Brad Kam, Co-Founder of Unstoppable Domains: A Corporate Ethereum Dystopia

Brad Kam is the Co-Founder of Unstoppable Domains. In this conversation, Brad and Anthony Pompliano discuss free speech, censorship, China, the societal impact of Unstoppable Domains, how it works, and what the technical challenges were. BLOCKFI-----BlockFi allows you to keep your crypto, put it up as collateral, and receive a USD loan funded directly to your bank account. They do loans ranging from $2,000 to $10,000,000, and they're perfect for helping you reach your financial goals of all sizes. Visit BlockFi.com/Pomp to learn more about putting your crypto to work without having to sell it. CRYPTO. COM-----Crypto.com is a pioneering payment and cryptocurrency platform that seeks to accelerate the world's transition to cryptocurrency. With the vision of "cryptocurrency in every wallet", the Crypto.com App offers a full range of financial products with competitive pricing, well designed UX and high security. It is the best place to buy, sell and pay with crypto. COINMINE-----The Coinmine One is like an Xbox that turns your electricity into Bitcoin. You just plug it in, connect to wifi, and tap on the crypto you want. It’s so easy anyone can do it. Everything is controlled from the Coinmine mobile app and the Coinmine keeps getting better with over the air updates that add new coins, features and services to your Coinmine. Visit coinmine.com/pomp to get a Coinmine and earn crypto for powering a new world. ETORO-----This episode of Off the Chain is sponsored by eToro, the smartest crypto trading platform, and one of the largest in the world. Join 11 million other traders and create an account at etoro.com and build your crypto portfolio the smart way.

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

• 0:01Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off the Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off. Brad Cam is a co-founder of Unstoppable Domains. In this conversation, we discussed free speech, censorship, China, the societal impact of unstoppable domains, how exactly it works, what the technical challenges they overcame were, and they also announced a new domain extension, .crypto. I'm really excited about what they're building. They're replacing crypto addresses with an easy to remember domain name. And right now, they're running a buy one, get one free domain offer, starting with the launch of this episode.

• 0:46Anthony Pompliano?

  You can check it out at unstoppabledomains.com. I'm gonna grab pomp.crypto, and I hope you grab one as well. Enjoy the episode. Skrt skrt. Wanna know who has the best URL? Crypto.com. That's right, crypto.com. They're a crypto platform with one goal, motherf***ing mass adoption. That's why we're all here. We're trying to get crypto in every wallet. Crypto.com is helping people do that through buying, earning, lending, and card payment. Everything you could want at crypto.com. Go help your boy out, tell him Pomp sent you. Download the app or visit crypto.com. Pomp's got you, always. Ever wanted to get into mining and didn't know how? Don't worry, your boy Pomp's got you.

• 1:30Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:13Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:55Anthony Pompliano?

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• 3:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Again, that's etoro.com. Get VIP access to Bitcoin and crypto markets today.

• 3:42Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 4:08Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I'm super excited. I've got Brad here with me. He's working on probably one of the more powerful ideas that I've seen in the crypto and blockchain space. So I'm excited to kind of go over what Unstoppable Domains is and kind of what they're up to. So thanks so much for taking the time and coming to do this, Brad.

• 4:29Speaker 02

  Thanks so much for having me. Excited.

• 4:31Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. Let's start with your background and kind of what you did pre-blockchain cryptocurrency and Bitcoin.

• 4:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I've been an entrepreneur since I was in college. Started in the real estate world, bought up some houses during the last economic crash, 2009, 2010 era. 2012, moved to San Francisco to get into the startup game. Worked on a startup called Talkable, which is a referral marketing software company. So spent six years working on that, but was spending a lot of nights thinking about crypto. So it's time to get in the game.

• 5:01Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. And do you remember the first time that you ever saw Bitcoin or blockchain and kind of what your thought was?

• 5:07Speaker 02

  I read a Wired article in like 2011, the rise and fall of Bitcoin, and I didn't think much of it. But when I moved to San Francisco in December of 2012, I moved into this place called 20 Mission, which is like a Bitcoin hacker house. I think the second crypto exchange in the US was launched out of the basement. Some of the earliest crypto meetups were there. So when I moved to San Francisco, just basically everybody I met was a Bitcoin fanatic, and I bit the bug pretty soon after and haven't been able to stop thinking about it. That was almost seven years ago.

