 Live from San Juan, Puerto Rico, it's theCUBE. Covering Blockchain Unbound. Brought to you by Blockchain Industries. Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's exclusive coverage in Puerto Rico for Blockchain Unbound. I'm John Furrier, your host. Here, covering all the action in Puerto Rico as the global society and industry come together. Our next guest is Marshall Taplitz. He's the Chief Strategy Officer and Co-Founder of NinjaNYNJA.biz. Check out their site NYNJA.biz. Marshall, thanks for joining me. Thank you. So talk about what you guys do. You guys are doing some disruptive stuff. Tell us about what you guys do then it will jam into a conversation. Sure, so are you familiar with WeChat in China, for example? Okay, great. So I've personally been living in China 15 years. So we've watched kind of the birth of the Chinese internet which, as we know, is a little different than the regular internet. A lot of mobile users. A lot of mobile users. 800 million China mobile subscribers alone. And WeChat basically is a platform that started off as just a messenger but basically what it's done is it's integrated into every facet of Chinese society. To give you an example, you go to a restaurant, you scan a QR code, the menu comes up, you pick the food, you pay for the food, it comes, you walk out. Everything like that is in China. Everything like that is in WeChat in China. So what we've done is we've kind of taken this concept and we're working on a global version of it that's cryptocurrency based and we are working specifically with Chinese companies in order to help them go global as part of the China One Belt One Road program and working with companies like Alibaba, what have you, in order to help Chinese companies go overseas and take what they've built in China but operate globally with cryptocurrency. And you guys in China or, because it's been hard for companies to start companies in China. So you're living in China or you're working in China? So because we live in Shenzhen, right next to it is Hong Kong. Hong Kong is where our company is based. Hong Kong, as you know, previous British colony, the legal system and the financial system, everything. So you're Domicile in Hong Kong, that's where you're based? Me personally in Shenzhen, but the company is in Hong Kong. Yes, and we also have a Wyoming corporation in the US. Shenzhen's where the action is, that's where WeChat is. That's right. Alibaba's got Alipay and then there's more business to business with their app. So I get that WeChat's been highly successful. In fact, we have a huge following on WeChat. SiliconANGLE and Wikibon, it's free content but that brings up the question of Chinese kind of showing the way with mobile expansion. Their uses are heavily mobile savvy. That's right. This is pretty obvious when you think about it, but in America and around the world, that's going to translate to the new user experience. So in your opinion, how would you describe the expectations that users have? Because you're living on the front end of the wave of what mobile's doing. There's a lot of gamification going on, it's kind of creepy, but what is your view of the expectations that users have and what's different about what's currently available in the web stack and the 20-year-old e-commerce stacks that are out there? I think the most important thing is reducing friction. You don't want to be using platforms where you cannot do it wherever you are, whenever you are. You don't want to have to go through payment processes, you don't have to re-authenticate yourself across whatever platforms you use. And interestingly, when I first went to China, it was all about copying what was in the West but actually it's kind of the opposite now. So we basically want to take this concept of a frictionless digital life and make it a global opportunity and especially with blockchain and cryptocurrency, you have that really as an opportunity because if you look at all the apps that are out there and the platforms that are out there, the only ones that have gone past a billion users, WhatsApp, Instagram, whatever, are the free ones. But as soon as you layer in payment, it becomes very locked. And as big as WeChat is and as big as Line is, but ultimately it's locked into the RAM and B system or in Korea, what have you. So the cryptocurrency is really the first opportunity that the world's had to create platforms that can get up to a billion, two billion, three billion users that are able to pay. And we just think that's a once in a lifetime opportunity and we want to be part of it. So I got to ask you about the impact that cloud computing has had on this. Obviously we've seen cloud computing destroy the data center model, allow people to get time to value faster mobile on top, big data analytics, using data, all this stuff's awesome stuff. So the question is, is that that's kind of a horizontally disruptive view. So these stacks that are built old way where I got to own the stack end to end. Yeah, this was standardization in the lower end stack. But now you're thinking about more of a horizontal. I got jurisdictions, I got regions, I got countries, we got sovereignty. All of these things are in the melting pot of the cryptocurrency blockchain, decentralized applications are major impacts to all those things. How do you see that playing out? Because that's kind of what developers worry about. Oh shit, will this work on that chain? Exactly. I got Neo, I got this, I got that. So the plumbing is totally a moving train right now. That's right. But the business models are pretty obvious. So there's like a business ops thing going on what DevOps did for cloud. Exactly. You got this new abstraction thing going on with