 from the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering Hoshokon 2018. Brought to you by Hoshokon. Okay, welcome back everyone. We're here live in Las Vegas for theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Hoshokon. This is the first inaugural event of its kind. It's the first security blockchain conference where all the top minds in the security blockchain decentralized world come together to try to work on, solve and enhance the security profile of how the world's running. As we know, blockchains run in the infrastructure and we need security. I'm John Furrier, coast of theCUBE. I'm here with David Johnson as the CEO of Latvium. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me, John. So you're one of the brain trusts in the industry here, this event, trying to solve the security problems. Let's get into it. But first, take a minute to explain what you guys do. What does your company do? What's your purpose to exist? Why are you in business? Well, our main goal is trying to help get the message of crypto out and increase adoption in the space. We do a lot of things. We're a multifunctional platform. We're trying to make, just make it easy by putting everything in one place. We believe that there's a lot of complexity. There's a lot of technical knowledge required. I mean, I've been technology for 30 years and it's really complexity is crypto. And we just think everyday people probably will not learn that. It's like, they don't know why their car moves when they press the gas pedal, but they know that it does and we're trying to solve that for crypto. And it's like a car. Imagine having to open the hood up, throw a switch, put your finger, put the screwdriver on this, get a charge, go back in, run in. I mean, just turn the key. It's asking a bit much. Yeah. At least that's not for us. So when you're saying moving a lot of complexity in the platform, are you talking about custody? You talking about tech stack? What specifically are you guys doing? Is it technology stack? Is it a framework? Is it software? Is it, it's a platform. It's a platform, it is a community where they can come in. It's a multi-currency wallet. It's an exchange. They can work for crypto. They can hire for crypto. So again, we're taking it from the client side. Anything they would want to do with crypto, we're trying to put that in one place. So you're trying to build a multi-purpose platform where someone can run turnkey. Exactly. A full end to end life cycle of crypto. That's correct. And why would they do that? Build an app. Marketplaces is a business model driven. So what's your target customer looking to do? Are they developers? Are they big businesses? Well, our target market is the everyday person who wants access to crypto. They're hearing about crypto, but they don't know how to participate. So it starts off easy for them. They can come into the platform and they can perform a task on a platform and now they're immediately a crypto holder, right? So we just want, we want to expose that space and make that access point as easy as possible. That's where they get people into cryptos. Give a crypto away. And that's kind of what we're doing. We're giving them crypto for their production. All right, so give me an example. We're into crypto. We're doing a little cube crypto. How do we get involved? What do we do? How do we use you? Well, one way you could use it is you could use us if you were trying to, say, promote something. That would be one way to do it. You want the community to get behind something. You want feedback. Say you have a website and you want feedback. You need beta testers, right? You could list a task on our platform. Our community base would see that listing. They could decide I want to perform this task and be paid in crypto. So you guys looking at the, you know, the upwork like crypto model. So WorkCoin is another, is they a competitor to you guys? I don't really feel like anybody in this space is a true competitor. There's crossover and some functionality, but because we're approaching the whole solution as a wallet and exchange and a tasking platform, I don't really see anybody's direct competition. It's good. I like the platform approach. So having platforms that are open versus closed is what people are concerned about these days. How are you handling the open versus closed question? You guys let these people own their own data. How's that working on the platform? Well, as it stands right now, you know, we're a hybrid between blockchain and centralization. And the reason for that is for scalability purposes. Blockchain tech is just not there. I know we all want it to be there. That's true. It's fair. But if we're honest, you know, we're not there. So we're trying to build an enterprise application and we know that if that's 100% pure blockchain right now that you're going to run the scale issues. So as far as- And reliability, many issues. Yes. We all know that, yes. And data, you know, data ownership is definitely a sensitive topic. As far as our approach on that, you know, we're pretty open on what we're storing. Our biggest data point is really a trust score and you have full control over that by how you participate within the system. You know, good actors get the benefits of being a good actor and there's consequences if you're a bad actor in the system. And the way that we do that is we have a verification system that's using biometric data off of your face