 Live from Toronto, Canada. It's theCUBE, covering Blockchain Futurist Conference 2018. Brought to you by theCUBE. Hello everyone, welcome to the live coverage here in Toronto. This is theCUBE's coverage of Blockchain Futurist event put on by Untraceable and the community here in Canada and around the world. I'm John Furrier with my coach, Dave Vellante, co-founders of theCUBE. We're here with CUBE alumni, Anthony Diorio, who's the founder and CEO of Decentral and JAX, the really cool product we're going to get into, but also the co-founder of Ethereum. Anthony, great to see you. Thanks for coming back on theCUBE. Thanks for having me again. So great keynote in typical Anthony Diorio fashion, no slides, you decide what you're going to talk about before you get up on stage, but you really kind of brought in. When I get on stage. When you get on stage, you come on, you do it. But it's the same, it's a nice theme. You're talking about the history, you're bringing in the community vibe, you're talking about the key milestones, you're really recognizing what the community's done. But more importantly, you're giving a roadmap for where you think the future's going and combined with the fact that you're also running Decentral and you got the JAX wallet. So really cool. So I want to ask you, where is it going and what's going on in the community from your perspective as of today? So where is this entire space going? I think it's going to be revolutionary. I think the infrastructure is being built out now, it's being built out for the last number of years. I think we're seeing more and more the interfaces and the ways that the masses are going to start connecting with these technologies. We're still being hindered by some problems with scalability, some other problems that are stopping these technologies, these decentralized techs from really spreading globally and being able to be utilized in a way that's going to make things faster, better and cheaper. But those problems will be solved and it's going to lead to revolutionary changes in every sector that you can imagine, every sector that generalize on third parties and intermediaries to facilitate things, technology is going to emerge, it's going to be able to make things better, make things faster. So I want to ask you something that I'm seeing a trend happen. Obviously we've seen the cycles of prices drop and crypto prices and a lot of people are focused on the mechanics of coin prices and so on and so forth. Also the international growth has been pretty massive. But you're starting to see two types of swim lanes. One is get this thing, get this coin out there, get it straight and get token economics going and then you've got builders. Building real products and durable companies are starting to see a trend now where people are starting to highlight the builders. People really looking at the longer term gain, trying to bring a token economics model but trying to get it right on building. And this is kind of a critical kind of inflection point in the industry where it's not just, hey, I want to make some cash, there's actually economic benefits of this revolution. But there's now a focus on the builders. People actually building technology, building companies. This is now the focus. This is what's becoming a legit deal, legit alpha entrepreneurs. Real communities are galvanizing around that. Your reaction to that dynamic happening right now? It's what we've always tried to do. With my company, with Decentral, we're not banking on a token. There's no raising and taking people's money to in order to token to grow and be the main focus of what we're doing. We may add a loyalty system in what we're doing down the road but it would never be something that we're collecting money for to actually make that as a main business. It's all about creating value. And our goal is to create the interface for all projects to be able to have the ability to manage and move value in their different platforms. So our goal has always been to not rely on a token-based system in order to create value. And we're seeing more and more that I think companies are realizing that you can have maybe some part of a token-based system but you really have to create value with it. And there's way too much idea of a token being the be-all and end-all and that's how we're going to base things. And there's too many of them out there right now. And I think that creating a real value and not banking just on that token being where you're going to make money is probably, that's the building stuff that needs to get done. Well, it's definitely a theme we've been hearing. Too many damn tokens and not enough value being created by those individual tokens. What's your take on the current sentiment? I mean, obviously people seeing the crypto prices. Your thoughts? There's just too much going on right now. And that's a good thing. And there's a lot of competition. But there's also very difficult to wade through all of the noise and wade through what's actually going to create value. And most of the stuff out there is not going to be valuable. It's not going to really radically, these companies and these projects that are emerging are not all of them are going to be successful and only a very few are actually going to create value. So I find it very difficult as the time is passing to identify what is going to be actually good and there's just too much out there and it becomes very difficult to actually identify those things. Well, somebody made the comment that we were doing a show yesterday here in Toronto and they said, you know, back then there was really only one Vitalik Buterin and now there's like zillions of them and they're all creating, you know, amazing ideas but there's a huge supply of those ideas and to your point now we're going to succeed. And it's ideas, but it's about execution too. And really can you carry that