 Hello, welcome to theCUBE Unstoppable Domains Showcase. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We've got a great discussion here called The Influencers Around. What's going on? Web three, and also this new sea change, cultural change around this next generation, internet, web, cloud, all happening. Chair of my OYANG industry analyst and founding partner, Kledo Insights. Chair of my great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. Renvestar Vice President of Marketing at Unstoppable Domains in the middle of all the action. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on theCUBE for this showcase. Now, my pleasure. Thanks for having us, John. Jeremy, I want to start with you. You've seen many waves, but fallen all of your work for over a decade now. You've seen the web 2.0 wave, now the web three is here. And it's not, I wouldn't say hyped up. It's really just ramping up. And you're seeing real practical examples. You're in the middle of all the action. What is this web three? Can you frame for us? I mean, you've seen many waves. What is web three mean? What is it all about? Well, John, you and I worked in the web 2.0 space and essentially that enabled peer-to-peer media where people could upload their thoughts and ideas and videos without having to rely on centralized media. Unfortunately, that distributed and decentralized movement actually became centralized on the platforms of the big social networks and big tech companies. And this has caused an uproar because the people who are creating the content did not have control, could not control their identities and could not really monetize or make decisions. So web three is, which is a moniker of a lot of different trends including crypto, blockchain, and sometimes the metaverse is to undo the controlling that has become centralized. And the power is now shifting back into the hands of the participants again. And then this movement, they want to have more control over their identities, their governance, the content that they're creating, how they're actually building it and then how they're monetizing it. So in many ways, it's changing the power and it's a new economic model. So that's web three without really even mentioning the technologies. Is that helpful? Yeah, it's great. And Ren, we were talking about on theCUBE many times and one notable stat, I don't think it's been reported but it's been more kind of a rumor. I hear that 30% of the Berkeley Q and Peter science students are dropping out and going into crypto or blockchain or decentralized startups. Which means that there's a big wave coming in of talent. You're seeing startups, you're seeing a lot more formation, you're seeing a lot more, I would say kind of ramping up of real people, not just people with a dream, it's actual builders out here doing stuff. What's your take on the web three movement with all this kind of change happening from people and also the new ideas being refactored? I think that the competition for talent is extremely real. And when we start looking at the stats, we see that there is an enormous draft of people that are moving into this space, people that are fascinated by technology and are embracing the ethos of web three. And at this stage, I think it's not only engineers and developers, but we have moved into a second phase where we see that a lot of supporting functions, marketing being one of them, sales, business development are being built up quite rapidly. It's not without actually reminding me of the mid 2000s. When I started working with Google at that point in time, the world gardens were actually absorbing vast, vast cohorts of young graduates and more experienced professionals that were passionate and moving into the web environment. And I think we are seeing a movement right now which is not entirely dissimilar, except faster. Yeah, Jeremiah, you've seen the conversations over the cloud, I call the cloud kind of revolution. You had mobile in 2007, but then you got Amazon web services change the application space on how people developed in the cloud. And again, that created a lot of value. Now you're seeing the role of data as a huge part of how people are scaling and the decentralized movement. So you got cloud, which is kind of classic today, state of the art enterprise and or app developers. And you got now decentralized wave coming. Okay, you're seeing apps being developed on that architecture. Data is central in all this, right? So how do you view this as someone who's watching the landscape, these walled gardens are hoarding all the data. I mean, LinkedIn, Facebook, they're not sharing that data with anyone. They're using it for themselves. So as it's taking control back comes to the forefront. How do you see this market with the applications and what comes out of that? So the thing that we've seen out of the five things that I mentioned that are decentralized, the ones that have been easier to move across have been the ability to monetize and to build. But the data aspect has actually stayed pretty much central, frankly. What has decentralized is that the contracts, the blockchain ledgers, those have decentralized. But the funny thing is often a big portion of these blockchain networks are on Amazon, 63 to 70%, same thing with Stilana. So they're still using the Web 2.0 architectures. However, we're also seeing other forms like IPFS where the data could be spread across a wider range of folks. But right now we're still dependent on Web 2.0. So the vision and the promise of Web 3.0 when it comes to full decentralization is not here by any means. I'd say we're at a Web 2.25. Pre-Web 3.0, no, but action is there. What's new guys, how do you guys see the dangers? Cause there's a lot of negative press but also a lot of positive press. You're seeing a lot of fraud. We've seen a lot of the crypto fraud over the past years. You've seen a lot of now positives. It's almost a self-governancing environment the way the culture is. But what are the dangers? How do you guys educate people? What should people pay attention to? What should people look for to understand where to position themselves? Yes, so we've learned a lot from Web 1, Web 2, the sharing economy and we are walking into Web 3 with eyes wide open. So people have rightfully put forth a number of challenges the sustainability issues with excess using of computing and