BREAKING NEWS: Coinbase Is Now Supporting Human-Readable Domains!

Bradley Kam is the co-founder of Unstoppable Domains, a company focused on popularizing blockchain-based domain names. This is a special "breaking news" episode of the podcast where we discuss the recent announcement by Coinbase Wallet to support Unstoppable Domains as a replacement for cryptocurrency addresses. You can learn more about the company and their product at unstoppabledomains.com =============================== Pomp writes a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://www.pompletter.com

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 Cam is the co-founder of Unstoppable Domains, a company focused on popularizing blockchain-based domain names. This is a special breaking news episode of the podcast where we discuss the recent announcement by Coinbase Wallet to support unstoppable domains as a replacement for cryptocurrency addresses. You can learn more about the company and their product at unstoppabledomains.com. Don't forget that I also write a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business, technology, and finance.

• 0:39Anthony Pompliano?

  I break down complex topics into easy to understand language while sharing my personal opinion on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at pompletter.com. Again, pompletter.com. Alright, let's get into this episode with Bradley. I hope you guys enjoy this one.

• 0:56Speaker 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.

• 1:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright guys, bang, bang. I've got Bradley back for round two. What's going on man? Thanks for doing this.

• 1:29Speaker 02

  Thanks much for having me.

• 1:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. So for the people who missed out and didn't watch our first episode together, maybe just give a quick kind of two minutes on your personal background and then what you guys are building at Unstoppable Domains.

• 1:44Speaker 02

  Sure. So I'm from Atlanta. I moved out to San Francisco to do the startup thing in 2012. I was working on a company that was not crypto-related, but I moved into this building called 20 Mission, which was an early Bitcoin hacker house. The second Bitcoin exchange in the US was launched out of our basement. Vitalik was giving talks in our courtyard before Ethereum launched. Everybody I met when I moved to San Francisco was some sort of a crypto fanatic. And so I bit the bug sometime in 2013 and was going to sleep every night thinking about it, even though I was by day working on working on marketing software. And eventually, eventually went went all in full time on crypto in 2018.

• 2:30Speaker 02

  Started working on unstoppable domains.

• 2:32Anthony Pompliano?

  So there's a lot of people who would say you had a front row seat, you know, 2013 all the way until 18. What kind of held you back from going full time? Was it just what else you were working on was so attractive? Or were you waiting for something to happen to kind of jump in?

• 2:49Speaker 02

  Uh, I think, you know, when it was, when it was kind of the early days and it was, you know, mostly Bitcoin and exchanges and things like that, you know, I'm not really a finance guy. And I think that most of the stuff that was happening was really more around finance exchanges, stuff like that. I thought it was cool. I thought it was great, but I didn't really see a direct role for myself in terms of contributing. Once it got around to 2017 ish and we got to the sort of smart contract phase, where people were starting to build pretty cool applications that were actually functioning in the world and were doing all kinds of things. That's when I could kind of get my head around, you know, how, how I could participate.

• 3:29Speaker 02

  When it kind of moved maybe past this really hardcore protocol phase and more into the, let's build some apps that people are going to use phase. That felt more, more like an area that I could contribute in.

• 3:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so talk us through today, what does unstoppable domains do? And kind of what is the product and how has it been going? And then we'll get into some of the recent announcements.

• 3:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, for sure. So unstoppable domains is onboarding users to the decentralized web. And for those of you who don't know what the decentralized web is, it is one where you control your own content, where you can put up a website and no one can take it down other than you. With the traditional web, you've got your dot com domain and GoDaddy can take that away from you. Vera Sign, the creator of it, can also take it away from you. Amazon Web Services can turn off your websites. You've got all of these ways that the current internet gets to control what you're allowed to say and what you're not. The decentralized web is one where you control it.

