 Welcome to theCUBE's special showcase with Unstoppable Domains. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE here in Palo Alto, California. I'm Matt Gould, who's the founder and CEO of Unstoppable Domains. Matt, great to come on, congratulations on the success of your company. Unstoppable Domains, thanks for kicking off this showcase. Well, thank you, happy to be here. So love, first of all, love the story you've got going on here. Love the approach, very innovative. But you're also on the big web three wave, which we know that leads into metaverse, unlimited new ways, people are consuming information, content applications are being built differently. This is a major wave and it's happening. Some people are trying to squint through the hype versus reality, but you don't have to be a rocket science to realize that it's a cultural shift and a technical shift going on with web three. So this is kind of what's happening in the market. So give us your take, what's your reaction? You're in the middle of it, you're on this wave. Yeah, well, I would say it's a torrent of change that got unleashed just over a decade ago with Bitcoin coming out and giving people the ability to have digital items that they could actually own themselves online. And this is a new thing and people coming, especially from my generation of millennials, they spend their time online in these digital spaces and they've wanted to be able to own these items. You see it from gaming and Fortnite and skins and Warcraft and all these other places. But this is really being enabled by this new crypto technology to just extend to a whole lot more applications from money, which everyone's familiar with, to NFT projects like board-aids or crypto bucks. You know, I was listening to your podcast, you guys got a great pod. I think you're on 117 episodes now and growing. You guys do a deep dive. So people watching, check out the Unstoppable podcast. But in the last podcast, Matt, you mentioned some of the older generations like me, I grew up with IP addresses. And before the web, they called it information super highway. It wasn't even called the web yet. But IP was generated by the United States Department of Commerce and R&D. That became the internet, the internet became the web. Back then it was just get some web pages up and find what you're looking for, right? Very analog compared to what's now today. Now you mentioned gaming. You mentioned how people are changing. Can you talk about your view of this cultural shift? And we've been talking about on theCUBE for many, many years now, but it's actually happening now where the expectation of the audience and the users and the people consuming and communicating and bonding and groups, whether it's gaming or communities, are expecting new behaviors, new applications. And it's a forcing function. This shift is happening now. What's your reaction to that? What's your explanation? Yeah, well, I think it just goes back to the shift of people's where they spending their time. And if you look today, most people spend 50% plus of their time in front of a screen. And that's just a tremendous amount of effort. But if you look at how much their assets are digital, it's like less than 1% of their portfolio would be some sort of digital asset compared to literally 50% of every day sitting in front of a screen. And simultaneously what's happening is these new technologies emerging around cryptocurrencies, blockchain systems, ways for you to track digital ownership of things and then kind of bring that into your different applications. So one of the big things that's happening with web three is this concept of data portability, meaning that I can own something on one application and I could potentially take that with me to several other applications across the internet. And so this is like the emerging digital property rights that are happening right now as we transition from a model in web two where you're on a hosted service like Facebook, it's a walled garden, they own and control everything. You are the product, they're mining you for data and they're just selling ads, right? To a system where it's much more open, you can go into these worlds and experiences, you can take things with you and you can leave with them. And most people are doing this with cryptocurrency, maybe you earn an in-game currency, you can leave and take that to a different game and you can spend it somewhere else. So the user is now unable to bring their data to the party, whereas before now you couldn't really do that and that data includes their money or that includes their digital items. And so I think that's the big shift that we're seeing and that changes a lot in how applications serve up to users. It's going to change their user experiences, for instance. I think the script has flipped and you're right on. I agree with you. I think you guys are smart to see it. And I think everyone who's on this wave will see it. Let's get into that because this is happening. People are saying, I'm done with being mined and being manipulated by the big Facebooks and the LinkedIn's of the world who are using the user. Now the contract was a free product and you gave up your data, but then it got too far. Now people want to be in charge of their data. They want to broker their data. They want to collect their digital exhaust, maybe collect some things in a game or maybe do some commerce in an application or marketplace. So these are the new use cases. How does the digital identity architecture work with Unstoppable? How are you guys