mining the excessive amount of scams that are happening in part due to unknown identities. Also the architecture breaks down in some periods and there's a lack of regulation. This is something different though in the last periods that we've gone through we didn't really know what was going to happen and we walked and think this is going to be great the sharing economy the gig economy, the social media it's going to change the world hurrah. It's very different now. People are a little bit jaded. So I think that's the big change. And so I think we're going to see that sort out and suss out just like we've seen with other trends. It's still very much in the early years. Ren, I got to get your take on this whole should influencers and should people be anonymous or should they be doxed out there? You saw the board eight guys that did that were kind of doxed a little bit there and that went viral. This is an issue, right? Because we just had a problem of fake news, fake people, fake information. And now you have a much more secure environment in immutability is a wonderful thing. It's a feature, not a bug, right? So how is this all coming down? And I know you guys are in the middle of it with NFTs as authentication. Take us, what's your take on this? Because this is a big issue. Look, I think first I am extremely optimistic about technology in general. So I'm super, super bullish about this. And yet, I think that while crypto has so many upsides it's important to be super conscious and aware of the downsides that come with it too. If you think about every Fortune 500 company there is always training required by all employees on internet safety reporting of potential attacks and so on. In the web tree, we don't have that kind of standard reporting mechanisms yet for bad actors in that space. And so when you think about influencers in particular they do have a responsibility to educate people about the potential but also the dangers of the technology of web tree of crypto basically. Whether you're talking about hacks or online safety the need for a hardware wallet, impersonators on Discord, securely storing your seed phrase. So every actor influencer or else has got a role to play. I think that in that context to your point it's very hard to tell whether influencers should be anonymous, obsidious or fully docked. The decentralized nature of web tree will probably lead us to see a combination of those anonymity levels so to speak. And the movements that we've seen around some influencers identities becoming public are particularly interesting. I think there's probably a convergence of web two and web three at play here. Maybe echoing Jeremy ours on the notion of 2.5 for now. I think in web two all business founders and employees are known and they held accountable for their public comments and their actions. If web three enables us to be anonymous if DAOs have voting control what happens if people make comments and there is no way to know who they are basically. What if the DAO doesn't take appropriate action? I think eventually there will be an element of community self-regulation where influencers will be acting in the best interest of their reputation. And I believe that the communities will self-regulate themselves and will create natural boundaries around what can be said or not said. I think that's a really good point about influencers and reputation because Jeremiah, does it matter that you're anonymous? I have an icon that could be a NFT or a picture but if I have an ongoing reputation I have trust, there's trust there. It's not like just a bot that was created just to spam someone. You know what I'm saying? You're getting into this new way. You're right. And that word you said trust that's what really this is about. But we've seen that public docs people with their full identities have made mistakes. They have pulled the hood over people's faces and really scam them out of a lot of money. We've seen that and that that doesn't change anything in human behavior. So I think over time that we will see a new form of a reputation system emerge even for pseudonyms and perhaps for people that are just anonymous that only show their potential wallet address a series of numbers and letters. That form might take a new form of a web 3.0 FICO score and you could look at their behaviors. Did they transact? How did they behave? Were they involved in projects that were not healthy? And because all of that information is public on the chain and you can go back in time and see that we might see a new form of a scoring emerge. Of course, who controls that scoring? That's a whole other topic on control and trust. So right now, John we do see that there's a number of projects new NFT projects where the founders will claim and use this as a point of differentiation that they are fully docs so you know who they are and their names. Secondly, we're seeing a number of products or platforms that require KYC know your customers so that self-identification often with a government ID or credit card in order to bridge out your coins and turn that into a fiat in some cases that's required in some of these marketplaces. So we're seeing a collision here between full names and pseudonyms and being anonymous. That's awesome. And I think this is the new again a whole new form of governance. Ren, you mentioned some comments about DAO's. I want to get your thoughts again. You know, Jeremiah, we've become historians over the years, we're getting old. I'm a little bit older than you but we've seen the movies more. You know, I remember breaking in the business when the computer standards bodies were built to be more organic and then they became much more of a kind of an anti-innovation environment where people, the companies would get involved the standards organization just to slow things down and muck things up a little bit. So you know, you look at DAO, it's like, hmm, is DAO a good thing or a bad thing? The answer is from people I talk to is it depends. So I'd love to get your thoughts on getting momentum and becoming de facto with value or value proposition vis-a-vis just a DAO for the sake of having a DAO. This has been a conversation that's been kind of in the inside the baseball here inside the ropes of the industry but there's trade-offs. Can you guys share your thoughts on when to do a DAO and when not to do a DAO and the