• 4:34Speaker 02

  And so what we've built is a simple registrar, like, kind of like a GoDaddy, unstoppabledomains.com, where you can go and you can buy domains. We've also built our own domain registries. We have .crypto and .zill, where you can, these are smart contracts on the blockchain. You can register domains, store them inside of your wallet. And now we're building out, uh, simple website tools. So, think about what happens after you go and you buy a domain and a traditional registrar, they then say, hey, you want these tools to launch your own website? Uh, we're doing the same thing, except for your websites are going to be on IPFS, on decentralized storage. So we've got, uh, a whole, it's, the idea

• 5:16Speaker 02

  is, is that unstoppabledomains.com is a hub for you to go and do everything you would want to do on the decentralized web.

• 5:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. In, in terms of, um, kind of how people access this, do they do that through like a Google Chrome browser? Do they need a decentralized, um, kind of enabled browser? How does that work?

• 5:35Speaker 02

  Yeah. So you do need browser support because it's not part of traditional DNS. And so what's happening is, is that browsers in, with the decentralized web, browsers are kind of like the, the, the gatekeepers. They decide, uh, they opt in to support this. And so we have our own Chrome extension. There are some other tools that you can use. Uh, but there's also browsers that are natively integrating. So Opera Browser for Android, uh, integrated in March. I believe that was the first time that any major browser has supported a non-Ican DNS domain extension. And there are several more browsers that are looking at this pretty closely. Uh, Mozilla actually just ran this, uh, Fix the Internet program that we were part of, uh, over the past few months. And so they're looking very

• 6:20Speaker 02

  closely at decentralized web. Uh, there's been kind of a, a turning point this year where browsers are taking it seriously. Uh, browsers are looking at crypto wallets seriously as a method for security. So it's a pretty, uh, it, it, there's a lot of these ideas that the crypto community's been talking about for years that are finally converging and, and finally going mainstream.

• 6:40Anthony Pompliano?

  So when people first hear this, you know, and I've talked to a bunch of people, they hear the advertisements on the podcast, the first thing they say to me is like, "That's a great idea. No one's ever gonna do that," or "That's gonna take 20 years for people to start to adopt." You guys are a shining example of like, "That's not true," and have had quite a bit of success. Maybe talk to us a little bit just about like, what metrics you can share publicly in terms of the adoption that you've seen and how popular this is today, and not something that's gonna happen in 20 years.

• 7:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, people are already playing around right now. So there's more than 260,000 domains registered. There's more than 20,000 websites live. Some top websites are like kyber.crypto, kybernetworkdex, there's switchio.crypto, there's myetherwallet.crypto. I think we got some of your podcasts up on pomp.crypto. So there's a whole bunch of, of apps that are already up and out there, but there's also just a lot of people playing around. And I think the reason why this is gonna move faster even than the traditional internet did is, first of all, it has the benefit of the traditional internet exists and we can use that for distribution.

• 7:50Speaker 02

  You can post your decentralized website on Twitter and tell people to go check it out. So we have the benefit of distribution from the old system. But we also just have, the current internet is falling apart, honestly. We have, you know, Twitter hacks that just happened. We've got, you know, Chinese censors. We've got all of these things that are causing the regular internet to just break in front of our eyes. And that's causing a lot of, a lot of companies to take it seriously and start building. So if you're a DAP, you don't actually, you don't actually have a fully decentralized application.

• 8:26Speaker 02

  If a company can, like GoDaddy can just come in and take it down, like, you know, you may, you may have your smart contracts on the blockchain, but if no one can access it, how does that help you? So there's some real use cases right now. We also are seeing a bunch of bloggers. And if you think about blogging, it's like the most basic form of free speech. You know, here's what I think. And a lot of people in the world, if they were to go and publish on the local blogging tools that they use, depending on what they say, if it pisses off some important person, that might go down. And that's not going to happen here. And I think as, as the politics

• 9:06Speaker 02

  around the world has gotten so much more extreme, the demand for this has become so much clearer. I think it's in the zeitgeist now. You know, even two years ago, when we would talk to people about this, they're like, is internet censorship really a problem? You know, is the internet, is the internet really that bad? It seems like everything's going pretty well. And this would be, that was more of an American perspective than it was a global perspective. But now I think even when we talk to people in America, they're like, yeah, man, the internet is, internet's in bad shape, you know? Seventeen year olds are getting control of, you know, Barack Obama, Barack Obama's Twitter account and stuff like that. Man, we have a problem. And guess what would solve that problem? If you had a private key that was securing your account, and that's how you unlocked

• 9:51Speaker 02

  it. So, you know, we have the solutions already in our world. We use them, you know, you and I probably use them every day. So the solutions are there, the problem is glaring, and now we just have an onboarding problem. And that's, that's, that's really what we're trying to solve. We're just, you know, one by one, trying to bring users over.

