#424: Bradley Kam on Crypto Payments

Brad Kam is the Co-Founder of Unstoppable Domains. In this conversation, we discuss crypto payments, real world IDs, oracles, how to access the decentralized web, and Twitter verification. ======================= Digital art is here, and it's real. NFTs are selling for hundreds and thousands of dollars. The only platform I buy on is Nifty Gateway, which is an official sponsor of the Pomp Podcast. They release content from the best NFT artists in the world twice weekly, and have featured many world famous artists including Kenny Scharf, Trevor Jones and WhIsBe. NFTs on Nifty Gateway are in extremely high demand, so if you really want one, make sure to be on the website as soon as it is released. Go to http://www.niftygateway.com and sign up for an account today. ======================= Diginex is the first company with a cryptocurrency exchange to be listed in the US. That exchange, EQUOS, has been built to institutional standards, but is available to everyone. You can trade Bitcoin and Ethereum spot, as well as Bitcoin perpetuals, and get a 5% discount on all fees, by signing up using http://www.equos.com/pomp ======================= Coinbase Wallets are adding support for .crypto and .zil domains through their partnership with Unstoppable Domains. Unstoppable Domains provides an all-in-one solution for blockchain domains. You can send money using these new domains instead of long Bitcoin wallet addresses, while also storing your domain in Coinbase's collectibles section. Go to http://www.unstoppabledomains.com in the dapp browser to register and manage your domains.

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

• 0:00Anthony 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. Let's kick this thing off. Bradley Kam is the co-founder and CRO of Unstoppable Domains. In this conversation, we discuss crypto payments, real-world identification, oracles, how to access the decentralized web, and Twitter verification methods. I really enjoyed this conversation with Brad, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into the episode though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is Nifty Gateway. Digital art is here, and it's real. NFTs are selling for hundreds and thousands of dollars. The only platform I buy on is

• 0:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Nifty Gateway, which is an official sponsor of this podcast. That's why I'm telling you about them right now. They release content from the best NFT artists, the digital artists in the world, twice weekly, and they featured many world-famous artists, including Kenny Sharp, Trevor Jones, and Who's Be? NFTs on Nifty Gateway are extremely high demand, they're high-quality, and if you want one, you gotta make sure you got an account on the website, so that you can catch when they drop them. So go to niftygateway.com. Again, niftygateway.com. Digital art is gonna be bigger than analog art, in my opinion. I've been buying a bunch of it. You guys have probably seen me talking about it on Twitter and in the email. Go and check out niftygateway.com, sign up for an account,

• 1:27Anthony Pompliano?

  and get ready, everyone should have some digital art. Go check them out. Next up is Digenex. They are the first company with a cryptocurrency exchange to be listed in the United States. That exchange, Equus, is, or it has been built to institutional standards. It is built to institutional standards, but it is available to everyone. You can trade Bitcoin and Ethereum spot, as well as Bitcoin perpetuals, and you will get a 5% discount on all fees if you sign up by going to equos.com/pomp. Again, equos.com/pomp, or go in the description, you can click on the link there. Digenex, the first publicly traded crypto exchange in the United States, and their exchange, Equus.

• 2:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Is where you can go trade crypto. Go check it out. Lastly, is unstoppable domains. You're gonna hear a ton about them today from Brad, our guest, but basically they have taken the ability to use Bitcoin wallet addresses. Think of this as the long string of letters and numbers that you gotta send when you send Bitcoin to somebody and your heart is just pounding and you're sweating and you think you're like Eminem and you just can't figure out what's going on and you're scared you're gonna lose money. Well, now you don't have to do all that. You can go to unstoppabledomains.com. You can buy a .crypto domain. So literally I have pomp.crypto. And then when somebody says, hey, what's your wallet address? How do I send you Bitcoin? You can say, oh, cool, man. Just send it to pomp.crypto. You

• 2:54Anthony Pompliano?

  can go to Coinbase Wallet and simply just type in pomp.crypto and next thing you know, it will end up in your wallet. So just like URLs used to be all about IP addresses and you had to remember a sequence of numbers. We've eventually got human readable domains. Now unstoppable domains is bringing human readable, easily memorable URLs or domain names to the decentralized web. I love it. It's a no brainer. Go to unstoppabledomains.com. If somebody buys your domain that you want, before you do, they get it, you don't. First come, first served. You're out of luck. Game over. You lose. So go to unstoppable domains

• 3:34Anthony Pompliano?

  today and you will be able to purchase whatever you want that's available. And if you get it, nobody else gets it. So go get your name, go get your company, go get a domain you think is gonna be valuable in the future, whatever you want. Go to unstoppabledomains.com. Tell them I sent you. And that is it. Let's get into this episode. Brad, I hope you guys enjoy it.