• 5:36Anthony Pompliano?

  That's awesome. All right. So what'd you do first in the crypto space? And then how did you eventually come up with the idea for Unstoppable Domains?

• 5:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, so at first I was really just an investor, advised a couple of companies, kind of tinkered around. And then in 2017, my co-founder Matt came up with this idea to build domain names on blockchains and to kind of turn it into this sort of consumer-friendly product. And I got roped in somewhere a few months after.

• 6:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And I think a lot of people probably heard of unstoppable domains. They've seen the press coverage, et cetera. Let's start from the very beginning, like just what exactly is it? And how does it work?

• 6:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, so unstoppable domains is a registry business. So it's very similar to like a VeriSign, which owns .com, except for our domain name systems are on blockchains. And the idea is that blockchain domains do two things that regular domains can't do. The first is to simplify your crypto payments, to replace all of your crypto addresses with a single human readable name. So you could have like pomp dot whatever. You can attach your Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, all of your crypto addresses to this one domain. You tell it to me, I type it into a wallet and pay you. I don't need to know your addresses. I don't need to see your addresses. I don't even need to know which crypto you want to receive, because you've already attached the currencies that you accept to your domain. So that's payments. You can also use them to build unsensible websites.

• 7:00Speaker 02

  And the way this works is you can point your domain to content on like a decentralized storage network like IPFS. And then the domain is essentially an asset on a blockchain. It sits inside of your wallet, just like a cryptocurrency. So the combination of having a domain that you control, that's self custody by you, and content that's on a decentralized storage network means you can build a website that only you can put up and only you can take down. And this is really different from the way that traditional domains work, where if you have like a .com, you have a registrar like GoDaddy or something like that. They're your custodian. They can move the domain around for you. If they get a court order, they're going to take it. Same is true for your content. Your content is probably sitting on like Amazon Web Services

• 7:45Speaker 02

  or something like that. Same thing. If they don't like what you're doing, they can flip off your website. It takes only a few minutes. Or also, if they get a court order, that website's coming down. Not a huge deal in the United States, but around the world, there's a lot of places and a lot of people that are putting up things that you and I wouldn't think are wrong, that are getting censored and taken down. And the user tools are the tools themselves are built in such a way that companies and governments have complete control over them.

• 8:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, so we'll get to some of the censorship stuff in a second. Let's dig a little deeper into the technical components of this, right? Because I think the idea is pretty easy to understand of just, hey, there's going to be unstoppable domains, you know, great naming on your guys' part. But how does this work from a technical standpoint? And how do you actually prevent there being somebody who has the control to take down the domains?

• 8:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, so what happens is, is we launch our registry on a public blockchain. So it's a smart contract on a public blockchain. Each domain is essentially like, essentially like an NFT. It is like a non-fungible token, so each domain is unique. Each domain is an asset that sits inside of your wallet, just like a cryptocurrency. So it has the same security model as you storing your own Bitcoin or you storing your own Ethereum. So you need the private key in order to move it around. And the same is true for when you add information to it. So what you're really doing is you're pointing your domain to your content, and your content is sitting on a decentralized storage network or something like that. And the way, the way it works is, is you sign a message with that private key, the same

• 9:16Speaker 02

  private key that controls the domain, and you say, "My IPFS hash equals this." And so because you're the only one that can write that IPFS hash to your domain, you're the only one that can update the content. And so the domain is just like a cryptocurrency. Someone needs to get your private key in order to move it. And then your web content, same thing. Someone needs to get your private key in order to update it.

• 9:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so as you're doing this, can you do it on Bitcoin, Ethereum, kind of any public blockchain? Or is this specific to just a certain few of them?

• 9:47Speaker 02

  So in order to make this really robust, you need to launch the smart contract on a public blockchain like an Ethereum or something like that. But it doesn't really, from the end user perspective, what winds up happening is you can attach any cryptocurrency address to a domain that's sitting on, say, the Ethereum blockchain. So if Bitcoin is your, is the primary way that you receive money, fine. Attach your Bitcoin address, Ethereum address, Litecoin address, doesn't really matter. So basically, any single domain, any single domain name that we create has the ability to receive any cryptocurrency.