• 10:11Anthony Pompliano?

  And so obviously, the dot crypto or dot zil domains, the, these literally unstoppable domains, which is a great name for the, for the business, are able to be used for a kind of the destination or the public address, if you will, for a website. But you also can use them for wallet addresses as well. And so maybe talk a little bit about how you can use, you know, pomp dot crypto or whatever, for a wallet address.

• 10:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, think of, think of them as like the, the gateway to the decentralized web. So, you know, a blockchain domain can be used for your website, it can be used to receive money, kind of like your Venmo account. It can also be used for messaging. We just launched a chat protocol where you'd be able to message me, brad dot crypto, we can message back and forth, brad dot crypto and pomp dot crypto, and that's a Centralized encrypted encrypted messaging system. And so when you do it that way, you've got, so you can send me money to Brad dot crypto. You can check out my website. So if I'm, you know, showing you some sort of marketing advertisements. When you pay me, you'll know that you're paying the same person. When you message me to discuss it, you'll know you're talking to the same person. So you don't have to go back and forth across platforms.

• 11:22Speaker 02

  And that prevents all kinds of these phishing scams that we see. You know, I got to talk to you on Telegram over here. I got to send message to some email box over here. I can't tell if I'm talking to the same person. We can guarantee you're talking to the same person in this paradigm. Uh, but the way that it works on the money side is I've got Brad dot crypto. I attach all of my crypto addresses, my Bitcoin address, my Ethereum address, my Litecoin address, whatever. I can attach up to, I think there's 70 currencies supported right now and theoretically any currency. Uh, and then you can just go into a wallet and, and pay. So I don't need to ask you anymore what currency you want to receive. I don't need to ask you what your addresses are. I can just pump down crypto. I can just type it in and send money.

• 12:04Anthony Pompliano?

  And so you have said this big announcement now with, with Coinbase. Maybe talk a little bit about what exactly is the announcement? And how does it work for users and also technically?

• 12:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. So Coinbase Wallet now supports, uh, sending money from using dot crypto and dot Zillow domains. And so the way this works is I can just go into this end field, uh, inside of any currency, inside of Coinbase Wallet, type in Brad dot crypto and send money. And what's happening, I mean, it's so, it's so simple to the point where it's hard to imagine in 10 years, people are going to be using addresses, uh, just like no one uses IP addresses in order to find websites. And I think it's going to be the same here because. This is easier and it's just as secure because the domain name is an asset on the blockchain too.

• 12:57Speaker 02

  It's stored by you. So any information that you update, any crypto address you add, whatever, you have to sign a message with your private key. So any updates, you're the only person that can make the update. Unstoppable can't make an update. Unstoppable can't take the domain away from you. Your wallet can't make an update. Your wallet can't take the domain away from you. And so because you have that dynamic, it enables you to trust a, a human readable system instead of a not human readable system. And it may be that people will still use addresses like machine to machine. But maybe not even there. Like maybe it'll actually be a good idea to give every single smart contract a name too.

• 13:37Speaker 02

  Just, just to have, just to have, you know, simplicity when you're writing code. So I don't see why the current addressing system is going to be used much for, you know, day-to-day payments in the future.

• 13:53Anthony Pompliano?

  And so I guess as part of this, uh, it's kind of history repeating itself, right? Which is, there was a point in time where to use the internet, you had to use IP addresses to get around. And so literally you'd have to either have memorized or have written down, here is the exact sequence of numbers in order to get to a certain destination. When we had URLs used that were kind of human readable, complete game changer. I don't have to remember, you know, a random sequence of, uh, numbers. I now can just know google.com, right? Uh, or unstoppabledomains.com. And so that is, uh, an inflection point in terms of internet adoption and usage. I'm assuming that you guys, uh, expect something similar here, but maybe just talk through,

• 14:36Anthony Pompliano?

  you know, once everyone is able to send cryptocurrency to a human readable domain, what's the impact and kind of how do you guys think about how this kind of sequentially plays out? And if it is an inflection point?

