>>Okay, welcome back everyone to the Cube's live coverage here in Monaco for the MoCo crypto summit. I'm John fur. You're host of the cube. We got a great guest Dustin plant Boltz who is a crypto advisor, but also the crypto editor for Forbes Monaco here. Seeing the official event, the AAL event of the Monaco crypto summit in Monaco, your coverage area for Forbes, your MCing. Welcome to the >>Cube. Thank you for having me. And it's, it's always fun when I get to have an event in our backyard, cuz I get to hear what others know. And to me I'm very curious. Yeah. Always >>Learning. So you're on the MC on the stage here, you know, queue in the program online great program. So it's innovative event, inaugural event, great name by the way. Crypto summit and mono crypto >>Summit. Yeah, the MoCo crypto summit. >>That sounds like I want to attend every year. >>You're you're more than welcome to attend next year. >>Well, I hope so. Either way. I'm at the Al event with you. So gimme the take on what's on stage. What's been the program, like what's your observations going on here at the event today? >>So what we're starting to see globally is this digitization of things and the people that are part of the innovation side. And so that's what we've been able to see this morning. We're we're now at the break is what sort of companies are out there, the good ones and what are they building? Is this innovation? Is it even innovative and figuring out how they're gonna do it and the roadmaps to getting there from the metaverses to NFTs and even to decentralized finance. >>Yeah, it's the number one question I get is what's legit. What's not legit. And then you're starting to see the, the, the wheat and the shaft separating here and you know, something called crypto winter. But I don't see it. I mean, I see correction for some of the bad things going on in terms of not having the right underpinning infrastructure, the creative ideas are amazing. We're also seeing like digital bits and other platforms kind of coming together to enable the creators and, and the NFT side for instance has been huge. What has been your observation on that enablement? Because you have two schools of thoughts. You have the total nerds we're up and down building everything. Then you have artists and creators, whether it's music, tech apps building, they don't necessarily want to get 'em to the covers. They don't want to deal with all that. Yeah. Have you seen, what's your, what's your take on that? >>So I I'm seeing that a lot of these major brands, you know, they they're striving for excellence. You know, they're being more careful of who they partner with and the types of companies and you know, they, they look at it from reality and a little tough love to figure out should they align their brand. So what we're seeing here is is that there is so much inertia moving forward. That we're just at the beginning of this thing. Yeah. McKinsey recently said that the ecosystem will be over $30 trillion. So when you recognize that we are so early and it's those right now, or some might say are the risk takers. But to me there, aren't taking risk. They're being a part of making history. >>Yeah. You get the pioneers and you get the financial. So as they come together, how do you see the market? Cause what I've noticed with crypto and here in, in this, this market is international. One lot of international finance us is kind of lag behind. You got all kinds of rules, but you got the, the combination of the, the future billionaires. Sure. Okay. The pioneers and then the financeers yeah. Coming the money, the money and the power coming together. What's your reporting show you that's going on right now? What should people know about on how this is evolving? What they shouldn't >>Expect? Well, so you have a group that wants to become cryers they're seeing these individuals globally. They're making lots and lots of money, but what they don't realize is that not everybody is gonna have that outcome, but looking at the technology aspect of it and how it's going to improve a system that many can agree is collectively broken legacy just can't move beyond. It was never designed to you'll see people take shots at certain card companies and I go, but you recognize they developed the assembly line. And so I'm seeing that the smart money they got in long ago, believe it or not. And those now they're looking out for their errors are the ones that saying, I will not have an excuse when my, my grandkids or my, my nieces or my nephews, when they come and ask, where were you when the greatest transformational shift in human history, from both education to jobs, to careers and even wealth was being shifted to a digital world, why were you on the sideline waiting? And so I think what we're gonna see is this tsunami coming, and it's gonna start with one big player and then two and five, you go, go alone. You go far, go together. You go further. And that's what we're seeing is that this collective is moving forward >>And the community, we just had Beth Kaiser on, I've known Beth for many, many years. And she's what she's her journey has done. She's had a great mission and then gets she's a data scientist and came to Analytica. Now she's doing work with Ukraine and the rallying support around it has been impressive. And it's a