I mean, how this video's going to be an NFT soon. We get on board with the program here, but how do I log into my app? I'm going to have a D app and I got my domain name. Do I have to submit is there benchmarking? Is there approval process? Is there APIs and SDK kind of thinking around it? How are you thinking about dealing with the apps? >> Yeah, so all of the above. And what we're trying to do here is build like an SSO solution, but it's consumer based. So what we've done is adapted some SSO protocols that other people have used, the standard ones, in order to connect that back to an NFT domain in this case. And that way you GET the best of both worlds. So you can use these authorization protocols for data permissioning that are, you know, standard Web2 APIs, but then the permissioning system is actually based on the user-controlled NFT. So they're assigning it that with their private public key pair in order to make those updates. So that allows you to connect into both of these systems. We think that that's how technology typically impacts the world is it's not like you have something that just replaces something overnight. You have an integration of these technologies over time. And we really see these Web3 components and net two domains integrating nicely into regular apps. So as an example in the future, when you log in right now, you see Google off, Facebook off, or you can type in an email address, you could see NFT, Unstoppable Domains or NFT authorization. And you can SSO in to that website. When you go to a website like an e-commerce website, you could share information about yourself, 'cause you've connected your wallet now. So you could say, "Yes, I am a unique individual. "I do live in New York and I just bought a new house." And then when you permission all that information about yourself to that application, you can serve up a new user experience for you. And we think it's going to be very interesting for doing rewards and discounts online for e-commerce specifically in the future because that opens up a whole new market. 'Cause they can ask you questions about yourself and you can deliver that information directly to the app. >> I really think that the gaming market has totally nailed the future use case, which is in game currency, in game end engagement, in game data. And now bringing that to kind of a horizontally scalable like surface areas is huge, right? So, you know, I think that's a huge success on the concept. The question I have to ask you is you getting any pushback from, ICANN, the International Corporation of Naming and Numbers, they got dot everything now.club, 'cause the clubhouse, they got dot, party.live. I mean the real domain name people are over here, Web2, you guys are coming out with the Web3. Where is that connect for people who are not following along the Web3 trend? How do you rationalize the domain angle here? >> Yeah, well, so I would say that NFT domains are what domains on DNS were always meant to be 30 plus years ago. And they just didn't have blockchain systems back in the nineties when they were building these things. So there's no way to make them for individuals. So what happened was for DNS, it actually ended up being business. So if you look at DNS names, there's about 350 million registrations. They're basically all small business. And it's like, 20 to 50 million small businesses who own the majority of these.com or these regular DNS domain names. And that's their focus. NFT domains, because all of a sudden you have the wallet, you have them in your wallet and your crypto wallet, they're actually for individuals. So that market, instead of being for small businesses is actually end users. So instead of being for 20 to 50 million small businesses, we're talking about being useful for three to four billion people who have an internet connection. And so we actually think that the market size for NFT domains is somewhere 50 to a hundred X, the market size for traditional domain names. And then the use cases are going to be much more for individuals on a day to day basis. So it's like people are going to want you on a use them for receiving cryptocurrency or receiving dollars or payments or USCC coin, where they're going to want to use them as identifiers on social networks, where they're going to want to use them for SSO. And they're not going to want to use them as much for things like websites, which is what Web2 is. And if I'm being perfectly honest, if I'm looking out 10 years from now, I think that these traditional domain name systems are going to want to work with and adopt this new NFT technology, 'cause they're going to want to have these features for the domain names. So like in short, I think NFT domain names are domain names with superpowers. This is the next generation of naming systems. And naming systems were always meant to be identity networks. >> Yeah, they hit a glass ceiling. I mean they just can't, they're not built for that. And having people, having their own names, is essentially what decentralization is all about. 