#739 Human Readable Domains Deep Dive w/ Brantly Millegan & Matthew Gould

Brantly Millegan is the Director Of Operations at ENS (Ethereum Naming Service) and Matthew Gould is the Co-Founder & CEO of Unstoppable Domains. This is a special episode with two guests, completely dedicated to human readable domains. Through this service, Crypto users are able to set customizable wallet addresses instead of an address based on random numbers and letters. It's something I think about a lot when buying, selling or transacting on-chain. The advancement of human readable domains is a necessity as we continue to scale-up the industry. In this episode, both guests present their product solution to this problem. ======================= BlockFi provides financial products for crypto investors. Products include high-yield interest accounts, USD loans, and no fee trading. To start earning today visit: http://www.blockfi.com/Pomp ======================= Choice is a new self-directed IRA product that I'm really excited about. If you are listening to this, you are likely part of the 7.1 million bitcoin owners who have retirement accounts with dollars in them, but not bitcoin. I was in that situation too. Now you can actually buy real Bitcoin in your retirement account. I'm talking about owning your private keys and using tax-advantaged dollars to do it too. Absolute game changer. https://www.retirewithchoice.com/pomp ======================= Circle is a global financial technology firm that enables businesses of all sizes to harness the power of stablecoins and public blockchains for payments, commerce and financial applications worldwide. Circle is also a principal developer of USD Coin (USDC), the fastest growing, fully reserved and regulated dollar stablecoin in the world. The free Circle Account and suite of platform API services bridge the gap between traditional payments and crypto for trading, DeFi, and NFT marketplaces. Create seamless, user-friendly, mainstream customer experiences with crypto-native infrastructure under the hood with Circle. Learn more at circle.com.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Today's episode is a very special one. I've been thinking a lot about the lack of human readable domains, or the human readable addresses when buying, selling, or simply trying to access various wallets and addresses on-chain. The long string of letters and numbers is very difficult to use, and probably is a very large obstacle for mainstream adoption. In order to better understand this problem, and also some of the potential solutions, I've brought on two separate guests for today's podcast. The first is Brently Milligan from ENS. ENS is something that we will talk about in the first half of the podcast. And

• 0:47Anthony Pompliano?

  then I've brought on the founder and CEO of Unstoppable Domains, Matt Gold, and that we will talk about in the second half of the podcast. I hope you enjoy this deep dive on the problem and two of the potential solutions that everyone is focused on. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is BlockFi. BlockFi provides financial products for crypto investors. Those products include a high-yield interest account, a US dollar loan product against your crypto collateral, and a no-fee cryptocurrency trading platform. BlockFi also just released a brand-new product, a Bitcoin Rewards credit card. It's a normal credit card that when you swipe it, you earn back Bitcoin rather than cash back or airline miles. Normal credit card,

• 1:29Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:14Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:59Anthony Pompliano?

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• 3:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Visit circle.com/pomp to book a meeting with one of their experts. Again, circle.com/pomp to book a meeting with one of the experts at Circle who will help you figure out how to manage your corporate or institutional funds or your treasury to earn higher yield. All right, let's get into this episode with Lynn. I hope you guys enjoy this one.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. So I think we've got Brantley with us now.

• 4:27Anthony Pompliano?

  You there?

• 4:28Speaker 02

  Hey.

• 4:29Anthony Pompliano?

  How are you, man?

• 4:30Speaker 02

  Good, and I'm Brantly dot east.

• 4:34Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, let's get started first. There's people who are very excited that we're doing this. Help me understand your thought process, the framework you use to evaluate the problem, right, in terms of kind of the legacy, long string of letters and numbers. How do you think about why that's a problem? Could we actually scale and reach billions of users with it? If we didn't have other solutions, like just talk to us about the problem to start with.

• 4:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, so obviously not. I mean, so, you know, these will be like the early years when we were copying and pasting, you know, Bitcoin, Ethereum addresses. But that that's not the future, and I don't think really anybody thinks that. Yeah, so so our principles for how to solve this problem are a couple. So one, we think that this is the type of, so like naming and identity, this is the type of thing that's like a public utility. Like, nobody should own the the naming system of the Internet. So this is true of DNS, actually. So like DNS itself, that the core part of it is a, you know, nonprofit, open protocol of the Internet. There are companies that then have the consumer facing side. So they have this interesting hybrid model.

• 5:43Speaker 02

  But DNS itself, you know, it's just like a neutral protocol of the Internet. So we think that still holds true here. So we think things should be, you know, open, public, neutral. And that has really informed how we've gone about doing DNS. I can talk more about that in a second. Another key principle is that the Internet already has a naming system. And so with DNS, you know, there wasn't really a widely used thing when it was started. It was new, but now we do. And so we think it's best for users and best for the success of the technology if we try to remain as compatible with the existing namespace as for as long as possible. So like, you know, we're not trying to like replace DNS anytime.

• 6:28Speaker 02

  You know, DNS, for what it does, it does it really well. Okay, right. But we want to complement and expand it of a new capabilities and to kind of.

• 6:38Speaker 02

  Bring the internet to this new decentralized blockchain future, but with as few collisions and problems as possible.

• 6:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so when you start to think about what has been built today, let's start with just what is the actual product and what does it support? What assets does it allow for somebody to receive or send? And then what are the use cases of which people are using that product today?

• 7:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, so ENS is not a product. It's a protocol. There is no for-profit company behind it. It's self-running on the Ethereum blockchain. You can interact with it directly. You don't have to interact with any company to interact with it. You just submit transactions to it and it works automatically. That's for like registering as well. And even the revenue that comes from it goes back to the protocol. So, you know, we launched a DAO earlier this month. We can talk about that. It just goes back to the community, back to the protocol. So, ENS has two types of names on it. So, it has .eth names, which are native to ENS. They only exist on ENS. They don't exist on traditional DNS, although ENS is

• 7:44Speaker 02

  in a special position where there's no chance of name collisions with DNS. It's an observed space. I could talk more into the details of that, but that's very important to us. And .eth names give you the full benefits of being blockchain native. So, full self-custody, like the user, you register it directly yourself. There's no trusted third party involved in the registration process. You own it directly yourself. Nobody can take your name away from you, not even the DAO, or, you know, nobody can do that. It's censorship resistant as a result, also transferability. They're NFTs. You can, they can be held by a DAO. They can be held by a multi-sig. They can be used as collateral, you know, in DeFi or something like this. I actually did the world's first NFT loan backed by an ENS

• 8:26Speaker 02

  name with Alex Massmedge back in the day. Hey, Alex. So, that's a critical thing. And then we also have DNS namespace integration. So, what this means is that if you own a DNS domain name, you can import that into ENS. With the same ending. So for example, I have BCMilligan.com on DNS, traditional DNS. I've imported, so I have BCMilligan.com on ENS's .com, not .eth, that'd be a separate name. And so this really is part of our vision of extending and complementing the DNS namespace. So you can, you can do most of the same stuff with the DNS names imported. There's a few

• 9:07Speaker 02

  restrictions since ultimately the source of truth is on this other system, but you can do most of the same things.