community vibe, but the community's not just like sympathetic they're hands on together to your point. >>Yeah. It, but it also takes courage. I mean, you look at Britney Kaiser and what she had, and to me, courage is not, not having fear. Courage is not allowing the fear to stop. You, you know, recently asked my executive coach, who's 85 and I'm turning 39. This question of, do you let fear stop you? How do you decide? And he said, you know, you can either let, you can either ride the dragon. And I said, or let the dragon chase you. And Brittany has been one of these that made a decision to do what was right. And it came down to integrity. Yeah. >>So what are you have to these days what's going on in your world? >>What is going on in my world? So I moderate events all over and I connect and I like to ask people questions. So I'm gonna ask you, I'm gonna turn at the interviewer on the >>Interview. It's good. Natural. >>What are you learning? >>I mean, I'm learning, I mean today or this week or this month or this year. Well, I was just talking with Brittany about this. The security world is converging cloud technology, cloud computing. That revolution has just been amazing. Amazon posted their earnings yesterday. They blew it away as far as I'm concerned. So they kind of show there's no tech recession. I've learned that this recession, that we're so called in is the first downturn in tech where there's been cloud players as hyperscalers as an economic engine. Okay. So from a, from a business perspective, Amazon web services, Microsoft Azure now Google cloud, Alibaba's now in, in international version. This is the first time at downturns ever happened with cloud computing as an economic engine. And so therefore what I'm seeing is the digital transformation that's happening across the world for enterprises and entrepreneurs is not stopping. >>It's actually accelerating. So although the GDPs down in inflation is down, you're seeing a massive shift continuing to accelerate, spending and transformation with cloud technologies and decentralized. So you can almost see it kind of in the, this event and other events, even some of the bigger events, the best smartest people are working on it. The applications in all the categories are transforming. If cloud is step one, decentralized gonna be step two. So I see that kind of bridge going from cloud computing, cloud native to decentralized native. And I think a D DAPP market's gonna just explode. I think NFTs are just scratched on the surface. I think that's kind of, I won't say gimmicky, but I think no, but you're right, much more of a much more of a, an illustration that there's more coming. >>There is a lot more coming because people are seeing that there's more to an NFT than an ugly luck and J you know, ugly and JP image that there's, that there's data in there. And that your avatar will be stored as just that as an NFT. And I learned today from go of sing, that decentralization is, is the key to innovation. And I agree with that statement. Holy. >>Yeah. I mean, I think access to stuff is gonna be multidimensional. Like you think about the NFT as, as an ID, whether it's him or UN unstoppable domains is that company just got financing another round where the billion dollars, their concept is like, Hey, one NFT is your access for all of your potential identities in context. >>And isn't that exciting that we're now gonna be at this stage where you travel with you. Yeah. Instead of someone else traveling with you, you get to decide who you will be. And to me, everything you're doing in this world, this reality is now becoming part of your digital asset as a whole. >>I remember when I started my podcasting company in 20 2004, early pioneers, Evan Williams was there with Odo and you had, you know, the blogging revolution going on that whole democratization wave actually didn't happen right then. But all the people that were involved in that web two oh, kind of CRAs was all about democratization. It's kind of happening now. I mean, 15, 20 years later at web services is transformed cloud the democratization for own your own data, putting users in control. And I think in the middle of that, the Facebook's the world, the world garden data, you know, manipulation kind of took it off track a little bit. So I think now I'm, I psych to see that it's back on track to where it was. I mean, Facebook made billions of dollars. Now you got LinkedIn. I mean, LinkedIn's great for your resume, but it's also become a wall's garden with no data export. >>Yeah. And then >>No APIs keep >>Changing. Think about this. That if you wanna apply for a job, just change something quickly. Yeah. Ah, now you're the senior VP. Yeah. Before you were, you're an office manager >>Like to see the immutable block change, >>You don't get to see when did the record change. Yeah. >>Reputation data. You're a digital exhaust people gonna wanna reign that in. And I think the user in charge message that Brit Kaiser was talks about is hugely a mess under, under, under amplified concept. Digital assets are key, but the data ownership is something that I think is, is >>Powerful. So I'm gonna be launching a brand new company in and around September called cryptos. And it's a crypto career center. Think of it like the, the crypto for LinkedIn, that it's an aggregator