enabling that? Can you take us through the vision of where you guys came on this because it's unique in an NFT and kind of the domain name concept coming together? Can you explain? Yeah, so we think we approach the problem for if we're going to rebuild the way that people interact online, what are kind of the first primitives that they're going to need in order to make that possible? And we thought that one of the things that you have on every network when you log on Twitter, you have a Twitter handle. When you log on Instagram, you have an Instagram handle. It's your name, right? You have that name that's on those applications. And right now what happens is if users get kicked off the platform, they lose 100% of their followers, right? And they also, in some cases, they can't even directly contact their followers on some of these platforms. There's no way for them to retain this social network. So you have all these influencers who are today's small businesses who build up these large, profitable small businesses online being key opinion leaders to their demographic. And then they could be de-platformed or they're unable to take this data and move to another platform. If that platform raises their fees, you've seen several platforms increase their take rates to 10, 20, 30, 40%, and they're getting locked in and they're getting squeezed, right? So we just said, you know what? The first thing you're going to want to own is going to be your piece of digital property. It's going to be your name across these applications. And if you look at every computing network in the history of computing networks, they end up with a naming system. And when we looked back at DDS, which came out in the 90s, it was just a way for people to find these webpages much easier instead of mapping these IP addresses. And then we said to ourselves, you know what's going to happen in the future is just like everyone has an email address that they use in their Web 2 world in order to identify themselves as they log into all these applications. They're going to have an NFT domain in the Web 3 world in order to authenticate and bring their data with them across these applications. So we saw a direct correlation there between DNS and what we're doing with NFT domain name systems. And the bigger breakthrough here is that NFT domain systems are these NFT assets that live on a blockchain. They are owned by users. They're built on these open systems so that multiple applications can read data off of them. And that makes them portable. So we were looking for an infrastructure play like a picks and shovels play for the emerging Web 3 metaverse. And we thought that names were just something that if we wanted a future to happen where all 3.5 billion people with cell phones are sending crypto and digital assets back and forth, they're going to need to have a name to make this a lot easier instead of these long IP addresses or hex addresses in the case of crypto. And also people have multiple wallets too. It's not like there's all kinds of wallet variations, name verification. You see link trees everywhere. That's essentially just an app. I mean, it doesn't really do anything. I mean, so you're seeing people kind of trying to figure it out. I mean, I got a GitHub handle. I got a LinkedIn handle. I mean, what do you do with it? Yeah. And then specific to crypto, there was a very hair on fire use case for people who buy their first Bitcoin. And for those in the audience who haven't done this yet, when you go in and you go into an app and you buy your first Bitcoin or Ethereum or whatever cryptocurrency and then the first time you try to send it, there's this field where you want to send it. And it's this very long hex address. And it looks like an IP address from the 1980s, right? And it's like a bank number. And no one's going to use that to send money back and forth to each other. And so just like domain names in the DNS system replace IP addresses, NFT domains on blockchain systems replace hex addresses for sending and receiving, you know, cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, Ethereum, whatever. And that's its first use cases. It really plugs in there. So when you want to send money to someone, you can just instead of sending money to a large hex address that you have to copy and paste, you could have an error or you could send it to the wrong place. It's pretty scary. You can send it to, you know, John Furrier dot NFT. And so we thought that you're just not going to get global adoption without better UX. Same thing at work with dot com domains. And this is the same thing for Bitcoin and other crypto. It's interesting. If you look at the web two or trend one to two, web one went to two. It was all about ease of use, right? And making things simpler. Clutter, you know, more pages can't find things that was search. That was Google. Since then, has there actually been an advancement? Facebook currently is not an advancement there. Horting all the data. So I think we're broken between that step of, you know a free search to all the resources in the world too, which by the way, they're mining a lot of data too with the toolbar and Chrome. But now where's that web three crossover? So take us through your vision on digital identity and web two, Google searching, Facebook's broken, democracy's broken, users aren't in charge to web three. Got it. Well, we can start at web one. So the way that I think about it is if you go to web one, it was very simple just text web pages. So it was just a way for someone to like put up a