• 3:54Speaker 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.

• 4:20Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Brad from Unstoppable Domains here. Welcome back. Thank you so much for doing this, sir. Thanks much for having me. Absolutely. I feel like you guys have been absolutely crushing it. You guys have been launching all kinds of new things. For those that haven't listened to the previous episode, give us a quick Overview of just what is unstoppable domains?

• 4:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. So we are building domain names on blockchains. It's DNS on the blockchain. And what we've built is domain registries, similar to like dot coms, except for that they are smart contracts on a blockchain. So domains are stored inside of your wallet instead of sitting on GoDaddy or something else like that. So nobody else can move the domain around. Nobody can take the domain away from you. Unstoppable domains can't even take the domain away from you or turn it off or anything like that. And we've also built kind of like a GoDaddy for the blockchain where you can find domains, you can buy domains, you can manage domains, and you can build websites all from unstoppabledomains.com. So that's where we're building tools to make it easier for people to use the decentralized web.

• 5:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. And so when people hear decentralized web, I think they'll go, ooh, what's that? Like, maybe I've heard the term before. I have no clue what that actually means. Describe a little bit about the difference between a centralized web and a decentralized web.

• 5:39Speaker 02

  Users are in control in the decentralized web. It's exactly the same thing as what happens with crypto. With crypto, users are in control of your money. In traditional finance, banks and financial institutions are in control of your money. So the same thing is true for your domain names and for your web content. So your domain names in the traditional world are part of a centralized database, DNS servers. They're controlled by a whole bunch of different parties, but essentially effectively controlled by a group that's heavily, heavily influenced by the US government. And they're able to move domains around, turn domains off. They're, they essentially have custody of the domains for you.

• 6:22Speaker 02

  Blockchain domains, you have them, you control them, they're stored inside of your wallet, just like cryptocurrency. And then on the web hosting side, in the traditional world, you are storing your content on Amazon Web Services or some other, some other service like that. And here, you're storing your content on a decentralized storage network like IPFS, Filecoin, something like that. And so the net effect of all of this is when I have my domain, plus I have my hosted content. On a decentralized network, I now have a website that only I can put up or take down. I now have complete control of my data. This is the opposite of the way the traditional web works. And when you hear all of this kind of crazy stuff about what's going on with Facebook and all the controversies, all of it tends to come down to this one key point, which is these companies control your data.

• 7:07Speaker 02

  You don't control your data. And as a result of that, uh, we are not the customer of Facebook. We are the product of Facebook. The customer are the companies that are buying our data. If in the future world, when we have a future, when we have a decentralized web, you're going to control your data and then you'll be the customer of a future Facebook and you'll give them permission to use some of your data in order to provide you a service. But you'll control your social network. You'll, you'll control all of your data and you'll be able to move around with that. It'll be interoperable. You'll be able to use your, your social graph inside of 50 applications. Completely different than the way that the, that the current web works. And it all comes, comes down to this one simple idea. Users do not have property rights on the internet.

• 7:52Speaker 02

  You have property rights in the real world, but for some reason, when we went, when we moved things onto the internet, it all of a sudden became legal and okay for companies to just take everything, take everything from you. You would never allow, allow a company to walk inside of your house and take your stuff. That's what you're doing online right now.

• 8:10Anthony Pompliano?

  And so as you kind of go into this world, there's obviously the domains for websites and, and things to be hosted information. But the part to me that's so interesting is you can also use these domains now, uh, you know, Coinbase wallets, right? You guys have run ads kind of everywhere telling people that Coinbase wallets uh, now support these unstoppable domains as the recipient of funds. So I no longer will send somebody a Bitcoin wallet address. I now instead can send pomp.crypto and all of a sudden somebody can actually send me Bitcoin to that wallet address. Describe a little bit about kind of the, the multiple use cases of these domains.

