 Live from Nassau in the Bahamas, it's theCUBE covering Polygon 18, brought to you by Polymash. Well, everyone, welcome to a special exclusive CUBE conversation here in the Bahamas for Polygon 18 as a cryptography cryptocurrency, I should say, show with blockchain. It's a great event, it's about securitized tokens and token economics, the value economy that's changing the world is certainly in play. It's the beginning of a massive wave that's coming. We've reported on theCUBE and SiliconANGLE before. We're here with the co-founder of Ethereum and the CEO of Decentral, also maker of Jax. Anthony, great to see you, thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. So, you know, we've been covering a lot of emerging waves and I got to say that, you know, I've seen some waves in my days, but this one's a tsunami. You can see the water pulling out and you see the exposed clams and crabs out there. A complete shift of value, data, users, decentralized impacts of business models to industries. I mean, it's just mind blowing, it's intoxicating, but a new community is evolving. I mean, it reminds me of the early days of the personal computer combined with all the internet working and the internet, kind of rolled up into one massive shift. How do you see it from your perspective, being on the inner core of this community? What's your take? It's mostly the biggest thing of all those things that you mentioned, it's, yeah, the tsunami. It's, we started with information, when the internet was started, ways to be able to move information globally, disrupting everything to do with publishing companies, with postal service, anything to do with information transfer. And I've been around since the BBS days, way back there before the internet even came about. So, when the internet came about, it was my first thing, I'm like, wow, this is gonna just change the way information moves. And then when I got into this in 2012, into the crypto space, into Bitcoin, at the time, I'm like, wow, this is beyond the internet. This is value transfer now, without needing intermediaries, and the disruption that's gonna happen is gonna just completely change finance, the way the currencies are handled, and it's gonna touch every single sector. So, this is much bigger, and it's bigger because the everyday person can get involved with it. You know, one of the things that we were just commenting, this show Polycon 18, put on by Polymath, which makes a securitized token model for companies to use, sets up kind of a growth and funding model. We're gonna talk more about that in our live feed. But, you know, I noticed a lot of Canadians are here, besides having Ice Hockey, one of my favorite sports, being from the East Coast and the U.S. I remember in the 80s, a lot of PKI stuff being done in Canada. A lot of really important cryptography work was done in Canada. There's a lot of amazing computer science programs in Canada. There's a lot of progressive things going on in Canada. Can you share your thoughts on that? Because I think you're starting to see that wave coming down. I won't call it a cold spell, I'll call it like innovation spell coming from the north into the U.S. and then all around the world. Yeah, it's a real disappointment amount of Canadians in this whole scene, which is really interesting. I was at an event called the Stoichi Roundtable about a month ago in Cancun, and it was about 20% were actually from Canada, and it was a global event. And what I think it is, it's a community basis. It's in 2012, I started the Toronto Bitcoin Meetup Group, and that was like, what are we, six years ago. And the amount of people that have come through Decentral and come through the Meetup Group that we started started just sparking so many different things. That's where Ethereum came from. Polymath from Toronto here. Trevor and I go back way back to 2012. So I think it's a matter of the community being built up really early on in Toronto and Canada that have led to the spark of what's going on. And now with things like the public markets and the way Canada is, it's kind of being a good fertile ground for companies actually going live on the TSX in Canada, and that's helping to facilitate things. So a ton of talent, a ton of amazing things that I think hopefully Canada can prove itself to be the global headquarters. However, there's also regulatory things. And so you have a lot of Canadian companies that are saying we're going to set up offshore because we don't know how Canada's treating things. That's also a counterbalance. But in general, there's tons of good things coming out from Canada and from Toronto. You know, we were early on the cloud wave going back to 2000, late 2000s. And now you're starting to see with cloud computing, some visibility, obviously Amazon web services kicking ass and they were just blown away their numbers. But you're seeing kind of a clear visibility between infrastructure as a service and SaaS and just to kind of use as a metaphor for kind of what's going on here is the whole platform as a service never happened. So you got infrastructure and you got applications. So this community is emerging, it's still small, it's growing, it's dynamic, it's robust, very intimate. But there's some things going on at the infrastructure level that are super important and there's certainly a tsunami of new kinds of software developers coming in. So comment on those two things because it's kind of moving train is happening in parallel at the same time. Can you share some color on the dynamics between the infrastructure progress and innovation and speed, scale, tech, and then the tsunami of these decentralized application developers which are coming in from 13 year olds to 65 and older. I mean, across the gamut. We're building infrastructure, that's what it's about. I've always had a very long term thing with everything, whether I invest in things or do it, I'm super long term in the whole space. So 2012, everything was Bitcoin for me. 2013 started developing wallets. I realized that the wallet is the browser for value transfer. You got the internet browser, that's what moves information. Now we're in the age of value and the wallet is what enables people to manage and move digital assets. So I started building wallets for