'Cause we, what is a company? It's a collection of humans that aren't working in one place, they're decentralized. So then you decentralize the identity and everything's been changed. So completely love it. I think you guys are onto something really huge here. You pretty much laid out what's next for Web3, but you guys are in this state of growth. You've seen people signing up for names. That's great. What are the best practices? What are the steps are people taking? What's the common use case for folks who are putting this to work right now for you guys? Why do you see, what's the progression? >> Yeah, so the thing that we want to solve for people most immediately, is we want to make it easier for sending and receiving crypto payments. And I know that sounds like a niche market, but there's over 200 million people right now who have some form of cryptocurrency, right? And 99.9% of them are still sending crypto using these really long hex addresses. And that market is growing at 60 to 100% year over year. So first we need to get crypto into everybody's pocket and that's going to happen over the next three to five years. Let's call it, if it doubles every year for the next five years, we'll be there. And then we want to make it easier for all those people to send crypto back and forth. And I will admit I'm a big fan of these stable coins and these like... I would say utility focused tokens that are coming out just to make it easier for transferring money from here to Turkey and back or whatever. And that's the really the first step for NFT domain names. But what happens is when you have an NFT domain and that's what you're using to receive payments, and then you realize, oh, I can also use this to log into my favorite apps. It starts building that identity piece. And so we're also building products and services to make it more like your identity. And we think that it's going to build up over time. So instead of like doing an identity network top down where you're like a government or corporation, you say, oh, you have to have ID, here's your password, you have to have it. We're going to do it, bottoms up. We're going to give everyone on the planet and up to you domain name, it's going to give them some utility to make it easier to send, receive cryptocurrency. And we're going to say, "Hey, do you want to verify your Twitter profile?" Yes. Okay, great. You just attach that back. Hey, you want to verify your Reddit? Yes, Instagram? Yes, TikTok, yes. You want to verify your driver's license? Okay, yeah, we can attach that back. And then what happens is you end up building up organically digital identifiers for people using these blockchain naming systems. And once they have that, they're going to just... They're going to be able to share that information and that's going to lead to better experiences online for both commerce, but also just better user experiences in general. >> Every company when they web came along first, everyone pro proved the web once. Oh, it's terrible. A bad idea. Oh, it's so, unreliable, so slow. Hard to find things. Web2, everyone bought a domain name for their company, but then as they added webpages, these premalinks became so long, the webpage address fully qualified, permalink string, they bought keywords. And then that's another layer on top. So you started to see that evolution in the web. Now it's kind of hit ceiling. Here, everyone gets their NFT, they start doing more things. Then it becomes much more of a use case where it's more usable, not just for one thing. So we saw that movie before, so it's like a permalink, permanent. >> Yeah. >> Excellent. >> Yes indeed. I mean, if we're lucky it will be a decentralized bottoms up global identity that appreciates user privacy and allows people to opt in. And that's what we want to build. >> And the gas prices thing that's always come out always an objection here that, I mean, blockchain's perfect for this 'cause it's, imitable, it's written on the chain. All good, totally secure. What about the efficiency? How do you see that evolving real quick? >> Well, so a couple comments on efficiency. First of all, we picked domains as first product to market. 'Cause you need to take a look and see if the technology is capable of handling what you're trying to do and for domain names, you're not updating that every day. So like, if you look at traditional domain names, you only update it a couple times per year. So, the usage for that to set this up and configure it, most people set it up and configure it and then they only have a few changes per year. First of all, the overall you, it's not like a game. >> An IO problem. >> Right, right, right. So that part's good. So we picked a good place to start for going to market. And then the second piece is like, you're really just asking, are computer systems going to get more efficient over time? And if you know, the history of that has always been yes. And I remember the 90s, I had a modem and it was 14 kilobits and then it was 28 and then 56 and then 100. And now I have a hundred megabits up and down. And I look at blockchain systems and I don't know if anyone has a law for this yet, but throughput of blockchains is going up over time and there's going to be continued improvements over this over the next decade. We need them. We're going to use all of it. And you just need to make sure you're planning a business makes sense for the current environment. Just as an example, if you would try to launch Netflix for online streaming in 1990, you would've had a bad time because no one had bandwidth. So yeah, some applications are going to be wait to be a little bit later on in the cycle, but I actually think identity is perfectly fine to go ahead and get off the ground now. >> Yeah, the motivated parties for innovations here, I mean a point cast failed miserably that was like, they tried to stream video over T1 lines, but back in the days, nothing. So again, we've seen those speeds, double, triple in homes right now. Matt, congratulations, great stuff. Final, TikTok moment here. How would you summarize in a short clip, the difference between digital identity and Web2 and