 Okay, welcome back everyone. We're here live in Monaco for SiliconANGLE, the CUBE's coverage of the Monaco Crypto Summit. John Furrier, your host. We're here with Al Berger, the founder of the Digital Bits Blockchain. Digital Bits is presented in an open ecosystem. They're the main presenters, bringing everybody together. Al Berger is the man of the hour. Al, great to see you, CUBE alumni. Great to see you again. John, thanks for having me back on the show. It's been a while. This is an inaugural event. You and your team put together the Digital Bits Foundation, Digital Bits Blockchain, the enabling technology. The proof is in the pudding, as I always say. Now you're seeing companies building on top of the ecosystem. Why Monaco? This is an inaugural event. What's going on here? What's the motivation? What does all this mean, all this stuff coming together? Cher? Why Monaco? I mean, it's part of this next chapter. For us, things are happening in Monaco and we've yet to unveil that and we thought what better place to unveil what we're doing in Monaco rather than to do it in Monaco. So that was really the genesis of what gave birth to this idea to have the Monaco Crypto Summit. But that evolved beyond just sharing the nexus of it all. There are organizations here that have come from all over the world and will be sharing for the first time how they're also utilizing the Digital Bits Blockchain. Not bad to come to Monaco in the summer though. It's a pretty nice area here. Beautiful views. Summer time in Monaco is always great. But this is an inaugural event. That's why I love the name. So congratulations on the name. I think it's got a lot of legs to it. I think this will be something that's going to be around for a long, long time. So good call there. There's a lot of other dynamics going on. Prince Albert's got some involvement. He's interested in crypto. We're going to hear more about that in the Yacht Club presentation later tonight. You got startups, companies building on top of the capabilities of Digital Bits. You and I have talked in the past on theCUBE about the technology. Your technologist followed a lot of your ventures, successes and exits, multiple exits in tech. Silicon Valley knows you. Everyone knows you now around the world. It's kind of like a cloud game, but it's decentralized. You've got infrastructure, platform applications. There's super applications in decentralized.dfi to all kinds of new stuff going on. So you have a stack kind of going on here in a decentralized way and been validated by all the big names jumping in and changing their business models. Andries and Horowitz, you name it. Now a global financial market's converging on this huge opportunity around crypto and de-apps. Everything's happening. So what's your reaction to this? As someone who's been through many cycles, built companies and sold them and been successful. What's your analysis? This journey is then different and has unique, some similarities, but definitely some unique characteristics than prior journeys in venturing off to found a company and so forth. For me, it's been obviously the traditional way. Prior to this, obviously it was in the valley and had quite the journey. What I would say this time is, with all that's happening in blockchain and cryptocurrency, it's the amount of, say, capital formation, the amount of people involvement into an early technology, into an evolving technology, and there's various subcategories now across NFTs, metaverse and all things fungible. There's a global stage immediately and it sort of creates these sort of mini vortexes of getting more people involved. It's kind of, some semblance is like the dot-com bubble in a sense, but with a much bigger ecosystem in comparison to what we saw in the 90s. The thing about blockchain is that it needs to, more successful blockchains out there need to evolve into becoming as decentralized as possible, and so as to use your analogy of stack, I mean, it is incredibly important to have contributors at all layers, protocol layer, application, D app layer, and many corners of the world. But it all starts with an idea, so it's really hard to go from point A to point B, like any other new opportunity, and so for us it's been a journey, we're evolving in this next chapter, and a lot of that will be evident today throughout the course of the summit. We'll start to see, instructive feel even more so how the digital bits ecosystem is becoming more and more decentralized. We're gonna see a bunch of folks coming on at a stop stage, you're gonna come here, sit down on the queue and chat with me about their opportunities. I would you describe for the folks watching now what's going on on stage here all day, and then obviously there's the VIP gala tonight at the yacht club with Prince Albert, and the attendance and his team and a bunch of big power players. What's happening here? What's the vibe? What's the purpose? What's being presented? Can you just quickly share, take a minute to explain what's going on? So relative to the summit, it's organizations, platforms, there's a few metaverse platforms here that will be, I mean, they've been in existence, but they'll be unveiling their connection and how they're leveraging the digital bits blockchain for the very first time. And