 Hello and welcome to theCUBE's special presentation of Unstoppable Domains Partner Showcase. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We've got a great conversation talking about the future of the infrastructure of Web 3 all around domains, non-fungible tokens, and more. Two great guests, Charlie Brooks with Business Development of Unstoppable Domains and Michael Williams, product leader and advisor with Unstoppable Domains. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on theCUBE Partner Showcase with Unstoppable Domains. Thanks, John. Excited to be here. So I'd love what you guys are doing. Congratulations on all your success. You guys are on the leading edge of what is a major infrastructure shift. Web 3 is being called, but people who have been doing this for a while know that you see the blockchain, you see decentralization, you see immutability, all these future smart contracts. All the decentralized applications are now hitting the scene and NFTs are super hot as you can imagine. You guys are in the middle of it. So you guys are in the sweet spot of what I call the pragmatic pioneers. You guys are building solutions that are making a difference. I like single sign-on, you have the login product. Let's get into it. What is the path to a digital identity beyond the web? Because we know what web identity is, but now that the web is kind of being abstracted away by this new Web 3 layer, what is digital identity? Yeah, I can take that one. So I think what we're really seeing is this transition away from a purely physical identity where your online identity is really just a reflection of the parts of your physical identity, where you live, where you go to school, all of these things. And we're really seeing this world emerge where your online identity becomes much more of a primary. So if you have a way that you represent yourself in the online world, whether that's an Instagram account or TikTok or email address or username, all of these things together make up your digital identity. So congrats if you have any of those things, you already have one. Yeah, we see that all the time with Linktree. People put their Linktree out there and it's got the zillion handles we all get up to Instagram. Everyone's got like zillion identities. Is that a problem or an opportunity? I think it's just a reality. The fact is our identities are spread across all of these different services and platforms that we use. The problem with something like Linktree is that it is owned by Linktree. If I won the lottery, purchased Linktree and decided I wanted to change your personal website, John, I could easily do that. Moving to the kind of architecture that we have and NFT architecture changes that significantly. It puts a lot of power back in the hands of the people who actually own those identities. You know, I do a lot of CUBE showcases with folks around talking about machine learning and AI and the number one conversation that they bring up, the number one issue is data. And they say when data is siloed and protected and owned, it is not optimized for machine learning. So I can almost imagine as you bring NFTs to the digital identity you mentioned, you don't own your identity if someone else is managing the service, like Linktree. This is a cultural shift and an infrastructure software shift at the same time. Can you guys expand more about what you guys are doing with the NFT and unstoppable domains with respect to that digital identity? Because is that power shifting to the users now? And how does that compare to what's out there today? Sure, I think so. Our domains are NFTs. So they are ERC721 tokens. And if you think about in the past, kind of Web 2 identities are controlled by the platforms that we use, Twitter, Facebook, whatnot. There's really a lack of data portability there. Our accounts and data live on their servers. They can be deleted at any time. So using an NFT to anchor your digital identity really gives you full control over your identity. It can't be deleted, it can't be revoked or edited or changed without your permission. And really even better than information you store on your NFT domain can be plugged into the services you use so that you never have to enter the same data twice. So when you go from platform to platform, everything can be tied to your existing domain. You're not going to a new site kind of entering their ecosystem and providing all this information time and time again and not really having a clear understanding of how your data is being used and where it's being stored. So the innovation here is the NFT is your identity. And a non-fungible token NFT is different than say a fungible token. So for the folks out there that's trying to follow the bouncing ball, Michael, what's the difference between an NFT and a fungible token? And why is that important for identity? Yeah, my favorite metaphor here is baseball cards versus like dollar bills. So a dollar bill is fungible. If I have a dollar and you have a dollar, we can trade dollars and none of us is richer or poorer. If I have a Babe Ruth and you have a Hank Aaron and we swap baseball cards, like we have changed something fundamental. So the important thing about NFTs is that they are non-fungible. So if I have a domain and you have a domain, like I have that identity and you have that identity, they are unique, they're independent, they're owned by each one of us and then we can kind of swap them interchangeably. And that's why you're seeing NFTs hot with art and artists because it's like a property, it's a property issue, not so much a changeable or divisible kind of asset. Yep, it is ownership rights in digital form, yes. All right, so now let's get into what the identity piece, I think find that interesting because if I have something that's an NFT, it's non-fungible, it's unique to me, it's property, my property, my login, this sounds compelling. So how does login work with the NFT? Can you guys take us through that architecture? What does it do? How does it work and what's the benefit? Cool, so the way our login product works is it effectively uses your NFT domain, so MichaelDiCrypto for example, as the authentication piece of a login session. So basically when I go and I try to log in with my domain, I type in MichaelDiCrypto, I