Bitcoin. When we started Ethereum, I'm like, okay, there's beyond Bitcoin now. Started Ethereum, did that for about a year and then went back to building the interface, the actual platform for all these technologies to be able to utilize, to manage and move digital assets. So that's what I focus on is the infrastructure play of connecting to all these blockchains and providing the user experience to be able to, the masses like my dad, to be able to actually have the browser moment. It's like, oh, now I know what I can do with this. And that's what's been missing and that's what I've been focusing on. And then in there is where you have the app start getting built on to stuff. So that's always been my place to build the single interface for every blockchain, support the entire ecosystem, not focus on one technology because who knows what's going to actually live now for a long time. And that's what I'm doing is building that single interface that my dad can use to understand how to move and manage the digital assets and then partner with companies, projects, the polymaths, the aeons, all these companies from the space that are offering value in different areas. And we want to be that single interface that brings it all together. So definitely infrastructure play, but also applications that can be built on top of that infrastructure. Yeah, I mean, infrastructure needs to be enabled and you think about the browser, right? I mean, the browser created the internet to be usable and the web was born because of it. And of course, HTTP protocol. But interesting on the infrastructure side, I mean, I fought the wars back in the days with, you know, SNA, Decnet, TCPIP was emerging through the OSI models. I remember TCPIP was one of those moments and people use that as an example. I hear it all the time and I even use it here and there. But that created a galvanizing moment where, hey, we can interoperate together with the standard stack and not full all seven layers. But, you know, it made things happen. The question that people are asking is, it's kind of a TCPIP moment in this industry, but is there 40 versions of it? Like, I mean, so is that an issue? Is that reality? I don't think, I think it's actually, I always equate it to being there being websites. And what I do is I'm building the browser so that actually the websites can actually interact with the technology. So they're focusing on different sectors and they're making different plays in all these different areas that are going to touch with value transfers. Value transfer is amazing. That's what's going to disrupt things beyond information. And then with smart contracts and the thing we do with Ethereum, it's like, okay, this is all coming together to touch law, insurance, gaming, all the different sectors are going to be actually changed. I don't want to say disrupted, I don't like that word, but changed and evolved into great amazing things. But these protocols are being developed, our choice, and the ones that actually are the ones that are going to create the most amount of value and great user experience will be the ones that actually we're going to carry on. So it's amazing to see the amount of competition, the amount of new projects, and the ones that are creating the values, what's going to actually survive. And that dog will hunt, basically. Okay, the wallet question. I love this simplicity model. What's your vision on the wallet? Because you could say, okay, this multiple wallets is a diversity of wallets. I can have a brown wallet, black wallet, leather wallet, all kinds of different wallets. Are you looking at it as a technology enabler that you're doing, or as an actual wallet? Because, again, what we learned in open source is why build something when someone else already has it, right? So that's the ethos of most developers. So are you looking at the wallet as saying I'm going to provide a wallet capability and to end, or is it base code? It's interface. The wallet's the engine. The wallet is what's needed in order to connect with all the different blockchains. That's what we've been building over the last two years is actually the infrastructure to connect to all the different blockchains. It's the interface that we've built on eight platforms. So you can have a single interface on all the platforms that ties yourself in with a 12 word key that enables you to derive keys for all the blockchains. So the key system that we offer, the interface to all the connections, which is the browser, and then the backend AWS almost like structures to all the different blockchains is our value at 12 of our partners. And we're all about driving partner interaction. So simplicity is a big part of it. And ease of use, ease of integration. Yeah, we need the interface. You can't be using 10 different wallets for all the different things you're trying to manage. So we're trying to create that single interface across all the things that supports and drives the whole community forward. Dave Vellante who you just met, and I always talk about this all the time. You know, it's like you built, if people want to sell like certain technology a certain way, but it reminds me of the gaming industry, you know, they became a market for game engines. But that only because someone built a successful game and someone said, hey, I want a game engine. You have an engine. And I don't want to have to build an engine. I'll just use a game engine because someone did it and that became an industry. You can't sell a game engine if there's no gaming. So you have to have an application that might have some core technology. Is that what's happening in the wallet world right now? Are you kind of doing that? Is that- So for us, that's exactly the same way. There is, we build the infrastructure and now we have partners that create apps and tap into our back end so that they don't have to worry about all that stuff. An example is Coinbase. So Coinbase and us came to an agreement last year where we'll start helping them to, they have an app or they have a service where you can use your credit card to buy Litecoin, Bitcoin, Ethereum. Well, inside of Jack's, you'll be able to add that integration, connect them to all the chains. So their users can actually still buy that, but we can flip