• 8:48Speaker 02

  So the way to think about it is that a blockchain domain, you can write any information that you want to it because you control it. So it's far more flexible than a traditional domain. And what's going to wind up happening is, is that in the traditional world, you've got a Venmo account and a PayPal account with a username. And then you've got your website and then you've got maybe your, you know, Facebook username or your WhatsApp username, or whatever else you're using for messaging. All of these are different systems, all with different usernames. None of them interoperate. With a blockchain domain, you can just have one thing. So you can just have pomp.crypto, someone can send you money. Someone can also visit your website. Someone can also send you an encrypted message. And because it's all to the same thing, you now have this increased security.

• 9:32Speaker 02

  You have this decreased risk of an imposter. I know that when I am messaging with you, that I'm also paying to the same person. I know if I'm visiting your website and I send money to pomp.crypto, I'm sending to the same person that controls that website. So it's kind of a, it's kind of a weird idea for people that a domain name can also be your, you know, like kind of like your decentralized Venmo account. But it can. And that's the first use case that the crypto community has been using. So you mentioned Coinbase Wallet, works in a couple dozen other wallets, works for about 100 different currencies. So if you have 100 different crypto addresses, you can attach them all to this one domain. Tell somebody they can type that in, pay you in any of the currencies you support.

• 10:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. And so like, how does this change crypto payments? Like, what is the future look like? We saw with the centralized internet, there used to be IP addresses. You kind of had to remember all the numbers and the sequence. Then we got human readable URLs. That changed everything. Is the same thing going to happen here when it comes to Bitcoin and crypto payments with these kind of human readable domains?

• 10:38Speaker 02

  Absolutely. It's so hard. You, you, you can't even imagine onboarding, onboarding new people when you have to explain this idea of you got these, not only do you have a 20 character address and a 40 character address, but you've got dozens of them. So right now, sometimes people will send you an email, you know, with, you know, a list of, you know, 10 different addresses to send to. That just does not, that does not at all appear like the way that, you know, future payments are going to work. It's not the way the current payments work. If you look at the way it works right now, Venmo is great. You search for a name of somebody that you want to pay. You see their picture, maybe you see some social information in order to verify it's the right person, then you click and send. Like, that's the experience that ultimately we're going to need in crypto in order to be able to compete.

• 11:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. And I guess as this becomes more pervasive and people realize that you can do this, it also changes the types of payments that people look for, right? It's really hard right now to kind of take that Bitcoin wallet address or crypto wallet address and just like display it on your website, for example, right? But if now all of a sudden you can simply put in a social media message and say, hey, send it to pomp.crypto, complete game changer in the way that you use it. And I think that maybe one of the proxies people have done is use QR codes, right? It's kind of a way to do it. Maybe talk a little bit about not only the sender having their activity changed, but also the people who now can accept kind of donations or payments in a whole different way using these human readable domains.

• 12:02Speaker 02

  So you could imagine a campaign where somebody tries to do a fundraising campaign and essentially the domain itself, the payment address can go viral. Like, so right now you have to say, okay, you know, here's a cause that I really care about, everybody, you know, click on this link, read this description, go through these payment details, here's a, here's a credit card section, put in all your information, oh, what about your billing address? And you go through all of these different steps and then eventually you can support that campaign. Here, you can say, hey, you know, pay to, you know, feed the children.crypto or whatever. I don't know if that's a live domain, so don't, don't try that. But something like that. And then you could just share that on the internet and say, hey, hey, everybody, you

• 12:47Speaker 02

  know, do you support this cause?

• 12:50Speaker 02

  Send money to, you know, this. And that's the only information that people need to know. So I think there's a, there's a future where we're going to have viral donation campaigns because it's just so low friction in order to be able to participate.

• 13:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And to me, the part that becomes really interesting now is, one, can they go viral? But two, it's, I call it meme-able, right? Meaning that like, I can remember, pomp.crypto, if I say it enough times, everyone will remember it. You can imagine that happening also for, whether it's celebrities, large businesses, nonprofits, just, you kind of go down the line, you can really see that the domain itself becomes part of that marketing message, right? It becomes, you know, the meme is the message, and there's nothing better than actually the address itself, kind of going out. And we saw it in the late 90s with like, every company being .com. Like, what better name than to have your website as your name, right? I think here, something similar is happening, right?