• 9:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 9:14Speaker 02

  That's the namespace.

• 9:14Anthony Pompliano?

  So hold on, I want to make sure that we're going slow here to make sure everyone's following along. You guys have built, first of all, protocol is a product, right? Absolutely. So you've got a product, which is this protocol, ENS. The idea is that you create ENS, which is compatible with DNS, the legacy system. But also, what you're essentially doing is you're allowing people to replace that long string of letters and numbers with ENS namespace. .eth is the most popular one, but you could have other ones. And you can replace just your wallet address. So hey, if you want to send me something, send it to this namespace. But you can also use it as collateral, as you talked about with a loan. You own it, right,

• 9:54Anthony Pompliano?

  as a NFT? Is that correct? Or is it some other technical architecture behind the . or the namespace?

• 10:01Speaker 02

  So .eth things are just ERC 721 compatible NFTs.

• 10:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. So when you think about those assets, the first question that I have is, what assets does it support? Because I think this is a big misconception that a lot of people don't understand. Can I just send ETH? Can I send Bitcoin? Can I send other assets? Can I send an NFT? How does it work from a usability standpoint?

• 10:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. So when it comes to the simplified payments use case of ENS, and I say there's three major use cases, this is one of them. It can support any arbitrary assets. So this does confuse a lot of people. They think you can only send Ether or Ethereum-based assets. No, you can send, receive Bitcoin to a name, no, Solana, Solana NFT, Dogecoin. So what this means is actually like you can send Dogecoin to BCMilligan.com and it's using ENS on it. Ethereum in the background.

• 10:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, hold on, timeout for a second because this is where I think people get lost. So BCMilligan.com is a URL that you own via the DNS system. You can, I'll use the word port, that may be the inaccurate word, but we can port it over to this new system. And you can put that, if I have a wallet, I can put BCMilligan.com into my wallet and send any asset that that wallet supports and it will end up in your wallet. How does that technically occur in the backend? Because most people would think of a dot com as the DNS system. They think they're going to a URL, but you're actually using it in this new system as a wallet ID essentially.

• 11:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's actually much simpler than people think. So a lot of people think that like if I send, let's say Ether to Brantley dot ETH, that like I'm sending it to the name and that like ENS receives it and forwards it on to you or something. It's actually much simpler than this. So ENS is ultimately just names and like data attached to those names. So I can store any arbitrary data. I could store a Bitcoin address, an Ethereum address, a lot of address. I can store my favorite type of dog. I can store my phone number, anything you want. And then when I type in that name, let's say in a wallet, let's say trust wallet, like I'm sending Doge. I say, send this to BCMilligan.com. What they do is it looks at BCMilligan.com on ENS on Ethereum. Grab, you know, since based on context, it knows I'm sending Dogecoin.

• 12:18Speaker 02

  So grabs the Dogecoin address in my records. It brings that back to the wallet and then the wallet just sends it like a normal Dogecoin transaction on the Dogecoin network. But that just happens all in the background. From the user's perspective, like you're sending Doge to BCMilligan.com, but that's what's happening in the background.

• 12:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, now I asked a ton of people for pros and cons of this whole system. The pros seem to be around, one, not having to use a long string of letters and numbers. That's, I think, most people are like, yeah, whatever the system ends up being the successful one, like that's like a no brainer. We have to do that in order to scale. The second one was what I'll call this like interoperability, right? So having A namespace that can support all kinds of different assets regardless of where they come from. The third thing is what I'll label as identity. So we literally started, I said your government name and then you hit me with, no, here's my namespace as my name.

• 13:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's my fiat name.

• 13:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, your fiat name. Okay.

• 13:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Growing up, we called it a government name. You called a fiat name. Perfect. Explain this idea of identity, right? Again, forget for a second what the actual namespace is, whether it's a dot ETH, a dot COM, a dot whatever. Just how do you think about the importance of that as we enter into this new digital financial system?

• 13:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it's actually the most important use case of ENS. It's certainly the most widely used one. So basically, yeah, you, you have, let's say, an Ethereum account because ENS is Ethereum based. And you log into, let's say, Adap with your, with your Ethereum account. There's two ways to do this, actually. There's connect while it was all, then you, there's like you sign a message. And the, when you do that, you're giving the DAP your public address. Okay, this is how you're identified with. You can then do something called a reverse lookup, in which case basically the, the, the DAP will get what's called your primary ENS names. You, you designate, let's say you have 20 ENS names or something like this. You designate one as your primary ENS name.

• 14:18Speaker 02

  And then when you log into Adap, they can grab that one because it's associated with your Ethereum accounts. And they display that as your username. And then once they have their, your username, they can also then grab information from your records. So let's say we have an avatar record, which you can just have like a normal file as your avatar. You can also designate an NFT that you verifiably own as your avatar. And that could automatically show up. So this, this works like on Uniswap, for example. I connect to the Brantley dot ETH and it has like my punk or something like that, right?

• 14:49Anthony Pompliano?

  So on this point, real quick, is this reliant on Coinbase or an exchange or a decentralized application? Them adding support for this type of functionality? Like, do they have to basically plug in and use the standards that you guys have created in order to support this? Like via an API or how does that work? And is it available to anything that is built in a decentralized manner? Or is it specific? They make the decision to support these types of name spaces.

• 15:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's entirely on chain. The information's entirely on chain. Now, we provide, we have created a metadata service to that services can use to get the avatar if they want. But they don't have to. I mean, that's just, we built one for ourselves for our own app, then other people can also use it. But the information's entirely on chain, it's entirely decentralized. I mean, this is really critical to the whole vision of ENS. That like, if the, the primary team developing, if we all died, nothing stops, nothing, nothing has hurt, ENS continues to go on. I hope people would mourn my death, but ENS would continue to go on, no problem, because literally we're running no infrastructure. This really confuses a lot of people. So, and a key thing on this identity thing, I want to say is that, okay.