billboard and here's the piece of information and here's some things that you could read about it, right? And then what happened with web two was you started having applications being built that had, you know, backend infrastructure to provide services. So if you think about web two, these are all, you know these are websites or web portals that have services attached to them, whether that's a social network service or search engine or whatever. And then as we move to web three, the new thing that's happening here is the user is coming onto that experience and they're able to connect in their wallet or their web three identity to that app and they can bring their data to the party. So it's kind of like web one, you just have a static web page. Web two, you have static web page with a service like a server back here. And then web three, the user can come in and bring their database with them in order to have much better app experiences. So how does that change things? Well, for one, that means that you want data to be portable across apps. So we touched on gaming earlier maybe if I have an in-game item for one game that I'm playing for a certain company I can take it across two or three different games. It also impacts money, money is just digital information. So now I can connect to a bunch of different apps and I can just use cryptocurrency to make those payments across those things instead of having to use a credit card. But then another thing that happens is I can bring an unlimited amount of additional information about myself when I plug in my wallet. And as an example, when I plug in to Google search for instance, they could take a look at my wallet that I've connected and they could pull information about me that I enable, that I share with them. And this means that I'm going to get a much more personalized experience on these websites. And I'm also going to have much more control over my data. There's a lot of people out there right now who are worried about data privacy especially in places like Europe. And one of the ways to solve that is simply to not store the data and instead have the user bring it with them. You know, I've always thought about this and always debated it with David Lothin, my co-host does top down governance, privacy laws outweigh the organic bottoms up innovation. So what you're getting out of here is, hey, if you can actually have that solved before it even starts. It was almost as if those services were built for the problem of web two. Not three. What's your reaction to that? I think that is right on the money. And if you look at it as a security, like if I put my security researcher hat on, I think the biggest problem we have with security and privacy on the web today is that we have these large organizations that are collecting so much data on us and they just become these honeypots. And there have been huge breaches. Equifax a few years back is a big one. And just all your credit card data got leaked, right? And all your credit information got leaked. And we just have this model where these big companies sell your data. They create a giant database which is worth hundreds of millions of dollars if not billions to be attacked. And then someone eventually is gonna hack that in order to pull that information. Well, if instead, and you can look at this at web three. So for those of the audience who have used a web three application, one of these dApps, to trade cryptocurrencies or something, you'll know that when you go there, you actually connect to your wall. So when you're working with these web, you connect, you bring your information with you and you connect it. That means that the app has none of that stored, right? So these apps that people are using for trading cryptocurrency on dApps or whatever, they have no stored information. So if someone hacks one of these DeFi exchanges, for instance, there's nothing to steal. And that's because the only time the information is being accessed is when the user is actively using the site. And so as someone who cares about security and privacy, I go, wow, that's a much better data model. And that gives so much more control of the user because the user just permissions access to the data only during the time period in which they're interacting with the application. And so I think you're right. And like, we are very excited to be building these tools, right? Because I see like, if you look at Europe, they basically passed GDPR and then all the companies are going, we can't comply with that. And they keep postponing it or like changing it a little bit and trying to make it easier to comply with. But honestly, we just need to switch the data models. So the companies aren't even taking the data and then they're going to be in a much better spot. The GDPR is again, a nightmare. I think it's the wrong approach. I always said it was screwed up because most companies don't even know where stuff is stored. Nevermind how they delete someone's entry in a database, they even know what they're collecting at some level, it becomes so complicated. So right on the money there, good, good call out there. Question for you is this then, okay. So do you decouple the wallet from the ID or are they together? And is it going to be a universal wallet? Do you guys see yourselves as universal domains? Take me through the thinking around how you're looking at the wallet and the actual identity of the user, which obviously is important on the identity side. Wallet, is that just universal or is that going to be coming together? I think so the way