• 13:48Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 13:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. You guys also have launched this Twitter verification, or kind of real-world IDs. I don't think people even understand the problem. So let's start there, of kind of like, what problem you saw around identification as you guys were building?

• 14:04Speaker 02

  So just imagine for a moment, someone says, hey, you know, send me, you know, $100,000 for some business transaction. Now imagine that they say, okay, send it to this anonymous, random string of numbers and letters, and hope that it gets to, you know, hope that this money gets to me. I mean, we've all had this, you know, this feeling of, you know, I'm, I type in the address, I check it, I triple-check it, maybe I do a test transaction, I panic for an extra 30 seconds, and then finally, I, I will myself to press the button. That's the current experience that we have with crypto payments. That is very different than how it works with Venmo. With Venmo, I don't do any of those things. Even if I want to send my friend $2,000, I go, I find their username, I see their picture,

• 14:46Speaker 02

  I can verify some piece of social information about them if they've linked it. I feel pretty confident I'm paying the right person, then I press set. And so, there's all of this context that we get in order to be able to send money in the traditional world. And none of that exists in the crypto world yet. So what we did is, We said, okay, well, what's information that would be useful for people before they send money to somebody? And one thing that we thought was verification of your Twitter account. So what you're doing is, is you're attaching your Twitter handle to a crypto address. And you're doing this in a relatively secure way.

• 15:26Speaker 02

  You're using oracles that go and verify, they all go and check the blockchain and check Twitter to verify that it's the same person that controls the domain name, it's the same person that controls the Twitter account. But then in effect of this is, if I go and type, if you go and verify pump.crypto, when I go to pay you, I can see the Twitter handle before I pay. And so then I can click it and I can verify and I can say, okay, this is definitely the right person before I'm sending money. And so if you think about the types of people that are going to be wanting to receive crypto for their businesses, you know, it's going to be people who are already public in this way for the most part.

• 16:09Speaker 02

  And so this is a great way for them to add more verification. Twitter handle is just one thing, but the nice thing about Twitter handles is that they are, they're relatively good pseudo anonymous IDs, because you have a lot of reputation around them, because Twitter platform is very secure and very mature. And so you've got a lot of people who have years of tweets and followers and other things that you can look at and, you know, scan. And it takes five seconds to say, okay, you know, this is just the right person.

• 16:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. And what's interesting to me about this whole thing is, one, using Twitter as the identification system is interesting. But also, two, is it starts to really eat away at one of the problems, which has historically been, how do I, one, make sure that the person or organization I'm sending money to is going to get it, right? So just like the address itself is a pain in the ass. But now, two, it's like, and where it ends up, ends up being the person that I actually intended it for, right? So it's kind of like a two-step thing that you guys are solving here. Talk a little bit about kind of the technology that you're using in order to be able to actually do this verification.

• 17:21Speaker 02

  So what people are doing is, is you're signing a message with your private key that controls the domain name and you're writing, you're, you're writing the Twitter handle to the blockchain. You're also tweeting with like a, with a code that matches. And then oracles in the background, chain link oracles, we use the, the chain link system in order to do this, uh, will go and check the blockchain and go and check Twitter and say, do these things match? And then they actually do a proof and link that information to the blockchain. And if they all agree, then the, the Twitter handle is verified. And so the net effect of this is a Twitter handle is associated with a specific crypto address on the blockchain.

• 18:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so when you're thinking about other types of verification that could potentially work, Twitter is obviously a great one. Is it a belief that like eventually you'll be able to tap into like government databases and use like licenses or passports or, or something like that? Or maybe are there other kind of social consensus almost type, uh, identifications that may, uh, may be valuable?

• 18:27Speaker 02

  So I think you're, you're going in a couple of pretty cool directions here. I think where this can end up is, you know, ultimately what we're, what you get from a blockchain domain is you get, uh, the user in control. So the, when the user is in control, the user gets to decide what information is going to be associated with it. It's not like a top-down, you know, government ID where they decide everything and they control everything. You decide, so you can actually decide, I want to be completely anonymous and invisible. I want to be pseudo anonymous and have like a little bit of association. I want to be completely public, uh, but only tied to my social IDs. Uh, or I want to also have this, you know, maybe I want this to be tied to my government ID. You can have all of the above.