sign it with my wallet, which cryptographically proves that I am this human, this is me, I have the rights to login. And then when I do so, I have the ability to share certain parts of my identity information with the applications that I use. So it really blends the best of ease of use from web two, I've just a standard login with Gmail SSO experience with all of the security and privacy benefits of web three. How important is single sign-on? Because, I mean, right now people are used to like seeing things like login with your GitHub handle or LinkedIn or Google, Apple, I mean, you're seeing people offering login. Okay, what's the difference here from those solutions and why does it make sense for the user? Sure, yeah, the big difference is what we're building is really user first. So if you think about traditional SSOs, you are the product when you use their product, they're selling your data, you know, they're tracking everything you do. Login with Instable handles not only authentication but data sharing as well. So when you log in, a domain owner can choose to share aspects of their online identity, such as first name, preferred language, profile picture, location. So this is a user controlled way of using a sign-on where they are permissioning these different pieces of their identity. And really apps can use this information to enable new experiences such as, for example, a website might automatically enable high contrast mode for someone visually impaired. It could pre-populate your friends from a decentralized social graph. So what we're doing is taking the best parts of Web2 SSO and combining them with the best parts of Web3. So no more losing your password, entering in the same data hundreds of times, depending on other services, keep your information safe. Login with Instable really puts you in complete control of your data. And a big part of that is you're not going to have 80 plus user names and passwords anymore. We have these tools like password managers that exist to kind of put a band-aid on this issue, but it's not really a long-term solution. So what we're building is really seamless onboarding where everything can be tied to your domain so that you can navigate to different apps in a much more seamless way. Michael, I got to get your thoughts on this because on the product side, it's interesting my mind's kind of connecting some dots. If I have, first of all, great convenience to reduce all those logins, right? So check there, little pain, pain reduction. But when you think about what's different, I can now broker my data as well as log in. So let's just say hypothetically, I'm cruising around some DApps and I'm doing things and earning reputation or attention or points or whatever tokens, utility tokens. There could be a way for me to control what I own. I'm the product, I own the data. Is that kind of where this is going? I think it's definitely a direction it could go. Say for example, if I'm a e-commerce platform and I'm trying to figure out where I'm going to place a new billboard, one of the things that I could request from a user is their address. I can figure out where they live, what city they're in that will help inform the decision that I need to make as a business. And in return, maybe I give that person a dollar off their purchase, right? Like we can start to build a stronger relationship between the applications that people use and the people that use them and try to optimize that whole experience and try to just transfer information back and forth to make everyone's lives better. What's the roadmap on the business side, Charlie? When you see companies kind of adopting it, they're probably taking baby steps, they're crawling before they walk, they're walking before they run. I mean, I can see decentralized applications in the future where there's FinTech or whatever, having new kinds of marketplaces that take advantage of the paradigm where the script flips to the user first. Okay, so I see that. How do people get started now? What are some of the success momentum points that you're seeing companies do now with Unstoppable? Sure, so a lot of Web3 apps are very sensitive about respecting the information that their users are providing, right? So what we're doing is offering different ways for apps to get in touch with their users in a way that is user-controlled. So an example there is that a lot of Web3 companies will use Wallet Connect to allow users to log in using a wallet address. An issue there is that one person can have hundreds of wallet addresses and it's impossible for the app to understand that. So what we do is we use login, we attach an email address, some other pieces to a wallet address so that we can identify who a unique user is and the app is able to collect that information. They don't have to deal with passwords or PII storage. They have access to a huge amount of new data for an improved UX. It's really simple to implement and maintain as well. So one example there is if you are a DeFi platform and you want to reward your users for coming to their site for the first time, now that they can identify a unique user, they can drop a token into that user's wallet all because they're able to identify that user as unique. So they have a better way of understanding their customers. They enable their customers to share data. A lot of these companies will ask users to follow them on Twitter or Discord when they need to provide updates or bug bounties, all these different things and Login with Unstoppable lets them permission email addresses so they can collect emails if they want to do a newsletter and instead of sort of harvesting data from elsewhere and kind of forcing people to join this newsletter program, it's all user controlled. So each user saying, yes, you can use my email for your newsletter. I'm supporting your project, want to be kept up to date with bugs or bounties or rewards programs. So really it's just kind of a better way for users to share the data that they're willing to with DAPS and DAPS can use it to create all sorts of incentives and really just kind of understand their users on a different level. How is the development, Michael, going on the smart contract side of the business? Ethereum has always been heralded as being very developer