Web3. >> In Web2, you don't get to own your own online presidence, and in Web3 you do get to own it. So I think if you were going to simplify it, really Web3 is about ownership and we're excited to give everyone on the planet a chance to own their name and choose when and where and how they want to share information about themselves. >> So now users are in charge. >> Exactly, you got it. >> They're not the product anymore. If you got to be the product you might as well monetize the product, and that's the data. Real quick thoughts just to close out the roll of data and all this, your view. >> We haven't enabled users to own their data online since the beginning of the internet. And we're now starting to do that. It's going to have profound changes for how every application on the planet interacts with their users. >> Awesome stuff, Matt, take a minute to give a plug for the company. How many employees you got? What are you guys looking for for hiring, fundraising? Give a quick commercial for what's going on Unstoppable Domains. >> Yeah, so if you haven't already, check us out at unstoppabledomains.com, we're also on Twitter at Unstoppable web. And we have a wonderful podcast as well that you should check out if you haven't already. And we are just crossed a hundred people. We're growing, three to five hundred percent year over year. We're basically hiring every position across the company right now. So if you're interested in getting into Web3, even if you're coming from a traditional to background, please reach out. We love teaching people about this new world and how you can be a part of it. >> And you're a virtual company. You have a little headquarters or is it all virtual? What's the situation there? >> Yeah, I actually just assumed we are 100% remote and asynchronous and we're currently in five countries across the planet in mostly concentrated in the US and the EU areas. >> I heard a rumor too. Maybe you can confirm or admit or deny this rumor. I heard a rumor that you have mandatory vacation policy. >> This is true. And that's because we are a team of people who like to get things done. But we also know that recovery is an important part of any organization. So if you push too hard, we want to remind people we're on a marathon, right? This is not a sprint. And so we want people to be with us long term, and we do think that this is a 10 year move. And so yeah, do force people. We'll unplug you at the end of the year, if you- >> That's what I was going to ask you. So what's the consequence of, I don't take vacation. >> Yeah, we literally unplug you. (both laughing) >> You won't be able to get into slack. Right, and that's (indistinct). >> Well, when people start having their avatars be their bought and you don't even know what you're unplugging at some point, that's where you guys come in with the NFT saying that that's not the real person, it's not the real human. >> Yeah, exactly. We'll be able to check. >> NFT is great innovation, great use case, Matt congratulations. Thanks for coming on and sharing the story to kick off this showcase with theCUBE. Thanks for sharing all that great insight. Appreciate it. >> Yeah, John had a wonderful time. >> All right, this is theCUBE Unstoppable Domains showcasing. We've got 10 great pieces of content we're dropping all today. Check them out. Stay with us for more coverage. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

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

>>Hello, and welcome to this cubes presentation with unstoppable domains. It's a showcase we're featuring all the best content in web three. And with unstabled a showcase I'm John furrier, your host of the cube. We've got a great guest here, Matt Miscavige. Covich who's the chief revenue officer of unstoppable domains. Matt, welcome to the showcase. Appreciate it. >>Thank you for having me. So >>The theme of this segment is the potential of the web three marketplace with unstoppable domains, the chief revenue officer, you guys have a very intriguing, interesting concept. That's going extremely well. Congratulations, but you're using NFTs for access and domains. Of course, the, the metaverse is huge. People want their own domains, but it's not just like real estate in the sense of a website. It's bigger than that. It's a lot going on. So take us through what is the value proposition and what is the product? >>Absolutely. So for the past 20 years, most of us have been interacting on the internet. Using usernames issued to us by big corporations like Facebook, Google, Twitter, tech talks, Snapchat, et cetera. Whenever we get these usernames for free it's because we in our data are the product as some of the recent leaks. And the media has shown incentives. Individuals and companies are not always aligned. And most importantly, individuals are not in control of their own digital identity and the data, which means they can economically benefit from the value they create online. Think of Twitter as a two-sided marketplace with 0% revenue share back to its creators. We're now having in the creator economy and we believe that individuals should see the economic rewards of what they do in create online. That's all we're trying to do here at unstoppable domains is provide user own take control identity to four and a half billion internet users. >>It's interesting to see change that's happening with web three. And just in cultural terms, users are expecting to be part of the creative, the personality of the company. There's this almost this disintermediation of the middleman. You know, whether it's an ad network or a