• 19:10Speaker 02

  And so what you can get is you can get kind of like a bottom up, uh, a bottom up view of who this person is. If I tie three things together, then that makes you even more confident that you know who I am. If you tie a government ID, uh, sure, that can give you even more. So I think what you're going to wind up getting in the blockchain world in general is very similar to what you get in the internet, which is, uh, all degrees of, of usage, all the way from the completely private to the completely public. And I think this is something that people have still been wrestling with in the crypto world. I don't know if you, if you, you probably remember this. If you go back and you look at memes on the internet from the late 1990s, it's all about how you never know who anyone

• 19:54Speaker 02

  is. You could be like texting with a dog or something like that in the background. Those were all the jokes that you, there's no ID on the internet. It's completely this crazy, anonymous, whatever. Now the joke is there's too much ID on the internet. Facebook and everybody's completely public. So like if you fast forward 20 years, the experience that we're having with the internet is almost completely the opposite of the impression that people had early on. And I think that what we can get from the blockchain world is a happy medium in users get to choose. Users can go to the completely private side of the spectrum. Users can go to the completely public side of the spectrum. Users can go anywhere in between. And we're not going to be forced to go one way or the other because apps won't control us. So user choice is going to lead to, long answer, user choice

• 20:37Speaker 02

  is going to lead to absolutely every version of this, all the way from anonymous to government ID and everything in between.

• 20:43Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. And these oracles seem to be kind of a really important piece of infrastructure in doing this, right? The connecting the kind of real world data to these blockchain based systems. How has the experience been in terms of using oracles? And do you guys see kind of other use cases in the product that you'll kind of continue to use them for?

• 21:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I think that what's, what's cool is that so real, um, oracles in general, I think they've, they've been getting pretty popular over the past year. And for the most part, they've been grabbing financial data, you know, like what's the price of Bitcoin? Uh, or something like that. So that you can, you have great derivative contracts or whatever else you're, you're trying to build into your app. You're trying to use financial data for primarily for financial services. That's great. Gigantic market. But there are, there's this real world information that's going to be super interesting for allowing users to do more things on the decentralized web. And the Twitter handle is just the first step there. There's a lot of other types of real world, uh, real world IDs that can be used here. Uh, and so we definitely plan to, plan to add more.

• 21:51Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. And as you think through kind of these domains, you've got one, I can go and I can host things in the decentralized web. I can do crypto payments. Are there other products or kind of services that you guys are thinking about as we look forward to kind of what you guys could build? It seems like you kind of have these different building blocks, right? You've got the domain system. You've got obviously the exchange where you can go and buy the domains. You've got this verification system now. You've got a pretty good understanding of Oracles. Like it does feel like you're laying the foundation to be able to build all kinds of stuff. I don't know if anything there that is either top of mind or that you guys are considering.

• 22:29Speaker 02

  So there's a bunch of different things that you need on the internet, but some of the kind of core components would be, you know, you need payments, you need content, which are websites, you need communication messaging. Those are three key components. And so the domains work for all of those. And so we're mostly, mostly the way that we build our roadmap is to facilitate those use cases. So Twitter verification is about payments, making it more comfortable for you to be able to send payments, making it less scary to send payments. So that's the idea behind that. The web tools that we've been building are around websites and content. And

• 23:10Speaker 02

  then we also built an early version of a chat app that is encrypted peer-to-peer chat app where the domain name is the username. So no one can turn off your, can turn off your messages and it's not sitting on any, on any company servers. So all of the things that you'll see us building are going to be around facilitating these, these kind of core features on the internet. And the current internet provides us with all three of those things. Payments probably, they do not as good of a job at. Maybe it's okay job now that we have Stripe and things like that. But for the most of the history of the internet, payments was actually quite, being done quite poorly on the internet. So these are the core features of the internet in general. We are just now building a decentralized user-controlled version of them.

• 23:53Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. And then help us understand kind of accessing this decentralized web. Because I think there's a lot of people who say, oh, decentralization, that's going to solve a lot of problems. Right? There, there's all kinds of things around ownership and putting the user in charge that you talked about. There's things around free speech, like there's just a lot of positive impact from having a truly decentralized internet that people build on top of. But then the question I always get is like, how the hell do I access the decentralized web? Right? They, they go to their Chrome browser or whatever, and they start typing around and like, ah, everything looks centralized to me. So help, help people just have kind of a 101 of how do they actually access that decentralized web? And where would you send them?