out? And that's the hardest part is the execution. And it's very difficult and there's a lot of people out there that struggle with that part. And they have an idea, they've got a paper, they build a team and it's like, well, how do we actually get it to create value? And then they're banking on their token value and they're not really creating something of substance that's going to be that value. But it's also due to limitations that that space has right now and mostly with scalability. And a big part of your effort is trying to reduce some of that friction, right? I mean, is that kind of the play? Yeah, our goal is to, when you build wallets or if you have to, a product has to build their own wallets, it takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of effort and it's really not what their focus should be on. And that's what our goal is to be is to build that interface that projects can use to move and manage their digital currencies and connect them with other projects and other services that their user-based needs. So what's missing is those interfaces now and that's what has always been my focus. You said this before we interviewed you in the Bahamas, we had a one-on-one, I also had a CUBE interview, but on the one-on-one, you were basically saying the wall is the new browser, which we like by the way, thought that was very relevant. And we see the wallet dynamic being central. The other thing that we heard yesterday and this has been a recurring theme in the industry is it's got to be easy to use. This whole system, it's like the internet, it's hard at first but then there's a chasm that's crossed on ease of use, that really will drive more adoption. So the notion of the centrality of why the wallet is critical and also the ease of use because like you said, entrepreneurs want to optimize their behavior time to build value, not about prices of their coin and their velocity and float and stock prices, when the reality is there's work to be done. That's right. You mean this is a real problem and it's opportunity, how is that wallet evolution going to emerge? How do you see it vis-a-vis potentially competition? What's your view now? Will there be a browser for every web page? Or wallet for every? That's what I mean. Our goal is to be the single interface for all those projects and that's our goal. We want to be able to have and expedite the way that we can bring new projects on board. It's difficult right now because you have a lot of different technologies in the background that we have to integrate and connect with. And things with Ethereum are pretty simple. Bitcoin, we've got ones like Bitcoin, but then there's all these new ones that are emerging too and they require a lot more effort and resources to do. That is our next goal, is to how do we figure out how to expedite getting all these projects in because we want to be the single thing. And it doesn't make sense that I've got to store or manage 20 different cryptocurrencies and I can only do some of them in Jax, I can do some of them in Kot, I've got to use other systems. It's really not a great user experience and that's what we're trying to perfect. Yeah, so you really only want, as a user, one or two browsers. You don't want... I'd say one browser, really, what you really want. And that's pretty much, you would say Chrome is what people are mostly using now and that's what happens over time. It may be a little bit of Safari, from some other stuff, whatever that, but you don't want four or five browsers, nobody uses three or four browsers. So the browser is the metaphor that you've used. Some people have said, well, it's really, the better metaphor is the app. There are like a zillions of apps on my phone. So help me understand why it's more browser than it is app. So I would say that you have browsers that have apps and integrations and then, so Chrome has extensions, those are apps. The browser itself is basically it's an interface where you can see what's going on and what allows you to move information. The wallet is what enables you to manage and move the value and we're going to have, we have integrations so I consider those of the apps that we'll have inside of the wallet that'll connect you to service providers that offer different value, different services. So I see it as the way for you to manage your keys and be able to navigate, but the apps will be baked into the wallet that will enable you to connect and buy and sell and trade and pay bills and all these things will be through apps. So that's why I see that as the interface as the browser. Talk about the dynamic around developers and one of the things that I've been saying on theCUBE and I'll say it here again, I think when you have volatility in pricing that scares the market or whether it's people speculate whether it's being manipulated or not, doesn't matter. If there's a scare factor, developers are in for the long game, when they pick a platform like Ethereum to work on, they're in for the long haul. So short term fluctuations shouldn't change behavior but there's now some dynamic where it kind of is and people are questioning that. How do you, what do you talk to those developers saying, stay the course, because Ethereum has the most developers, by far, what's the message to the developers? Don't worry, settle down, long game. They can, they got to make their own decisions on that. I think that with the industry is very market driven right now. Businesses having to, that are down to a fifth of what they were worth or what they have just in a few months really does take a toll and it really does, when you have a lot of growth plans and the things you want to do, it really does can put restrictions on that. So that's the world that it isn't. As for developers, and if they're passionate about what they're doing, especially with developers, they're generally going to do it. Regardless of the