benefits and trade-offs of that? Sure, maybe I'll start off with a definition and then we'll go to Ren. So a DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization the best way to think about this it's a digital cooperative and we've heard of worker cooperators before. The difference is that they're using blockchain technologies in order to do three things identity, governance and rewards and mechanisms. They're relying on web 2.0 tools and technologies like Discord and Telegram and social networks to communicate and as a cooperative they're trying to come up with a common goal. Ren, but what's your take? That's the setup. So for me, when I started my journey into crypto and web tree, I had no idea about what DAO actually meant and an easy way for me to think of it and to grasp the nature of it was about the comparison between a DAO and perhaps a more traditional company structure. In a traditional company structure, you have a hierarchy, the company is led by a CEO and other executives, the DAO was a flat structure and it's very much led by a group of core contributors. So to Jeremiah's point, you get that notion of a cooperative type of structure. The decision-making is very different. We're talking about a super high level of transparency proposals getting submitted and voting systems using tokens as opposed to management making decisions behind closed doors. I think that speaks to a totally new form of governance and I think we have hardly scratched the surface. We have seen recently very interesting moments in the web tree culture and we have seen how DAO suddenly have to make certain decisions and come to moments of claiming responsibility in order to police behavior of some of the members. I think that's important. I think it's going to redefine how we're thinking about that particularly new governance models and I think it's gonna pave the way for a lot of super interesting structure in the near future. That's a great point. Glad you're mine. That's a great point, Ren, around the transparency for governance. So, John, you posed the question, does this make things faster or slower? And right now, most DAOs are actually pretty slow because they're set up as a flat organization. So as a response to that, they're actually shifting to become representative democracies. Does that sound familiar? Where you can appoint a delegates and use tokens to vote for them and they have a decision power, almost like a committee and they can function. And so we've seen actually, there are sometimes our hierarchies except the person at the top is voted by those that have the tokens. In some cases, the people at the top had the most tokens, but that's a whole nother topic. So we're seeing a wide variety of governance structures. You know, Ren, I was talking with Matt, Matt G, the founder of Unstoppable and I was telling him about the domain name system. And one little trivia note that many people don't know about is that the US government, because the internet was started by the US, the Department of Commerce kept that on tight leash because the international telecommunications and you wanted to get their hands on it because of CCTLDs and other things. So at that time, because the innovation yet wasn't yet baked out, it was organically growing, the governance, the rules of the road, keeping it very stable versus meddling with it. So there's certain technologies that require a Jeremiah that, let's keep an eye on as a community, let's not formalize anything like the government did with the domain name system. Let's keep it tight and then finally released it, I think multiple years after 2004, I think it went over to the ITU, but this is a big point. I mean, if you get too structured, organic innovation can't go. What's your guys' reaction to that? So I think to take a stab at it, we have as a business, thinking of unstoppable domains, a strong incentive to innovate. And this is what is going to be determining long-term value growth for the organization, for partners, for users, for customers. So that degree of formalization actually gives us a sense of purpose and a sense of action. And if you compare that to DAOs, for instance, you can see how some of the upsides and downsides can pan out either way. It's not to say that there is a perfect solution. I think one of the advantages of the DAO is that you can let more people contribute. You can probably remove bias quite effectively and you can have a high level of participation and involvement in decisions and own the upside in many ways. As a company, it's a slightly different setup. We have the opportunity to coordinate a very diverse and part-time workforce in a very different way. And we do not have to deal with the inefficiencies that might be inherent to some form of extreme decentralization. So there is a balance from an organizational structure that comes either side. Awesome. Chairman, I want to get your thoughts on a trend that you've been involved in. We've both been involved in. And you're seeing it now with the kind of social media world, the role of an influencer. It's kind of moved from what was open source and influencer was a connect to someone who shared created content, enabled things to much more of a vanity that to photo on Instagram and having a large audience. So is there a new influencer model with Web3? Or is it the, I control the audience. I'm making money that way. Is there a shift in the influencer role or ideas that you see that should be in place for what is the role of an influencer? Because as Web3 comes, you're going to see that role become instrumental. We've seen it in open source projects. Influences, the people who write code or ship code. So what's your take on that? Because this has been a conversation people have been having the word influencer and redefining it and reframing it. Sure. The influence model really hasn't changed that much. But the way that they're behaving has when it comes to Web3 in this market. I mean, there's a couple of things. Some of the influencers are investors. And so when you see their name on a project or a new startup, that's an indicator that there's a higher level of success. You might want to pay more attention to it or not. Secondly, influencers themselves are launching their own NFT projects. Gary Vaynerchuk, a number of celebrities, Paris Hilton is involved, and they are also doing theirs