gatekeeper of any kind people going direct, right? So if I'm an artist, I can go direct to my fans. >>Exactly. So web through really shifts the power away from aggregators, aggregators and marketplaces have been some of the best business models. The last 20 years onto the internet, the web three is going to dramatically change that over the next decade, paying more power back in the hands of consumers. >>What type of companies do you guys work with and partner with that we see out there, what's give us some examples of the kinds of companies you're doing business with and partnering with. >>Yeah. So let's talk about use cases. First actually is the big use case that we identified initially for NFT domain names was around cryptocurrency transfers. Anyone who's ever bought cryptocurrency and tried to transfer it between the council while it's is familiar with these awkwardly long hexadecimal strings of random numbers and letters, where if you make a single type of money is lost forever. That's a pretty scary experience that exists today in our $2 trillion asset class with 250 million users. So the first set of partners that we worked on integrating with who actually cook the wilds and exchanges. So we will allow users to do is replace all their long hexadecimal wallet addresses with a single human readable name, like John dot NFT or Maxim needs give each dot crypto to allow for simple crypto transfers. >>And how did the exchange work with you guys on that as it is? Is it a plugin? Is it co-locating code together? What's the, what's the, what's the relationship between exchanges and unstoppable domains? >>Yeah, absolutely. A great question. So exchange has actually have to do a little bit of an engineering lift to work with us, and they can do that by either using our resolution libraries or using one of our API APIs or in order to look up an unstoppable name and figure out all the wallet addresses that's associated with that name. So today we work with dozens of the world's top exchanges and wallets ranging from Oko DX to Coinbase wallet, to trust wallet, to bread wallet, and many, many others. >>I got to ask you on the wallet side, is that a requirement in terms of having specific code and are there wallets that you work well with? Explain the wallet dynamic between unstoppable domains and wallets. >>Yeah. So while it's all have this huge usability problem for their users, because every single cryptocurrency held by every single one of their users has a different hexadecimal wallet address. And once again, every user is subject to the same human fallacies and errors, where they make a single type where their money can be lost forever. So we enable these wallets to do is to make crypto transfer as simple and as less scary than the current status code by giving the users on a sub well name that they can use to attach to all the waltz addresses on the backend. So companies like trust world, for example, which has 10 million users or Coinbase wallet. When you go to the crypto transfer fields, they can just type in an unstoppable name. They'll correctly, route the currency to the right person, to the right world, without any chance for human error. >>You know, when these big waves come, I gotta ask you this question. Cause a lot of people in the mainstream are getting into it. Now reminds me of the web wave that hit the big thing was how many people are coming online. It was one of the key metrics and how many web pages are being developed was another metric, which meant that people were building out web pages. And it's hard to look back and think, wow, that was actually a KPI. So internet users and webpages were the two proxies cause then search and just came out and everything else happened. So I'm going to ask you, there are people watching, they're seeing that on commercials on TV, they're seeing it everywhere stadiums are named after crypto companies. So the bottom line is people want to know how NFT domains take the fear out of working with crypto and sending crypto. >>Yeah, absolutely. So imagine if we had to navigate the web using IP addresses rather than typing in google.com, you'd have to type in a random string of words and numbers that you'd have to memorize. That would be super painful for users. And didn't, it wouldn't have gotten to where it is today with this, you know, almost 5 billion people online, the history of computer networks. We have human readable naming systems built on top. In every single instance. It's almost crazy that we got to a $2 trillion asset class with 250 million users worldwide 13 years after this, the Toshi white paper without a human readable naming system, other than supple domains and a few of our competitors, that's a fundamental problem that we need to solve in order to go from 250 million crypto users in 2022 to 5 billion crypto users, a decade from now. >>And just to point out and not to look back and maybe make a correlation, but I will, if you look at the naming system of DNS, what it did to IP addresses, that's one major innovation that enabled the web. Then you look at what keyword navigation has done on top of DNS, what that did for the industry. And that basically birthed Googled keywords, basically ads. So that's trillions and trillions of dollars again. Now shifting to you guys, is that how you see it? Obviously it's decentralized, so what's different. Okay. I get, so if you compare, Hey, Google was successful, you know, keyword advertising industry for less than 25 years or 20 years. >>Yeah. Yeah. What's different. Now is the technology inflection points. So blockchains have evolved to