focused. There's been creative innovations. You still got gas fees out there. You still got to do some things. How is the development environment? How are the applications coming? Cause I can see the really, I can see the flywheel kicking in as the developer front gets more streamlined, more efficient. And now you got the identity piece nailed down. I just see a lot of kind of dominoes falling at the same time. What's the status on the dev side? What's your- The fascinating thing about crypto is how quickly it changes. And when I joined, Ethereum was pretty reasonable still for transactions. It was very cheap to get things done very fast. We looked at last summer that things went completely out of control. This is a big reason that unstoppable for a long time has been working on a layer too. And we've moved over to the polygon as our primary source of record, which is built on top of Ethereum, of course. I think saved well over a hundred million dollars in gas fees for our users. We're constantly keeping an eye on new technologies that are emerging, weighing how we can incorporate those things and really where this industry is going to take us. In many ways, we are just as much passengers as the other people floating around the ecosystem as well. Yes, it's certainly getting faster every day. I've seen a huge uptake on Ethereum. I heard a stat that most people at the University of California, Berkeley, 30% of the computer science students are dropping out to join web three companies. Just goes to show you this cultural shift. And you're going to see a lot more companies getting involved. Asking Charlie on the biz dev front, how are companies getting started? What's the playbook? Are they putting their toe on the wall? Are they jumping in full throttle? What's the roadmap? What's the best practice for people to get started with unstoppable? Absolutely. We're lucky that we get a lot of inbound interest from companies, web two and web three, because they first want to secure their domains. And we do a ton of work on the backend to protect trademark domains. We want to avoid squatting as much as possible. We don't think that's a spirit of web three at all and certainly not what the original intention of the internet was. So fair amount of companies will reach out to us to get their domain. And then we can have a longer conversation about some of the other integrations and ways we can collaborate. So certainly visiting our website unstoppabledomains.com is a great starting point. We have an app submission page where apps can reach out to us, even request a grant. We have a grant program to help developers get started, provide them some resources to work with us and integrate some of our technology. We have great documentation as well on the site. So you can read all about what it takes to resolve domains if you're a wallet or an exchange, as well as what it takes to integrate login with unstoppable, which is actually a super easy integration as well, which we're really excited about. So yeah, I'd say check out the website, apply for a grant if you think you're a fit there. Then of course, people can always reach out to me directly on Twitter, on Telegram, email. We're very reachable and we're always happy to chat with projects and learn more about what they're doing. What's the coolest thing you've seen going on, Charlie, with your partners right now? What's the number one use case that's cool that people are jumping on right now to get in and get some success out of the gate? Yeah, maybe GameFi kind of play to earn is huge. It's blowing up and the gaming community is really passionate, vibrant, just expanding like crazy. Same with DeFi. There's all this cool new stuff you can do with DeFi where no matter how big your portfolio is, you're able to stake and use all these interesting tools to kind of grow your book. So it's super exciting to see and talk to all these projects and there's certainly kind of an energy in the community where everyone wants to onboard the general public to Web3, right? So we're all working on these cool projects, but we need everyone to come over from Web2, kind of understand the advantages of DeFi, of GameFi, of having an entity domain. So I'm lucky that I'm kind of one of the first layers there of meeting new projects and kind of helping them get access to more users so that they can grow along with us. Yeah, I remember the early days of Bitcoin and Ethereum, we were giving it away to give the community mantra was give a Bitcoin to someone. That was when it was a, you can actually give a Bitcoin to someone. What's the word of mouth or organic viral? I won't say growth hack because that's got negative connotations, but what's the community's way of putting forth the mission for unstoppable? Is it just more domains? You guys have any programs got going on? Is it give it away? I'll see you can get domains on your site, but what's the way to get people ingratiated in and getting comfortable? Yeah, so much of what we do is really to solve that, to solve that question, answer that question, Michael. We spend a ton of time and energy just on education and whether that's specifically around domains or just general web three. We have a podcast which is pretty exceptional which talks to web three leaders from across the space and makes the projects that they're working on more accessible. I think we passed over a hundred episodes not too long ago. There's a ton of stuff that we do that other people do if anyone has questions, I'm happy to talk about resources of course. Yeah, the pod, I think you guys are up to 117, but that's a deep dive. I think you guys go deep on the podcast. So that's where you go in. What else is new on digital identity? Where do you guys see the future going? Now that you get the baseline identity with the NFT, makes a lot of sense, create innovation, good logic, makes sense, solid, technically. What's next? Yeah. I think this really boils down to the way that the internet has grown, doesn't really feel like the way that the internet should be. Like our data shouldn't live in these walled gardens controlled by these large companies. Like ultimately people should be responsible for their own identities. They should have control over the things that they do online, the data