this world. What's your view on that? Do you agree or what's your take? Well you pretty much nailed it. I mean basically what's happening is over the last 10 or 15 years, people have finally accepted that having your own server is kind of silly and most people now will just spin up whatever they need in terms of resources on the cloud. But over the last couple years, you're really going more toward edge cloud where the way the clouds work is that basically it's pushing to get the least amount of latency and store the data as close to the user as possible. And then there's also regulatory in some countries now in terms of if your users are from this country you have to legally store the data in this area. So this is all kind of evolving. And if you look at the blockchain technology, I think it's the payment version of that. So for example, everyone's always concerned about getting in and out of fiat currency and how am I going to get back to dollars and this and that. But I think what's going to wind up happening is this is going to get pushed toward the edges and there will be opportunities and ways with exchanges what have you to get in and out. But more importantly, it's going to be like just other currencies. So for example, I live in China but I come to the US a few times a year, I also travel to Europe. I have some dollars, I have some euros, I have some renminbi. When I leave China, I don't immediately sell every one of my renminbi. I just keep it because at some point I'm going to need it. And I think what's going to happen in the cryptocurrency space is especially on the larger blockchains like Ethereum and Neo, what have you is people are just going to get used to keeping some of it and they're going to stop worrying about what the exact exchange rate is and how am I going to get in and out and this and that. And they're just going to start treating it as part of their currency stack that they keep. As long as there's some level of stability, it's just like, I remember when I was growing up, there was no euro, every country had their own currency, right? You had the French Frank, you had the Swiss Frank, the Deutsche Mark, Lear, et cetera, et cetera. That's right. But you're seeing that the viability of the money aspect. That's right. There's two things that we've identified in analysis. And I was talking about it last night, I talked about this morning on theCUBE is the killer apps for blockchain cryptocurrency, these types of apps is two things. Money and marketplaces. That's right. Everything else is just kind of circling around those two more. But certainly that's the main part of it. Money, moving around. So the UK just announced with Coinbase, the financial content authority, reading the news yesterday has essentially said we're going to allow for the fast payment system to convert to Fiat. This is a government, the UK is the nation. This is the beginning to your point that if they don't get up to speed, the edge of the network will democratize them and kind of circle the wagons, if you will. So it's already happening. Yeah, and I think what governments are starting to realize is, hey guys, this is just a technology and not only do you don't really have jurisdiction to control it, but also that you don't even have the technical means. So Wyoming is a good example of regulation coming into place that just kind of accepts the presence that this now exists, right? And they're not going to try to make it something and fit it into the old way. So, and in terms of the stability of these coins, I think it is important because people want stability, but in other ways, if you don't look at the exchange rate, it's actually way more stable than the current system. And I'll give an example. In the last month or two, the prices of cryptocurrencies have dropped almost like 40%. Now, if the stock markets and the global FX markets drop 40%, you'd have blood in the streets, but the crypto market is asset-based instead of debt-based. And because it's so structurally sound, it's able to handle these wild swings without actually collapsing the system. So in many ways, it's way more stable. And then as the market caps and the buy-in of these currencies get bigger and bigger, of course it's going to be more stable over time. Well, I mean, it's stable from a failed standpoint, but a lot of emotional instability. People losing money for the first time. But that's just because they're speculating, right? They're speculating, and then if they're down, they feel like they lost, you know? But that's life. I mean, people that are in the game, like you, we're long on this. So what would you explain to someone? Because I have two, a lot of friends that have two schools of thought. That's a total scam. Don't associate with that, too. Oh my God, that's the next biggest wave. Let's get our surfboards out there and let's get on this. Sure. There's a multiple set coming in. It's the biggest thing we've seen. Sure. And everything in between. How do you explain it to people for the first time? It's just your traditional curve of, you know, there's early adopters and what have you. And, you know, if you were one of the guys buying up domain names in the early 90s, you know, some people would say, I can't believe you're spending $100,000 buying up domain names, but, you know, some of them now are worth, you know, tens of millions of dollars. So, but again, this is the speculatory piece of it, and there's no shortage of opportunities for speculation, and I encourage everybody to speculate a little bit because what it does is it gets you a taste of the technology. And usually, when you have some money on the line, you pay more attention. So if speculation is what gets people