• 16:00Speaker 02

  This has been happening in Web three for a while of people, you sign in with your private key. Use your ENS name and things like this for your identity, but it all been just like organically done. With no standards and some people were doing good practices and some people are doing bad practices, right? So the Ethereum Foundation and ENS, we teamed up earlier this year and we had an RFP request for proposals. Basically saying, hey, we want to find somebody who can like standardize what's currently being done, just with best practices. We selected this company called Spruce ID. In the last few months, they've been leading this open community. Process to basically write an EIP, that's the Ethereum Standards Process, Ethereum Improvement Proposal, it's like BIPs, right?

• 16:42Speaker 02

  And that's almost done, basically to standardize this, and we call it Sign In With Ethereum. So it's best practices, here's exactly the message you should have people sign. They have like a JavaScript library, they have like an OAuth implementation, you know, you can use if you want. And so you sign with your private key, uses your ENS name as your username, uses your avatar from the records, uses any other profile data. And I think the cool thing about this is that this works not just for crypto services. We've designed it so that non-crypto services can easily add this as an authentication option. So like, you're signing into some other random non-crypto service, they have like Sign In With Email, Sign In With Google, Sign In With Facebook. Well, we made this so they can just drop into those options, Sign In With Ethereum as one of those options.

• 17:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. Now, there was basically three main issues when I asked people. So they told me pros, then the cons, or the questions. Probably actually more people had questions. I'm gonna go down, and let's start with the ones that are the least specific to you guys, and then we'll get to the ones that are most specific. The first is gas fees, right? We have, my brother's here, we have a screenshot that somebody sent us where they tried to do $300 on the Ethereum network. I think it was last night or this morning, and it was like $17,000 gas fee. Now, that is an outlier. That is not the normal thing, right? But there are times where it spikes, and it happens across all of these different networks. It's happened on Bitcoin in the past, etc. But how do you think

• 18:04Anthony Pompliano?

  about the gas fees today for something like this? And is that overcomable in kind of the short term?

• 18:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, it's not sustainable. I mean, obviously. I mean, it sucks for me, too. I mean, it's not good. Yeah, so a couple of things to make clear. Sign with Ethereum has no gas fees, because that's just off-chain sign, right? So some people are like, oh, it's like $200 to sign in, but this is not true.

• 18:28Anthony Pompliano?

  So the sign-in functionality doesn't have a gas. Really, the only gas fee that would be involved in this is the purchase of the namespace?

• 18:36Speaker 02

  Correct. Yeah, yeah. So the sign-in thing, there's no gas fee. Also, like, when you send, let's say I'm sending Bitcoin to BCMilligan.com, there's no added gas fee on the ENS side, because it's just a lookup, right? I mean, there's a transaction on the Bitcoin side, but that's, that's nothing to do with the ENS, right? So that's the key thing. But yeah, so ENS as a system is a full-stack naming system that entirely runs on Ethereum Layer 1, which is obviously extremely expensive right now. So yeah, we want to move this to Layer 2s and do this. It's a tricky thing to do, though, because ENS is entirely decentralized, right? We were a centralized system. We could just like, you know, do this very, you know, just send our registration somewhere else. But yes, it's entirely decentralized. We have a plan in place that's gonna happen in stages. The first stage is, it's actually Vitalik about

• 19:20Speaker 02

  a year ago proposed an idea for this, and we kind of refined it with some community calls. We're creating a new standard for, inventing a new standard for Layer 1 to Layer 2 communication without any additional trust assumptions. And I don't want to get into the technical stuff, but basically... Users will be able to put records and subdomains on an external location of their choice, any arbitrary one, like, we don't want to have to choose, like, let the user use Arbitrum, and it could even be like Solana, it could even, you know, it could be, you could store on Bitcoin, I guess technically, you could store on a server, you know, any external location other than the Ethereum layer one that you want, you choose it, and it just fits into the ENS system. This is really exciting, because it'll make updating

• 20:03Speaker 02

  records cheaper, but also, it's really been our vision that probably most names, long term, would be subdomains, like, you know, the average user's probably not gonna be out, you know, it's like, they're gonna get a free subdomain when they create a wallet, you know, like a Gmail account, or something like this. And with this system, somebody could create, like, unlimited subdomains for free off-chain. So we think we could actually onboard huge numbers of users, you know, at zero cost.

• 20:28Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, all right. Just because we only have so much time, I want to keep going.

• 20:31Speaker 02

  Go ahead.

• 20:32Anthony Pompliano?

  And, again, unverified information, but somebody in the chat just said, they went to just go register an ENS, $5, I think is the cost of it, and they said that the gas fee showed $138. $138 is much better than $17,000, but $138.

• 20:47Speaker 02

  It's absurd, yeah.

• 20:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, yeah, so, we got that. Second big, kind of, topic that people had questions or concerns about was privacy. How do you think about privacy, either this does increase privacy, or it decreases privacy, how do you just think about mitigating any sort of privacy concerns?

• 21:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, like Bitcoin and other blockchains, it's kind of both at the same time, depends on how you use it. What I recommend is that every person has at least two Ethereum accounts, right? They should have their public one, they're okay having public, that's what they use for their public things, and then have a private one where they keep, like, their main stash. This is good for privacy, also for security, that if your public one gets hacked, you don't lose everything. That's really the best solution right now. In the future, I'd say there's, there's good prospects, using things like zero knowledge proofs and things like this, we can add other layers of privacy, but that's what I recommend right now.

• 21:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, then the last one, and this one actually surprised me, is .eth in Ethiopia, which I literally thought was a joke the first time I saw this. Explain, so my understanding, again, this is very rudimentary, is that the DNS registration for .eth, like the .com, .org, .whatever, is reserved for the country of Ethiopia? One, is that true? And then, two, how do you think about, is that a problem? Is it not a problem? Is there, could you buy it? Like, what happens there in terms of this, like, backwards compatibility that you've talked about?

• 22:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it is true, but it's not a problem. So if you want to know, here's exactly what happened. So about two, two, two and a half decades ago, ICANN, which is the nonprofit, which just helps coordinate the DNS, the TLD namespace, it basically said, okay, let's give every country a two-letter country code, but let's also, so that's like .fr, .us, .uk, things like that, right? So each country, the government actually controls a top-level domain. Then they also said, well, let's just reserve three-letter country codes. We don't need to give this to the countries because they already have one, they like, they don't need a second one. But this also just means that nobody else can ever register this. So like, nobody should have .usa except for the US government, because that'd be kind of dumb in their opinion. But the US also doesn't need it, because they also, they also have .us.