that we kind of think about it is that wallets are where people have their financial interactions online, right? And then identity is much more about, it's kind of like being your passport. So it's like your driver's license for the internet. So these are two kind of separate products we see longer term and they actually work together. So like if you have a domain name, it actually is easier to make deposits into your wallet because it's easier to remember to send money to methagool.crypto and that way it's easier for me to receive payments or whatever. And then inside my wallet, I'm going to be doing DeFi trades or whatever and that doesn't really have an interaction with names necessarily in order to do those transactions. But then if I want to sign into a website or something, I could connect that with my NFT domain. And I do think that these two things are kind of separate. I think we're going to still early. So figuring out exactly how the industry is going to shake out over like a five to 10 year time horizon and maybe a little bit more difficult. And we can see some other emerging, what you would consider like cornerstones of the crypto ecosystem. But I do think identity reputation is one of those. And I also think that your financial applications of DeFi are going to be another. So those are the two areas where I see it. And just to note on this, when you have a wallet, it usually has multiple cryptocurrency addresses. So you're going to have like 50 cryptocurrency addresses in a wallet. You're going to want to have one domain name that links back to all those because you're just not going to remember those 50 different addresses. So that's how I think that they collaborate. And we collaborate with several large wallets as well, like blockchain.com and you know, another 30 plus of these to make it easier for sending out and receiving cryptocurrency. So the wallet basically is a D app. The way you look at it. You integrate whatever you want, you just integrate in. How do I log into decentralized applications with my NFT domain name? Because this becomes, okay, I got to love the idea. Love my identity. I'm in my own NFT. I mean, hell, this video is going to be an NFT soon. We get on board with the program here. But how do I log into my app? I'm going to have a D app and I got my domain name. Do I have to submit? Is there benchmarking? Is there approval process? Is there APIs and SDK kind of thinking around it? How do you thinking about dealing with the apps? Yeah, so all of the above. And what we're trying to do here is build like an SSO solution, but that it's consumer based. So what we've done is adapted some SSO protocols that other people have used, the standard ones, in order to connect that back to an NFT domain, in this case, and that way you get the best of both worlds. So you can use these authorization protocols for data permissioning that are, you know, standard web 2 APIs, but then the permissioning system is actually based on the user controlled NFT. So they're assigning that with their private public key pair in order to make those updates. So that allows you to connect into both of these systems. We think that that's how technology typically impacts the world is it's not like you have something that just replaces something overnight. You have an integration of these technologies over time. And we really see these web 3 components in NFT domains integrating nicely into regular apps. So as an example, in the future, when you log in, right now you see Google off Facebook off or you type in an email address, you could see NFT, you know, unstoppable domains or NFT authorization. And you can SSO in with that to that website. When you go to a website, like an e-commerce website, you can share information about yourself because you've connected your wallet now. So you could say, yes, I am a unique individual. I do live in New York and I just bought a new house, right? And then when you permission all that information about yourself to that application, can serve up a new user experience for you. And we think it's going to be very interesting for doing rewards and discounts online for e-commerce specifically in the future because that opens up a whole new market because they can ask you questions about yourself and you can deliver that information directly to the app. I really think that the gaming market has totally nailed the future use case, which is in-game currency, in-game engagement, in-game data, and now bringing that to kind of a horizontally scalable, like surface area is huge, right? So, you know, I think that's a huge success on the concept. Question I have to ask you is you getting any pushback from ICANN, the International Corporation of Name and Numbers, they got dot everything now. Dot club, because a clubhouse, they got dot, you know, party, dot live. I mean, so the real domain name people are over here, web two, you guys are coming out with the web three. Where is that connect with people who are not following along the web three trend? How do they, how do you rationalize the domain angle here? Well, so I would say that NFT domains are what domains on DNS were always meant to be 30 plus years ago. And they just didn't have blockchain systems back in the 90s when they were building these things. So there's no way to make them for individuals. So what happened was for DNS, it actually ended up being for business. So if you look at DNS names, there's about 350 million registrations. They're basically all small business. And it's like, you know, 20 to 50 million small