• 24:32Speaker 02

  So, uh, right now I would send you to Opera Browser for Android. That is the first place to support native resolution of domain names. So if you go to Opera for Android, you can type in a dot crypto, just like a dot com, and it works. There will be more soon. Uh, there are several browsers that are in various phases of working on this. But what's going to wind up happening is, is that we're going to have a relatively small, uh, but fully functioning alternate internet. Where we're going to have a handful of key browsers and other applications where this stuff works. And it's not going to work natively inside of Chrome or Safari in the short term.

• 25:13Speaker 02

  And we don't expect that they're going to jump on the decentralized web bandwagon quickly. They're going to wait until, uh, there's a whole bunch of users and until they have to. But in the meantime, uh, we've got all of these, you know, great alternative tools that particularly the crypto community is, you know, is by and large already using. And then you can also use Chrome extensions and extensions in various browsers.

• 25:37Anthony Pompliano?

  And is the thought process that, uh, it's kind of a game theory, um, where nobody jumps into the decentralized web out of the major players until there's enough users. And then once one does it, everyone has to follow. But like, everyone kind of like looks around the room and says, hey, nobody do it yet. Cause then that means we're all going to have to go do it, but eventually that does, uh, that does tip over.

• 25:56Speaker 02

  Well, so I think we're in a better place now than maybe we would have been even a few years ago in the browser world, where there's a bit more innovation now. There's, you know, there's been Brave Browser, there's Opera is actually trying to do a lot of different stuff. There's a lot of alternative browsers that are on the rise. So there's a community of applications that are pushing the web, the browser world forward. I think the kind of big four, big three are going to wait because browser is not their core business. So they don't have a reason to innovate there unless they absolutely have to. And so they

• 26:36Speaker 02

  will, but they'll do it when it's time. Whereas these other applications will do it, you know, to help facilitate the decentralized web because they need, they need strategies for the future. They need to be able to have, they need differentiation in their markets, but they also need, they also need new market opportunities. You know, they need some place to go where the browser market has been a bit stagnant. Now there's, there's energy towards this, towards this new world. And even separate from decentralized web features, they're also interested in crypto in general and integrating crypto wallets, DeFi applications, things like that. A browser is a great place to store your assets, to have a wallet in

• 27:19Speaker 02

  there. So there's a bunch of different things that are pushing the kind of alternate browser world in this direction. And that's really the wave that we're riding in order to get in. And that's what's going to allow, you know, users, tens of millions, even hundreds of millions of users to be able to use this stuff in 2021. But then, when will it be native in Chrome? That's probably going to be once we have, once we have, you know, millions of cool websites.

• 27:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. What's the, the most interesting use case you've seen so far in the decentralized web that you're excited about?

• 27:52Speaker 02

  So one thing that people are working on a lot right now is this idea of having a domain name controlled by a group of people, like by a DAO, instead of by an individual. And the reason why this matters is because admins have liability. So if you control your domain name inside of GoDaddy and you're the admin, you're the one in charge. You can make a mistake, make an update, you could get hacked, any number of other problems, and you also have legal responsibility. And so for a lot of projects that are trying to be, you know, open source, community-driven, they still have this admin problem for their website.

• 28:34Speaker 02

  They still have, all the liability comes back to whoever is building that front end. And if they can go all the way to have that front end on the decentralized web and have the domain name controlled by a thousand people in the community that are voting on its contents, you've actually changed the legal framework. So that's one really cool one that a lot of people are working on. Another one is charging for content. You know, just pay me a dollar, pay me $2 to watch this video. The most basic type of content monetization that just doesn't work in the regular internet.

• 29:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you think that's going to become prevalent? Do you think that's where we're going to end up here on the internet for monetization?