that's shared, the benefit of that data. So the world that we are working towards is very much that, where we are giving people the ability to be paid for sharing their data with companies. We're giving applications the ability to request information from the people that use those applications to improve their experience. We're really just trying to make connections across the ecosystem through these products to enable a better experience for everyone. So whether that's the use cases that I mentioned already or maybe viewing reviews on something like Yelp or Amazon that just confirm that the person that you are looking at is actually a real person, not some bot that's been paid to load a review. Like the interesting thing about these products is they're so universally applicable. There are so many different ways that we can try to plug them in. So we are- Bots is a great example. It's double edged soil. You can have a metaverse image and have pre-programmed conversations with liquid audio and video application, or it's a real person. How do you know the difference? Yeah, these are going to be questions around who solves that problem. Now there's a time for bots and there's a time not for bots. We all know what happens when you get into the game of manipulation, but also it can be helpful. This is where you got to be smart and identity is critical in this future. Charlie, what's your reaction to the future of digital identity? I mean, so much to look at here on the trajectory. Yeah. I think a big part of it is data portability, right? If you go to a site like Instagram, you're giving them all this content that's very personal to you and you can't just pack up and leave Instagram. So we want a future where most of these apps are just kind of a front-end and you can navigate from one to the other and bring your data with you and not be beholden to the companies that operate centralized servers. So I think data portability is huge and it's going to open up a lot of doors. And just going back to that thought on kind of cleaning up web two for a better web three, when I think about the Amazons, the Yelps of the world, there are all these bots or all these awful fake reviews. There's a lot of gamification happening that is really just creating a lot of noise. And I want to bring kind of transparency back to the internet where when you see a review you should know that that's a real human and blockchain technology is enabling us to do that. And certainly NFT domains are going to play a huge part of that. So I think that having an experience where you know and trust the people that you're interacting with is going to be really powerful and just a better experience for everyone. And there's a lot of ramifications with that. Politically speaking, we've all seen all the issues with kind of attacking communities and using bots and fake accounts to kind of hit people's pain points is, it's kind of sad and certainly not something that we want to see continue happening. So whatever we can do to kind of give people their digital identity and help people understand that this is a real person on the other end, I think is huge for the future of the internet and really for society as well. That's a great call out there, Charlie. Cleaning up the mess of web 2.0, web 2, actually it was 2.0 technically, now web 3 is 0.0 in it. But I saw on or listened to the podcast with Matt, this recent one, he had a great metaphor that went back to when I was growing up on the internet, you had IP addresses, right? And the mess there was you couldn't find what you want to look and no one could remember what to type in because you could type in IP addresses in the browser back then. And then DNS came out and then keywords, that's web. Okay, now that mess now is fraud, misinformation, bot manipulation, deep fakes, many other kind of unwanted kind of time to innovate. And every year, every time you had these inflection points there'd be an abstraction on top of it. So similar thing happening here, is that, are you guys see it too? Yeah, I think we're going back to some of the foundational architecture of the internet, DNS, and really bringing that forward about 30, 40 years in terms of technology. So loading in some more cryptography and some other fancy things to help patch some of those issues from the previous versions of the web. Awesome. Well guys, thanks so much for coming on and the spirit of our TikTok, you know, I'm only summarized this, can you guys give us a quick TikTok moment, short comment on, you know, where this is all going, where is login, single sign on mean, and what should people do to take steps to secure their digital identity? Sure, I'll jump in here. So it's time for people to secure their digital identity. The great first step is going on several domains and getting an NFT domain. You know, you can control your data, you can do a lot of cool different things with your domain, including posting your own website that you own forever and no one can take it away from you. I would certainly recommend that people join our Discord Telegram communities, check out our podcast. It's really great, especially if you're new to crypto web three. You know, we do a great job of sort of explaining all the basic concepts and expanding on them. So yeah, I'd say, you know, the time is now to get your digital identity and start embracing web three because it's really exploding right now and there's just so many incredible advantages, especially for the user. Michael, what's your take? I mean, I could not have said it better myself. Like we always say, if you're not on the next wave, you're driftwood and this is a big wave, it's happening. It's pretty clear guys, it's there, it's happening now. And again, very pragmatic implementations of solving problems, the sign-on, the app integration. Congratulations. And we got our cube domain too, by the way. So we're, I think we're good, you know? So we got to put it to you, it's appreciated. Charlie, Michael, thanks for coming on and Sharon, the update. It's a pleasure. Okay, this is the cube with unstoppable domains, partner showcase. Sean for your host, got a lot of other great interviews. Check them out. We're going to continue our coverage and continue on with this great showcase. Thanks for watching.