 Well, we're unwelcome to this special exclusive CUBE conversation here in the studios in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furry, co-host of the CUBE co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media. We have exclusive breaking launch here from a CUBE alumni, Albert Gio, who's the founder and CEO of FuseChain, a hot startup going after the blockchain. It's a little bit of open source. This is a launch. This is new information, how you're coming out. You're still in stealth, but for the first time talking about your new project. Again, CUBE alumni, welcome to this CUBE conversation. Thank you for having me, John. So you're the founder and CEO of FuseChain. That's correct, yeah. So you're just in Miami, 5,000 people at these blockchain conferences which are exploding. It's the biggest wave crypto and blockchain in tandem are creating a very attractive intoxicating market. I mean, it's the biggest wave we've seen and all the alpha entrepreneurs are going out there. You know, there's some scammers too are trying to get into this market. We've documented that on CUBE, but it's the biggest wave we've seen in a long time. You're out there. Talk about what is FuseChain? What's the story? Give us the updates. Sure, sure. So FuseChain is a blockchain technology company really founded to support a new open source project that is also coming out of stealth mode called the digital bits project. It's focused on disrupting the coalition loyalty industry. What we refer to as let's say 1.0 loyalty and rewards. We feel that that market is right for disruption, a lot of friction, other things I'm happy to talk about in that space. And we feel that blockchain and a decentralized model with the right partners and coalition could change the game. So you got a T-shirt for us, appreciate it called digital bits. New open source project, but I like about what you're doing. First of all, you got a great track record. You got a ton of startups you've done in the past. And again, great exits and you always have a good eye for where this disruption certainly crypto is dislocating industries, not just disrupting, radically changing the makeup. So before I dig in, I want to get into digital bits. A little bit open source. So you got an open source project combined with what you guys doing. So it sounds like either red hat, what red hat was for Linux, you're for digital bits, is that? That's right. So FuseChain is focused on building applications that are interoptable with that blockchain to support enterprises such as merchants, retailers, hotels, so forth, that would be working with the digital bits project. And so we feel that there's an opportunity to monetize that, building let's say SaaS type models around these applications in supporting and helping make digital bits very successful. So it's interesting, I was observed when I was in New York last fall and I walked into a funds conversation with a bunch of guys and people were trying to grok where the action was and I kind of raised my hand and said, you can tell the good deals are the ones that are going to take down an incumbent industry, not just the player. You're taking a similar approach, which I like about what your deal is. What is it about your approach and what is the target and how are you going to attack that? Sure, sure. So first and foremost, really focused on blockchain and what was important for us, characteristic-wise, and we felt that it needed to be rapid transaction in terms of nature, right? So seconds as opposed to blocks, let's say every 10 minutes like Bitcoin, for example, because we were focused ultimately on let's say the consumer space. So we first and foremost focused on how our approach to developing this protocol in supporting the digital business project. From there, it was what industry that we feel would be best suited for this and this is how we gravitated to the loyalty industry. There's kind of already a learned behavior in loyalty. People look at points as, let's say, a form of currency. They know how to, let's say, go join one, earn and what have you. It's kind of like human mining, if you will. And so we wanted to fit, let's say, blockchain technology into loyalty as opposed to fitting loyalty into blockchain. The other thing that I liked in terms of us going in this direction was really looking at, I mean, there's a lot of different ICOs, blockchain projects out there and so forth. We're the first to market with this, we're the first to market with that, but what's the incumbent doing in corporate America, let's say? They're probably sitting and waiting. And there's nothing preventing them from copycatting and doing the same when there's enough of an established market. What I liked about loyalty, more specifically the coalition models, we didn't feel that with a decentralized model putting into the market a decentralized model that they could replicate that quite the same way. Kind of like if you look at Netflix and what they did to Blockbuster. Blockbuster could not pivot quite the same way. We feel that loyalty dot one, more specifically the coalition programs will have a challenges in adopting blockchain in a similar manner. And so we feel that for that reason, what we're up to here with this latest venture is going to be highly disruptive. Let's go through the business model after we talk a little bit about the actual tech and the product. So you have digital bits and notice you guys have a trademark on that going on. So okay, but it's going to be open source. So what is digital bits? Is that the coin? Is it a utility token? Talk about how does it work? What are you actually doing? So digital bits is the name of the open source project. It's the name of the blockchain protocol. It will be the name of the cryptocurrencies while the native