businesses who own the majority of these, these.com or these regular DNS domain names. And that's their focus. NFT domains, because all of a sudden you have the wallet, you have them in your wallet, in your crypto wallet, they're actually for individuals. So that market, instead of being for small businesses, is actually end users. So instead of being for, you know, 20 to 50 million small businesses, we're talking about being useful for three to four billion people who have an internet connection. And so we actually think that the market size for NFT domains is somewhere 50 to 100 X, the market size for traditional domain names. And then the use cases are going to be much more for individuals on a day-to-day basis. So it's like, people are going to want to use them for receiving cryptocurrency or receiving dollars or payments or USC C point, or they're going to want to use them as identifiers on social networks, or they're going to want to use them for SSO. And they're not going to want to use them as much for things like websites, which is what Web 2 is. And if I'm being perfectly honest, if I'm looking out 10 years from now, I think that these traditional domain name systems are going to want to work with and adopt this new NFT technology, because they're going to want to have these features for the domain names. So like in short, I think NFT domain names are domain names with superpowers. This is the next generation of naming systems and naming systems were always meant to be identity networks. Yeah, they hit a glass ceiling. I mean, they just can't, they're not built for that, right? So I mean, and having people having their own names is essentially what decentralization is all about. Cause what is a company? It's a collection of humans that aren't working in one place. They're decentralized. And then you decentralize the identity and everything's been changed. So completely love it. I think you guys are onto something really huge here. You pretty much laid out what's next for Web 3, but you guys are in this state of growth. You see people signing up for names. That's great. What are the best practices? What are the steps are people taking? What's the common use case for folks who are putting this to work right now for you guys? Why do you see, what's the progression? Yeah, so the thing that we want to solve for people most immediately is we want to make it easier for sending and receiving crypto payments. And I know that sounds like a niche market, but there's over 200 million people right now who have some form of cryptocurrency, right? And 99.9% of them are still sending crypto using these really long hex addresses. And that market is growing at 60 to 100% year over year. So first we need to get crypto into everybody's pocket. And that's gonna happen over the next three to five years, let's call it, if it doubles every year for the next five years, we'll be there. And then we want to make it easier for all those people to send crypto back and forth. And I will admit, I'm a big fan of these stable coins and these like, I would say utility focused tokens that are coming out just to make it easier for transferring money from here to Turkey and back or whatever. And that's the really the first step for NFT domain names. But what happens is when you have an NFT domain and that's what you're using to receive payments and then you realize, oh, I can also use this to log into my favorite apps, it starts building that identity piece. And so we're also building products and services to make it more like your identity. And we think that's gonna build up over time. So instead of like doing an identity network top down where you're like a government or a corporation, say, oh, you have to have an ID, here's your password, you have to have it. We're gonna do it bottoms up. We're gonna give everyone on the planet an NFT domain name. It's gonna give them some utility to make it easier to send or receive cryptocurrency. And we're gonna say, hey, do you wanna verify your Twitter profile? Yes, okay, great, you can test that back. Hey, you wanna verify your Reddit? Yes, Instagram, yes, TikTok, yes. You wanna verify your driver's license? Okay, yeah, we can attach that back. And then what happens is you end up building up organically digital identifiers for people using these blockchain naming systems. And once they have that, they're gonna be able to share that information. And that's gonna lead to better experiences online for both commerce, but also just better user experiences in general. Every company when the web came along, first of all, everyone poo-pooed the web once. Now it's a terrible, bad idea. Oh, and so unreliable, so slow, hard to find things. Web two, everyone bought a domain name for their company. But then as they added web pages, these permalinks became so long that the web page address, fully qualified, permalink string, they bought keywords. And then that's another layer on top. So you started to see that evolution in the web. Now it's kind of hit it's ceiling. Here, everyone gets their NFT, they start doing more things. Then it becomes much more of a use case where it's more usable, not just for one thing. So we saw that movie before. So it's like a permalink, permanent. Yeah, that's it. I mean, if we're lucky, it will be a decentralized bottoms up global identity that appreciates user privacy and allows people to opt in. And that's what we want to build. And the gas prices thing that's always come, that's always an objection to hear that. I mean, blockchain is perfect for this because