a point where they enable high throughput, high transaction volume and true decentralized ownership. The NFT standard, which is only a couple of years old know, has taken off massively around trading of profile pictures like crypto punks and the boy apes yacht club where they use cases extended much more than just, you know, a cool JPEG that goes up in value two or three X year over year. There is the true use case here around ownership of identity ownership over a data set, decentralized log-in authentication and permission data sharing. One of the sad things that happened in Jeanette on the internalized decade really was that the platforms built out have now allowed developers to built on top of them and a trustless permissionless way. Developers who build applications on top of some of the early monopolies in the last decade, got the rules changed on them. APIs, cutoff, new fees instituted. That's not going to happen in web three because all permissionless custody in a user's own wallet, we cannot take the way they will continue to exist in eternity, regardless of what happens to unstoppable domains, which gives developers a lot more confidence in building new products for the web three identity standard that we're building out. >>You guys amazing is that's a whole nother generational shift. I'm always been a big fan of abstractions when innovation is needed, when they're problems that need to be solved, messes to be cleaned up. Good abstraction layer on top of new architecture is really, really phenomenal. I guess the key question for I have for you is, you know, the queue, we have all this video where where's our NFT should, how should we implement NFTs? >>There's a couple of different ways you could think about it. You could do proof of attendance, protocol NFTs, which are really interesting way for users to show that they were at particular events. So just in the same way that people collect, t-shirts some conferences, people will be collecting. And if Ts to show, there were in person attending in person cultural moments, whether they were acquired an event online or offline, you could do NFTs for employees to show that they were at your company during certain periods of the company's growth. So think of replacing the resume with a cryptographically secure resume like this on the blockchain and perpetuity. Now more than half of all the resumes contain lies, which is a pretty gnarly problem as a hiring manager, or you constantly have to sort through as ways that this can impact that side of the market as well. >>I saw some, and I think it was a use case for everything. Appreciate that. And of course we can have the most favorite, cute moments. It could be a cube host NFT at 40 apes out there. Why not have a board cube host going on and, and >>Auction for charity on open? >>All right, great stuff. Now let's get into some of the cool tech nerd stuff, which is really the login piece, which I think is fascinating. The having NFTs be a login mechanism is another great innovation. Okay. So this is cool. Cause it's like think of it as one click and FTS, if you will. What's the response been on this? Log-in with unstoppable for that product? What some of the use gates is. Can you give some examples of the momentum and traction? >>Yeah, absolutely. So we launched the product less than 90 days ago. We already have 90 committed or integrated partners live today with a login product. And this replaces login with Google login with Facebook, with a way that's user owned and user controlled. And over time, people will be capturing additional information back to their NFP domain names, such as their reputation, their history, things they've done online and be able to permission to share that with applications that they interact with in order to get any rewards, once you own all your data and you can choose to share it with companies or incentivize you to share data. For example, imagine you just bought a new house and you have 3000 square feet to furnish. You could tell that fact and prove it to a company like Wayfair. Would they be incentivized to give you discounts? We're spending 10, 20, $30,000 and you'll do all of your purchasing there rather than spread across other e-commerce retailers. For sure they would. But right now, when you go to that website, you're just another random email address. They have no idea who you are, what you've done, what your credit score is, whether you house buyer or not. But if you could permission to share that to using a log-in open software product, I mean the web would just be much, much different. >>And I think one of the things too, as these, I call them analog old school companies, old guard companies is referred to in the cube talk here, but we were still always called that old guard is the people who aren't innovating. You could think about companies having more community too, because if you have more sharing and you have this marketplace concept and you have these new dynamics of how people are working together, sharing will provide more transparency, but yet security on identity. Therefore things are going to be happening organically. That's a community dynamic. What's your view on that? And what's your reaction >>Communities are such an important part of web three and the cryptos ecosystem in general, people are very tightly knit and they all support each other. There's a huge amount of collaboration in this space because we're all trying to onboard the next billion users into the ecosystem. And we know we have some fundamental challenges and problems to solve, whether it's complex wallet