• 22:59Speaker 02

  So basically, all these three-letter country codes are reserved. So reserved means that they're never going to be created, they're not, but they're not, they have no plans to give it to the governments. So like Ethiopia has .et, but .eth is reserved as a three-letter country code for them. But there's no, there's no chance, so like another round of, the opening another round for people to register new top-level domains here in the next year or two, nobody can register .eth, there's no chance of a name collision there. That isn't true for all the other blockchain naming systems out there and their TLDs. So all those, they're not reserved, other people could register them. I think it's likely that other people will. And note that because of DNS's full DNS namespace integration, if somebody else registers

• 23:43Speaker 02

  those names on DNS, those different owners will own those names on DNS. And DNS is the most integrated. ...rated blockchain naming service by a long shot. I mean, ENS has more integration, several times more integrations than all other ones combined. I mean, it's like hundreds more. So I think this is going to be a really serious problem with name collisions. With ETH, there's no, there's no chance of that in the even medium to long term. I will also say though, just to completely tie up this like possibly hanging problem. I actually do have contacts with the Ethiopian government, which is funny to me. And we are in talks to like basically just like acquire the long-term rights to this. But there's no rush because like there's no imminent danger.

• 24:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so all that makes sense. Couple more things for you. One, on the size, and again, this is me doing rudimentary research. So bear with me if I've got numbers wrong here. ENS has got about half a million domains that you've sold. You've got-

• 24:46Speaker 02

  Well, that's currently existing. So that name, that number can go up and down because dot E names can expire.

• 24:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 24:53Speaker 02

  And that's critical for the long-term names, uh, health of the namespace.

• 24:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so similar if somebody has a dot com and then they don't have it anymore. Somebody else could come and get it.

• 25:01Speaker 02

  Because you want unused names to be able, there needs to be a mechanism to get unused names to go back into circulation.

• 25:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Correct, okay. Uh, and so my understanding is that there are other platforms that have more domains that have been sold. But in terms of the number of unique customers, you guys have more than that? Is that a fair understanding of kind of how to think about customers, domains? And some of this is like, there's a recycling component versus not? Or how do you think about like size across the various teams trying to build solutions to this?

• 25:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, so like handshake, I think is like over 2 million names or something, you know? And I'd say names, number of names, we consider to be one of the least important things optimized for. In fact, I would say the way we've designed our system, we've said this for years publicly. We are not optimizing for number of names. We're also not optimizing for revenue. We're optimizing for use. So even like the way we've done our pricing, we've set it up in a way to try to disincentivize people, let's say, buying up huge numbers of names like a squatters and trying to incentivize average users using the name. Yeah, in terms of number of users, a problem with other systems is that they're like private and so it's not on-chain. You don't actually know how many people have things

• 26:17Speaker 02

  or how many names. You can just trust what they say. ENS, on the other hand, is entirely on-chain, 100%, so all of our data is entirely public. I'd say it's likely that ENS has the most users, probably by a large margin. I don't know that for certain because there's other data's not actually on-chain and public. What we do have, though, and something that we have focused a lot on, I do consider important, is integrations. So where can you, what can you actually do with this? Where can you use it? We've worked very hard on that and ENS, like I said, it has, you know, several times more integrations than all the other naming systems combined. I mean, it's like way ahead on this. I also note, too, we've never paid for a single integration. This is entirely organic. In fact, most of the integrations these days, people just do it because we're like the

• 27:00Speaker 02

  open public standard everybody uses. And I just like, sometimes I'm like using a DAP, like, oh, this DAP has ENS. I didn't know that. Add it to the website or something like that. If you do integrate ENS, developers out there, let me know so we can, you know, add it to our website, track it, you know, help promote it as well. We'd love to do that.

• 27:15Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. Last question, and this is probably the one that you and I are going to disagree on the most, but I'm going to let you say your piece, is you guys just airdropped like $2 billion, I think at the time, to people who held ENS namespaces. I've got a whole thought process in terms of airdrops and yield farming, et cetera. What you're essentially doing is if you were a centralized corporation, that was a for-profit, right? Which I understand you guys are taking a different approach, but if you were, that would basically be, in my opinion, like customer acquisition cost, right? You'd be spending marketing dollars to go and get it. When you do an airdrop like this, now people have a financial interest in seeing this be successful. And so some people just run and they go sell, right? Because they're just like, hey, I got free money or whatever.

• 27:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Some people hold it and they want the value to go up and other people may not even know that they got it airdropped, right? So there's a whole bunch of different reactions. How do you think about the creation of a DAO, governance, airdrop? Like, walk me through your guys' thought process around this.

• 28:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, so key principle here, and I tweeted this out, you were not airdropped free money. You were airdropped. Everybody listening, say it with me. Do you know what, Pomp? What were your airdrops?

• 28:21Anthony Pompliano?

  I know what you're gonna say, but go ahead.

• 28:22Speaker 02

  Responsibility. That's what you were airdropped. And we really do take this seriously. I mean, yes, some people, it has a market value. People can sell. There's no shaming of that. But I think people should take this seriously. And I think it's gone very well. And it lets it be a community-owned protocol.

• 28:36Anthony Pompliano?

  But that's what I want to understand is why did you guys do it? Like, how do you like, when you think about like, hey, here's what we did. What's the thought process behind doing this versus not having done it?

• 28:45Speaker 02

  Oh, I have simple. Okay, so the core parts of VNS are self-running, and they have no human input at all. So there's no need for governance. But there are a couple of aspects of the VNS protocol that require human discretion. We haven't been able to automate away yet. And we'd like to automate just everything if we could. Eventually, maybe we will. But in the meantime, there are a few things. So things like dot ETH pricing, we're not confident we can set that. And it's going to make sense for 100 years, right? Or like what to do with the revenue. I don't know. Who should have a right to have say over what happens there? So this is a decentralized democratic way of saying the community can set those parameters. That we don't think we should have, you know, a central group or small number of people setting it. That's why we did it. I would say if eventually we could automate all that away,

• 29:28Speaker 02

  that would be the best situation. But for now, this is the best way of handling those things.

• 29:33Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. What questions you guys got? Hey, so thanks for doing this, by the way. I appreciate you coming on. So my question was just-

• 29:39Speaker 02

  Did any of you, did any of you get the airdrop?

• 29:41Anthony Pompliano?

  No. No.

• 29:44Speaker 02

  Guys, that's now. What happened?

• 29:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Hold on, hold on. Go, and then you can ask us questions at the end, Brinley. But we just got to hurry before we run out of time. All good. So my question is just around domain registered. You guys say on your website, you have 1.7. I know people were saying 1.5 earlier. But regardless of however many millions it is, how big can this get? Do you think everyone's eventually going to have them? What is your guys' like total addressable market look like?