it, use another partner and give them Polymath. That's the thing. It's about creating value with the different apps and we want to be the store that connects all these different apps to the blockchain. So they don't have to worry about that. BitPay is another example. They enable you to pay invoices in Bitcoin, but they only want to deal with Bitcoin. Well, in Jack's, you can pay with any currency. We flip it to Bitcoin with one of our partners, send them Bitcoin, they don't have to worry about all the back end. So you're creating interoperability of money and value. The value, yeah, definitely. Or for your money, well, you know. And the experience that my dad's going to use to understand this whole space. They don't have to write code to integrate. The user can just use it. All right, talk about the developer community. What's your advice to developers that are on board and looking for guidance and navigating through and people are learning really fast. You're seeing people come into the industry literally with some background that might not be related to tech, but have natural math skills, natural coding skills. They're coming in and actually making a difference joining communities. What's your advice to these developers who want to build decentralized applications? So there's two separate kind of devs. There's ones that can be really good devs that can be onboarded into the space. They're not working on protocol level stuff. And then there's the devs that actually are working on the protocol stuff. And they're hard to find. They're hard to secure because you need the experience of number of years in order to do that. For us, we actually look for good devs and we can bring in an onboard into what we do, which is not necessarily solving major problems. It's working with protocols that are solving it and integrating those protocols in. So the protocol level is very difficult to find developers right now. So I would suggest as much experience on that is going to be what you can do to get ahead. But in general, if you're a good dev, don't be scared of the space. And if you're going to align yourself with a company that can help teach you how to get in, that's what we want. We don't actually target blockchain devs. We target good devs and we let them know we don't even advertise blockchain. Because sometimes they go out with blockchain. I don't have that. If you get good devs, we can actually teach them on our end. So it's actually, we did a job fair about a week ago. We had 100 devs come out, pre-qualified devs that we spent about a month trying to pre-qualify them. They came in, already had the experience. And we had 100 of them come in because they're interested in the space. I mean, we market it as, you don't need to know blockchain. Good devs, we'll get you into it. You know, we were talking last night, we're having some cocktails with some crypto guys and gals and it was funny. We talked about two things. I don't want to get your thoughts on reaction to both of them. One was latency kills. And the other one was women in the ecosystem. This event here has a lot of women on the agenda. And so you're seeing a lot of great diversity going on. So what's your reaction? Latency kills and the role of latency is something to watch and design against and then the diversity angle. Can you first clarify what you mean about latency kills? I'm not sure you know that. Yeah, in terms of like networking, right? So like for, you know, around trip times, you have a decentralized network. You're running to the blockchain. Oh, you just mean the slowness with decentralized network. Yeah, decentralized network. Yeah, there's definitely a major issue which is scalability. There's a major issue which will be solved and that will be solved. I don't really think too much about it except the problem solvers are dealing with that and they will get past to the point where we can use and scale these technologies globally and there's, because of the competition. You're not worried about it. You just see it. It's just a problem space. I don't worry about anything. This will happen, it's coming. As for the second thing, I'd like to look at individuals. So I don't really look at the gender thing with it. It's more about individuals and I don't want to say I'm going to start now focus on encouraging women to get into the space. It's hopefully they will start taking an issue just like everybody else does. So I tend not to look at the two types of the things there. Well, I bring it up because the New York Times wrote a really negative story about women and not being in the space and I was just highlighting that this event, Polycon, Polymath folks. But it's like tech. It's just the way it is and why even think about it. It is what it is. Yeah, I hope we won't have these conversations anymore. We're not the best of the best people and I've got a number of girls that work for me and they're fantastic. But I don't necessarily going to head a job and say, well, we got to bring in more women to do it. That doesn't make any sense. Yeah, and that conversation should be just assumed. All right, so I want to get your thoughts on what you're working on. What are you working on right now? So you've got your company. You've done some great things. We know the Ethereum story and that's continued to evolve in a great way with attractive to developers. And I saw Charlie up on a panel and with Bill Tai in Dubai and really commenting on he's long on Ethereum. He actually said it's going to be more valuable than Bitcoin, little haymaker for the young gun there on stage. Really important for developers. And you're pioneering with the wallet. What's the key things that you're working on both on the technical product side and on the business front for Decentral? So the technical side has been for the last year and a half building the backend infrastructure to be able to support 10 million, 15 million users. We haven't been advertising. We haven't been marketing what we've been doing because we think it's the wrong approach to actually go and try to just look for user growth when your infrastructure is not ready to grow. So our focus has been fully on being able to support 15, 20 million users. We're at about one million right now, all organic without