addresses, whether it's the lack of portable data sharing, whether it's just simple education, right? I'm sure, you know, tens of millions of people got into crypto for the first time during the super bowl face on some of those awesome ads that ran. >>Yeah. Love the QR code. That's a direct response. I remember when the QR code has been around for a long time. I remember in the nineties, late nineties, it was a thing, a device at red QR codes that did navigation to a webpage. So I mean, QR codes are super cool, great way to get, and we all using it to, with the pandemic to ordering food. So I think QR codes are here to stay. In fact, we should have a QR code on all of our images here on the screen too. So we'll work on that, but I gotta ask you on the project side, now let's get into the devs and kind of the applications, the users that are adopting unstoppable and this new way of doing things, why are they gravitating towards this login concepts? Can you give some examples and put, give some color commentary to why are these D application distribute application guys and gals programming and with you guys? >>Yeah. They all believe that the potential for why we're trying to create a round user own the controlled identity. We're the only company in the market right now with a product that's live and working today. There's been a lot of promises made and we're the first ones to actually deliver to companies like cook finance, for example, are seeing the benefit of being able to have their users go through a simple process to check in and authenticate into the application, using your NFT domain name, rather than having to create an email address and password combination as a login, which inevitably leads to problems such as lost passwords, password resets, all those fun things that we used to deal with on a daily basis. >>Okay. So now I got to ask you the kind of partnerships you guys are looking at doing. I can only imagine the old, old school days you had a registry and you had registrars, you had a sales mechanism. I noticed you guys are selling NFT kind of like domain names on your website. Is that a kind of a current situation? Is that going to be ongoing? How do you envision your business model evolving and what kind of partnerships do you see coming along? >>Yeah, absolutely. So we're working with a lot of different companies from browsers that took changes to wallets, to individual NFT projects, to more recently even exploring partnership, partnership opportunities with fashion brands. For example, the Tyree market is moving so so fast. And what we're trying to essentially do here is create the standard naming system for web three. So a big part of that for us, we'll be working with partners like blockchain.com and with circle who's behind the DC coin on creating registries, such as dot blockchain and dot coin and making those available to tens of millions and ultimately hundreds of millions and billions of users worldwide. We want an ensemble domain name to be the first asset that every user in crypto gets, even before they buy their Bitcoin Ethereum or dovish coin. >>It makes a lot of sense obstruct the way the long hexadecimal string. We all know that we all write down putting a safe, hopefully you don't forget about it. You know, I always say, make sure you tell someone where your addresses. So in case something happens, you don't lose all that crypto. All good stuff. I got to ask the question around the ecosystem. Okay, can you share your view and vision of either your purse, yourself or the company when you have this kind of new market, you have all kinds of, and we meant the web was a good example, right? Web pages, you need web development tools. You had HTML by hand. Then you had all these tools. So you had tools and platforms and things kind of came well, grew together. How was the web three stakeholder ecosystem space evolving? What's what are some of the white spaces? What are some of the clearly defined areas that are developing? >>Yeah, I mean, we've seen an explosion in new smart contract blockchains and the past couple of years actually going live, which is really interesting because they support a huge number of different use cases, different trade-offs on each. We recently partnered and moved over a primary infrastructure to polygon, which is a leading EVM compatible smart chain, which allows us to provide free gas fees to users for maintaining and managing their domain name. So we're trying to move all obstacles around user adoption. Here. We all need to have Ethereum in your wallet. You know, it'd be an unstoppable domains customer or user. You don't have to worry about paying transaction fees. Every time you want to update the wallet, addresses associated with your domain name. We want to make this really big and accessible for everybody. And that means driving down costs as much as possible. Yeah, >>It's a whole nother wave. It's a wave that's built on the shoulders of others. It's a shift and infrastructure, new capabilities, new new applications. I think it's a, it's a great thing. You guys doing the naming system makes a lot of sense. This abstraction layer creates that ease of use. It simplifies things makes things easier. I mean, this is, was the promise of, of these abstraction layers. Final question. If I want to get involved, say we want to do a cube NFT with unstoppable. How do we work with you? How do we engage? Can you give a quick plug on what companies can do to engage with you guys on a business level? >>Yeah, absolutely. So we're looking to partner with wallets, exchanges, browsers, and companies who