it's immutable, it's written on the chain, all good, totally secure. What about the efficiency? How do you see that evolving real quick? Also a couple of comments on efficiency. First of all, we picked domains as a first product to market because you need to take a look and see if the technology is capable of handling what you're trying to do. And for domain names, you're not updating that every day. So like if you look at traditional domain names, you only updated a couple of times per year. So the usage for that to set this up and configure it, most people set it up and configure it and then they'll only have a few changes per year. So first of all, the overall, it's not like a game. Got an IO problem. Right, so that part's good. So we picked a good place to start for going to market. And then the second piece is like, you're really just asking our computer systems going to get more efficient over time. And if the history of that has always been yes. And I remember the 90s, I had a modem and it was whatever, 14 kilobits and then it was 28 and then 56 and then 100 and now I have 100 megabits up and down. And I look at blockchain systems and I don't know if anyone has a law for this yet, but throughput of blockchains is going up over time. And there's going to be continued improvements over this over the next decade. We need them, we're going to use all of it. And you just need to make sure you're planning a business and make sense for the current environment. Just as an example, if you had tried to launch Netflix for online streaming in 1990, you would have had a bad time because no one had bandwidth. So yet some applications are going to wait to be a little bit later on in the cycle. But I actually think identity is perfectly fine to go ahead and get off the ground now. Yeah, the motivated parties for innovations here. I mean, a point cast failed miserably. That was like the, they tried to stream video over T1 lines, but back in the day is nothing. So again, we've seen those speeds double, triple in homes right now. Matt, congratulations, great stuff. Final, you know, TikTok moment here. How would you summarize short and a short clip, the difference between digital identity in web two and web three? In web two, you don't get to own your own online president and in web three, you do get to own it. So I think if you were going to simplify it, really web three is about ownership and we're excited to give everyone on the planet a chance to own their name and choose when and where and how they want to share information about themselves. So now users are in charge. Exactly, you got it. They're not the product anymore. If you're going to be the product, you might as well monetize the product and that's the data. Real quick thoughts just to close out, the role of data in all this, your view. We haven't enabled users to own their data online since the beginning of the internet and we're now starting to do that. It's going to have profound changes for how every application on the planet interacts with their users. Awesome stuff. Matt, take a minute to give a plug for the company. How many employees you got? What are you guys looking for? For hiring, fundraising, give a quick commercial for what's going on unstoppable domains. Yeah, so if you haven't already, check us out at unstoppabledomains.com. We're also on Twitter at unstoppable web and we have a wonderful podcast as well that you should check out if you haven't already. And we are just crossed 100 people. We're growing three to five, 100% year over year. We're basically hiring every position across the company right now. So if you're interested in getting into web three, even if you're coming from a traditional web two background, please reach out. We love teaching people about this new world and how you can be a part of it. And you're a virtual company, you have a little headquarters, is it all virtual? What's the situation there? Yeah, I actually just assumed we are 100% remote and asynchronous. And we're currently in five countries across the planet, mostly concentrated in the US and EU areas. I heard a rumor too, maybe you can confirm or admit or deny this rumor. I heard a rumor that you have mandatory vacation policy. This is true. And that's because we are a team of people who like to get things done. And but we also know that recovery is an important part of any organization. So if you push too hard, we want to remind people we're on a marathon, right? This is not a sprint. And so we want people to be with us long-term. We do think that this is a 10-year move. And so, yeah, we do force people, we'll unplug you at the end of the year. That's what I was going to ask you. So what's the consequence of I don't take vacation? Yeah, we literally unplug you. You won't be able to get into Slack, right? And that's how we regulate. Well, when people start having their avatars be their bot and you don't even know what you're unplugging at some point, that's where you guys come in with the NFTs and that's not the real person. It's not the real human. Yeah, exactly. We'll be able to check. NFTs, great innovation, great use case. Mack, congratulations. Thanks for coming on and sharing the story to kick off this showcase with theCUBE. Thanks for sharing all that great insight. Appreciate it. Yeah, John had a wonderful time. All right, this is theCUBE. Unstoppable domains, showcasing. We got great 10 great pieces of content. We're dropping all today. Check them out. Stay with us for more coverage. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching.