 Everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's Unstoppable Domains Partner Showcase. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. This segment and this session is about expansion into Asia Pacific and Europe for Unstoppable Domains. It's a hot startup in the Web3 area. Really creating a new innovation around NFTs, crypto, single sign-on, and digital identity, giving users the power like they should. We've got two great guests, Ajad Rahman, head of Europe, and Neal Kanth, owner's Neal, I.R. head of Asia. So, Ajad Neal, welcome to this Cube and let's talk about the expansion. It's not really expansion, the global economy is a global, but showcase here about Unstoppable is going to Europe. Thanks for coming on. Thanks, John, for inviting us. So, we're living in a global world, obviously crypto, blockchain, decentralized applications. You're starting to see mainstream adoption, which means the shift is happening. There are more apps coming and it means more infrastructure and things got to get easier, right? So, reduce the steps it takes to do stuff, make the wallets better, give people more secure access and control of the day. This is what Unstoppable is all about. You guys are in the middle of it, you're on this wave. What is the potential of Web 3 with Unstoppable and in general in Asia and in Europe? I can go first. So, let's look at the Asia market. I mean, typically we see the US market, the Europe markets for typical Web 2.0 software and infrastructure is definitely the larger markets with US typically accounting for about 60% and Europe about 20 to 30% and Asia has always been small. But we see in this whole world of blockchain, crypto, Web 3.0, Asia already has about 160 million users. They have more than 35 local exchanges. And if you really look at the number of countries in terms of the rate of adoption, many of the Asian countries which probably you would have never even heard of like Vietnam actually topping the list, right? One of the reasons that this is happening again, if you go through the Asian Development Bank's latest report, you have these Gen Zs and millennials, that's 50% of the Asian population. And if you really look at 50% of the Asian population, that's 1.1 billion people out of the total 1.8 billion Gen Z and millennials that you have in the world. And these folks are digital native. Their people, in fact, the Gen Zs are mobile first and millennials, many of us like myself at least are people who are digital. And 20% of the world's economy is currently digital. And the rest, 40 to 50% which is going to happen, it's going to happen in the Web 3.0 world. And that's going to be driven by millennials and Gen Zs. I think that's why this whole space is so exciting because it's being driven by the users, by the new generation. I mean, that's my broad part on this whole thing. Before we get to the side, I want to just comment on Asia also and the other areas where mobile first came, you had to end the younger demographics, absolutely driving the change because they're like, well, I don't want the old way. They go right from scratch at the beginning, they're using the technologies. That has propelled the crypto world. I mean, that is absolutely true. Everyone's kind of seeing that. And that's now influencing some of these developer nations like say in Europe, for instance, and even North America, I think Europe's more advanced than North America, in my opinion, but we'll get to that. So potential in Europe. Sajad, can you take us through your thoughts on as head of Europe for a while? Absolutely. So news right, I think Asia's way ahead in terms of Gen Z user adopting crypto. Europe is actually a distant second, but it's surprising to note that Europe actually has the highest transaction activity in crypto over the last year and a half. And if you dig a bit deeper, I'd say arguably for Europe, I think the opportunity in web-free is perhaps the largest and perhaps it can mean the most for Europe. Europe for the last decade has been trailing behind Asia and North America when it comes to birthing unicorns. And I think web-free can provide a step-change opportunity. This belief for me stems from the fact that Europe's policy, right? Like for example, GDPR is focused on enabling user data ownership. And I think I recently read a very good paper out of Stanford by Patrick Henson. They speak for web-free being the best pathway for Europe enabling traditional sovereignty. So what that means is users control the data, they bring to the internet and they harness the value from it. And on one hand, while Europe is enabling that regulation, that could bring that forth, web-free actually brings it into action. So I think with more enablement, better regulation and we'll see more hubs like the crypto valley in Switzerland pop-up that will bring, I think, and I became able to say not over-regulation, the right regulation, we can expect more influence of capital, more builder talent that then drives more adoption. So I think the prospects for Europe in terms of usage, as well as builders are quite right. Yeah, and I think also you guys are in areas where the cultural shift is so dramatic. You mentioned Asia, the demographics. Even the entrepreneurial culture in Europe right now is booming. You look at all the venture-backed startups and