are in the crypto space already and realize they have a huge problem around usability with crypto transfers and wild addresses. Additionally, we're looking to partner with decentralized applications as well as web to companies who perhaps want to offer log-in with unstoppable domain functionality. In addition to, or in replacement of the login with Google and log-in with Facebook buttons that we all know and love. And we're looking to work with fashion brands and companies in the sports sector who perhaps want to claim their unstoppable names, free of charge from us. I might add in order to use that on Twitter or other marketing materials that they may have out there in the world to signal that they're not only forward looking, but that they're supportive of this huge wave that we're all riding at the most. >>May I great insight, chief revenue officer ensemble domains. Thanks for coming on the showcase, the cube and unstoppable domain share in the insights. Thanks for coming on. Okay. This cubes coverage here with the unstoppable domain showcase. I'm John furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.

(click) >> Well welcome to the special Cube conversation. I'm John Furrier with The Cube. We're here at Sundance Film Festival, Sundance, 2018, special coverage. All the top stories are obviously in the Intel Tech Lounge. All week's been our home base. We've been out on the streets getting the best stories, but one of the most biggest, compelling tech stories is the VR revolution is here. And the impact artist, the new creative. My next guest here is Michael Smit, who is the Chief Commercial Officer of Ziva. Welcome, to The Cube conversation. >> Thanks John, thanks, it's a pleasure to be here. >> You guys have a very impressive company. You're here at the Intel Tech Lounge. You're displaying Ziva. I saw a demo over there. You guys are bringing, I mean, really studio grade quality of animation, and integrated into storytelling. And this is not new for you. But one of the themes of democratization. So, you guys are a key tell sign in my opinion of where the developer, the creative developer market's going. Talk about what you guys are doing. And some of the big things you've done. I know you had some big films. Share a little bit about Ziva, and then we can have a conversation. >> Sure, sure. You know, we like to say, I mean, truly we believe in characters. And at the heart of our technology is character simulation technology. So, here at Sundance, you know, and Intel, we've been working with Intel for a while. They gave us an opportunity to be here. You know, when you think about stories. Stories kind of are driven by characters. And great characters make great stories. So, in our world, great characters are characters that are simulated through physics, and anatomical simulation to achieve levels of plausibility and reality. That previously maybe was only accessible to the very top, you know, budgeted productions. Or the very top VFX studios of the world. >> And what have you worked on? Just share some of the films that you've worked on. And some of the tech. >> Yeah, I'll give a background of the, where I guess the previous kind of, legacy of the technology comes from. But it's actually my partners, who are here with me, have a story record. They actually co-authored the software. You know, 10 years ago or so, that drove characters in titles like, Avatar, and Apes, and the Hobbit. James and Simon, I think they're on a, floating around back there. They've also got a Sci-Tek at home for the engineering work. And the vision here is that, you know, they did that work, and they were really motivated and enthused to do amazing work, amazing results, provide amazing results. They want to enable that same, and provide that same kind of functionality to small studios, big studios, game studios, independents, anyone who wants to tell a great story. >> And there's a huge tsunami. We've been talking at The Cube for the folks watching. Know that, I've been on this narrative around a renaissance in software development. Now we're seeing a renaissance in creative development. And we call that the new creative. Because an organic trend is brewing pretty fast. And used to be, not just Indie filmmakers, we're talking about kids, adults, creatives who are doing filmmaking things, in like virtual reality. And some of the successes that we're seeing, like Baobab Studios is one. They're having the hits around the characters. So, there's a thirst and a demand for technology for characters, but it's hard to build. This is an opportunity for you guys. What's your view on, on that trend? Are you guys going to be a supplier? Can I just use your technology to get characters? And where does this fit into the evolution of say, VR? >> Sure, I mean I touch on that concept of the new creative, because those who want to build and create amazing characters, to tell rich stories, tell immersive experiences. They don't want be, you know, like anything else in our life these days, like anything else that Intel is powering in our life these days. Automation of the simpler tasks should be a given. You don't want creatives to get hung up on, you know, trying to make your cheek look exactly the way it needs to look over 500 frames. When you want them to be making, bringing the story to life. So, our software basically automates a lot of the nuance of organic characters and properties. And the things that make us realistic. And I think it empowers and enables those creatives to tell the stories. >> And how can they tap into Ziva? Because I believe that you guys