so, but also other categories as well. Even soon here, massive multi-billion dollar real estate development all coming to the digital bits blockchain. So this is a physical world, massive resort real estate development completely being tokenized. You guys had some success in digital assets. Obviously the Roma team, I saw the announcement on YouTube was pretty big. You get digital bits in the jersey, you got a new player, so caught my attention. You got sports teams, you got here, you got applications. People building on top of digital bits. Why? For us, vision needs to be supported by strategy. From inception, it was finding ways to take an enterprise go to market strategy. And some of it may be a bit of trial and error in the early onset from 2017, 18, when the journey kind of began for the digital bits blockchain. But also part of it is timing. And one of the things that we saw more recently, again, it's kind of like the journey in the stack you were referring to before, nobody foresaw the pandemic. Nobody foresaw that the whole world would be at home staring at a screen and figuring out what to do with their time. And many of the world for the first time began to learn about blockchain and cryptocurrency for the first time in the onset of this pandemic. And so that became a huge accelerant for the space. And so another quote I'll take away from you, that I've recall you saying many years ago, you need to have a horse in the track to be in the race. We were very fortunate to have a horse in the track by having already a number of years of development, awareness so that when there's kind of like these market shifts that can become an accelerant, we're in a position to move with the industry. And so it's been an incredible couple of years. Timing was great for you guys. Yeah. And so there's different contributors in the ecosystem, some that I'm affiliated with that have done things in the sports space and other things that I'm not affiliated with. There's a lot of things that, again, are emerging today that are happening in different categories or themes of metaverse, for example, and I'm humbled by it, just simply by the virtue of the fact that they're utilizing the digital with its blockchain, but I had no stake in building what they've built in terms of their platform and applications. Well, you're enabling technology, so just to kind of pivot off you said, yeah, the pandemic was a tailwind now for this movement, for many reasons. One, people sit at home, boy, hey, this is technically, hey, this is working on the blockchain. Two, the future of work or the future of how things are organized was remote work. Remote work is like next door neighbor to decentralization. Like, I mean, come on, you're talking about people going, this is not the future, it's not where it used to be. So that kind of galvanized a lot of people. And also the business models have shifted, so now post-pandemic, everything's hybrid, which is virtual, physical. So that's a perfect storm. So total acceleration, agree. And we're seeing the traction. Now, what's interesting about what you guys are doing is you're enabling people to build apps on it. That's the platform. And that's, again, what I want to ask you is, I had people always ask me, what's digital bits? So I'm going to ask you, what is digital bits? Well, digital bits is both the name of a blockchain. It's also the name of a cryptocurrency, the native cryptocurrency of the digital bits blockchain. And so it began 2017 as a fork of stellar, in terms of the original repository. And it was a question I was asked earlier today in a press conference of, like, oh, there's all these blockchains. Well, we're still in this early stage, this early part of this evolution. And so I don't necessarily see a lot of what's happening if there's a competitive, but rather complimentary. Because in Unison, there's different use cases, different categories where kind of a blockchain can find its array of adoption in this sort of phase of it all. For us, we've been referred to as a few different things, one of which is, in the aspiration, become this blockchain for brands. I think today we'll learn that it's become much bigger than that in terms of its capability. It's not necessarily that it's a result of new technology, it's a lot of this technology's been there, it's just how it's being exploited and used. We're unveiling today, for example, and part of now this chapter for me is working with community developers. Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, before you go there. So, okay, I see Digital Bits, I love the name, by the way, so thanks for that. You kind of get to the news now. You have a press conference. Take me through the press conference. What's the news? What are you guys announcing here today? So at the press conference, we did share not everything. There's more likely in store by the end of today that it's not on the agenda, and maybe I'll be back on the show later today. We will have you back, we'll find out. Come on, show some of it. But in terms of what we've shared so far at the press conference, it was centered around two key themes. I wanted to, obviously talked about the array of things to come today, but focused on some of the things I'm directly involved in. One of which was Nicoswap, and