as well. Steve Aoki, famous DJ, launched his as well. So they're going headfirst and participating in building in this model. And their communities are coming around them and they're building economies. Now the difference is it's not I speak as an influencer to the fans. The difference is that the fans are now part of the community and they hold, they literally hold and own some of the economic value, whether it's tokens or the NFTs. So it's a collaborative economy, if you will, where they're all benefiting together. And that's a big difference as well. And lastly, there's one little tactic we're seeing where marketers are airdropping NFTs, branded NFTs to influencers wallet. So you can see it in there. So there's new tactics that are forming as well. That's super exciting. And what's your reaction to that? Because he just hit on a whole new way of how engagement's happening, how people are closed looping their votes, their votes of confidence or votes with their wallet and brands, which are artists now influencers. I mean, this is a whole game-changing instrumentation level. I think that's what we are seeing right now is super reinvigorating as a marketer who's been around for a few years, basically. I think that the shift in the way brands are going to communicate and engage with their audiences is profound. It's probably as revolutionary and even more revolutionary than the movement for brands in getting into digital. And you have that sentiment of a gold rush right now with a lot of brands that are trying to understand NFTs and how to actually engage with those communities and those audiences. There are many levels in which brands and influencers are going to engage. There are many influencers that actually advance the message and the mission because the explosion of content on the web tree has been crazy. Part of that is due to the network effect nature of crypto because, as Jeremiah mentioned, people are incentivized to promote projects. Holders of an NFT are also incentivized to promote it. So you end up with a flywheel which is pretty unique of people that are hyping their project and that are educating other people about it and commenting on the ecosystem with the IP right being given to NFT holders. You're going to see people promote brands instead of the brands actually having to. And so the notion of brands engaging and delivering elements of value to their fans is something that's super attractive, extremely interesting. And I think, again, we have hardly scratched the surface of all that is possible in that particular space. It's interesting. You guys are bringing some great insight here. Jeremiah, the old days, the word authentic was kind of a cliche and brands tried to be authentic and they didn't really know what to do. They called it organic, right? And now you have the trust concept with or authenticity and environment like web three where you can actually measure it and monetize it and capture it if you're actually authentic and trustworthy. That's right. And because it's on blockchain, you can see how somebody's behave with their economic behavior in the past. Of course, big corporations aren't going to have that type of trail on blockchain just yet, but individuals and executives who participate in this market might be. And we'll also see new types of affinity. Do executives, do they participate in these NFT communities? Do they purchase them? We're seeing numerous brands like Adidas acquire different NFT projects to participate. And of course, the big brands are grabbing their domains. Of course, you could talk to Rand about that because owning your own name is a part of this trust and being found. That's awesome. Great insight guys. Closing comments, takeaways for the audience here. Each of you take a minute to share your thoughts on what you think is happening now, where it goes. All right, where's it going to go? Jeremiah, we'll start with you. Sure. I think the vision of web three where full decentralization happens, where the power is completely shifted into the edges. I don't think it's going to happen. I think we will reach web 2.5. And I've been through so many tech trends where we said that the power's going to shift completely to the end. It just doesn't. There's two reasons. One is the venture capital are the ones who tend to own the programs in the first place. And secondly, the startups themselves end up becoming the one percenters. We see Airbnb and Uber are one percenters now. So that trend happens over and over and over. Now, with that said, the world will be in a better place. We will have more transparency. We will see economic power shifted to the people, the participants. And so they will have more control over the internet that they are building. Awesome, Rand, final comments. I'm fully aligned with Jeremiah on the notions of control being returned to users, the notion of ownership and the notion of redistribution of the economic value that is created across all the different chains that we are going to see and all those ecosystems. I believe that we are going to witness two parallel movements of expansion, one that is going to be very lateral. When you think of crypto and web 3, essentially you think of a few hundred tribes. And I think that more projects are going to appear, more coalitions of individuals and entities and those are going to exist around those projects. So you're going to see an increase in the number of tribes that one might join. And I also think that we're going to progress rapidly from the low hundred millions of crypto and NFT holders into the billions, basically. And that's going to be extremely interesting. I think that the next waves of crypto users, NFT fans are going to look very different from the early adopters that we had witnessed in the very early days. So it's not going to be your traditional model of technology adoption curves. I think the demographics are going to shift and the motivations are going to be different as well, which is going to be a wonderful time to educate and engage with new community members. All right, Rand-Jeremiah, thank you both for that great insight, great segment. Breaking down web 3 or web 2.5, as Jeremiah says, but we're in a better place. This is a segment with the influencers as part of the cubes and the unstoppable domains showcase. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.