• 30:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we have about a half billion on our website. And that's entirely on chains, public information. I mean, our goal is that not only does every human on the planet have an ENS name, but that every like non-human thing is named with an ENS name. So you can also name smart contracts with that. Many people already do this today. You could name devices, AIs, organizations. I mean, I think it's possible there's like a trillion names. I think the vast majority of those will be, you know, like off-chain subdomains. They're not gonna be like paying, you know, protocols fee for it. But I think literally ENS could be the identity naming system for everything human and non-human.

• 30:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Gotcha. John?

• 30:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, nice to meet you. Um, can you please just talk about the resale value of these? I know you mentioned it a little bit earlier, but can you just talk about like, what is the, I guess, monetary value of certain domains and like the different styles of them?

• 30:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, so a principle we've always said is we're all about use. We don't care about speculation. We think if something just became a speculative haven, this would be a failure situation for ENS. So every single time that there's a zero-sum decision between like, are we gonna help users or we gonna help speculators? We always choose users every single time. And some speculators, it gets them pissed off at us, but we've been public about this. It's about use. That said, I would say like, if you look at the open sea secondary market trading, I mean, ENS represents over 99% of the domains secondary market. I mean, it's basically the only player because I think it's the one with the most used by Longshot.

• 31:34Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you think? And I've got one question, then you can say whatever you want, uh, which I'm scared as hell to allow you to do. But, uh, what do you think is the fairest critique of what you're doing? Like, you've heard them all. I've seen you on Twitter, you know, fighting back and kind of fighting the good fight from your opinion, right? But like, what do you think is the fairest critique of what you're doing?

• 31:53Speaker 02

  Um, I would say, I think scaling is the biggest problem for ENS and for blockchains in general. And I say this about Bitcoin, Ethereum, ENS, the entire space. If we can't really actually solve scaling in a decentralized way, it kind of like, then this thing can't really take over the world. And it's a hard problem to solve. I say, I think we have a good path towards that, um, but it's hard to do. And, you know, DNS has successfully scaled to like billions of users. And that's extremely impressive and props to all the OGs who scaled DNS. And let's see if we can scale ENS in the blockchain world to that level.

• 32:32Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. You got the last 30 seconds. What do you want to say?

• 32:36Speaker 02

  Well, I said this on Twitter. I got you pomp tornado emoji dot if you want it. I can give it to you for free.

• 32:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Pomp? Oh, like my Twitter, uh, my Twitter name?

• 32:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:46Anthony Pompliano?

  What, what, what did I do with it if you gave it to me?

• 32:49Speaker 02

  I mean, you could use it to receive ether, Bitcoin, Dogecoin. You could put it as your Twitter name. Although I did say, I think that would be the market top of pomp.

• 32:56Anthony Pompliano?

  There is, uh, there is, uh, you couldn't drop me an airdrop of $2 billion, uh, dollars worth of ENS. I still wouldn't do that, but

• 33:04Speaker 02

  No, you missed it.

• 33:05Anthony Pompliano?

  We'll talk, we'll talk. I missed it. Uh, but we'll, we'll talk about the name. Here's, here's what I will say. I will say this, right? And I think that, uh, uh, there are plenty of people. People are going to be mad that I'm even talking to you, right? Uh, literally, which is an absurd, uh, thing, uh, all by itself. But here's what I will say is that you and I both agree that on the problem, which is that the long string of letters and numbers is absolutely insane. We have to solve that problem. The second thing that I think, uh, we agree on is that you cannot have what I'll call siloed or vertical specific name spaces. If URLs, if you could only go to a URL on a Chrome browser versus something else, that wouldn't make sense, right? So there has to be kind of an open system. There has to be some sort of interoperability.

• 33:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, the part where I probably tap myself out in terms of expertise and, uh, and frankly, having you spent way more time on this and literally do it for a living, is, uh, what is the right technical architecture? What are all of the technical challenges, scaling, all that stuff? Like, I think myself and literally millions of other people are going to rely on folks who are building this in the free market to kind of decide who's the winner. But I do, uh, think that both you and I agree on the problem and the fact that like the structure has to be open and be interoperable with all these different assets, or there's just no way to do it. And people may not like that, but at the end of the day, what you need is you have to have, uh, usage, right? Of various assets. And so even Bitcoin, if people are, you know, all about Bitcoin and they want to just send Bitcoin back and forth,

• 34:29Anthony Pompliano?

  uh, for goods or services, using the long string of letters and numbers, like, it sucks, right? We gotta fix it. So like,

• 34:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. And if you want an open decentralized naming system, I mean, yes, is it? There you go.

• 34:42Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. I appreciate it. Where do you want us to send, uh, send people to find you on the internet? If they got follow-up questions, they want to yell and scream at you.

• 34:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, the, the ENS website, ens domain is a good summary of what ENS is. ENS domains is also on Twitter that I'm on Twitter on Brantley dot E.

• 34:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome, man. Listen, thank, thank you for taking the time to come on here. I appreciate it. I also, by the way, I appreciate the fact that when I started tweeting about this, you took the time to go ahead and explain kind of how everything works and, and, uh, at one point I sent him, uh, lightning addresses, which is a whole nother architecture that we don't have time to get into, uh, where you can basically use like an email address. And he went through and I sent him the developer docs. He read through it quickly and said, Hey, here's how I think this works. So I appreciate you, uh,

• 35:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. And thanks for the invite. Really appreciate it.

• 35:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course. All right, man. Thank you. Now we are going to bring on next Matt from Unstoppable Domains, which is another team working on solving this exact same problem. Matt, are you there?

• 35:38Speaker 04

  Yes, I am.

• 35:39Anthony Pompliano?

  How are you?

• 35:40Speaker 04

  Doing great. Good morning to you. I guess good afternoon there.

• 35:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. You too. Um, all right. So we just had on, uh, Brantley from ENS. And I feel like we did a pretty good job covering what the problem is. I don't want to speak for you, but my guess is that you also agree having a long string of letters and numbers is a huge problem. And in order to get mass adoption in this industry, we're going to have to solve that problem. Is that a fair assumption for me to make?

• 36:03Speaker 04

  Absolutely. No way we go global unless we fix this problem.

• 36:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. Now my question is, uh, let's start with kind of how you and your team is looking at solving this problem. If you can kind of describe what the product, like how the product itself works or how it's technically architected.

• 36:18Speaker 04

  Yeah. So, uh, we sell NFT domains and these are on chain on using a suite of smart contracts. And, uh, it allows you to map any type of information you would want from a name like matt.crypto, to say, let's say a Bitcoin address, a Litecoin address, an Ethereum address, what have you, for sending cryptocurrency payments. That's the hair on fire use case that most people are using, uh, this tech for right now. But longer term, obviously we think you're going to add a bunch more stuff to your domain names. People are already adding, uh, profile pictures, uh, they're linking their Twitter, they're verifying credentials about themselves. Uh, so there's, there's a lot that this can do, but in the short run, it's mostly about making payments, uh, you know, 10 times easier for normal people.