• 10:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And but it's all built on top of the Ethereum blockchains where this this exists and works best right now.

• 10:27Speaker 02

  So we built on multiple blockchains. We built we built our first system on Zilika blockchain, which is another smart contract platform that does sharding. We're building our second one on Ethereum.

• 10:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And as you're building this, what were some of the technical challenges that you guys had to figure out or kind of get around that maybe other people either hadn't figured out yet, or you guys had unique solutions to?

• 10:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it's sort of like the biggest problem as we see this is it's really more around there's two things. There's the kind of the ecosystem problem, meaning that you need to get lots and lots of applications inside the ecosystem to support it. And then there's the user tools problem. So this idea of decentralized domain names, I think, has been floating around in the crypto world for a long time. There was Namecoin very early on. There were some other attempts on smart contract blockchains as well. But the problem has been, how do you get all the applications to connect together? And how do you make it super easy for users? So a lot of the things that have been difficult that we've been solving for are how do we make it super simple for users to be able

• 11:27Speaker 02

  to do things like sign messages with their private key, store domains easily, easily in a self custody way. All of these things, it's really about making what are otherwise difficult things easy in the UI. And so if you were to go, for example, to unstoppabledomains.com and manage your domain, we have a little management section, you buy a domain, you can check out very easily with crypto or credit card. The domain gets transferred to a wallet that is rolled into our application. It's a self custody wallet. And then with a couple of clicks, you can copy and paste like a Bitcoin address and click save. And then it writes it signs a message and writes a message to the blockchain. So you as the

• 12:09Speaker 02

  user, don't even realize necessarily that that's what's happening. All you see is I saved an address to my domain. What's really happening is there's a transaction on the blockchain underneath. One of the things that we did is we cover the fees, which helps to make this a little bit easier. But getting it all the way down to this really simple user experience has been probably the most the most challenging thing.

• 12:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so how's it going so far in terms of you guys obviously built this that works, that the technology's there, you've got a great name, you've raised some capital. What are you seeing from a user adoption standpoint?

• 12:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think things have been rolling pretty fast. So we started selling our first domain name system in March. As of today, we've registered more than 100,000 domains. So this is essentially the fastest pace of any blockchain domain name system here to date, and also pretty big for any registry business, even for the traditional domain name world. So people are buying domains, claiming domains, adding addresses, and starting to use them for payments.

• 13:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Very cool. And so walk us through how you guys actually make money in this system, right? You go from 0 to 100,000 domains. What's kind of the business model and how do you see that evolving?

• 13:16Speaker 02

  So we sell domains. It's quite simple. The domains are priced between $20 and up to $10,000 for the most premium domains. It's a one-time fee, though. So over time, we'll be launching some subscription services for advanced features. They'll be optional. You'll always be able to just buy a domain, interact with it, control it forever yourself.

• 13:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. I'll start doing some math in my head. 100,000 times 20 is a big number. So I think that where you guys can go with this, there's kind of, I look at it like you guys are coming up on a fork in the road, right? And you can take this a whole bunch of different ways, right? There's the payment angle, there's the domain angle, there's a whole bunch of things around societal impact that we'll get into in a minute. What's kind of next for you guys?

• 14:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think that the really powerful thing about this is that, so in the traditional world, you've got payments, and payments is this very separate concept. You have to integrate Stripe, you have to do all this kind of crazy, crazy stuff in order to get payments into your website. In the blockchain world, payments and websites are essentially the same concept. So you're going to have your domain, you're going to have Pomp. dot whatever. I'll be able to send money to it. You'll also be able to host a website there. And when I send money to it, I know that the web content that is where you're advertising, let's say you're advertising a product or a service or whatever, I know that when I pay you, I'm paying the same person that put up this website. So it's basically like this concept of payments and websites become one. And if you actually need both, so if