money, I usually find. So some might leave, some might come in, but it's generally what that individual person is going to do is whether they think they should keep going on it. But the markets, I mean, the markets do really play a factor in a lot of things. How do you plan your 12 month ahead when the markets take you down to have such a massive swing where you're now at 10% what you may have had back? It's really, really do play. You've got to pay attention. They're runwaying, it's short and big time. So Anthony, I was struck by your keynote today and other keynotes where I've seen you incredibly humble, such a successful individual. You talk about your humble beginnings, the grassroots, meetups, and I was struck by when you first read Vitalik's white paper, you said it was very comp, after two or three pages, you're like, yeah, your eyes are bleeding. So you went to Charles and you couldn't explain things. A lot of people feel like, okay, you've got to be an alpha geek to succeed in this business. Talk about your particular skill set and maybe share with the audience some of the skill sets that they can tap to succeed in this industry. So I hire a lot of developers. I'm not a developer. I need to interface with them, but I don't need to know into a lot of the nitty gritty and if you have good people working for you on that and they don't want to be meant and usually the ones that are leading stuff, they want to code and they want to do it. So I've always been the person that can bring the team together and build a team that's going to be able to carry that out without me necessarily being the person that's doing that. You can't do everything. I'm a generalist in a lot of different things. I am not very good at math. When Vitalik would write articles back in the day of a Bitcoin magazine, I would really read them and then he gets into his formulas and stuff and it's just not something I can do. So I'm a generalist that does a number of different things and I can put the teams together and I can figure out ways to monetize and I can figure out ways to gather the right people together, but I'm not a developer, I'm not a coder and that's fine. And I think it's the entrepreneurs that really are the ones that lead the things. I've always found I can hire developers. I think to have developers that are running projects, they're generally not their specialty is to be able to manage the whole operations on a whole team. And I think that's what Ethereum has suffered from since 2014. I think there was a, we had eight founders split between developers and business people and it led to a divide that eventually was turned into more of a developer focused project and that's where it's been since. And what that's enabled is people such as myself, Joseph Luga and Charles Hodgson to do our own things and be able to do great things. And I think that you need a mixture of people with different sets of skills and I think at the end of the day though, it's the vision of the entrepreneur, of the person that takes the risks and is able to bring together all facets of something, not just necessarily the technical side or the developer side of things. What are the conditions that have made Toronto such an epicenter for blockchain development? I think it's mostly community. I think very early on from the start of the meetups that I did and them growing and continuously doing them from 2012, 2013, 2014 to having people such as Vitalik being from here, other entrepreneurs, there's just been a culture here in blockchain here that people have recognized and you're starting to see a lot of VCs, a lot of people taking their trips up here and you're getting kind of like something's happening here in Toronto and what's caused that and I think, honestly I think a lot of us do with the meetups, I think the central and creating a physical hub that allowed the community to grow and start thinking about ideas and bringing people together, I think can put a lot of impact in it has played a lot of that factor. A lot of talent too I think. And I think the talent, yeah, there's talent, but it's not just the developers though too, it's entrepreneurs. Developers are one part of this animal and they're an important part, but it's the idea of the sparks risk-taking and it's about putting together many pieces of the puzzle and developers have one aspect of it and I think it's more of the entrepreneurship that has actually created that. This is a lot of talent in a lot of places. I've lived in Silicon Valley for 20 years now, moving to East Coast and there's a striking difference back in the class of venture capital. Silicon Valley was where the action was, in venture because of the ecosystem, the money capital formation, risk-taking capabilities and people have tried to replicate Silicon Valley, Silicon Beach, Silicon Nest, Silicon Net, but with blockchain and crypto token economics for the first time the capital formation's different. The teams are warming in a different way where you're starting to see an imagination of entrepreneurial epicenters and it's not trying to be Silicon Valley, but the results still the same, but that's what blockchain's all about. It's reimagining something that can be done better more efficiently. So you start to see Toronto, you start to see outside the United States with a lot of capital formation, a lot of entrepreneurial energy. Blockchain and crypto certainly has community. Again, that's the perfect storm. This is impacting the entrepreneurial. It's also regulatory stuff as well and I think for Toronto and Canada to be doing what it's done in unregulatory uncertainty, like we don't know what's really, what's going to happen here. And that I think has stifled things to where it really could be because you do have a lot of companies here that will set up in the Caribbean country or set up in Europe, they're setting up in Switzerland because