interested, and it gets them watching it and understanding the technology and using it, then I'm all for it. But people shouldn't be speculating with money they don't have. Anything could happen in the short term. You know, nobody knows what's gonna happen with any specific currency, but in terms of the technology itself, this is a revolution way bigger than the internet itself. This is where you're getting not only communications like the internet, but finance and governance and all as one, programmable money, programmable contracts, it wipes out finance, it wipes out legal, it wipes out governance in many ways. So this is a huge evolution in human society, and we've termed this open unity actually. And so we believe that society has to reach a state of open unity in order to go into the singularity as we would envision it wanting to be as something that's under our control. Yeah, and I think one of the things, first of all, that's a great statement, well said. I'll just kind of put some reality on that connected dots is that if you look at the trajectory of cloud computing, Amazon web services was laughed at years ago. EC2, S3 came out, compute, storage, basic building blocks, it has a lot more services. What cloud did for software developers and what they've disrupted from a business standpoint, DevOps, is proven, and what open source has done, even going back to the old Red Hat days and Linux, as it now a tier one global citizen in software, you look at those two trends, you can connect that dots to what you just said. That's right. And what made cloud great was they made application developers have access to programmable infrastructure. Exactly. You're talking about a whole nother level of software programmability, money, marketplaces, society. Yeah, I mean, you hit it on the head there, right? That's exactly right. So when a programmer wants to start a business, instead of going to create an LLC and getting their EA, EIN, tax ID, or whatever, and when they want to go into Europe and dealing with that and then trying to open a bank account, which is almost impossible internationally now, instead of that, you just have your SDKs and your APIs, whatever, and you've got access to money program at it. You can take money, you can move money around globally, frictionless, permissionless, with governance, smart contracts. They might not even in SDKs dashboard. Exactly. It's a console. Click, smart contracts, governance, turnkey. And one of the things we're working on with Ninja, in particular, is this kind of on-demand marketplace and putting together decentralized teams for work. And this is all driven by smart contracts. So one of the issues with the economy is the huge booms and busts that people have in the economy. And if you look at the root cause of that, my personal opinion is that it's because of payment terms. So for example, if I do work for you, and then you, what do you call it? I do work for you, and then there's an invoice, but it's not due for 30 days. Now your business may be structurally sound, but the truth is your cash flow is all over the place. With blockchain technology, we can actually do real-time payments. You can be paid minute by minute, hour by hour, real-time program contract. So we're going to create very flat, even money flows through the entire economy globally, and we're going to just completely remove these booms and busts that are really nothing more than just cash flow issues that are compounded and compounded at a global level. I mean, I lived through the dot-com bubble. I was actually part of it on the front end, on the euphoria side, as well as on the crash, part of the whole search paradigm, Google right there, keywords, all that stuff happening, growth, massive growth. So I saw the scammers in there, or the bubble people we called them, but the reality is everything happened. There was pet foods online, you could get shopping delivered to your house. So again, to your point, there's little euphoric right now, but what's different is you have now community data. See what I see happening is it's not a major bubble crash because self-government, self-governing, self-governance is a community dynamic. So I think there's going to be a lot of self-healing inside the networks themselves. You're already seeing it here. I mean, a lot of people, bad actors being identified, investors flight to quality, looking at quality deals. Interesting times, your thoughts. Well, I mean, we've been through many evolutions of society. We've had serfdom, we've had monarchies, we've had representative democracies, we have all these things. And I mean, I just think the next evolution is decentralized governance, right? And we don't even know what that means yet, because it's just starting, but I think we can all, if we close our eyes and really think about it, I think it's pretty obvious what the issues are with our current system and not just the US, but globally. And I think we have an opportunity here to build in kind of organic program governance. And what's really special about blockchain technology is if I program it to do X, it's gonna do X. So we don't need to, I don't need to know who you are to trust you, right? I don't need to worry about where we're gonna sue each other, or where we're gonna have arbitration if things go wrong. We're just gonna make an agreement, and we're gonna program it that way, and that's it, right? And now the next phase is I could build on top of that, trusting that that's just gonna happen. So you can create these chains of trust, and that can happen anywhere in the world. So I think this is a whole other thing. Sounds like a bunch of web services. Well, in many ways, in terms of the architecture, you could