• 14:48Speaker 02

  you want to have, if you want to have a truly uncensorable business, you need to be able to receive money and you need to be able to host content. So, and I know there was another question there in terms of what's next. So, one thing that I'd love to share with your with your community, because I think they'll be they'll be excited about is that we're getting ready to launch our second domain extension. It's going to be on the Ethereum blockchain. It's called .crypto. And the idea is that it is going to be the blockchain domain system for the entire crypto community. So you could have like pomp.crypto, and for example, we'll make sure that we'll make sure that you get you get pomp.crypto. And and the other thing is, is that so as soon as this show goes live, we're going to

• 15:29Speaker 02

  be doing a one for one, where you'll be able to buy our first domain extension is called .zill. So you'll be able to buy a .zill domain, and you'll automatically get the same .crypto domain for any any domain that's larger than seven characters. So something that I think I think as soon as this as soon as the show goes live, that'll be that'll be something that the community will be excited about.

• 15:51Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. So help me understand, how hard is it for you to add new kind of domain names, right? So .zill, .crypto, etc. Is this something where you can add hundreds or thousands of them in the future? Is it something where you'll kind of stay concentrated around four or five? Like, what's the plan and how difficult is it to add more?

• 16:10Speaker 02

  It's difficult from an ecosystem perspective. Our goal is not to create a lot of systems. I think that two is probably is probably plenty for a while. There may be some reason or some new features. The biggest reason might be to go and launch on a new blockchain. If there's a new blockchain that winds up being more efficient than Ethereum. But for now, the plan is to stick with these two, .zill and .crypto. And, you know, we think, you know, .crypto is essentially the, you know, the premium, the premium domain name system, and so we'll be heavily focused on that.

• 16:41Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm holding out for pomp bitcoin. I like it, though. All right, I want to get into some of the meat of this, which is the societal impact, right? Obviously, like I said in the beginning, this is a really powerful idea around unstoppable domains. Let's start with the the positive side and the part that I think is non controversial, especially in the developed world, Western world, which is you guys are going to take a big swipe at the ability for people to censor content, prevent access to information, to prevent freedom of speech, etc. Maybe just talk a little bit about how you guys philosophically think about this impact and kind of how you think it actually will play out in reality.

• 17:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, so this is the reason why we started this business. This is the reason why I'm motivated to wake up in the morning and do this is because we believe that anyone in the world should be able to publish and transact without fear of censorship. Companies, governments, there's no one group or one person that I trust to decide what is OK on the Internet. And this idea of allowing companies and governments to be our gatekeepers has continued to escalate. The Internet, I think, started in the 90s and 2000s with this very anarchic ethos, and over time has become extremely centralized to the point where it's becoming kind of dangerous. It's becoming dangerous to people around the world, but I think it's also becoming

• 18:04Speaker 02

  dangerous to people in the US as well, and it's getting worse. And as we see a rise of authoritarianism around the world, I think it's connected. I think it's connected to the centralization of data, and this might be one of the biggest risks we face, and our only hope is to decentralize it. We need to take the power out of these groups.

• 18:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and so it's a really interesting way of looking at, I think a lot of folks are saying, hey, the fact that we've given up so much data, the fact that we don't have access to this data is a huge problem. I think what you're saying is, it's not so much that we've given up the data or given access to the data, it's actually that we've given it to a centralized authority, and that centralized authority, we have, one, no recourse against, and, two, they're able to do a lot of, maybe not nefarious things, as much as just things that you or I wouldn't agree with.

• 18:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I think that, I think the context, again, in the US is quite different. In the US, there aren't that many groups of people that are being censored, at least not for legal activity, but if you look at it around the world, it's very different. I would say more than half of the world does not live in a free society, and so legal speech, or what we would consider to be legal or OK speech, political opposition, other unpopular ideas, these types of things, or even unpopular businesses that are considered legal, are getting censored all over the place. They get censored at the domain level, they get censored at the website content level, and they get censored at the payment processing level. And a blockchain domain name system solves all those problems.

• 19:29Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. And so is the idea here that not only one, you can kind of give people a peaceful way to fight back, right, against a lot of that authoritarian-arianism, I said that word wrong, but that's fine, everyone will laugh, and then also the censorship? Or is it a thing where, or kind of additionally, there will also be this whole ecosystem built on top of unstoppable domains and you'll kind of get some of the old existing world to be able to fight back, but also there's a whole new world of content and, you know, folks who will use the unstoppable domains to build new things as well?