advertising. So if you can't support that, why you want to be advertising? So we've been focusing the last year and a half to ensure that we are scalable and that we can grow when we hit the go button. So this year is all about hitting that go button. It's infrastructure is now in place. We are set to support 10 million users. And now it's the announcement which we did just recently about Jack's Liberty, which is our new platform, Jack's 2.0, which is everything you need for the blockchain space. It's your explorers, your charts, your graphs, your portfolio, your news directed on what your portfolio is. It's the one browser. You don't want to be using 10 different browsers to go to different websites. We've always had the goal to create the engine which is the wallet, and then the interface which is the single thing that the masses can use to understand the technology. So our focus is on partnerships into the app store of our products that connects to all the back ends and basically supporting every company creating wins for everybody, helping to push every product that actually has value, incentivizing people to create better valuable projects because then you'll get more support from us and creating wins for everybody. I'm not about Ethereum, I'm not about Bitcoin, I'm about the whole ecosystem. You're about to grow. Rising tide floats all boats. But what's the value proposition that you're offering to partners on the integration? Is it speed to deployment, speed to value, all of those things? So getting your token inside of Jack's now gets you on eight platforms and you don't want to worry about having a wallet for your separate platform. It doesn't make any sense. Awesome. So what we do is we charge for integrations to come inside of our product and then we have separate things. That's integration partners or token partners. Then we have service partners. That's the bit pays, the coin based, the crack. All those guys that can have apps or have integrations inside where we can expose our users to their services and they pay us. So our proposition to them is more users and more service on a single interface so that we can direct their users and we don't charge users anymore. We get paid through our integration. So think about us being paid for every website visit. That's good value. Okay, so now you're going to give a keynote on stage here at the Polymath event called Polycon 18. What are you going to be talking about? What's the vibe? What's the script? Do you have an agenda? You're laid back. You're cool. Is there a talk format? What are you going to do? I never plan anything before I walk up on stage. Literally, I like to look at the audience. Any preparation stuff for me doesn't make any sense. So I'll literally go up on stage and I always wing it from there. So it could be a little bit about just people working together. There's a lot of this versus that mentality. There's the whole thing of if you're not this then you're that. If you're not Trump then you're clear. I don't like that. I think there's a lot in between. There's a lot of things that it's about working together. It's creating great synergies, creating things that help the whole thing grow. And we've seen that, especially a lot of companies in Toronto. There's so many synergistic relationships of gaps being filled in from companies just in Toronto that add value. So Polycon, Polymath, security tokens. It was needed. It was something I talked with Trevor about a year ago and he's taken it and flown with it. We support Polymath. But I also invest in other securities platforms as well. T-Zero is something that I'm looking to get in. I've got about 45 different projects right now. It's spreading the love. It's saying let's all work together. As long as there's no scamming going on, I'm good. Let's work together, let's all come together. You know, Anthony, I did some checking around on you before the interview. And I got to say, you know community. You know open source. You've been around and seen the formulas at work. I mean, you talk about an open source. East those, that's now going totally mainstream. It's not a second tier citizen. By a long shot, that's an old story. This cryptocurrency and blockchain and this new decentralized community has a mission. I've noticed the pattern, right? And you're seeing folks like yourself doing amazing work and pioneering and also the hard work you put in the work in. There's a mission. Take a minute to explain what the mission is because there are a lot of people that are aligning with this mission globally not just on the technical front. You mentioned this diversity and that's a good thing. What is the mission that really brings everyone together? Cause that seems to be the magic that's going on here. I can't speak for other people but for me, the mission is to improve life, reduce suffering, create value, create wealth and both knowledge and other things that can enable you to carry out those things. So my end game is improving life. Haven't fully baked up what that's gonna be but my step now is to create wealth of value, wealth of knowledge, wealth of resources to be able to then tackle that afterwards. So it's all about, I don't accept money. I don't take people's money. It's all self-funded. We're about creating value. I like to the fact that I don't have any partners. I can move really quickly and I don't like to take people's money or hold people's money. I want to empower people with the tools or at least give them the tools that they can decide whether they want to be empowered or not and I want to be able to just create stuff that's going to create amazing value, user experiences, mind-blowing experiences and just help improve things and drive technology forward. You know, we align with that. We love that culture. We believe it's a pay it forward world. We've made our business at the cube on paying it forward. Really appreciate you taking the time to pay it forward with us and share your content here and I want to say congratulations for all the amazing work you've done. You've worked hard. You've made a great dent in the universe and it's just getting started. So congratulations. One of the best interviews I've ever done. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Appreciate it.