• 14:50Speaker 02

  I think what we're seeing here is a little different than what we saw with the traditional internet. Well, we're actually seeing convergence. So, you know, in the old world, you know, you have your website address over here. You've got your payment address, like your Venmo or your PayPal account over here. You've got your communication address, which is like your Facebook Messenger account or your email address or whatever. All of these are separate things. And what you're getting with the decentralized web is everything's rolling up into this one thing. So the domain can do all of those things. And so what's going to happen is, is that you're going to have this

• 15:28Speaker 02

  identity, so to speak, that can do all of these different things. And so it's going to help all of the use cases. Because I know that when I'm sending money to Brad dot crypto, it's the same person whose website I'm looking at. It makes me more comfortable to send. So it is going to, so the usage of decentralized websites will increase the usage of crypto payments. The usage of decentralized messaging will, will increase the usage of decentralized websites. The increase of crypto payments will increase. So all of these use cases are going to be playing into each other in this way. And so I think that this sort of onboarding phase is the shift that we're going through right now.

• 16:12Speaker 02

  Where we're transitioning from a kind of developer focused set of products, where, you know, we have to learn, and even non-technical folks have to learn, you know, all kinds of stuff about private keys and whatever, into a user focused state where we can communicate to people, "Hey, here's your blockchain ID, essentially. You can go and use it for all of these things." So we're in early days of that shift, but the shift is now possible. So I think that what we're, the phase where we're at, if I were to define it, is we're in the tunnel and we can start to see the light.

• 16:55Speaker 02

  Like, we can start to see, like, what is this going to look like in 10 years? How is this going to work? How are these two or three billion, you know, internet users? How are they going to adopt? And I think it's going to be through, through stuff like this, you know? Go, you get an ID, you share it with your friends, you use it for all of these things. It's very tangible for people. So I think that's where we're at, the beginning of being able to see what the future looks like.

• 17:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and the part to me that's so interesting is similar to how you can put your website URL out in the world and you may send it directly. So I could send you an exact URL and I want Brad to go and visit it. Or I could post it on my Twitter account and anyone who comes across it can click and do that. That kind of one to one and also one to many adoption of URLs created opportunity to do things that we just didn't ever imagine, right? So we've seen people do all kinds of crazy stuff with the internet. It seems like this is very similar where today most addresses are used in a one to one scenario. So you say, hey, I want to send POM some money, right? I go ahead and I send you my address, you then send it.

• 18:04Anthony Pompliano?

  When all of a sudden now I can simply post POM dot crypto anywhere, you really can open up the use cases for cryptocurrencies. You can drastically increase. You also make it easier for businesses, right? You probably reduce a lot of kind of fraud and all the craziness. And so it feels like this is just a net positive across many different facets of the crypto world. And getting Coinbase on board makes it, you know, not only the net positive, but it's like, you know, on steroids because you've got the largest US exchange supporting this now.

• 18:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I think that one to many is very astute. I think that is a very, that is a powerful, that is a powerful dynamic that hasn't really been unlocked yet in crypto. And I think what we're going to start to see relatively soon are things like, like viral donation campaigns, you know, like, hey, crypto community, let's all get together and let's donate, you know, million dollars to this cause. And you could have the payment address go viral on social media.

• 19:09Speaker 02

  You don't even need, you won't even need to offer any more steps. You'll just say, hey, here's this, you know, awesome cause, pay here. Nothing else like that alone is all the information that you need. So it's really, really, really concise. And I think that's, that's going to be powerful. In terms of Coinbase, you know, I mean, I think it's, you know, obviously it's super exciting for us. Coinbase is, you know, you know, pinnacle crypto brand. Uh, but I think what we're really seeing at this point is we're seeing ubiquity for, uh, for blockchain domain names, like pretty much, you know, pretty much every major crypto wallet at this point is, is adopting this technology.