becoming the industry standard for education, becoming the industry standard for crypto ships, with partners like ledger and moon pay and Casper labs. >>Look at this, we got an exclusive scoop on the cube. This >>Is the first time I will tell you this the first time in, in an environment like this. Yeah. That I'm excited to, I'm excited to talk about, right. Because it's time to be part of the change. Yeah, exactly. You know, as a father, I look at, I know where it's headed in the world of business. I know in the world of this, that we're gonna call the internet of connected things. Yeah. That it's gonna require you to have a certain talent skill or a certain certification. And to me, it's important to have an industry that supports one >>Staff and also, and also history on misinformation, smear campaigns can happen and ruin a career >>Overnight. Can you imagine that one little thing and because the internet never forgets. Yeah. It stays around indefinitely. >>The truth has to come out. Dustin. Great to have you on the queue. Thank you so much. Final question. What have you learned in there is MC what's your takeaway real quick? >>What I've learned is I never tire of learning. Thank you again, to learn more. Dustin plan.com. >>All right. Thanks for coming. Thank you. Cube coverage here at Monaco. I'm Shawn furry. We'll back with more coverage after this short break.

[Music] hello everyone welcome back to the live coverage here in monaco for the monaco crypto summit i'm john furrier host of thecube uh we have a great great guest lineup here already in nine interviews small gathering of the influencers and the people making it happen powered by digital bits sponsored by digital bits presented by digital bits of course a lot happening around decentralization web 3 the metaverse we've got a a powerhouse influencer on the qb ryan gills the founder of openmeta been in the issue for a while ryan great to see you thanks for coming on great to be here thank you you know one of the things that we were observing earlier conversations is you have young and old coming together the best and brightest right now in the front line it's been there for a couple years you know get some hype cycles going on but that's normal in these early growth markets but still true north star is in play that is democratize remove the intermediaries create immutable power to the people the same kind of theme has been drum beating on now come the metaverse wave which is the nfts now the meta verses you know at the beginning of this next wave yeah this is where we're at right now what are you working on tell us what's what's open meta working on yeah i mean so there is a reason for all of this right i think we go through all these different cycles and there's an economic incentive engine and it's designed in because people really like making money but there's a deeper reason for it all and the words the buzzwords the terms they change based off of different cycles this one is a metaverse i just saw it a little early you know so i recognized the importance of an open metaverse probably in 2017 and really decided to dedicate 10 years to that um so we're very early into that decade and we're starting to see more of a movement building and uh you know i've catalyzed a lot of that from from the beginning and making sure that while everything moves to a closed corporate side of things there's also an equal bottom-up approach which i think is just more important and more interesting well first of all i want to give you a lot of props for seeing it early and recognizing the impact and potential collateral damage of not not having open and i was joking earlier about the facebook little snafu with the the exercise app and ftc getting involved and you know i kind of common new york times guy comment online like hey i remember aol wanted to monopolize dial up internet and look the open web obviously changed all that they went to sign an extinction not the same comparable here but you know everyone wants to have their own little walled guard and they feel comfortable first-party data the data business so balancing the benefit of data and all the ip that could come into whether it's a visualization or platform it has to be open without open then you're going to have fragmentation you're going to have all kinds of perverse incentives how does the metaverse continue with such big players like meta themselves x that new name for facebook you know big bully tons of cash you know looking to you know get their sins forgiven um so to speak i mean you got google probably will come in apple's right around the corner amazon you get the whales out there how do is it proprietary is walled garden the new proprietary how do you view all that because it's it's still early and so there's a lot of change can happen well it's an interesting story that's really playing out in three acts right we had the first act which was really truly open right there was this idea that the internet is for the end user this is all just networking and then web 2 came and we got a lot of really great business models from it and it got closed up you know and now as we enter this sort of third act we have the opportunity to learn from both of those right and so i think web 3 needs to go back to the values of web one with the lessons