cryptocurrency to that blockchain once it's put into circulation. And the project itself, we will ultimately see that spun into a foundation. So it's the name of all of the above in terms of what digital bits is. FuseChain is a contributor to that project and we obviously like what it stands for. We're building parallel, let's say, management platforms and so forth. Others are free to do this as well and have begun to do so that will help make that project successful. You know, in other words- So people can take the code from digital bits and apply it, but you're going to be the token in the project. Yeah, if you think of like, use red as an example, right? So there was an open source project out there with various Linux-type projects, right? Back in the day. And big enterprises wanted to take advantage of that. But who was going to support them in doing that? So Red Hat's obviously established a very successful market in doing that. So in a similar manner, we want to support digital bits in a very big way. We're building applications that businesses are going to need so they don't have to go build them themselves and we'll bring those to market. Who are your targets? Are you targeting existing businesses that have loyalty? You're trying to take that business away from it? Is it net new? What's the target market- So the collision loyalty industry is fairly well established. What does that mean, coalition? Coalition, so multi-merchant. So in the United States, there's a brand known as Plenty. It happens to be owned by American Express, but you can go to Macy's and they're in Plenty, Exxon Mobile and so forth. Canada is a very, very big market for this as well. So you have Air Miles, major grocery store changes. They're always inspiring. I hate these programs. Well, that's the other issue with them, right? So there's tremendous friction and frustration now with these programs that exist and we're looking to disrupt that as well. So how do they work with you? Give an example of the use case of power. So ultimately, we feel that, so from a coalition standpoint, oftentimes the merchant is paying a reoccurring fee to support that program. So let's say a big grocery store or a hotel or what have you. And in order for the privilege of their customers to be able to earn, let's say, while shopping online at their store or in that facility, just for the privilege of their users to be able to earn, the merchant is having to pay the operator of that program before the consumer has done anything with those points. And so it's a big cost to them. And we basically, just to sort of quantify, that could be as much of a 80% savings versus what the merchant would have to pay to support 1.0 to support this decentralized blockchain based solution. So are you guys a decentralized application? Are you a decentralized platform? Are you an infrastructure protocol? How do you categorically define yourself? Yeah, so digital bits is definitely an infrastructure protocol, but focused specifically on loyalty and rewards. And so, and just to, it's really open in that sense that various businesses and so forth can join and support this in a number of different ways, whether it's preexisting products, platforms that they have, they want it to be interoptable or they simply want their users to be able to now earn this form of loyalty. And we have, in the coming weeks, you'll see announcements from other brands, some, let's say, blue chip-ish, and others up and coming early stage companies with doing loyalty in a different way, joining the digital bits project to take advantage of the tokenized economy. I like this red hat to Linux and MetaForbes. I think no one's actually, I haven't seen that yet, I see a lot of a needle in happening certainly at the infrastructure, the decentralized apps or de-apps as they're called is a huge growth market. We see a big tsunami coming with de-apps, decentralized applications. So, will I be writing decentralized apps on your platform infrastructure? Is that what they're doing? How are they implementing in your mind the fused chain and the digital bits? So, I mean, there's basic examples of products in market already, let's say multi-coin wallets, right? If they want to enlist digital bits as another cryptocurrency that their app supports, then they can support the project in that way. So, there's a number of different ways that developers or established businesses- I can build my own wallet, I can integrate it into a pre-existing multi-coin wallet. But you're pretty flexible, you're agnostic on how that gets done. Exactly, exactly. And so, and this is why ultimately digital bits will be spun into a foundation that will establish some policies around this. So, it's not completely naked, there's some governance. That's always tricky, you got to be careful. Well, governance from the standpoint of, I'm looking at it from the perspective of how merchants, the terms by which they would disseminate digital bits to their consumers. So, some lightweight governance, is it hardcore governance or lightweight? No, no, I would say lightweight. So, it's making sure that there's no bad actors, at least at the time of- Is that going to be a non-profit or part of the fused chain? No, no, non-profit. Okay, okay, so let's get into some of your journey. Obviously, entrepreneurial journeys are happening all the time. A lot of people are jumping into the ICO and our crypto blockchain as a start. A lot of my alpha friends are doing it, it's just like, wow, it's like, this is a big trend, because it's disruptive. Wherever there's disruption, you're going to have entrepreneurs, but also scammers, we'll get that in a second. But, talk about your journey. Obviously, you have to get formed, get a little firm. It could be expensive, we've documented theCUBE with