the young generation building companies, again, cloud computing is a big part of that, as obviously, but compared to the United States, you go back 15 years ago, Europe was way behind on the startup scene. Now it's booming and pumping on all cylinders and kind of points at this cultural shift. It's almost like a generational, it's like the digital hippies changing the world. They're web three, I don't want to be web two. Web two is so old, I don't want to do that. And then it's all because it's changing, right? And there are things inadequate with web two on the naming system. Also the arbitrage around fake information, bots, users being manipulated, and also, you know, merchandise and monetize through these portals. That's kind of ending. So talk about the dynamic of web two, three at those areas. You've got users and you've got companies who build applications, they're going to shift and be forced, in our opinion, and you want to get your reaction to that. Do you think applications are going to have to be web three or users will reject them? Yeah, I think I'll jump in and I'm not to hear a news port. I think the web three is built on few principles, right? There's decentralization, worship, and composability. And I think these are not binary. So, you know, if I look further on the future, I don't see a future where you have just web three. I think there's going to be a coexistence of cooperation between web two companies, web three and the deep bridges. I think there's going to be, there's a sliding scale to decentralization versus centralization, similarly, you know, ownership. And I think users will find what works best for them in different contexts. I think what unstoppable is doing is essentially providing the identity system for web three. And that's way more powerful when it comes being built on the options than the naming system we had for web three, right? The identity system can serve the purpose of taking a user's personal identifier as your blockchain domain name and attaching all kinds of attributes that define who you are both in the physical and digital world and filling out information that you can transact on the basis of. And I think the users would, as we go to a no-port and no-port future, right? Where, you know, in web two, more of the users were essentially consumers or readers of the internet. And in web three, with more low-port and no-port technology platforms taking shape and getting proliferation, you would see more users being actually writers, publishers, and developers on the internet. And they would value owning their data and to harness the most amount of value from them. So I think that's the powerful concept. And I think that's the future I see that web three, where web three will dominate. Neil, what do you think? Well, I think you put it very, very nicely. I think you covered most of the points. But I'm seeing a lot of different things that are happening in the ground. I think a lot of the governments, a lot of the web two dot zero players, the traditional banks, these guys are not sitting quiet on the blockchain space. There are a lot of pilots happening in the blockchain space, right? I mean, I can give you real life examples. I mean, one of the biggest example is in my home state of Maharashtra in Mumbai is, they actually partnered with Polygon Matic, right? They actually built a private blockchain-based capability to kind of deliver your COVID vaccination certificates with the QR code, right? And that's the only way they could deliver that kind of volumes in that short of time with the kind of user control, the user control the user has on the data, that could only be possible because of blockchain. Of course, it's still private because it's healthcare data. They still want to keep it something that's not fully on a blockchain. That is something. Similarly, there is a consortium of about nine banks who have actually been trying to work on making things like remittances or, you know, trade finance much, much easier. I mean, remittances through a traditional web two dot zero world is very, very costly. And especially in the Asian countries, but a lot of people from Southeast Asia work across the world and send back money home. It's a very costly and a time-taking affair. So they have actually partnered and built a blockchain based capability. Again, in a pilot stage to kind of reduce the transaction costs. Like for example, if you just look at the trade finance space where there are 40 million traders who do 2.45 trillion dollars of transaction, they were able to actually reduce the time that it takes from eight to nine days to about two to three days. So to add on to what you're saying, I think these two worlds are going to meet and meet very soon. And when they meet, what they need is a single digital identity, a human readable way of being able to send and receive and do commerce. I think that's where I see unstoppable domains, very nicely positioned to be able to integrate these two worlds. So that's, that's my thought on that. That was a great point. I was going to get into which industries and kind of what areas to see in your, in geographies, but that's a good point about saving time. I like how you brought that up because in these new waves, you either got to reduce the steps that takes to do something or save time, make