in hindsight of web 2. and all of the winners from web 2 are clearly going to want to keep winning in web 3. so you can probably guess every single company and corporation on earth will move into this i think most governments will move into it as well and um but they're not the ones that are leading it the ones that are leading it are are just it's a culture of people it's a movement that's building and accumulating over time you know it's weird it's uh the whole web 2 thing is the history is interesting because you know when i started my podcasting company in 2004 there's only like three of us you know the dave weiner me evan williams and jack dorsey and we thought and the blogging just was getting going and the dream was democratization at the time mainstream media was the enemy and then now blogs are media so and then all sudden it like maybe it was the 2008 area with the that recession it stopped and then like facebook came in obviously twitter was formed from the death of odio podcasting company so the moment in time in history was a glimmic glimmer of hope well we went under my company went under we all went under but then that ended and then you had the era of twitter facebook linkedin reddit was still around so it kind of stopped where did it where did it pick up was it the ethereum bitcoin and ethereum brought that back where'd the open come back well it's a generational thing if you if you go back to like you know apple as a startup they were trying to take down ibm right it was always there's always the bigger thing that was that we we're trying to sort of unbundle or unpackage because they have too much power they have too much influence and now you know facebook and apple and these big tech companies they are that on on the planet and they're doing it bigger than it's ever been done but when they were startups they existed to try to take that from a bigger company so i think you know it's not an it's not a fact that like facebook or zuckerberg is is the villain here it's just the fact that we're reaching peak centralization anything past this point it becomes more and more unhealthy right and an open metaverse is just a way to build a solution instead of more of a problem and i think if we do just allow corporations to build and own them on the metaverse these problems will get bigger and larger more significant they will touch more people on earth and we know what that looks like so why not try something different so what's the playbook what's the current architecture of the open meta verse that you see and how do people get involved is there protocols to be developed is there new things that are needed how does the architecture layout take us through that your mindset vision on that and then how can people get involved yeah so the the entity structure of what i do is a company called crucible out of the uk um but i i found out very quickly that just a purely for-profit closed company a commercial company won't achieve this objective there's limitations to that so i run a dao as well out of switzerland it's called open meta we actually we named it this six months before facebook changed their name and so this is just the track we're on right and what we develop is a protocol uh we believe that the internet built by game developers is how you define the metaverse and that protocol is in the dao it is in the dow it's that's crucial crucible protocol open meta okay you can think of crucible as labs okay no we're building we're building everything so incubator kind of r d kind of thing exactly yeah and i'm making the choice to develop things and open them up create public goods out of them harness things that are more of a bottom-up approach you know and what we're developing is the emergence protocol which is basically defining the interface between the wallets and the game engines right so you have unity and unreal which all the game developers are sort of building with and we have built software that drops into those game engines to map ownership between the wallet and the experience in the game so integration layer basically between the wallet kind of how stripe is viewed from a software developer's campaign exactly but done on open rails and being done for a skill set of world building that is coming and game developers are the best suited for this world building and i like to own what i built yeah i don't like other people to own what i build and i think there's an entire generation that's that's really how do you feel about the owning and sharing component is that where you see the scale coming into play here i can own it and scale it through the relationship of the open rails yeah i mean i think the truth is that the open metaverse will be a smaller network than even one corporate virtual world for a while because these companies have billions of people right yeah every room you've ever been in on earth people are using two or three of facebook's products right they just have that adoption but they don't have trust they don't have passion they don't have the movement that you see in web3 they don't have the talent the level of creative talent those people care about owning what they create on the on what can someone get involved with question is that developer is that a sponsor what do people do to get involved with do you and