and we're creating a unique digital profile tied back to the user. So unlike other platforms where they can just make a new account, become a bad actor, you can't do that in our system. So that's one space that's very unique. I think crypto's got a lot of opportunities to manage bad actors. Yes. If you can make the incentive costly. Yes. That's an interesting and dynamic. And that's kind of what you guys are thinking too. Like, yeah, bad actors always the problem is and web is easy to be anonymous. That's it. You just start a bot and get killed, create a new one and spawn, you know. Yeah. I always say that the internet gave us this amazing platform for communication and networking and opened up a whole new world. But it removed trust. Totally removed trust. There is no concept of digital trust. Reputation and trust. Reputation and trust are scattered. A lot of people when crypto are trying and struggling with two things, I want to get your thoughts and reaction to. One is community. Yes. And the other one is marketplaces. You're a classic marketplace. If you're doing tasks, gig economy, we know what that means. You're sharing, you're open, you're publishing. It's open. So check on the marketplace. Community is another one. How do you build a community? Sure. People raise these big ICOs and they say, hey, I need a community. You can't buy a community. No, no, you have to have something people want. And so that's the question. I mean, in any business model, you're looking to, you got to find what it is that you're building that someone wants. If you can't define that, then you don't have a business. All right, so here's a pressure question for you. What's the hallway conversations like that? You're overhearing and also you're participating in. Here at HoseoCon, a lot of smart people. I've overheard a bunch of conversations. I just want to bust in and listen. I feel rude by like listening, leaning in. Interesting people here. Sure. Great to ask. What are some of the hallway conversations that you're overhearing and some that you're participating in? Well, I think there's a lot of focus on the security levels of the contracts. There's been quite a few hacks just over the last couple of days. So that's been a buzz. And I think it's kind of interesting that we're at a security conference and then we have hacks there going on. So there's been a lot of buzz around that. People have been traveling on the planet and attacked whenever all the security guys would travel. Social engineering at its best. Yeah, right at the gates. All right, anything else, sessions you've been to? You know, as far as the sessions go, I mean, I think that Max put on a great session today. I thought, you know, he's always an eloquent speaker. And so that was a great speech as far as I was concerned. You know, I think that it's nice to see that we're moving in the direction of acknowledging that security is a big deal in the space. And I think that's great that Hoseo's bringing that out. What's the biggest surprise this week for you here? I would say that the biggest surprise for me is just how well organized the event is. You know, been to quite a few events and the Hoseo team has done a great job organizing this event. Yeah, and it's not too crowded either. It's the right mix of people, of course. You know, they're videotaping all the sessions. So just let everyone know, we'll put those videos up in the cube cloud and make them searchable for Hoseo console. We're going to help get those videos out as well. Cool, so what's new with the business? How's things going? What's the update, funding, status, employees? These are going really well. I mean, we've actually seen really exponential growth this month. We're registering between a thousand, 3,000 registrations a day now. We've got about 22,000 verified members in our system. And when I say verified, it means that they've actually gone through a verification process so they can't duplicate accounts. And they got a wallet. They're downloaded. They got the wallet. Exactly, it's all in one. You register, you get multi-currency wallet off the bat. So we've seen a lot of growth and a lot of attention in so far in the smart system. And which blockchain are you using? Well, again, we're a multi-currency. So we're tied in. You don't care. Well, our token is ERC-20. But as far as how we deal with other blockchains, right now we have Bitcoin integration, Tether integration, Ethereum integration, and we're going to be adding ERC-20. So you're using the ERC-20 mainly for the smart contract on the transaction? Yeah, we're using ERC-20 for our own tokens. Yes. Okay, got it. The tokens for the gigs, the work, the utility token. The utility token. Yes, that's our token. That's your token, okay, got it. That's correct, that's correct. Yeah, so they're getting, but they can take that immediately and they can change it up for Bitcoin if they like or they can hold our token or anything. Hence the exchange piece. Correct, it's all there. So multi-purpose, yeah, that's interesting. Great, well hey, congratulations. David Johnson, CEO of Latium, check them out. And to end exchange, getting work done tasks. We certainly could use some UI on our project. So can we put that in there? There you go, there you go. Get some business done here at theCUBE, bringing you live coverage here at Hosho Con. Stay with us. We got two days of wall-to-wall coverage. We'll be back with more after this short break.