• 36:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. And when you think about this NFT, these are ERC 721, like traditional NFT structures?

• 37:06Speaker 04

  Absolutely. Yep. And just like regular NFTs, there's no renewal fees on our NFT domains. You own them in your wallet. They're self custody assets and we think that's the way they should be.

• 37:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. And similar to, let's say, ENS or other teams that are trying to solve this, you can basically have this support, all kinds of different things like you described. What do you feel like is the big differentiation between what you guys are doing versus some of the other teams? Is there a technical aspect? Is there like an economic aspect? How do you feel the difference or where do you kind of draw the line in the sand? In terms of the different teams that are trying to solve this problem?

• 37:43Speaker 04

  Yeah. So there are actually a lot of teams that came up around 2017 to try to address this problem. When people first started, started thinking about solving sending crypto payments with blockchain naming services. And so some of them have taken different paths. I think the biggest differentiators for us, for people who are in the market, we are technology agnostic. You know, we're not tied to any given blockchain, like Ethereum or anything else. We actually view ourselves as an application that exists to make it easier for users, regardless of what crypto assets they want to use. We also don't have any renewal fees. So we really took the NFT approach that every other NFT on the planet has, where you buy a domain once and you own it forever. And then we are laser focused on making sure this is accessible for everyone on the planet.

• 38:27Speaker 04

  So one of the things that we do is we actually cover the gas fees. So it's absolutely free to mint and set up your NFT domain through Unsupped Domains. This is a commitment that we want to hold for our users going forward. Because we think that you really need to understand the full cost of ownership for these things to make them usable for everybody. So, you know, when we say we think that there should be an NFT domain name in all 3 billion people on the planet's wallet, that means that, you know, they need to cost $5 or less. And, and you need to have gas fees be basically minimal or else you're just not going to be able to get it. And these countries where, you know, the average income for the month may be 250 bucks. If that's the cost of the gas fees for registering your domain name, then that's a no go.

• 39:08Anthony Pompliano?

  So obviously the gas fees, and I don't know if you were listening earlier, we were talking about, somebody sent us a screenshot, they were trying to spend like, I don't know, it was 150, 250 bucks, whatever, and the gas fee was like $17,000, obviously extreme outlier, right? But while we were on the show, somebody went and looked, and to buy $5, it was like 138 bucks. So to your point, not very sustainable. How do you look at the interoperability? How important is this for you guys to operate on one single chain versus, could you build this on Bitcoin? Could you build this on other chains? Like, how do you think about kind of the technical architecture? And probably more importantly, does it matter to the end user? Do they actually care? Or do they just want zero fees or as low as fees as possible?

• 39:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, so we've actually already built on several different blockchain systems. So we've built on three already, and we've migrated twice. And the way that we make those decisions is what is cheapest for users, while still maintaining that level of decentralization and security at the main chain. And then we also let users choose which one they want to be on. So, and we're investing a lot on building different bridges between the different blockchains. And so I think that ultimately, users should have a choice on where they want to register and store their assets. And we are going to try our best to vet the technologies that allow that to happen at the lowest cost. So we recently just migrated over to Polygon for our new domain name system, our most recent one. And that way, we could cover the fees and make them zero.

• 40:33Speaker 04

  So yeah, from us, I agree with you. Like, I don't think users care about the technology behind, at the very base level, what they're using, as long as it meets a level of decentralization and security. And then beyond that, we're really, you know, we're an app that sells a product, and that product is making it easier for you to send cryptocurrency or do lookups about somebody. And so the cheaper we can make that, I think the better.

• 40:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so when you think about the traction that you guys have had so far, walk me through how you think about the various metrics that you can share publicly.

• 41:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I think as of yesterday, we have 1.8 million domains registered. This is, you know, three or four X, maybe five X, any of the other people in our space. We've also have four- Of the top five most popular domain extensions. So you know doc crypto, dot zil, dot wallet, dot NFT. These are four of the top five blockchain naming services. They're all offered by unstoppable domains. And we're seeing just super rapid growth. We registered more domain names in the past four months than have been registered by any other system over the past four years. Our integration count year over year is up 600%. We're projecting similar numbers going into next year. So we're seeing an explosion in these utility NFTs.

• 41:48Speaker 04

  And that's kind of our category here with blockchain NFT domains as identifiers on the internet. And I think that whole space is just set to continue growing strongly into next year and over the next three to five years.

• 42:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. Now, I similarly, as I was looking at some of the other folks trying to solve this as well, I went around and I asked and I don't know how qualified the people I asked for. I basically asked everyone that I could in the short period of time that I had, what they thought about various approaches. And one of the things that came up with unstoppable domains that I would put in the positive category was there was integrations and support by some of the exchanges. And so maybe talk a little bit about those integrations, like how do those come about? Is that like a business development deal that unstoppable domains does with the exchange? Can the exchange just do it themselves? Is there an API? Just walk me through both the technical and kind of like the business components of those.

• 42:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, we have an entire enterprise team that works with exchanges and other large applications to integrate unstoppable domains. Now, it's true, they can go and look at the docs. All the smart contracts are on chain. So anyone who wants to integrate can go and do it 100% on their own. But you know, when you interact with large businesses and when you're trying to actually onboard the really large web two companies into the space, they want to talk to somebody and go through their particular situation. So yeah, we have an entire enterprise team that works directly with large wallets and web two companies in the space, educating them about NFT domains and blockchain technology, how this can fit into their app, what are the user flows? And their main concern to what you would expect, right? They're worried about user security, you know, they don't want to offer a new product to a bunch of customers and then

• 43:24Speaker 04

  the customers all lose their keys to that product or you know, they send It's the wrong address or something like that. So there's a lot of user education around that, too. But yeah, we have an entire enterprise team that works directly with exchanges. Very proud of the guys in our business development team to do a great job. And we are going to continue to double down on that next year. We think it's important. I mean, if you get the biggest, most people have about five crypto exchanges and wallets that they use. So if you can be in the top, you know, 20 exchanges and wallets globally, or, you know, even regionally, then you're likely going to be covered in, you know, 80% of the applications that anyone is going to be using right now. And so that's how we kind of do the market.

• 44:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. Now, the most popular question that I got was around what I'll call backwards compatibility, right? So with the DNS type stuff, and most people just didn't know, how do you guys look at that? Is there compatibility today? Will there be compatibility in the future? How do you think about that?

