 Hello, welcome everyone to theCUBE's coverage here in Monaco, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. The Monaco Crypto Summit is happening, we're here for the full day, and tonight at the Yacht Club for special presentations. Crypto team is here, digital bits, and the industry's gathering, and we've got some great guests lined up throughout the day. Our first guest is Michael Gord, co-founder and CEO of GDA Capital. Michael, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks a lot, John. So we're kicking off the day here, we got a lot of commentary around crypto, and also we're in Monaco, so kind of a special, inaugural event. Why this event? Why are people gathering here in Monaco? Monaco has traditionally been a top financial jurisdiction, but, and there has been crypto events here before, but never with participation from Prince Albert. So this being the first event, first blockchain focused event in Monaco that has participation from Prince Albert has brought a global audience, and the fact that digital bits is intending to, there's a lot of excitement in what digital bits is going to be coming to market with. Yeah, and I think I talked to Al Berger, the founder and CEO of Digital Bits. I've known him for many years, he's a tech guy by heart, but he's been in the trenches doing a lot of work over the years in crypto, and one of the things I think Digital Bits has nailed is first the name's amazing, but they got real deals. I saw an announcement a couple of days ago, it was less than 48 hours. Romo Soccer Team has a new player, they've wrote a big roll out. Digital Bits is on the uniform, on the front of it. Huge crowd, great visibility, so this is a real trend where the assets of physical and digital coming together, there's certainly a lot of hype and a lot of kind of like cleaning up right now in the market, but this train is up the station, it's happening. Train is up the station. There's been a lot of, over the past decade, a lot of startups building on blockchains, and some of those startups have become big companies, but big traditional enterprises have been slow to adopt digital assets, and Digital Bits is really well positioned to bring a lot of those, bring a lot of enterprise participation to the blockchain. Yeah, but we met a couple of days ago, and we were talking at the hotel. You've been at this for a while, you got some great successes. Tell us about your firm, what are you guys doing, GDA, what are some of the things you're working on? You're doing some investment, what are some of the angles you're taking, bets you've made, things you're looking at? Yeah, so I'm a serial entrepreneur and investor, I've been focused on the mainstream adoption of digital assets for the last decade. Went about that in various different ways as I have matured, but the way our business looks now is focused on bridging the gap between institutional capital markets and the blockchain, and helping institutional capital participate in the market. So we help digital assets with their public offering, we've bought it into traditional public markets through the Blockchain Moon Acquisition Corp SPAC that one of my co-founders is director of. We have a brokerage business that does a few hundred million dollars on what the transaction volume, collateralized lending business. We just started some funds, principal investments, and then we incubate our own companies internally and new categories like the Metaverse, NFTs, and other things like that. So pretty diverse across the blockchain capital market at this point, and in general looking to create solutions to help the traditional capital market and the blockchain capital market get deeper exposure here. You know, it's interesting, I hear you're speaking about how you guys are handling your view of the landscape, multiple moving parts on the investment thesis, a lot of integration of instruments and vehicles. It's a new creative structural change. I mean, if you look at just the money, how crypto and the future of money, this cultural shift, it's also some structural change on how to invest, how to manage the investments, how to bring on like incubation into most capital, public, private. At the same time, on the other side of the coin, you have the entrepreneurial energy of a lot of entrepreneurial ideas. So you see a lot of creative artists, the creator culture has emerged in the past year and a half as a massive wave. But to me, that's just an application on top of the new infrastructure. If you look at all the big investment houses that are pouring billions of whether it's Andrew Norwitz or other big VC moving and shifting, it's all the same game. It's the infrastructure platform applications, but it's different, it's not what we used to see because of decentralized. How do you react to that? What's your view on that concept? Do you see it the same way? Yeah, I think that everything with blockchains is novel, but almost all of it we've seen before. So we've had games before. Now with the blockchain, we have the ability to earn income by playing games. We've had exchanges before, but they've always been a centralized organization that everything that is now built on blockchains exists in the traditional internet or capital market or game industry or whatever, there has been art for generations. There's been now the ability to have art on the blockchain with provable NFT, everything is innovative because of the decentralization aspect, but it's not, it's not the first thing, first time that we've seen any of this stuff. It's almost interesting, you're seeing a recycling of all the same concepts on the old web, kind of coming to the new web. And there's also a Gen Z angle, especially with the metaverse. Metaverse, the constant theme I'm seeing is, hey, you want to watch sports, you can watch in the metaverse and do it differently and not have to attend. So, you know, the whole pandemic has shown us that hybrid virtual and hybrid is coming together. So I see a huge tsunami of innovation coming from just the tailwind post pandemic. I think still massive value in a real events like this, us being able to sit in front of each other as real people is not replicable in the metaverse, but to be in Monaco is not possible for everyone because of visa reasons, because they have something, you know, it's just, you have to be here today is not possible for 100% of the world or for a sports game or for a concert or for a music premiere, movie premiere, really anything that's happening in the real world. The metaverse is not going to replace the real world, but it is going to create a massive additional audience to anything that's happening in the real world that anyone around the world can participate and how amazing would it be for