the other are the number of things that I'm involved with here within Monaco. So in terms of Nicoswap, by way of name, Niko, and in the spirit of decentralization, Niko, in ancient Greek means victory for the people. So we thought that was a fitting name for the platform. It's a decentralized exchange platform on the digital bits blockchain filled with liquidity pool technology, automated market-making technology. It's, by way of comparison, digital bits version of, let's say, a Uniswap, but lower cost, faster, and so forth. And there's a number of organizations here today that are announcing that they're deploying on Nicoswap, bringing their token to the digital bits blockchain and launching on Nicoswap. So I'm super excited about that. This is part of evolution and part of fostering decentralization. And so what that enables is, by virtue of being able to, again, helping other organizations getting their horse in the track, the common denominator for us is digital bits. It's the fact that every application, every utility token, every NFT, does require digital bits, including the digital bits currency to provide that security to be used for Gassies and so on and so forth. So the blockchain itself, it's kind of a common denominator beneficiary, the one way you can kind of think of it. But, yeah, we shared a lot around Nicoswap, what it looks like, and its key functionality and who's some of the organizations that are on board day one. The other part of the press conference today we shared was more Monaco-centric. Digital bits in Monaco, and this journey is just beginning. It's super humbling, it's super exciting for me to be a part of it. There is, again, in no real particular order, there's an e-campus that's focused around cyber security and blockchain education for both private sector and public sector, so academia. So skills gap. Government. Issue solves some skill gap issues. Correct. Right, it's an organization, financial institution, a whole department needs to know more about blockchain, how they can leverage it. Digital bits is the blockchain that is forming the first part of the curriculum for this e-campus that's launching here in Monaco with an organization called NVINI. The other thing that we shared and announced today was that the first sovereign cloud in Europe is the Monaco cloud. It's recently launched, what makes it sovereign in essence is a few aspects of its characteristics, but digital bits, blockchain nodes are being deployed in the Monaco cloud. And so beyond the nodes that already exist, it's the network is further being, let's say,hearted. It's not to bring you scale. In resiliency. The whole thing around censorship resistance, right? The more nodes, there's a huge strategic aspect to obviously deploying nodes in sovereign clouds. And so in Europe, the first for that is the Monaco cloud. So we're really honored to be working with a team there and NVINI and so forth for that. And then as well, number of months ago, we began a journey with the Prince Albert Monaco Foundation. The chair, president is Prince Albert and the vice president CEO is Olivia Wendam who was in attendance at the press conference as well. And we unveiled the foundation's platform entirely built on the digital bits blockchain, utilizing the digital bits cryptocurrency as well as NFT ticketing and so forth. So we unveiled that, we showcase that for members of the press, how it will be used and so forth. What were some of the questions you got? I mean, it went everywhere from, there was a regulatory regulation question related to Europe, to questions around decentralization. What are we doing? How do we compare to proof of work? Why digital bits? A big part of that is I think we have a lot of common values with the foundation, Prince Albert Foundation around the environment being equal friendly and so on and so forth. And so the questions of that sort, what's the next chapter look like and how is more and more decentralization, in my view, gonna be fueled? And you said you got some announcements you can't talk about coming. Okay, so what's that gonna be related to? It gets a little bit of teaser on that, is it gonna be massive, is it grand finale? Or is it? It's not a finale. It's the unveiling, it's an unboxing of a new deal. What is it, a deal? Is it technology? It's a large organization that is leveraging both digital bits watching and digital currency. Body swear of that one, okay, good. Well, Al, thanks for coming on and congratulations. We will catch up with you either at the end of the day here on the live program or we will be at the Yacht Club and Monaco Yacht Club tonight for the big event. We hope to be live there, but if not, we will report on that. Thanks for having me, John. It was a great, great time. Congratulations, Digital Bits, really rockin' the world here in Monaco. Love the name, Digital Bits, makes tons of sense, platform to enable applications. This is the future, you're gonna start to see this decentralized model that kind of looks like cloud computing but not, it's technology enabling the creative and the application transformations to decentralization. It's coming almost every single category will be centralized. We'll be covering Alka Blanket on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. Bye.