it easy. And these are the, this is the success for formula in anything, whether it's an app or UI or whatever. But what specifically are they doing in your areas? And what about unstoppable, how they attract it to? Is it because of the identity? Is it because of the, the apps? Is it because of the single sign-on? What is that? What is the reason that they're leaning in and unpacking this further into their pilots? Sajat, do you want to take that? Yeah. I have a piece out there. So I think, and let me clarify the question, John, you're talking about where two companies looking to partner and solve potential partnerships, right? Yeah, what are they seeing? And what are they seeing as the value that the pilots we heard from Neil Kanath around the financial industry? I think obviously gaming is one that's obvious, huge. Financial, healthcare. I mean, these are obviously verticals that are going to be heavily impacted in a positive way. What are they seeing as the value? What's getting them motivated to do these pilots? Why are they jumping in with both feet, if you will, on these projects? Is it because it's saving money? Is it time or both? Is it ease of use? Is it the users' expectations? Trying to tease out how you guys see that evolving. Yeah. I think the space as the movement is going very fast, but I think the space is still young. And right now, a lot of these companies are seeking the potential that Web3 offers. And I think the key dimensions, like possibility, decentralization, ownership. So I think the key thing I'm seeing in EU is these Web2 companies seeing the momentum and looking to harness that by enabling bridges to Web3. One of the key friends in Europe has been fintech. I think over the last five to six years we'll have the Revolute N26 eToro, creating platforms, new banks and super finance, super apps rising to the forefront. And they are all enabling or so connected and bridge with Web3 in some shape and form. Either any of them creating a crypto, some are launching their own native wallets. And these are essentially ways that they can want to track users. So the Gen Z who are looking for more frictional finance to get them on board, but also to look to enable more adoption by their own users who are not using these services that potentially create new revenue streams and create allocation of capital that they could not have access to otherwise. So I think that's one friend I'm seeing over here. I think the other key trend in Europe at least has been games and again, that links to a dimension of Web3 that is called the metaverse. So a lot of game companies are looking to step into game file, which is a game completely different business model to what traditional game companies use to use. Similarly, metaverse is where game ownership creates a different business model. And they see that users and gamers of the future would want to engage with that versus just being monetized on the basis of friction or ads. And I think that's something that they're becoming aware of and will quickly in the space of launching your metaverses or game by applications or creating in probability with these employees applications. You know, I wanted to get into this point, but I was going to ask about the community empowerment piece of this equation, because digital identity is about the user's identity, which implies they're part of a community. Web3 is very community centric, but you mentioned gaming. I mean, people who have been watching the gaming world like ourselves know that communities and marketplaces have been very active for years, many years, over 15 years, community games, currency, in-game activity has been out there, right? But siloed within the games themselves. So now it seems that that paradigm is coming in and empowering all communities. Is this something that you guys see and agree with? And if so, what's different about that? How are our communities being empowered? I guess that's the question. Yeah, I can maybe take that to that. So, I mean, I was so hard of actually infinity. 40% of their user base is in Vietnam and the average earning that a person makes in a month out of playing this game is more than the national daily or minimum wage that is there, right? So that's the kind of potential. Actually, going back as a combination of actually answering your earlier question and I think over and above what Sajat said, what's very unique in Asia is we still have a lot of unbanked people, right? So if you really look at the total unbanked population of the world, it's 1.6 billion and 24% of that is in Asia. So almost 375 million people are in Asia. So these are people who do not have access to finance or credit. So the whole idea is how do we get these people onto a banking system, onto peer-to-peer lending or peer-to-peer finance kind of capabilities? I think, again, unstoppable domains kind of helps in that. If you just look at the pure Web 3.0 world and the complex technical way in which money or other crypto is transferred from one wallet to the other, it's very difficult for an unbanked person who probably cannot even do basic communication, cannot read and write to actually be able to do it. But something that's very human-readable, something that's very easy for him to understand, something that's visual, something that he can see on his