Goodwin, a law firm in the Valley that's doing a lot of ICOs. It could be expensive, there's tax consequences. So, how are you looking at as an entrepreneur? Yeah, so you get an opportunity recognition, check. Now you've got to put it together. Utility token, are you raising money? Are you doing an ICO? Can you give us some details? So, it's a utility token. We are raising money. Fused chain initially is focused on raising capital. Let's call it the old-fashioned way. So, fused chain itself is taken in equity investment, not involving any, let's say, cryptocurrency. So, no token sales on that, it's simply just. To date, but digital bits itself will be, you know, partaking in raising capital for the project. With fused chains, ICO or their own ICO? No, no, it would be the digital bits projects. So, will the ICO go through fused chain or will it go through digital bits? It will go through digital bits. Okay, so you got a utility, so that involves a token sale. So, you're going to do a private, that's equity for fused chain, and then a token sale for digital bits. Correct. Okay, that's a nice structure. Call it the pre-sale in advance of it actually being widely disseminated. So, what is the utility of the platform? Because that's the Howie test. Yeah, so we're keeping it really simple to start. We feel that we'll be able to demonstrate other utilities with this project. But similar to other projects out there, if you're familiar with like Ripple and Stellar and so forth, some basic utility. You need to have some of the coin to be able to send coin. And so, we're keeping it relatively simple from that perspective. There's security benefits and- So, the utility you're going after at launch is token sharing? Correct. Okay, and the activity is loyalty based to the merchants? Yes, and consumers. So, ultimately, digital bit stands for all these sort of things I just mentioned. Integrated together in this decentralized model really focused on getting back to users. So, first and foremost, users being consumers that use these programs and the merchants that have historically supported these types of programs. In addition to that, digital bits is also focused on society, giving back to society. More specifically, aligning itself with charitable organizations worldwide that the project itself will be able to get back to. You're an infrastructure guy. Last time it was a huge success. We sold it on exit, you know, peering and networking. You have one big global network now. So, I got to get your perspective as an entrepreneur and now you've been traveling. We're trying to get you in last week here on theCUBE to talk about your project. You're getting out there now, but you've seen a lot of the events. You're out in the field. You're out in the trenches. What's the landscape like in crypto and blockchain? Can you offer any- Yeah, absolutely. Observations, good, bad and ugly, what's it take? I was, for example, more recently last week, I attended the North American Bitcoin Blockchain Conference down in Miami, nearly 5,000 people, tremendous buzz, great pedigree among speakers, both domestic speakers worldwide, and people, I would say, of all walks of life. A lot of people are interested in either in the space or very interested in the space. And I mean, I don't have the numbers in terms of what the attendance was last year at that conference, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's 10X in terms of size. I mean, are these news in tech, are they tech gurus? What's the makeup and profile of some of the folks in here? Overstock.com CEO, one of the keynote speakers of this event, obviously a very well-established company heavy in blockchain with their subsidiary, T-Zero, as well as some of the up-and-comers, great pedigree more specifically associated with the blockchain space, but really supporting a lot of these events and being great evangelists for all things blockchain. So I got to get your perspective on again, you've seen many ways of innovation. We were talking before we came on camera. I've been saying, and we've been talking privately in the Valley here and in other places, that this is like the dot-com bubble, but it's accelerated. Everyone's getting their surfboards and jumping out in this big wave. So some think there will be a crash. I think there'll be a kind of, probably a reset. There's just too much action happening. And again, the dot-com bubble, everything actually happened. So it's a little anecdote there, but the point is, there's some scammers, there's some bubble activity. How are you sorting through that noise? What should people look through them? Because when people are like, well, I'm skeptical, Al, you're on a, you're riding a hype wave right now. What's the real deal? I mean, the reality is with anything super exciting, it always, there's always scammers. This is known, I mean, if you take traditional stocks, there's always the penny stock scammers, let's say. And so this is not necessarily something exclusive to blockchain, tokens, or what have you. We see this in the traditional capital market systems and equities that are out there today. I'd say that this is very much mid-90s internet in terms of equivalent. The benefit of blockchain is that the internet exists. So social networking, Facebook, I mean, the ability to get news out there, widely disseminated. The internet exists, and that infrastructure is helping support the rapid growth trend that we're seeing with blockchain. So I would say that it will, it is a bigger phenomenon than the internet was in the 90 by virtue of the internet now existing. So I gotta ask you, so one of the things I always say is that there's no value being created, it's really a mirage, right? So what's interesting about blockchain is that there's a lot of value creation