they don't know the playing field of what they have to deal with here and that's something that's in their days and it's the countries that figure that part out along with how do they spark and bring the entrepreneurs in and I think the regulatory climate it takes a massive factor in that and we've been able to do in Toronto and Canada what we've been able to do despite having the clarity and certainty in that space. And that's a red flag I think that people should pay attention to. Don't lose the entrepreneurial energy to another domicile location. All right, final question for at least for me, Dave might have one. As someone looking out over the landscape certainly you've been involved as on a business end and putting teams together on the Ethereum communities as well as your own company. Looking out at the landscape we spoke in February and so at Polycon and now in going forward. What's the state of the union in decentralization of applications and token economics and blockchain? What's your view of the current situation as the market is what it is now and certainly is going to continue to evolve? What's the state of the union from Anthony Dior's perspective? So it's just keep doing what we're doing keep building things, keep building on infrastructure. I've toned down a lot of investments I've toned down a lot of things and I focus on that just because A, it's very, very difficult now to distinguish between projects. It's very hard. B, I have a lot of investments which are going to grow over the next few years and my focus is now on doing my business stuff. I think we are going to weed out a lot of the people that aren't creating value in this space and that aren't going to be along for the rides and when they see the markets go down they're going to disappear but then they come back in and things are going to thrive. We've seen this before. It's not a new thing in this space. Things are going down then they go higher then they go down then they go higher again and it's been on generally a pretty good incline. We're just in the down thing right now and that's okay, let's keep plugging away and keep building on infrastructure. Yeah, and that's a clear theme you see here and other events, meetups, underpinning optimism, right? It's still there. The innovation is still there. People are very excited. Do you think there's an emphasis on builders? I mean, obviously you just basically say the value creators are going to be the center of the action. Do you think that the industry globally recognizes that the legit players creating value are the ones that are going to be rewarded and recognized? Are we not there yet? Close enough. That's an interesting question. I think I mentioned that's what's going to happen but I think right now there's a lot of people trying to make a lot of quick money. I think those people will be weeded out and I think it will come down to those value creators, those people that are really building things up that will be the ones that last just like we saw with the internet. Same type of thing. You have the hype, you have it grow, you have it blow up and then you have the slow, steady value added producers that will be the ones that actually are going to be able to. Like I said, we've seen it before. It's just a lot faster of what happened over time. Determine how many cycles you live in this industry. You know, we've talked about that before. Dave and I have been through many waves as have you. Thanks so much for taking the time to come on. Give a quick plug on what's happening with Jax. Essentially an amazing New York trip. Your exclusive boat party was well talked about. You had the two cars you gave away but you laid out the future 3.0. Is Jax Wally got some other products? What's the status of Jax? How's it going and when can people get their hands on it and how are you onboarding customers? Give the update on the Jax wallet. So the Jax 2.0 called Jax Liberty is out in beta right now. You can download it on different platforms. What it is is a interface that does much more than just being a wallet. It's your charts, your graphs, your news, your portfolio, apps, it's gamified with leveling up experience points. We're going to connect you with our partners, all these different services. Really to be the center point of that one single interface that you're going to have for everything for your digital life. That's the goal for that. Where you can be in control of your money, your identity, your communications. And Liberty is coming out in the next couple of weeks, the full release. And that's really going to be our flagship product. And I think it's going to be the thing that's going to create a single place for people to use in our space. Can developers, are developers going to be able to tap into this capability? So as we as developers, will we be able to not only use the wallet, will there be APIs and interfaces into the wallet? Yeah, so right now when we put integrations in, what are we coming over the next many months? Will it be us actually integrating with our partners? But eventually our goal is to have SDKs where you could use our backend infrastructures, our connections to the blockchains that we can give the tools people create their own, their own utilities and their own applications inside of JAX. Well, we certainly want to continue the conversation. Great to have you on. Of course, with the CUBE token that we want for our media business, we want JAX on the wallet. Anthony Diorio, industry leader, pioneer, also running a great business right now. It's essential in JAX. Here on theCUBE, given us the straight scoop, a shortcut to the truth. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. Live coverage here in Toronto, part of Untraceable's flagship event here with all the best people in the blockchain industry, the Futurist Conference. We'll be right back with more after this short break.