• 20:03Speaker 02

  Yes, I think it's actually really similar to Bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general, where if you look at the history of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, you know, it started out with use cases around, you know, heavily censored activities, people doing things that they just couldn't do in the other world, but over time, we're starting to see, you know, more traditional businesses move into it because the technology actually works better. It's cheaper to send a transaction, it's faster to send a transaction, the technology is more robust than what we've currently been using. And the same is true here for blockchain domain name systems, where, you know, it may be that early on, it's going to start with, you know, Chinese political dissidents that are not able, that are not able to publish in any other platform without it getting taken down. But over time, we'll

• 20:46Speaker 02

  find that, you know, this is just better. Like, you can, you can sell a domain name, you don't need an escrow agent. You can transfer a domain name in 30 seconds without, without, without those types of rules that exist in the current world. You'll be able to, ultimately, you'll be able to store content in a cheaper way because you're not only having to go to Amazon Web Services, you'll be able to access anybody in the world's computer who wants to put up, who wants to offer their servers for storage space. So ultimately, this technology is more robust and we definitely see a future where traditional businesses move over to this because it works better.

• 21:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Skrt skrt! Wanna know who has the best URL? Crypto.com. That's right, Crypto.com. They're a crypto platform with one goal: Motherf***ing mass adoption. That's why we're all here. We're trying to get crypto in every wallet. Crypto.com is helping people do that through buying, earning, lending, and card payment. Everything you could want at Crypto.com. Go help your boy out, tell him Pomp sent you. Download the app or visit Crypto.com. Pomp's got you, always. Ever wanted to get into mining and didn't know how? Don't worry, your boy Pomp's got you. Everybody got some electricity and wifi? All you gotta do is go to CoinMine.com, you buy a coin mine. It's like an Xbox or a Playstation

• 22:07Anthony Pompliano?

  that helps you turn your electricity into Bitcoin. That's right. You purchase it, it shows up at your doorstep, you pull it out of the box, you plug it in, connect to your wifi, five minutes or less, you're mining Bitcoin. All you have to do is control it from the mobile app they provide, and then you receive over-the-air updates that add new coins and new features on a consistent basis. Kinda like how Tesla does over-the-air updates and updates the car software. Just your update in your coin mine. Consumer mining made easy. That's right, go to CoinMine.com, tell them Pomp sent ya, and thank me later. One more word from our sponsor BlockFi. Their new interest account allows you to securely deposit your Bitcoin or Ether at BlockFi and receive 6% annual interest paid monthly in cryptocurrency.

• 22:52Anthony Pompliano?

  This rate actually compounds, so you receive a 6.2% APY, which is very attractive given the alternatives. So you can actually take your Bitcoin, you can deposit it with BlockFi, and get paid an interest rate of 6% in return. Go check out BlockFi.com/Pomp, again BlockFi.com/Pomp, to sign up and start earning interest on your crypto today. So that's a lot of the kind of positive societal impact. I think that there's a lot of nuance in there. Each situation is different and the devil's kind of in the details. I would be remiss if I didn't ask about kind of the detraction to a lot of this, right? I think the people who see, oh, an unstoppable domain, yes, there's probably a positive impact, but also there could be negative sides, right? What if the kind of this technology

• 23:36Anthony Pompliano?

  or this product falls into the bad actor's hands, right? So whether it is somebody who's posting child pornography or human trafficking, right? All this kind of stuff that today it gets censored by being taken down or prevented access to for people. If the domains are unstoppable, one, can that content persist? And how do you guys think about that as, you know, product creators and kind of the impact that could be used by these bad people?