• 29:14Speaker 02

  I think there's, I think it's a strategy. It won't be a strategy in every single case. I think we're going to have a lot of different things, you know? Like right now, we're kind of in the, I guess, probably the bundling phase of, you know, of content where, you know, you go and you pay, you know, Netflix and then they give you a million different things. Or you go and you pay, you know, cable and they give you a million different things. It's heavily bundled. You're not able to pay for specific content. So I can't remember the name of the guy who said this, but it's a pretty famous startup quote, that everything in startups, everything in technology is either bundling or unbundling. And it's the simplest idea that's actually very profound, and I think this is true. So I think the short answer is everywhere where it's previously, where it's currently

• 29:57Speaker 02

  bundled, we'll probably see unbundling, and everywhere where it's currently unbundled, we'll probably see bundling. One of the places where we see a lot of bundling right now is on like video content. And therefore that leads me to believe that there is a huge demand for people to unbundle it. You know, like, maybe, maybe you have some premium content that you'd want to sell. And you could charge, you know, five bucks for a video rather than having advertisements. And not to say that advertisements are, are a bad strategy or that you're going to give up on it entirely. But there may be places where, um, you know, where it's appropriate to, to charge.

• 30:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. It, it's, um, it's so fascinating to kind of think through micro payments and, and streaming payments, right? Kind of, uh, rather than pay your 10, 12 bucks to Netflix every month. What if you just pay, uh, kind of as you watch things and then at some point it tops out and you pay the 12 bucks. Right? You know, and, and there's kind of a cap on how much you can spend, uh, for power users or something. It, it, it just feels like that's kind of the world that we're moving towards. Obviously, we need the tech stacks built. We need people to kind of put the interfaces on there and get users. But it, it definitely feels like that technology will, uh, will unlock a lot of, uh, of, of new business models.

• 31:06Speaker 02

  One other thing I like about the content category in the decentralized web. It's just making it easier for people to post the content in a way that it won't get, you know, it won't get messed with. It won't get taken down. YouTube has been doing all kinds of, all kinds of things to, you know, crypto content. Um, and even just have the option of easy donations. Um, cause you know, I've seen this, you know, with influencers where you, you essentially have this like pent up demand amongst their community. Where they're saying like, we think you're awesome. We would like to pay you. You, what you're giving us primarily is for free, so we're looking for ways to pay you. So maybe you sell me like a mug with your face on it or something. That's like a common solution is, is that influencers go and do a little bit of e-commerce. But maybe it's even more natural to just say, you know, donate to me.

• 31:50Speaker 02

  I mean, that's like the Patreon model almost. So you'll start to see, I think, a lot of optional payments too, uh, to influencers. And, and that could wind up being a really big revenue source. I mean, there were, you know, early examples of this on the internet. I think there was one where, um, this is probably like, ah, man, I'm gonna sound old. This is probably 2005 or something like that, where Radiohead released an album and the cost was, uh, optional. Pay anywhere from zero to whatever you want. And they made millions. Um, and, and I think that you're going to see things like this, um, from content creators. Where as long as it's easy to pay me, then I can even have like a pay what you.

• 32:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. Couldn't agree more. And I think Patreon and a couple of others, you know, have done it in a centralized world, but it's it's coming and and there might not be a middleman is the good way to look at it. Brad, listen, thank you so much for taking the time to do this. Where can we send people to find you on the internet and find out more about Unstoppable Domains?

• 32:46Speaker 02

  So I would check us out on Twitter at Unstoppable Web. You'll see all of our updates from there. And then, of course, you know, check out unstoppabledomains.com. You'll be able to see what's see what the latest is. And we're always, you know, bro, we're always shipping something.

• 33:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. And I'll throw you one softball to end this. Every time I do the ad read, I try to emphasize this as much as possible, but I figured you'd be better than me. I don't think that people get if somebody else buys the domain, it's not there for them anymore. Like, there's only one. It's very similar to kind of URLs in the centralized world. So maybe just talk a little bit about the the kind of auction process or the purchasing process of the actual domains to end this.

• 33:27Speaker 02

  So what's happening is, when you purchase a domain, it is getting minted, minted on the blockchain and then sent to your wallet. So the way that the contracts work, the application works on the blockchain, you can only have one of each domain. So if the domain already exists, it can't be minted. Somebody else already has it. And if you want to get it from them, I would recommend checking out OpenSea, which is the secondary market where a lot of people are trading trading domain names.

• 33:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. Listen, thank you so much for taking the time to do this. Everyone, go check out unstoppabledomains.com. You can go get a domain name. You can use it for everything from hosting content on the decentralized web to doing crypto payments. I've got pomp.crypto. None of you losers can get that one. But you can go get other ones. So go go check it out. And thanks so much, Brad. We'll do it again.

• 34:18Speaker 02

  Thanks so much for having me.