 Well, welcome to this Cube's presentation and with Unstoppable Domains, it's a showcase. We're featuring all the best content in Web3 and with Unstoppable Domains, it's a showcase. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We've got a great guest here, Matt Mitskovich, 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 Web3 marketplace with Unstoppable Domains. You're 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 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 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 living in the creator economy, and we believe that individuals should see the economic rewards of what they do in create online. That's what we're trying to do here at Unstoppable Domains is provide user-owned and controlled 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 almost this disintermediation of the middleman. 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 aggregators. Aggregators and multiplicates have been some of the best business models the last 20 years onto the internet. But Web3 is going to dramatically change that 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? Let'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. Well, 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 hexadecimal 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 in a $2 trillion asset class with 250 million users. So the first set of partners that we worked on integrating with were actually crypto wallets and exchanges. So we allow users to do is replace all their long hexadecimal wallet addresses with a single human readable name like john.nft or mattsmitzkiewicz.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 a great question. So exchanges actually have to do a little bit of an engineering lift to work with us and they can do that by either using the resolution libraries or using one of our APIs 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 OKEX 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 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 or if they make a single type where their money can be lost forever. So what we enable these wallets to do is to make crypto transfers simple and less scary than the current status code 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 TrustWallet, for example, which has 10 million users or Coinbase wallet. When you go to the crypto transfer fields there, you can just type in an unstoppable name and it'll correctly route the currency to the right person, to the right wallet without any chance for human error. You know, when these big waves come, I got to ask this question because a lot of people on 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. 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 web pages were the two proxies because then search engines came out and everything else happened. So I got to ask you, there are people watching, they're seeing them 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 the Google.com, you'd have to type in a random string of numbers that you'd have to memorize. That would be super painful for users and the net 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 than stop all 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 Google keywords, basically ads. So that's trillions and trillions of dollars. Again, now shifting to you guys, is that how you see it? I'll say it's decentralized. So what's different? Okay, I get, so if you compare, hey, Google was successful, keyword advertising industry for the last 25 years or 20 years. 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, has taken off massively around trading of profile pictures like crypto punts and the Board Apes Yacht Club. The use cases extend much more than just a quote, 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 data, 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 build out, have now allowed developers to build on top of them in 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 cut off, new fees instituted. It's not going to happen in the web three because all permissionless, once an NFT is minted, it's custody to the user's own wallet. We cannot take it away, 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 web three identity standard that we're building out. You know what's amazing is that's a whole nother 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 and 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, theCUBE, we have all this video where where's our NFT? 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 a particular event. So just in the same way that people collect t-shirts from conferences, people will be collecting NFTs to show they were in person, attending in person cultural moments or they were part of 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 their resume with a cryptographically secure resume that exists on the blockchain and perpetuity. Now more than half of all resumes contain lies which is a pretty not only problem as a hiring manager that we constantly have to sort through. There's ways that this can impact that side of the market as well. That's awesome. And I think this is a use case for everything. I appreciate that. And of course we can have the most favorite cube moments. It could be a cube host NFT. At Board Apes out there, why not have a board cube host going on? You're an auction for charity on 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 because that'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 some of the use cases, can you give some examples of the momentum attraction? Yeah, absolutely. So we launched the product less than 90 days ago and we already have 90 committed or integrated partners live today with the 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 attaching additional information back to their NFT domain names, such as their reputation, their history, things they've done online and be able to permissionly share that with applications that they interact with in order to gain your 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 bought a new house and you have 3,000 square feet to furnish, you could tell that fact and prove it to a company like Wayfair where they'd 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 in your house buyer or not. But if you could permission to share that using a login with an insoluble product, I mean the web would just be much, much different. Yeah, I think one of the things too as these, I call them analog old school companies, old guard companies as referred to in the cube talk here, but we still always call that old guard as 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 crypto ecosystem in general. People are very tightly knit. 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 have gone to crypto for the first time during the Super Bowl based 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 90s, late 90s, it was 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 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 doing things. Why are they gravitating towards this login concepts? Can you give some examples and give some color commentary too? Why are these DApplication, distributed application, DApps guys and gals programming with you guys? Yeah, they all believe in the potential for what we're trying to create around user-owned and 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. 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, passwords, resets all those fun things that, you know, 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. The entire 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 registries such as the blockchain and the 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 away the long hexadecimal stream we all know that we all write down, put in a save, hopefully you 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 that Web was a good example, right? Web pages, you needed Web development tools. You had HTML by hand, then you had all these tools. So you had tools and platforms and things kind of grew together. How is the Web 3 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 an explosion in 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 don't need to have Ethereum in your wallet in order to be an installable domain's 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. The subtraction layer creates that ease of use. It simplifies things, makes things easier. I mean, this was the promise 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 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 might 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. The cube and unstoppable domain share and the insights. Thanks for coming on. Thank you. Okay, this cubes coverage here with the unstoppable domain showcase. John Furrier, your host, thanks for watching.