• 24:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I think the same, you know, the sort of the same arguments were thrown out about Bitcoin itself and cryptocurrencies early on. And I think that there's, you know, there's a few things. I think the first thing to keep in mind is that the majority of people around the world are using these tools and want to use these tools because the current tools are not able to serve them. So the majority of us and the majority of uses are not for these bad actors. So I think that's, you know, that's an important thing to keep in mind for crypto, and I think the same will be true for blockchain domains. But the other part of it is that these things, these bad things, they happen on the regular internet too. They already exist and persist in the world. So I think it's challenging to get it to zero, no matter how hard we try, but we will try because we don't want

• 24:46Speaker 02

  those things to happen. The reason we're doing this is because we want to promote global free speech. We don't want to help bad people do bad things. And there's a lot of ways that this will work that I think will ultimately be better than the way that the current, that the current internet functions. And the way it works is, is that at the protocol level, you can do anything. Anybody can interact with the public blockchain, anybody can sign a message and write information to the public blockchain. Theoretically, anybody could read that information. But in reality, with the commercial internet, with the commercial decentralized internet, what's going to happen is, applications aren't going to serve up stuff that they object to or stuff Stuff that is illegal. So what's going to wind up happening is your browser will choose,

• 25:31Speaker 02

  you know, will essentially choose, okay, this is content that we don't want to serve you. And that'll be way better because you don't get one view on what's okay. You know, this browser over here might say, you know, might take a specific moral, moral, moral opinion on this or that content and show it to you or not show it to you. This other browser might take a different view. And what's going to wind up happening is, you'll choose your browser, you'll choose your application, your application will choose your internet, but we're going to get dozens of different versions, hundreds of different versions. And through that, we'll wind up getting protected from cases where things that we really should see, or things that we really want to see, we're not going to be stopped from seeing them.

• 26:10Anthony Pompliano?

  And Sue, is this almost like when you're describing this, the first thing that jumps to mind is like, it's like a product stack or technology stack for a certain ethics, morals and perspectives, right? Where you'll say, hey, this protocol with this web browser, with this application in the web browser, etc., gives me access to a certain view of the world, whereas somebody else may not do that. Is that a fair way to kind of look at like a technology or product stack on a, on a specific perspective, ethics or moral kind of spectrum? Or do you look at it a little bit differently?

• 26:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think maybe we look at it slightly differently. So the way that, the way that we look at it is that technology tools themselves should not take an opinion. Technology tools, the only way to get a 100% safe and secure system is to have a system where the user controls their own activities completely. If any company, any individual, any group, even unstoppable domains, if anybody gets to decide, or get, then, then that's going to be, that's going to break down the safety and security of the system. So the system needs to be agnostic. Now, we also live in the real world, as do, as does everybody. And what's going to wind up happening is you and I are not going to want to have a completely anarchic internet where all of this terrible stuff is served. Even if we

• 27:24Speaker 02

  want and promote global free speech, we personally, I mean, I don't want to see that stuff. You don't want to see that stuff. So what's going to wind up happening is, we're going to want our applications to do this for us. And so that's how it's going to, that's how it's going to work. We'll be, you know, facilitating that and enabling that. But at its core, what we're really focused on is Tools that take no opinion about what you do. And this is exactly how Bitcoin and Ethereum work. Miners don't evaluate whether or not they think you're a good person before they process your transaction. And that's the reason why we have a safe and secure system.

• 27:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's a really interesting way to look at it and one that I think has a lot of validity. What do you think is kind of the first pressure test, right? In terms of as this happens, if there is some nefarious actor who comes into the system, where do you guys anticipate some of those issues popping up? Is it more kind of in the conversation, so like in the press or general population? Or is it something from a more technical standpoint where there's actual security threats or something like that?

• 28:25Speaker 02

  I think it'll probably, I mean, this is just speculation, but I think it'll probably be more like a public opinion type thing. But I expect that the first lightning rods we're going to see are going to be lightning rods around free speech, where there's going to be some people that want this thing to be said, and there's going to be other people that don't want this thing to be said, and there's going to be a fight about it. And I would broadly say, I would say that's a good thing. That's a good conversation to have. And it's OK for me to say this content is good and you to say this content is bad. You can choose your own internet. We don't all have to agree. And I think that's going to make a more diverse world, that's going to make a more robust technology stack. This is going to be a better version of the future.

• 29:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I think that's a very fair position to take. What do you think is the big inflection point here for the existing internet, right? So existing corporations, et cetera, to say, look, I need an unstoppable domain. I want one of these on the blockchain. Is there something that you're looking at as that inflection point?