your team and to make it bigger i mean it shouldn't be too small so if this tracks you can assume it gets bigger if you care about an open metaverse you have a seat at the table if you become a member of the dao you have a voice at the table you can make decisions with us we are building developing technology that can be used openly so if you're a game developer and you use unity or unreal we will open the beta this month later and then we move directly into what's called a game jam so a global hackathon for game developers where we just go through a giant exploration of what is possible i mean you think about gaming i always said the early adopters of all technology and the old web one was porn and that was because they were they were agnostic of vendor pitches or whatever is it made money they've worked we don't tell them we've always been first we don't tolerate vaporware gaming is now the new area where it is so the audience doesn't want vapor they want it to work they want technology to be solid they want community so it's now the new arbiter so gaming is the pretext to metaverse clearly gaming is swallowing all of media and probably most of the world and this game mechanics under the hood and all kinds of underlying stuff now how does that shape the developer community so like take the classic software developer may not be a game developer how do they translate over you seeing crossover from the software developers that are out there to be game developers what's your take on that it's an interesting question because i come to a lot of these events and the entire web 3 movement is web developers it's in the name yeah right and we have a whole wave of exploration and nfts being sold of people who really love games they're they're players they're gamers and they're fans of games but they are not in the skill set of game development this is a whole discipline yeah it's a whole expertise right you have to understand ik retargeting rigging bone meshes and mapping of all of that stuff and environment building and rendering and all these things it's it's a stacked skill set and we haven't gone through any exploration yet with them that is the next cycle that we're going to and that's what i've spent the last three or four years preparing for yeah and getting the low code is going to be good i was saying earlier to the young gun we had on his name was um oscar belly he's argo versus he's 25 years old he's like he made a quote i'm too old to get into esports like 22 old 25 come on i'd love to be in esports i was commenting that there could be someone sitting next to us in the metaverse here on tv on our digital tv program in the future that's going to be possible the first party citizenship between physical experience absolutely and meta versus these cameras all are a layer in which you can blend the two yeah so that that's that's going to be coming sooner and it's really more of the innovation around these engines to make it look real and have someone actually moving their body not like a stick figure yes or a lego block this is where most people have overlooked because what you have is you have two worlds you have web 3 web developers who see this opportunity and are really going for it and then you have game developers who are resistant to it for the most part they have not acclimated to this but the game developers are more of the keys to it because they understand how to build worlds yeah they do they understand how to build they know what success looks like they know what success looks like if you if you talk about the metaverse with anyone the most you'll hear is ready player one yeah maybe snow crash but those things feel like games yeah right so the metaverse and gaming are so why are game developers um like holding back is because they're like ah it's too not ready yet i'm two more elite or is it more this is you know this is an episode on its own yeah um i'm actually a part of a documentary if you go to youtube and you say why gamers hate nfts there's a two-part documentary about an hour long that robin schmidt from the defiant did and it's really a very good deep dive into this but i think we're just in a moment in time right now if you remember henry ford when he he produced the car everybody wanted faster horses yeah they didn't understand the cultural shift that was happening they just wanted an incremental improvement right and you can't say that right now because it sounds arrogant but i do believe that this is a moment in time and i think once we get through this cultural shift it will be much more clear why it's important it's not pure speculation yeah it's not clout it's not purely money there's something happening that's important for humanity yeah and if we don't do it openly it will be more of a problem yeah i totally agree with you on that silent impact is number one and people some people just don't see it because it's around the corner visionaries do like yourselves we do my objective over the next say three to six months is to identify which game developers see the value in web 3 and are leaning into it because we've built technology that solves interoperability between engines mapping ownership from wallets all the sort of blueprints that are needed in order for a game developer to build this way we've developed that we just