are on the cusp of something really big. A big trend that no-one's really talking about. And we come at it from a tech angle. So, we can see historically what happened with open source software. I mean 10% of the notional property in most big breakthroughs is the unique IP. 90% of it is reused software. >> Yeah. >> So, you can almost see these dots connecting in this new creative world. You guys seem to be at the forefront of that. Is that part of how people can engage with you? Is that a role you guys see yourselves playing? And, you know, how does someone get a hold of your technology? Do they buy it? Do you license it? How does it work? >> Great question, I mean yeah, we focus on software to make characters. And that's what our customers license from us. We license to studios, we license to Indies. We license to academics. We license to people who want to try it out for free. So, if there's a plug opportunity the url for the website is zivadynamics.com you'll learn a lot more about the company, about some of the work-- >> How expensive is it? I mean, just give a, can you talk about the number? Is it expensive, is it affordable? How does someone who's experimenting, might have their art and their storytelling vision coming to life, and might not have a big budget. >> Yeah so, the Indie licenses basically work out to about 50 bucks a month, per user to leverage the software. Which when you think about previous, maybe less robust implementations of this kind of thinking. We're limited, and we're at the tail end of multi-million dollar investments by huge studios. So, we think that's a pretty good value equation. >> Where are you guys located? Talk about your company, and culture. And what drives you guys. >> Yeah, we're located in Vancouver. You know, we're in one of the epicenters of a lot of creative work, and a lot of filmmaking. In fact, I mean, within a short radius of our studio, the number of game, and visual effects studios, it's amazing. So, you know, but our team's international, in fact, one of our team members is kind of mostly based in Wellington. Another one is actually working in Norway these days. We've got somebody in Los Angeles. So, we're kind of all over the place. And our customer footprint, we've got users in every continent, but Antarctica. >> I wish you could have come on the panel. But we were kind of sold out, we've got a small footprint here at the Intel Tech Lounge in Sundance. And the real theme is, new creative. So, I've got to ask you, in your view what is the new creative mean to you? >> The new creative is somebody who's curious, and they're not scared. They're not concerned with necessarily what it is that they're going to be making, or the media format they're going to be making. They're curious about what story they're going to be telling. And they're going to pursue anything. And they're not going to be shackled by artificial constraints. They're not going to be shackled by budgets that stop them. That make them take creative ideas off the table. They're going to pursue what they can do themselves. They're going to leverage technology in unique ways. And we're going to see some pretty amazing stuff happening. >> Yeah, and it's always, give them more time to work on their art, not worry about the scaffolding in the software to do it. >> That's exactly it. >> What's your take on Sundance this year? Obviously the theme, obviously VR here in the studio. But AI has been the Intel theme as well. We see AI as a critical part of automation. The role of automation in software to assist and augment, and give more opportunities for developers. >> Yeah, yeah I think it, again, it's people that have developed expertise. And we shouldn't look at AI and automation as something to be concerned about. We need to look at it as a tool. And it's to say well, how do I do the last mile? How do I the last 10% of what I do really good, and have all the other stuff kind of taken care of for me. >> Michael what's the hallway conversation, as you know, there's no hallway here in Sundance, it's more of this sidewalk. When you're out at dinner, when you're done here at Intel. When you're out on the streets with your peers, and colleagues, and meeting new people. What's the conversation like this year at Sundance 2018? >> The conversation at Sundance, I mean, it's a conversation that to me, just goes beyond where Sundance has been before. In that, and I think we heard it in some of the panels. But some of the emerging technology used to be like, the additive thing, like now let's go see what's next. Now it's just a part of the big story. And certainly the filmmaking has legacy. Has more experience. Has a lot of amazing stuff. There's so many amazing filmmakers. And amazing content coming out of this place this year. But it's just the variety, the diversity of everything that's happening is just blowing me away. >> Michael Smit with zivadynamics.com check out the website. I think this is a trend that you guys are on. I think the sooner we get to ease of use of the creative developer. Whether it's a filmmaker, VR, and, or, content and digital. They need characters. I want my avatars (laughs) >> That's right. >> Thanks for spending the time, appreciate it. >> Thanks John. >> I'm John Furrier here for The Cube conversation, Sundance Film Festival 2018. We are covering it on the streets. And also here, ground zero for us is the Intel Tech Lounge. It's been buzzing all week with immersive media, not just VR, really showing creative developers a new way to reimagine storytelling. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)