• 44:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, so there are a couple of things there to unpack. So we are already backwards compatible. So we haven't launched any registry services that conflict with any other existing TLDs in the global namespace. So that's something that we do. There's 1,500 TLDs in the traditional DNS system. And so we made sure that we had zero conflicts with any of the TLDs that we launched. On a going forward basis, I think something that a lot of people missed is back in 2016, the naming system was essentially deregulated here in the US through an act of Congress. ICANN has no authority over blockchain domains. You know, some groups, you know, may try to say that they have partnerships with ICANN or something like that, but that's inaccurate.

• 44:59Speaker 04

  And, you know, the reason why the global namespace was so contentious and why the US decided that they would step out of that market is because it wasn't international. And what was happening was DNS and ICANN was seen as a US entity. And a lot of other countries, namely China, said, you know, we're not very happy with this system. We're going to go and build our own DNS system. And I actually think that blockchain-based naming services offer a free market alternative to these government systems. Like, I don't want to use China DNS, right? And I understand how some other countries may be a little bit wary about using the traditional ICANN DNS because they see it as, you know, a front for US interests. And blockchain naming services, this free, open market alternative, I think is stepping into this void here.

• 45:42Speaker 04

  And I'm actually very excited about how these systems are going to evolve in the future. I think that's a solution to a problem.

• 45:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And then in terms of...

• 45:51Anthony Pompliano?

  There's a couple of people in the chat that are asking around like on-chain versus not-on-chain. Can you describe what unstoppable domains is and then how you think about the pluses or minuses of both of those approaches?

• 46:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, so users want choices. I would, that's how I would couch that. So we make it easy for users to mint their domains to their wallet. They can wait to claim their domains when they're ready, or they can even store their domains in a custodial exchange like Gemini. So we actually think about it as suite of options for users on how they want to store domains. And, you know, I think people should claim the domain that they intend to use on a daily basis to their self custody wallet. I mean, that's what you should do, but it's kind of like Coinbase, right? Like Coinbase is on board of 70 million people. You go on there, you buy your Bitcoin. And then when you withdraw that Bitcoin to your personal wallet, that's when you take full ownership of that. And that's how we view unstoppable domains. We're an onboarding point for people to get into Web 3 and the decentralized web.

• 46:44Speaker 04

  We make it super easy for you to come to our site, pick out a domain name that you'd want to have. And then you can claim that to your wallet, you know, when you're ready. And I think that's great for users. And I think it also points out another thing, which is people are still very scared when interacting with, with blockchain and crypto in general. And that's something we as an industry need to do better to make people feel comfortable claiming these assets to their self custody wallet.

• 47:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. Joe and John, what questions do you guys have? Yeah, my question would just be around like the business in general, Matthew. I guess when it comes to threats, like what keeps you up at night? What are you worried about or what do you see as like one of the biggest threats to your business?

• 47:21Speaker 04

  So we actually list these out. So the biggest one is the crypto market, right? Having a pullback. I mean, we, our business is very dependent on crypto continuing to be successful over the next 10 years. And so as a business owner, you know, we employ 100 people. I'm always worried like, what if, what if Bitcoin has an 80% pullback? And I've lived through a couple of those cycles right now. So that's something you have to plan for as a business owner. You got to make sure you have enough to make it through, weather these bear markets. And so that's market risk, right? That external market risk. And when I'm looking at over the next three to five years, I'm on the product engineering side. So I'm always concerned about engineering and product execution. I stay up at night because of gas fees personally. So outside of market risk, it's really around.

• 48:00Speaker 04

  The things that I'm thinking about all the time are how can we make sure that we can get to a system that can serve us 3 billion users at scale where they're interacting with their blockchain domain a couple dozen times per day? Because then we're talking about tens of billions of potential interactions, you know, which of those interactions should be on-chain or off-chain? So that's my, my engineering answer to that. So business answer is you've got to be worried about the crypto market. It's extremely volatile. That's just part of being in the space. You've got to plan for it. And then the tech side, it's really about are we going to figure out how to scale blockchains to reach global demand? And I think the forecast is very good. It feels like internet modems in the 1990s. We get 14 gigabits, then 28, then 56, then now we got megabit and gigabit downloads. We're on that same trajectory with, with a lot of these smart contract blockchain platforms and it's just a matter of execute.

• 48:46Speaker 03

  Matthew, nice to, uh, nice to you again.

• 48:48Speaker 04

  Nice to meet you.

• 48:49Speaker 03

  Can you talk about, so one of the biggest problems is those gas fees. Can you talk about, is there a solution that is known today about it? Or are we kind of just waiting for that solution to come into fruition?

• 49:00Speaker 04

  So we just pushed a solution at unstoppable domains that we think is going to be good for us for the next two years. We are on a two-year technology cycle, so we basically update our technology about every 24 months. So as of today, the cost of minting and configuring a domain, it will is about three to five cents. And at Unstoppable, we're actually covering that fee, so it's free to users. But that's currently where we're at right now on our most recent update, and that actually just went live last month on Polygon. So that's been very successful and, but as adoption picks up, right? If we get another 20x number of users on that space, I'm, I have a very convinced that we're going to have capacity problems again on blockchains, and there's going to be another set of updates that happen two years from now.

• 49:44Speaker 04

  So, uh, and I do feel confident that there is technology to solve those problems on the horizon. If you're interested on what that technology is, I would suggest taking a look at zero knowledge proofs and rollups. That's, I, I think that's probably the place where most of these problems will get solved, at least another 100x better. So Matthew, uh, obviously, uh, I've worked with you guys in the past, uh, about this whole idea. And I think all of the teams, uh, that are working on this problem agree on, one, the problem that we need to fix this in order to scale. Uh, two, they also agree that there's got to be this like idea of interoperability, accept tons of different assets.

• 50:19Anthony Pompliano?

  And be able to do that in a pretty kind of easy way. One of the things that I don't think that I quite understand is this idea between owning and renting and the economics that are tied to this, even if the technical architecture is the exact same. Can you explain what the differences there are for folks?

• 50:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, so at Unstoppable, we chose to make it so that you own your domain. So it's a one-time fee that you pay for your domain name. It goes into your wallet. You own it forever. You don't ever have to worry about renewals or anything like that. We think that it is a big risk for domains, in particular, if you're going to use them as an identity for you to have to have a renewal, right? Because you can imagine a situation where what if the renewal fees are raised on you in the future? What if you forget to renew and you lose your domain? What if there's some sort of problem at the protocol level with the renewal contract? Because it adds a significant amount of complexity to code to build that in. These are all attack vectors. So I think that it's good to just remove renewals, period. Ownership is core to Web three.

