 Okay, welcome back everyone. It's theCUBE's coverage here in Monaco. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, Monaco Crypto Summit presented by Digital Bits, Media Parties, Cointelegraph and theCUBE. A lot of great stuff going on here. Digital Bits and the ecosystem around the world come together to talk about the next generation, NFT environments, metaverse, blockchain, all the innovations going up and down the stack of the decentralized world. That will be soon a reality for everybody. We have a great guest, David Lucicacier, who's the co-founder of Aftermath Island's Metaverse, which I got a little sneak preview of, but David, thanks for joining me. Thanks, John. Great to be here. We had dinner the other night at Nobu's. Great to know you. You get to know your background. Thank you. Stellar Pedigree. You run public companies. You've been involved in tech, media across the board. And this is a ship we're seeing like we've never been before. Perfect storm, technology change, cultural change, business model transformation, all around decentralization, crypto, token, economics, decentralized applications, metaverse. I mean, come on. And digital identity. Digital identity, which you're involved in. Take us through. What are you working on? Take a minute to explain what you're working on and then we'll get into it. So Aftermath Island is really a combination of three things. Digital identity, the ability to prove who you are. Because we think the internet, and I think everyone would agree, the internet's broken. You know, nefarious actors, bad actors can be anywhere, hacks, fake spots. So by being able to prove that you're a real person, not necessarily verifying your identity, but prove that you're a real person, can add a lot of benefits to everyone in the ecosystem. Second thing is we combine that with avatars, NFTs, and credentials. Because I'd like to represent myself as a little more buff than I am and maybe a little taller. And then the third thing is we put it in a Unreal Engine, so real, realistic, photo-realistic game engine metaverse that requires no downloading. It's all pixel streaming. Just like you stream Netflix, you can stream the game. I want to ask, because this is, I know it's a hard problem because I've asked a lot of people the same question. The Unreal Engine is really powerful and the imagery's amazing. Like gaming, we all know what it looks like. It's hard. It's not everyone's getting it right. What makes it so special? How are you guys cracking the code? Well, I think it's our experience. I mean, we've worked for major entertainment companies, major technology companies, major sports companies. So just to use your word, because I want to be humble about this, but we do have a great pedigree. We've also brought great people to the table. So having a platform isn't enough. We've got great creators and we've got great storytellers. So we've got the Nisiasa brothers. One, Mariano is an illustrator and former special editor, a projects editor at Marvel. And his brother Fabian is our storyteller, who's the co-creator of Deadpool. So we've got great people. And with Unreal Engine 5, we've really taken it from the ground up. We've looked at it and we've really combined it with new GPU cloud serving and pixel streaming so that the individual that's involved, engaged, immersed, is now really playing it without having to download a graphics package. Yeah, and also you dropped some names there and some brands. I know there's a lot more. I didn't, we've done a lot about them. You know all the top creators. And again, I love the creator culture. I mean, that's got new buzzers around, but ultimately it's artists, people building stuff. Application developers in the software world, movies and film, art and code is kind of coming together. It's the same kind of thing. Media and coding, it's like the same mindset. Creative, crazy good, smart, in a good way. In the blockchain, it's harder because you've got all this underlying infrastructure and stuff to provision and build. Often creators say, oh man, it's like doing chores. It's like, I just want to build cool stuff. I don't want to get in the weeds of all the tech. This is like, whoever cracks the code can unleash that heavy lifting so the artists can like feel good about kicking ass, taking names. Well, I'm being a little sly here because we've sort of broken it into three areas. And we've used blockchain to book and the platform. So we still think that gaming in the interactive platform has to have centralization. It has to have decision making. We have a great community between Twitter and Discord. We have over 30,000 people. And we have organizations that have already spawned themselves up or spun up to manage our land ownership and some of our guilds for some of our professions. But at the same time, they're allowing us to make decisions based on what the community wants. I mean, I've heard recently, I don't want to say it's a horror story, but it's been difficult that consensus based models for development have to get consensus and not everybody agrees. You still need a leadership. I mean, you still need sort of a captain on a ship to make sure that it is in order to... I mean, Penelope and the dictatorships aren't working well. I mean, Linux tried that and they worked for a while, but when they moved over to, we're going to make some decisions. I have an opinion, whether it's centralization, it's faster. Consensus systems can be diverse and time consuming. Well, they can be political as well. I mean, it can become a problem. So at the front end, we've got digital identity and that's all blockchain based. And at the back end, we have over 20 services, including DIDS and DITCOM, which is decentralized identifier communication and all our services are blockchain based. But in the middle, connected to NFTs, blockchain and everything else and to our digital identity, we have a game or a game platform or open world platform that is centralized, built on Unreal Engine, so that we can make those decisions that spur on individual development. It's an architecture. It is. I mean, this is essentially an operating environment. You can have the benefits of the decentralized, own your data, own your identity, and then have the middle be the playground and built. Now, that has to get done faster and you're constantly iterating. Exactly. So you need to have that. Exactly. So what are people saying about this? I mean, Tim, I think that makes a lot of sense. People are very intrigued. We're getting a lot of traction. First of all, Unreal Engine in the middle, brands love it because it provides a realistic view of a brand. Brands have spent hundreds of millions of dollars building brand equity and they don't necessarily want a cartoon representation of their brand. So brands love it. We showed a video here at the Monaco Crypto Summit of some of our videos available online on YouTube, but we're showing realistic, we can create realistic avatar. So people are really excited about what we're doing. You know, David, I think one of the things