• 29:27Speaker 02

  I think that what you're going to see most likely first is you're going to see traditional businesses playing around with this sort of technology for payments, because they don't have good payment solutions right now, especially not international payment solutions. So cryptocurrencies and blockchain domains paired with cryptocurrencies for payments are something that's going to be relevant, I think, to the traditional internet world relatively soon. The point in time at which they want to abandon their Amazon Web Services and all these other tools are going to be when this stack is more robust. And I think, you know, Ultimately, if you look at it on a long enough timeline, open source wins. Open source will be better, more robust, stronger, cheaper, all of these things. But that's going to take time.

• 30:09Speaker 02

  And initially, I think these tools will not be those things. And therefore, the people that will be focused on using them will be the people that have this hair on fire problem. They'll be the people that are getting censored right now. They'll be the people whose domains are getting seized from them. They'll be the people whose content is being switched off by various cloud service providers. So those are going to be the places where you'll see it first, I think. And then over time, it's going to be once the tech, once the tech is better and there will be that inflection point in the future, that's when the traditional world is going to start switching over.

• 30:42Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. Let's give you the benefit of the doubt and say you built everything that your heart can desire. You and the team are wildly successful. What does this look like in 10, 15, 20 years from today? What is that kind of ultimate ambition for Unstoppable Domains?

• 30:58Speaker 02

  The ultimate ambition is to have domains and websites on technology that cannot be censored, meaning that you can build your website, you can put it up, you can take it down, no one can stop you. Anyone around the world can view that website if they want to. Basically, the entire internet switches over to this. The current internet, if you look at it from the sort of nuts and bolts perspective, is not a safe and secure place. I mean, if you just read the news, you will see like these systems are not secure. Centralized systems have this huge problem. They are not secure. And ultimately, this is the only way for us to get complete security.

• 31:41Speaker 02

  So I think the entire internet is going to switch over to this.

• 31:44Anthony Pompliano?

  I love it. I think that if you can do half of that, you'll be in a good spot. Before I finish up, I always do rapid fire questions. What do you think is the most important company in crypto other than your own?

• 31:56Speaker 02

  Ooh, good question. I would say probably, I would say probably one of the, one of the big exchanges. So I'm a huge fan of Coinbase. They've been a great company. And I think they've, they've, they've, they've done it the right way in order to, in order to help spread crypto around the world.

• 32:14Anthony Pompliano?

  What's the one regulation you would change or improve if you could?

• 32:18Speaker 02

  Ooh, that's a good question. I would say probably just more clarity. There's just, it's not even, I don't even, I can't even point to a regulation. What I really can point to is fear. You know, you talk to a lawyer, a lawyer says, "You should be afraid of doing this or that with crypto." It's not illegal. It doesn't violate any specific rule, but you should be afraid because of lack of clarity. So I would say clarity, that there is a category and it's called securities, and most of the stuff in crypto is not that, and that we're, that there's just clarity to operate for all of these different, all these different parties.

• 32:55Anthony Pompliano?

  What's your most controversial thought in crypto? If you say it, everyone will go, "Oh, I completely disagree."

• 33:02Speaker 02

  I am cryptocurrency and blockchain agnostic. I don't care ultimately which tools people use. I want the technology and the community to rise across the board, and you'll see this playing out inside of the way that we talk about our business and the way that we build. We don't actually care. If you want to use Bitcoin, great. If you want to use Bitcoin Cash, great. If you want to use Ethereum, that's great, too. We don't care.

• 33:33Anthony Pompliano?

  In the tribalistic world of crypto, it's a very controversial thought, but one that is appreciated for sure. What's the most important book you've ever read?

• 33:43Speaker 02

  Ooh, that's a good question.

• 33:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Have you listened to the podcast? All I do is good questions.

• 33:49Speaker 02

  I'm gonna say, I'm gonna say one that sticks out to me and that I read recently, maybe not of all time, but Radical Markets. Radical Markets really impacted the way that I, the way that I think about, you know, what is an ideal economic system. And I also think that it's just this like amazing third way, you know, it's like, it's not socialist, it's not libertarian free market, it's this, it's this other thing that kind of can unite all the different views around a pragmatic version of how to build an economy that works.

• 34:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I haven't read that. I'll have to check it out for sure. I end each podcast letting the guest ask me one question, but first we talk aliens. Believer, non-believer?