• 51:22Speaker 04

  It's kind of like the ethos behind it. I think SaaS products are a Web two construction, right? Like if you want to pay an annual fee for something, then, you know, go back to 2010 is basically how I feel about it. And I think that it's weird to make domains any different than all the other NFTs. Every other NFT you buy has a one-time owner forever fee. And I think that's how we want to, that's how we want to do it. I mean, finally, I think renewal fees suck just emotionally. Like one of the reasons why we did it, I've forgotten to renew domains before on traditional internet. They always get sniped by somebody else and then you get gouged in order to try to buy it back from that person. And it's just a, I think it's a poor user experience overall.

• 51:57Anthony Pompliano?

  What is, what's your thought process in terms of traction so far of adoption of namespaces versus like the long string of letters and numbers? How do you evaluate that as a business in terms of like, okay, the industry is moving towards this? Or, you know, we're trying, but, but it's a slow slog.

• 52:16Speaker 04

  So on the growth side, I would say it's looking very positive because we are, we are seeing three to 500% year-over-year growth, basically, and it's actually close to 400, 500% year-over-year growth. And we're actually seeing domain name registrations. Actually over 1,000x year over year. We expect that to improve as well. If you think about it in terms of Bitcoin, like Bitcoin's average appreciation is probably or adoption is 60 to 100% per year. And so blockchain domain right now is growing closer to 400 to 500% year over year. So you project that over a five, 10 year period, that means we're going to get everyone adopted eventually. We are still very, very early, though. This is something I tell my team. There's about 250,000 people using NFT domains right now, and there's 250 million people who

• 52:59Speaker 04

  have cryptocurrency in some sort of wallet. So we have 1,000x to go, just in order to catch up with the current users. And that 250 million users that use crypto today is going to keep growing at 60 to 100% year over year. So I think we need to step on the gas even harder to make the growth rate go faster. It is positive right now because we are growing faster than the overall adoption of crypto. But I think we can, I think we can go even faster than that. So we'll see, we'll put the rocket boosters on.

• 53:24Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm fascinated by this, Matthew, in terms of getting this solved. I guess one other last thing, and I should have asked earlier, is unstoppable domains. Let's say that you get 10 million domains out there in people's hands and they go ahead and they attach it to

• 53:39Speaker 04

  Easy.

• 53:39Anthony Pompliano?

  There are easy, easy, done, right? Let's say also, whether you like it or not, that there's other teams that are working on this. They get another 10 million out there. Are people able to have interoperability between the different domain issuers, sellers, registrars, however you want to think about that? Like, can, if I have an unstoppable domain, and let's say that John has an ENS, can I send stuff to him and he can send stuff back to me because there's the on-chain component? Or is there challenges with doing that?

• 54:09Speaker 04

  They would both work in that case. And I think you bring up, I think you bring up a good point here, because it really is, we're all going to make it. I mean, ultimately, this is going to be a battle of crypto versus traditional industry. And I think it's important that we keep that in mind. Like, our goal is to bring crypto to the mass market, to like 3 billion people. And so I think that you need responsible actors in the space will try to build and make it easier for these things to interrupt and buy their design because they're on blockchain systems. Yeah, no problem. So if you have a doctor And someone else has a dot E. Both of those are going to work. It's really going to be up to users to choose which system is working best for them. Like whatever's the cheapest for them to use, or whatever their other value criteria are for picking a domain name system.

• 54:51Speaker 04

  And I like the competition, to be, to be honest. So we are, we are like a hyper competitive, you know, crypto hardcore, free market organization. And I think the competition is good for users. Like, we've already seen huge improvements in domain name services over the past couple of years in the market, just because all these teams are working really hard to bring products to people. And I expect to have that happen, you know, over the next three to five years as well.

• 55:16Anthony Pompliano?

  I officially, I just decided that I'm on team solve the problem. After that answer, like, that's what I like. That's, that's what I'm on team. Like, please God, solve this problem. Before you came out, we were talking like, when, when John, for the very first time, a while ago, started to interact with Bitcoin and wallet address, etc. It was one of the first things he said. He was like, did what? Like, this is, in some cases, maybe worse than, you know, account numbers and routing numbers at the bank. And so just obviously needs to get solved. So it's, it's a

• 55:46Speaker 04

  It's person, it's people's first emotional experience with cryptocurrency, right? So you like, you buy some crypto, you, and then the first thing you do is you want to send it to someone. And I mean, because you want to use it, right? And then the first thing you do is, oh crap, am I about to send this the wrong place? And like, you feel awful. Like, you're not sure. You double, you triple check the address. And even when you send it, you like message them afterwards, like, did you get it? You're looking on the blockchain. The thing that I see on the blockchain all the time, which I think is funny, is people are sending two payments, right? Because they send their first payment for $10, and then they see another payment for a thousand, once they know that went to the right place. And what's crazy is, it's not just you and I to do it. It's like Vitalik and Satoshi. If you go back and look and see how they sent crypto, it's the same thing. So like, everybody's scared.

• 56:28Speaker 04

  And domains solve this problem. Because when you're sending to a domain, you no longer worry about that address. It can also provide additional information about that person. So you could connect like a Twitter account to it, so they could see your Twitter handle when they're sending payments. I don't know, all the profile pictures is another one that people are attaching. So you can see like the picture of the person. So you can have some more contextual information around what you're sending, which I think will make it much more comfortable. Like what I'm saying. Sending something on Venmo, you know, it's like I have trusted accounts. I can click through. I can see that user's profile. Like if I'm sending to pomp.crypto, I could potentially even click through and see the pomp.crypto website and like make sure that, hey, that is, that's the right guy I'm sending it to. So yeah, overall, I mean, huge improvement in UX and it's really just getting started.

• 57:09Speaker 04

  I mean, this whole bring your own data to your applications through having your own digital identity and where that's going to go online for data privacy, just making the internet a safer place, I think is a big deal.

• 57:21Anthony Pompliano?

  I appreciate it. Where can we send people to find you and Unstoppable Domains on the internet?

• 57:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, definitely. Go to unstoppabledomains.com. We're also up on Twitter at unstoppableweb. You can find me at Matthew E Gould. I'm also on there. I'm the Penguin if you're looking for me on Twitter. And we also have, we have a podcast ourselves, a YouTube channel. We've got wonderful support and help team and Discord. If you're a developer, join in there to see how to integrate. The more people we can get to this faster, the better.

• 57:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome, man. Listen, thank you so much for taking the time to, to jump on here. Hopefully people are learning from this and we'll definitely have to do it again in the future.

• 57:55Speaker 04

  All right. Thank you, guys.

• 57:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Thanks, buddy.