mobile with a 2G network. We are not talking of, the world is talking about 5G, but there are parts of Asia which are still using 2G and 2.5G kind of network, right? So I think that's one key use case. I think the banks are trying to solve because for them, this is a whole new customer segment and sorry, I actually went back a little bit to your earlier question, but coming back to this whole community building, right? So on March 8th, we're launching something called as Women of Web 3.0, that is Wow 3. This is basically to again empower. So if you again look at Asia, women need a lot of training, they need a lot of enablement for them to be able to leverage the power of Web 3.0. I know I can talk about India because being from India, a lot of the women do not, they do all the small businesses, but the money is taken by middlemen or taken by their husbands. With Web 3.0, fundamentally the money comes to them because that's what they use to educate their children. And it's the same thing in a lot of other Southeast Asian countries as well. I think it's very important to build those communities or communities of women entrepreneurs. I think this is a big opportunity to really get the section of society which probably will take 10 more years if we go through the normal Web 1 to Web 2.0 progression where the power is with corporations and not with the individuals. And that's a great announcement by the way you mentioned the $10 million where the domains being issued out for, this is democratization is what it's all about. Again, this is a new revolution. I mean, this is a new thing. So great stuff, more education, more learning, and get the banks up and running, get those people banking because once they're banking, they get wallets. So they need the wallets. So let's get to the real meat here. You guys are in the territory of Europe and Asia where there's a lot of wallets, there's a lot of changes because they're not in the United States, there's a few of them there, but most of them outside the United States and you got a lot of de-apps developing, decentralized applications. So you've got all this coming together in your territory. What's the strategy? How are you going to attack that? You got the wallets, you got the exchanges and you got de-applications, de-apps. Yeah, I'm having a different day of worst passing. So I think, just quickly there, I think one point is, and Neil really expressed beautifully, is the financial inclusion. That is something that has inspired me how Web3 can make Internet more inclusive. That inspired my move here. Yeah, I think for us, I think when we're at the very start, when it comes to Europe, right? And the key focus in terms of our approach in Europe would be that we want to do two things. One, we want to increase the utility of these domain games. And the second thing is we want to write collaboration with our partners. So when I speak about utility, I think utility is when you have a universal identifier, which is a domain name, and then you have these attributes around it, right? What that defines your identity. So in the context in Europe, you would look to find partners who help us enrich that identity around the domain name and that adds value for users in terms of acquiring these domains in new places. And on the other end when it comes to proliferation, I think it's about working with all those crypto and crypto and Web3 participants as well as Web3 adjacent companies, brands, services, who can help us educate current and future and upcoming Web3 users about the utility of domain names and help us onboard them to the decent like Internet. So I think that's going to be a general focus. I think the key is that as hopefully we have one overarching regulation in the EU that allows us to do this at a regional level, but at the outset, I think it's going to be tackling it country by country, identifying countries where there's deeper penetration for Web3 and then making sure that we are partnering with local trusted partners that are already venting for local communities there. So yeah, that's my view. I think please do that once in court. I think, yeah. So again, in Asia, one is you have a significant part of humanity living in Asia, right? So obviously, all the other challenges and the opportunities that we talk about, I think the first area of focus would be educating the people on the massive opportunity that they have. And if you're able to get them in early, I think it's great for them as well, right? Because by the time governments, regulations, large banking financial companies move, but if you can get the larger population into this whole space, it's good for them. So they are first movers in that space. I think we're doing a lot of things on this worldwide. I think we've done more than a hundred podcasts, just educating people on what is Web3.0, what are NFT domains, what is DeFi and so on and so forth. I think it would need some bit of localization, customization in Asia, given that, you know, India itself has about 22 languages and then there are the other countries, each of them with their own local languages and syntax semantics and all those things, right? So I think that that is very important to be able to disseminate the knowledge, although it's global, but I think to get the grassroots people to understand the