someone from Zimbabwe, someone from Sydney and someone from Brazil to all be interested in what digital bits is doing in Monaco and what Prince Albert is, you know, how the Monaco Crypto Summit is looking to position Monaco in the future of cryptocurrency, the kind of theme of this event. And they have the amazing fortune to meet in the metaverse. It doesn't replace. Well, I mean, I think this is a great point. This to me is going to be the holy grail in my opinion. I agree. If you look at the notion of presence, we're face to face, we're here, there's people here. So we see each other in the lobby, maybe he's outside seeing at dinners. So when you have that face to face, that's the scariest resource, right? That's going to be the intimacy. Sometimes it's not even just to learn about what's going on, but if we're present here, how do we create that same experience where you have presence, not just some icon chatting, but like just movement, knowing that you're there, connected to people, first party, it's going to be, no one's really done it well. I think the metaverse to me is showing the path to being a first class citizen digitally with a real time event. It's new, so it is possible to communicate in the metaverse through a microphone. So if you're beside someone, then similar to the real world, you can say, hey, how's it going? What do you think about the presentationer or whatever you want? And if you're speaking in a conversational way, then the person beside you will hear what the person down the hall might not. It's also that I've seen new features in certain expert new metaverses that are coming to market that kind of take the Google Hangout or Skype, like video infrastructure and put that in so we could choose to have our cameras on, which is, it's getting better, but it of course doesn't replace real presence. There's no doubt in my mind that in near future, soon, soon and later, there's going to be a guest sitting right next to you that's not here. There will be a hologram model where people will be interviewed, will have capability to visualize that person. They'll be in a metaverse, they'll be queuing up for interviews. This is a game, this is a mind-blowing thing. I mean, if you just think about that concept that we could have participation in real time. Got a hook up here. With expression, with their digital expression, their icon, whatever, whatever their NFTs are. So I think this is going to be the blending of how communities gather. And I think ultimately how truth and journalism and news is going to change. So to me, we're super excited. We're here obviously because we want to get the stories and we love what Digital Bits is doing. Prince Albert's certainly a relevant figure on the global stage. I think this is a signal for a lot of things to come. Indeed, indeed. All right, so final question before we move on. What's your hottest thing you got going on? What are you looking at? What are you most excited about? Well, just this conference, we've got quite a lot of companies we have exposure in that are presenting. And a lot of them are coining new niches of the market. So we've spoken a lot about the metaverse. We have, and I think the metaverse is probably the thing that I'm overall most excited about. I think it's the next multi trillion dollar market that feels like Bitcoins in 2012. But in addition to that, we have the first regenerative finance platform that is presenting here that's using decentralized finance and blockchain technology to create a model that people can earn income while mining carbon credits essentially with an objective of having first blockchain, all blockchain protocols, but eventually creating a leaderboard of carbon positive businesses where businesses will challenge the competitors to be more carbon positive in a way that actually earns them income outside of the potential value. And what's the name of that company? That's Kyoto Protocol. We have the first entertain to earn company that is presenting here. It's Playgood, the first e-commerce metaverse platform. So integrated directly into e-commerce without needing to. I think the future of the metaverse is social links. You have finance in the metaverse and you have all of the logos of metaverses that you have experiences in, which is cool. But then you're going out of the native website instead of having a native to the website having a metaverse experience. So they're doing that. Yeah, really cool. Awesome. Final question, one more final question I've got for you, because you made me think of it. So metaverse obviously hot. Is there going to be an open metaverse could start to see walled gardens and you got Facebook, they got slammed dunked by the US in terms of an opposite move for buying an exercise app, which I don't think that was a good move by the US. I think they're going to let them do that. But they're kind of the walled garden model, the old Facebook. I mean, decentralized is about open. Yeah, historically, if we go back in time, there's always open and close infrastructure. In the internet, there is companies building open infrastructure, companies building closed infrastructure. We could have been talking in 1992 about whether the private intranet will create mass adoption or whether the open internet will create mass adoption and not that the intranet is probably, is even today, still a multi-billion dollar per year business, but it's not a multi trillion dollar per year, per year infrastructure like the public internet. Same with the blockchain in 2012, 2013, private blockchains were all the rage by banking, raising hundreds of millions of dollars to build up private blockchain infrastructure. And private blockchains are generating probably today still multi-billion dollars revenue annually, but they haven't accrued multi-trillion dollars like the public blockchain has. I think the same thing will be in the metaverse. There will be open and closed infrastructure, but event, and there already is closed, Fortnite and games are essentially closed metaverses just without ownable land. I think the value will accrue to the metaverse. It's going to be interesting. I mean, I always look at the AMO school, I look at AOL, they had day monopolized dial-up internet like where the hell did that go? You know, history. So again, we don't know. It's going to be maybe a connection point between these open metaverses. We'll see. Maybe I'll have an investment opportunity. Michael, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate you kicking off the event here. Monaco Crypto Summit powered by digital bits, presented by digital bits, the company really and behind all the innovation here and the companies. I'm John Furrier, back with more coverage after this short break. Thanks John.