opportunities. As an entrepreneur, you get to see that, and certainly you see it from the fuse chain and digital bits. If someone said to you, ow, this thing's a bunch of hype, where's the value? Where is the value? Why is crypto and blockchain attracting all these entrepreneurs? Why is it so intoxicating? Why is it attracting all walks of life? What's the value creation opportunity? Yeah, put cryptocurrencies aside for a moment and just focus on blockchain as a technology and really what it stands for. It is truly revolutionary. This is something that with the ability to have distributed ledgers, solving the double spend issue, all of these things that historically could not be done with the internet or other forms of technology. And so it's very powerful in terms of its applications in areas of let's say even supply chain and how businesses can have this sort of trusted collaborative platform or technology where you don't have to trust any centralized corporation, other institution or what have you, and it just works. So that is, it's the technology itself, it's highly powerful and it's already evident that it's touching a number of different industries. So outside of the cryptocurrencies, let's say craze, blockchain is definitely here, it's here to stay and it's going to just continue to share. So it's a fundamental infrastructure shift. Absolutely. All right, so let me give you the old snarky comment that I get on Facebook all the time. So, John, Crypto, it's on this blockchain. Have you seen a distributed database before? Right, LOL. So that's kind of some snarky comment. So the main series will be like, it's just a distributed database ledger and then some people will be like, I just don't see the business case. Why do people actually need blockchain? So what's your take on those two points? So I think that, I mean that's a great way to look at it. Can you solve that problem with just using a regular database? And probably oftentimes the answer is yes. So blockchain shouldn't necessarily be used for everything, but there's certain things that historically, and again, we're seeing- Smart contracts is one. Exactly. Immutable smart contracts. And so there's a number of industries where having it be blockchain based is definitely better than dealing with distributed databases. I mean, I've been calming. I'm pro blockchain, as you know. I'm pretty biased, people know that. However, what I say to folks is, look it, there's a dynamic going on here that's revolutionary at the infrastructure level. I think that's true. I think that'll play out. And I think immutability and then the decentralized nature of apps, it will be a whole other genre of software development, whether it's media entertainment to software. But ultimately it's these communities. If you look at in the media business, I was just at Sundance, there's new artists coming on that have their own audiences, right? So those are crushing the elites. So you have a revolution where the common person or group of people could get together in an unstructured way, decentralized way, to take on elite or huge industry incumbents or industries themselves. That's a phenomenon that's kind of nuanced. Absolutely. But it's real. It's absolutely real. I mean, think of an open source traditionally. You needed your employer to sponsor you, right? Okay, if I work for you, can I spend 10% of my time on an open source project? The open source project itself never really had a mechanism to provide some form of remuneration. Now by tokenizing and so forth, these native, let's say, currencies, an idea can provide a potential for reward. And we're seeing that happen. And so, but it's no different than any other great idea. 90 plus percent of startups don't necessarily make it. 90 plus percent of blockchain ideas may not make it, but the reality is a community with a great idea can kick off a project on their own and it could stand the test of time. Red Hat became popular from Linux, which was a second tier citizen in open source. Now it's tier one, obviously open source is running things. So I got to ask you a final question on the business model. How are you guys planning on making money? Is it from supporting the open source project specifically? More service? Is it on the coin side? Is it managing the coins? Where do you guys, do you have visibility yet into that business model? So I would say yes to what you just said. So FuseChain will create shareholder value in a few different ways. One, obviously being one of the first supporters to the digital bits project, we obviously want to see that project a wildly successful coin appreciation. And so the asset appreciation that potentially could occur there will create shareholder value for FuseChain. In addition to that, FuseChain is building applications that will be SaaS-like in model. We'll be able to derive reoccurring revenue, free meantime models, but we'll derive reoccurring revenue. Support of the ecosystem of creating the digital bits and evolve. Merchants you could go build software yourself or here's a subscription based platform that you can use and we'll provide support as well. Having fun? I'm having a blast. It's like a, it's the 90s all over again. Get the twinkle in the eye. Okay, I got to say it's super intoxicating. You know, I'll take a hit of that blockchain in next segment with you. Appreciate it, it's really awesome. Blockchain and crypto, really amazing revolution. We're doing our part to unpack it, analyze it and also look at the good deals out there. This is SiliconANGLE's theCUBE here in Palo Alto, I'm John Furrier, special exclusive CUBE conversation with FuseChain coming out, talking about their project for the first time, Digital Bits with Albergio, the founder and CEO. Thanks for watching. Get a hit of that blockchain, David.