opportunity, I think it would need some amount of work there. I think also building communities, I think John, you talked about communities, so did Sajat talk about communities. I think it's very important to build communities because communities create ideation. It talks about people share their challenges so that people don't repeat the same mistakes. So I think it's very important to build communities based on interest. I think we all know in the technology world, you can build communities around Telegram, Telegram, Discord, Twitter spaces and all those things. But again, when we're talking of financial inclusion, we're talking of a different kind of community building. I think that that would be important. And then of course I will kind of primarily from a company perspective, I think getting the 35 odd exchanges in Asia, the wallets to partner with us, just as an example, MATIC, they had till September of last year about 3,500 apps. In just one quarter, it doubled to 7,000 dApps on their platform. But that is the pace or the speed of innovation that we are seeing on this whole 3.0 space. I think it's very important to get those key partners who are developing those dApps, see the power of single sign-on, having a human readable digital identity, being able to seamlessly transfer your assets, digital assets across multiple cryptos, across multiple NFT marketplaces and so on and so forth. And I think the whole community thing too is also you see the communities being part of, certainly in the entertainment area and the artistry creator world, the users are part of the community, they own it too. So it goes both ways, but this brings up the marketplace too as well, because you guys have the opportunity to have trust built into the software layer. So now you can keep the reputation data. You can be anonymous, but it's trustworthy versus bots, which we all know bots can be killed and then started again with, and no one knows the time long it's been around. So the whole inadequacy of Web 2, which is just growing pains, right? This is what evolution looks like, next abstraction layer. So I love that vibe. How advanced do you think that thinking is where people are saying, hey, we need this abstraction layer, we need this digital identity, we need to start expanding our application so that the users can move across these and break down those silos where the data is. Because this is like the nerd problem, right? It's the data silos that are holding it back. What's your guys reaction to that? The killing the silos and making it horizontally scalable? I think it's a nerd problem. It is a problem of people who understand technology. It's a problem of a lot of the people in the business who want to compete effectively against those giants which are holding all the data. So I think those are the people who will innovate and move. Again, coming back to financial inclusion, coming back to the unbanked, those guys just want to do their business. They want to live their daily life. I think that's not where you will see, you will see innovation in a different form, but they're not going to disrupt the disruptors. I think that would be the people, you know, fintechs. I think they would be the first to move on to something like that. I mean, that's my humble opinion. Suggest. Yeah, I think... Go ahead. Absolutely. I mean, I touch on creators, right? So, and like I said earlier, right? We are heading for a future where more people will be creators on the internet, whether you're publishing, writing something, you're creating video content. And that means that the data they own, because that's their data, they bring it to the internet, that's more powerful, more useful, and they should be able to transact on that basis. So I think people are recognizing that and they will increasingly look to do so. And as they do that, they would want these systems that enable them to hold permissions with data. They would want to be able to control what the permission and what they want to provide for that. And at the end of the day, these applications have to work backwards from customers and keep the customers looking for that and that's where they would build. The users want freedom. They want to be able to be connected and not be restricted. They want to freely move around the global internet and do whatever they want with the friends and apps that they want to consume and not feel arbitraged. They don't want to feel like they're kind of nailed into a walled garden and stuck there and having to come back. It's the new normal. They don't want to be the product. They don't want to be the product. Gentlemen, great to have you on. Great conversation. We're going to continue this later. Certainly want to keep the updates coming. You guys are in a very hot area in Europe and Asia-Pacific. That's where a lot of the action is happening. We see the entrepreneurial activity, the business transformation, certainly with the new paradigm shift and this big wave that's coming. It's here, it's mainstream. Thanks for coming on and sharing your insights. Appreciate it. Thanks John, thanks for the opportunity. Have a good day. Great conversation. All the action is moving and happening real fast. This is theCUBE, Unstoppable Domains, partner showcase with, I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.