that I've had controversy statements in the past that got all the purists coming back to 2018 throwing tomatoes at me, but other halves like loving it. Because at that time, there was dogma, oh, the blockchain's got to be done. You know, it was slow and gas was there. So why, I can use a database. Now we use the blockchain for smart contracts, which that's what you want to do. You don't want to have that locked in. You want immutability. So again, there's opportunities to advance faster and not have to get stuck in the dogma, but maybe get back to it later. Database is a great example. I agree. I think over time, the community will take over the entire platform. But I think at the beginning, you have to have, again, you have to have a rudder on a ship to make it go somewhere. I mean, it's called product market fit. You've got to get to the market with the product people go, that's, I want that. Exactly. I mean, Unreal Engine is hard. One of some of the people you worked with, because I think what I like about what you're working on is that you are, and I think the great poster child of in terms of the organization of a group of people that are pros that want to do great work in a new world with the kind of experience and tools that they had in their old world, faster, cheaper, better, more control. When we were there at Web One, we're there at Web Two, and now with Web Three, we have the ability to fix some of the things that we thought were wrong with Web One and Two. And move into the ownership economy. And really, for us, we've got a great team of people around the world that we work with, and we're starting to bring in larger organizations to support us. I mean, our digital identity, we're really working with the backbone at IBM. And digital identity is very different in blockchain than is crypto. And we're working with great people in crypto now, and we announced today that we're minting our native token dubs with digital bits. So we're really excited about that. Congratulations. Yeah. Let me ask you a question, because I love the fact that you've borrowed multiple waves of innovation. Again, I've minted on that, but shared experience there. Different ride for different waves. What have you learned and shared to folks who are going to dip their toe and get on their surfboard, so to speak, use the California metaphor, so we're both Californians? What is Web Three Wave like? How's it different from Two? What's the learnings? Can you share? Our tissue experience, observation, anything around what you're doing now so that they can get insight into this wave? Well, you know, Web One and Web Two were broken. I mean, you could never go in, I think we had this discussion, you could never go into an electronic store in the real world, write your information down on a piece of paper and expect that you'd walk out of the store with a purchase. But we can type in information that is non-verified until I could take my friend's credit card, know where they live and use it. By using digital identity at a front end, we create one user, one account. That user can have thousands of verifiable credentials around them and hundreds of avatars. So I think what we've really learned is the ability to progress in a way that really puts data back in the hands of consumers and makes them the owner of their identity. By starting there, we have a world in front of us that is valuable to marketers, valuable to brands and valuable to individuals. And whether it's education, whether it's government services, whether it's retail, everything can be built on that simple premise that I am myself. It's interesting, there's a concept in technology we're called presence. You're present at an event, you're present at a store, you're present in some reality physically and you have credentials around that presence contextually. You're saying you can have one NFT, one digital identity or identity and have multiple identities that have contacts all stored. In an avatar, it's like changing your suit. Hey, I'm going into the Apple store, I'm now my Apple John. And think of it this way, brands can now connect with you and give you promos, give you product based on the information that you're willing to share with them about your real person and your avatar becomes your intermediary. So your payment information stored within your digital identity and your avatar, not at the retail level. So this is a concept we've been working on for a long time, I think we were talking about at dinner but I want to bring this up for you to comment and get a reaction to is that if what you just said is true, that means if I'm the user and I have power to control my data, the script flips, now I'm brokering my data to the brand. Exactly. Not the other way around or some intermediary. Exactly. I'm in control. And I could demand based on what my contextual relevance is to the brand. And the brand is willing to pay for that because if you think about it today, social media unfortunately is plagued by fake accounts and issues. And so brands are spending all this money and they're getting slippage and breakage and that's spent. If they know you're a real person, they're more likely to want to give you an incentive to engage with them because it's a one-to-one transaction that creates value. That's a great point you mentioned Twitter earlier. Look at Elon Musk uncovered all the bots on Twitter. And if they ever did it at the Facebook, I'm sure there's a ton of different accounts on Facebook, but it's out there. These walled gardens have various bad actors. Bad, it's not truth, what's the truth? I mean, gaming has this right now. It's like you're anonymous, you can go down, or you got to go real name. So you're going to- We've got a hybrid. You can do anonymously verified. So because we use biometrics to verify that you're a real person. So you can stay anonymous, but we know you're a real person because your biometrics belong to you. Well, David, great to have you on theCUBE. You've got a great insight and experience. Thanks for sharing. Thank you, John. What's next for you guys? You want to put a plug in for what you're working on. You're looking for people, funding, more action. What are you guys doing right now? Well, we've self-funded to date and we're finally going to be releasing opportunities for people to engage with us in tokenomics. And that's why we're working with digital bits. But we're also looking for great people and great partners. We're creating an interoperable open world where we want to bring partners to the table. So anyone who's interested, reach out to us. All right, David, we've got you. Thanks for going on theCUBE. All right, more coverage here on theCUBE. We're all over this area. We've been going back to 2018 when we brought theCUBE to all the events. Been covered on siliconangle.com since 2010. And watching this wave just get better. The reality is here, it is a metaverse world. It is a decentralized world happening to everyone, Monaco Crypto Summit here in Monaco. Thanks for watching. We'll be right back with more after this short break.