• 34:33Speaker 02

  I mean, there's gotta be some aliens. The universe is just too big.

• 34:39Anthony Pompliano?

  The thing now that I'm very interested in is if we came in contact, would we end up being the superior species? Or do you think that we would be submissive and therefore maybe it's actually good that we've never come in contact with them reportedly?

• 34:53Speaker 02

  I have to believe that there's, again, just because of the vastness of the universe, that there's probably both. You know, like, I think we've been, you know, whatever, we've been rolling as a species for maybe like 300,000 years, something like that, 200,000 or 300,000 years, maybe you go back to hominids, we got a couple million years. There's gotta be somebody that's been evolving, or some group that's been evolving for like, I don't know, a few hundred million or billion years. So, there's gotta be some that are ahead of us and some that are behind us. So, I guess I hope we bump into the ones that are behind us.

• 35:19Anthony Pompliano?

  It's pretty scary to think about the idea that there could be some sort of sentient beings that have been evolving for hundreds of millions of years.

• 35:29Speaker 02

  Definitely.

• 35:30Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, what one question do you have for me to wrap it up?

• 35:33Speaker 02

  I mean, what's your favorite crypto company?

• 35:36Anthony Pompliano?

  My favorite company? I always cheat, and it's my podcast, so I can do whatever I want. I say Bitcoin, just because I think from a market standpoint, you know, the market has determined that's the most valuable one by market cap today. But I do think that, you know, if you take what you guys are doing, or there's some other people in the market that are taking a lot of the ethos of Bitcoin, Ethereum, kind of, you know, these ones that the market has determined are super valuable. So, it's not the actual technology alone, it's the ethos of what they're trying to do. And you're applying it to, frankly, kind of, what I think previously was perceived as like nascent areas of crypto, right? So, blockchain domains, etc. But they're very large markets in traditional world.

• 36:20Anthony Pompliano?

  And you take the ethos of these public blockchains and you start to apply it to these areas. One, I think that, you know, just like you guys have seen, you see very fast growth, because there are a lot of people who want the ethos of the crypto world combined with the same services and products from the traditional world. But also, I think what you find is you're essentially building a product for a global audience, rather than a developed world audience. And, you know, we're sitting here in New York City and Manhattan. Like as far away from understanding the the developing world as possible for most people. But but I do find a lot of people in crypto have actually done a lot of travel, they've spent a lot of time. They have friends all over the world, and so they're a little bit more globalist in in mindset.

• 37:02Anthony Pompliano?

  And so it's pretty interesting to to see, you know, companies like yours and and others build along those ethos for for large markets in the traditional world.

• 37:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's really cool. And one of the things that I find the most fascinating about talking about this company is oftentimes, you know, we're talking about censorship on the internet, and we're talking about these problems. We, you know, we talked, we talked about it to folks in America, and they're a little bit puzzled. We talk about it to folks that live almost anywhere else in the world, and they get it immediately. They're like, oh, yeah, I've had a domain seized. Oh, yeah, you know, you're not allowed to say what you want to say in my country. So it's basically only in the United States where where some of these concepts are not completely clear.

• 37:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's, you know, oh, yeah, I had that blog where I wrote one time about the president. I didn't even say anything bad, but they just took it down because it had the president's name in it, right?

• 37:45Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 37:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome, man. Listen, where can people find out more about unstoppable domains and find you on the internet?

• 37:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, go to unstoppabledomains.com. And as I mentioned before, there's essentially a buy one, get one free for the dot crypto as soon as this show comes out. So check out the website and and yeah, reach out to us. We're on Telegram, we're on Twitter, we're all over the place.

• 38:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome. Well, thanks so much again for coming to do this. We'll have to do it again in the future. Hey, everyone. Pop here. If you liked this episode of Off the Chain and want to help us take crypto to the top of the Apple, Spotify and other podcast charts, please do us a favor and rate, review and subscribe. To review, simply go to the Off the Chain homepage, scroll down until you see the five blank stars. Taking 15 seconds to fill those stars in and leave a quick review goes a long way in helping us take the entire crypto ecosystem to the top of the charts. I appreciate you listening and see you next time on Off the Chain.