absolutely think of it like that. The reusability, the leverage is amazing. All right, I want to just end the segment, Marshall. Take a minute to end the segment, to talk about what you're working on. Ninja coin, ninjanynja.biz. You guys have a product, you've got a blockchain-enabled platform. You got a coin. Take a minute to explain what you're working on. Basically, we want to provide the tools and services to help people live in this new reality. So in order to basically function in the world that we're entering into, we're going to need tools that far surpass what's currently available in terms of the messages, the websites, all these things. We need to be operating at a level that takes communication completely frictionless, payment completely frictionless, and governance completely frictionless. And we have to put this all together. And that's what we're doing with Ninja. We're starting with a global communicator, which is basically, if you want to take WeChat, Telegram, whatever, but we have about 50 additional features that really take communications to the next level. And then on top of it, creating the baseline with cryptocurrency payment and also smart contract wizards and helping people kind of get these teams going and get paid and organize their financial life in a decentralized way. So we're just basically going to be the next generation of these messenger type platforms with blockchain integrated. And what you're going to see is that over the next couple of years, you're going to get to the first companies that are achieving not just a billion or two billion or three billion users, but paying users. And we're going to be one of the probably three to five platforms that are offering tools at the global level like this. And have you done an ICO already or not? We've just started our private ICO about two weeks ago. We're getting tremendous support in Asia. Quite frankly, the US is not seeing it as much. Is it a utility token or security? Utility token. And I think it's really telling interesting. Coming here, it's the first time I've been doing the presenting. We spoke yesterday at the D10E and we also spoke at D10E in Korea a week or two ago and the response is incredible. And I think the reason is because The Asian market gets it. Well, they're already living in this world within their own confines in terms of the messenger with their payment and governance built in. So when I tell them that, we're going to do this globally with crypto, immediately they get it. I'm having trouble here, especially in these five minute pitches, which is ridiculous. Yeah, it's like a chop shop. And it's just, I don't know how to, I don't know how to communicate the idea within this short timeframe. So what I'm looking for while we're here this week is just to find people who really want to take an hour or two or even people like yourself who want to do interviews and just kind of really talk to people and really explain what we're doing. Well, platform is complex. A lot of, not a piece is to it. It's a system, but the value you offer is essentially offering developers who are building products for tools that you've built so they can scale faster. That sounds like your value. That's right. And although I can't say specifically, we're also working on a deal that's going to get us started with about 15 million active users on day one. So it's very exciting and we're really, really excited about it. Coins to be utility measures what? Sorry? Well, your utility coin's going to be measuring what? What's the main token economics that drives? For the ICO economics? For your Ninja coin. Yeah, so basically we're releasing five billion tokens. 45% of them will be sold. There's a five cents of token. So the hard cap by definition is about 112 million. And we've, actually we're planning to do the public sale in April, but we may cancel it or postpone it just because the private sale's going really well. But we'll see how that goes. But in terms of once it's live, this will basically be the utility token of the entire ecosystem. So anybody, not just within our Ninja app or platform, but even people, I don't know if you know, XMPP Federation like back in the day. So if you could think of us as the next version of XMPP Federation, but using cryptocurrency in order to avoid bad actors by making it very expensive to do bad things and very cheap to do good things and globally. So it's like Twitter, you can create a bot instantly, but if there's coins involved, you'd have to spend to get it. That's right. And also people could spin up nodes that are basically their own Twitters and decide if those Twitters of their own, their Ninja boxes of their own are either just internally or you could specify specifically contacts or group of contacts or other nodes. That's a great way to get bad actors out because it costs them money. That's right. If email came out today. And it's decentralized, there's no single spot. That's right. If email came out today when cryptocurrency existed, there would be no spam because it would be expensive as hell to send more than a few a second, but it would still be free for everybody generally. And you wouldn't even have spam. So we think we could do that for messaging globally. Great. Marshall, thanks so much for coming on. You really appreciate it. Check out Ninja. Marshall Taplets is the chief strategy officer and co-founder of Ninja.biz. Check them out online. Check out their websites in Asia. Bring in that culture of mobile and fast moving real time apps to the rest of the developers. It's theCUBE coverage in Puerto Rico for blockchain unbound exclusive two days of coverage. We'll be right back with more after the short break. Thanks for watching.