 on the ground, presented by theCUBE. Here's your host, Jeff Frick. Jeff Frick here. We are on the ground in downtown San Francisco at the Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center. I've never been at the Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center. Pretty interesting location for a small but growing conference, the Bitcoin Conference, excuse me, Blockchain Conference here in San Francisco. We just had another Blockchain Conference about a month ago. So the Blockchain thing has really taken off and it's interesting that it's Blockchain Conferences, not Bitcoin Conferences. So we've got a couple of guests lined up. We're excited to jump into it. So our first guest is Aldo Carrascozo. Welcome, he is the founder and COO of AlignCommerce. Welcome, Aldo. Well, thanks for having me. So I just wanted to add, it used to be a lot of Bitcoin Conferences. Now it's just shift tremendously to all Blockchain ones. And you could see it throughout the years. Interesting. Yeah, so before we jump into that, why don't you give everybody a little background on what you guys are up to and the company. Perfect. So AlignCommerce essentially, we allow businesses in 60 countries to send and receive payments with each other through email. And we use the Blockchain as a settlement rail. So we make all payments local. And what's good about it is we're actually no longer using correspondent banks that make exorbitant fees. So that's what Align does. So let's follow up on the Blockchain versus Bitcoin. You were just on a panel in the main session and you just said there's not as many Bitcoin Conferences anymore, they're Blockchain. What are the differences between the two and why do you see kind of the shift of focus moving away necessarily the bright light on Bitcoin and we're hearing a lot more about Blockchain? Well, I think the whole concept of the Blockchain was introduced by Bitcoin the currency. So I think Bitcoin the currency was a very good use case specifically to show the greatness of the distributed ledger of the Blockchain. So what happened was you've got this whole Bitcoin trend that allowed people to send and receive value essentially in a distributed way without needing anyone in between. So it became a trustless system. So, and then now you've got this whole Blockchain revolution wherein you could apply this outside the use case of just sending and receiving funds. Now it's interesting on the Bitcoin piece because I always thought Bitcoin would be a lot better off if it wasn't so speculative. As a vehicle for holding value, exchanging value, I want something a little bit more stable and it seemed like a lot of the early adopters were much more about the speculation getting in on early on something. So I would imagine within a Blockchain application you don't necessarily have kind of this market volatility in terms of exchanging value. Yeah, I think one of the more important things is Bitcoin and the Blockchain, well the public ones at least they're coupled with each other and we always refer to them as the Yin and Yang. Essentially they work together right now to one is the use case, one is the protocol and you're seeing a lot of companies actually take out this whole Blockchain concept outside again of this transfer of value into use cases like the Internet of Things, allow machine to machine learning. Other larger FIs are actually using it to replace their old payment processing or transaction processing systems with one that will basically save a ton of fees. So is it really eliminating friction and what friction did you guys see in financial transactions that you decided to go after as a company? Because I think it was interesting in your talk, you talked about applications. It's like anything else, it's really what is the application? What are you trying to do? So what application did you guys seize on when you founded the company? Yeah, so we always say the Blockchain can be used, for any company that's thinking of using the Blockchain they have to think of their use case. It's not based on ideology nor is it based on currency. I think it's based on a specific use case and acceptance. Now the use case that Align Commerce wanted to go after really was the cross-border payments use case. So typically when funds are sent and received across borders let's say you're sending funds to the Philippines if it goes through a series of intermediate or respondent banks. Every time it hits a bank, you have this fee, like a toll fee. And then we realized that at the end of the day the problem wasn't just the payment, the problem was even the settlement, the problem was even the reconciliation. So Align wanted to do was essentially combine the payment, the communication, and the PII protocol into one. So we're able to couple the payment with the information at the same time. So Blockchain was perfect for this. Was there a particular vertical or particular industry, a particular type of transactions where you guys saw the opportunity and jumped in? Yeah, I mean we always saw that the small and medium businesses never had preferred relationships with their banks. Like if you were an SMB, you had to haggle FX rates, you had to source FX and sometimes banks wouldn't give you preferred rates. And then we realized that they actually, they provide a tremendous amount of fees. So I think on our last count, $50 billion worth of fees are attributed to the SMEs. So essentially we're trying to help these small guys play with the big guys when making all payments local. Okay, and then so do you just take a smaller fee than they would get it from their bank because they're not working kind of on that preferred status, is that how you guys make money? Essentially Align commerce, there's no fees to send and receive. We do have an interbank rate which is 190 basis points above what you find in Google or Reuters. Okay, great. So you've been at this for a while. It's 2016 March. Where are we in kind of the adoption of blockchain? We were just all panel with Microsoft was up there, Intel was up there, IBM is talking a lot about blockchain. Where are we kind of thinking the evolution of this whole thing? You know what's interesting is, back in the day when I was attending panels three, four years ago, you would see none of the big institutions. And I'm actually going to be in another panel where it's all big banks, it's all big FIs, asset managers. And they're really, really interested in how they can use this. And again, it's not just for minimizing and making sure that their transaction processing fees, they're trying to cut out their own, how do I say this, their own middlemen, they have their own. And they're using the blockchain essentially find ways to improve transaction processing, make it near real time and at the same time, save on fees. It's interesting, John from IBM said, the banks did read Clayton Christensen. So they are going to kill themselves before somebody else does. So that's good. Well, thanks for spending a few times. Good luck on the company. We'll keep an eye on you. Good luck on the panel this afternoon. Thanks for having me, Jeff. Absolutely. I'm Jeff Frick. We are live in San Francisco at the Nasdaq Enterprise Center at Blockchain San Francisco.