need to identify where are they right because the loudest voices are the ones that are pushing back against this yeah and if you're not on twitter you don't see how many people really see this opportunity and i talked to epic and unity and nvidia and they all agree that this is where the future is going but the one question mark is who wants it where are they you know it's interesting i talked to lauren besel earlier she's from the music background we were talking about open source and how music i found that is not open it's proprietary i was talking about when i was in college i used to deal software you'd be like what do you mean deal well at t source code was proprietary and that started the linux movement in the 80s that became a systems revolution and then open source then just started to accelerate now people like it's free software is like not a big deal everyone knows it's what it was never proprietary but we were fighting the big proprietary code bases you mentioned that earlier is there a proprietary thing for music well not really because it's licensed rights right so in the metaverse who's the proprietary is it the walled garden is the is it is it the gamers so is it the consoles is it the investment that these gaming companies have in the software itself so i find that that open source vibe is very much circulating around your world actually open maps in the word open but open source software has a trajectory you know foundations contributors community building same kind of mindset music not so much because no one's it's not direct comparable but i think here it's interesting the gaming culture could be that that proprietary ibm the the state the playstation the xbox you know if you dive into the modding community right the modding community has sort of been this like gray area of of gaming and they will modify games that already exist but they do it with the values of open source they do it with composability and there's been a few breakthroughs counter-strike is a mod right some of the largest games of all time came from mods of other games look at quake had a comeback i played first multiplayer doom when it came out in the 90s and that was all mod based exactly yeah quake and quake was better but you know i remember the first time on a 1.5 cable mode and playing with my friends remember vividly now the graphics weren't that good but that was mod it's mod so then you go i mean and then you go into these other subcultures like dungeons and dragons which was considered to be such a nerdy thing but it's just a deeply human thing it's a narrative building collective experience like these are all the bottom-up type approaches modding uh world building so you're going to connect so i'm just kind of thinking out loud here you're going to connect the open concept of source with open meta bring game developers and software drills together create a fabric of a baseline somewhat somewhat collected platform tooling and components and let it just sell form see what happens better self form that's your imposing composability is much faster yeah than a closed system and you got what are your current building blocks you have now you have the wallet and you have so we built an sdk on both unity and unreal okay as a part of a system that is a protocol that plugs into those two engines and we have an inventory service we have an avatar system we basically kind of leaned into this idea of a persona being the next step after a pfp so so folks that are out there girls and boys who are sitting there playing games they could build their own game on this thing absolutely this is the opportunity for them entrepreneurs to circumvent the system and go directly with open meta and build their own open environment like i said before i i like to own the things i built i've had that entrepreneurial lesson but i don't think in the future you should be so okay with other companies or other intermediaries owning you and what you build i think i mean opportunity to build value yeah and i think i think your point the mod culture is not so much going to be the answer it's what that was like the the the the dynamic of modding yes is developing yes and then therefore you get the benefit of sovereign identity yeah you get the benefit of unbanking that's not the way we market this but those are benefits that come along with it and it allows you to live a different life and may the better product win yeah i mean that's what you're enabling yeah ryan thanks so much for coming on real final question what's going on here why are we here in monaco what's going on this is the inaugural event presented by digital bits why are we here monaco crypto summit i'm here uh some friends of mine brittany kaiser and and lauren bissell invited me here yeah i've known al for for a number of years and i'm just here to support awesome congratulations and uh we'll keep in touch we'll follow up on the open meta great story we love it thanks for coming on okay cube coverage continues here live in monaco i'm john furrier and all the action here on the monaco crypto summit love the dame come back next year it'll be great back with more coverage to wrap up here on the ground then the yacht club event we're going to go right there as well that's in a few hours so we're going to be right back [Music] you