• 19:51Speaker 02

  And so we're getting to this point where you as a user are going to be able to really not, not really worry too much about, you know, which app you're using or having to think too hard about that, that it really is going to be this, uh, this, uh, this feature that you can just use across the crypto ecosystem without thinking about it. And I think that's what's required in order for it to really, uh, for it to really catch on. You know, it can't work in 10% of apps you use. It needs to work in, you know, 90. So we're, we're getting to that point.

• 20:21Anthony Pompliano?

  And in terms of, uh, if I go ahead, I've got a Coinbase account. I want to attach, uh, pomp.crypto. Can I send that to people and they can, uh, basically on Coinbase, go ahead and just send me Bitcoin or, or whatever. Uh, and they can do it from their Google Chrome browser or do they also need to be in a decentralized support, uh, decentralized web-supported browser?

• 20:43Speaker 02

  They don't need a special browser for this, but you do need to be using Coinbase Wallet. So this is Coinbase self custody wallet, not Coinbase.com, which I know is a little bit confusing for folks. Um, because they have similar names. Um, so this is Coinbase Wallet's self custody wallet. Um, which has, uh, which supports a bunch of different currencies. And so you don't need a special, uh, browser or anything like that. You just need to go and use it from your phone. So if you don't have Coinbase Wallet already, I'd suggest you check it out. It's a great wallet. Um, and has a great DApp browser. Um, a couple of other cool things about it. You can also see that you can also store the domain inside of Coinbase Wallet. So they have a Little collectible section, the domain shows up, you can see a list of them. And if you go to unstoppabledomains.com from within the DAP browser, you can manage your domain.

• 21:29Speaker 02

  So because your domain is sitting inside of your Coinbase wallet, when you go into the DAP browser and you want to make an update, you can sign a message with the private key right there. So Coinbase Wallet is this like one stop shop where you can do, it's essentially you got access to a domain registrar where you can do all of your updates. You've got a little storage mechanism where you can see it, and then of course you can use it for payments.

• 21:52Anthony Pompliano?

  And in terms of individuals versus businesses, where have you guys seen, so you mentioned, you know, 200 plus thousand kind of domains registered, 20,000 plus usage, all that kind of stuff. Like, are you seeing businesses adopt this stuff yet, or is it still mainly individuals who are kind of at the forefront of usage?

• 22:13Speaker 02

  There's a lot of crypto companies, there's a lot of crypto companies that are putting up either, you know, if you're a DAP, you're going to put up a front end, you're going to put up your front end on IPFS. And so you can have everything kind of fully function, as long as you don't have a backend, it's extremely easy. So we're seeing a lot of those cases, DAPs, we're also seeing a lot of these kind of, I would say it's kind of like SMBs almost, you know, people who are working on various types of crypto projects that are relatively small, not as professionalized as maybe an exchange or a wallet, that are building apps and websites. And then you also just have the kind of crypto enthusiasts. So it's a mix, but in terms of the raw number, it's more this like SMB individuals.

• 22:59Speaker 02

  Company wise, there's, there's just not enough crypto companies. So there's, I think, maybe a few thousand crypto companies that have claimed domains, of which, you know, people are in various stages of building websites.

• 23:13Anthony Pompliano?

  And how do you think about you've got Coinbase not supporting this? There's, you know, probably hundreds of wallets that that are out there. Kind of you guys methodically walking down and getting each one of these wallets to support unstoppable domains.

• 23:28Speaker 02

  Well, we want everybody to support it. And so we're, you know, we're, we're talking, we're talking to everybody. And if we're not talking to, if you have a wallet and we're not talking to you yet, please, please reach out. We'll, we'll make sure and find a way to, you know, find a way to work together. That's, that's exciting and beneficial for everybody.

• 23:46Speaker 02

  But yeah, I mean, we're, we, we are reaching out. The goal is to have, you know, a hundred percent adoption across the wallet community. I think that's what the user expects. I think anything short of that is actually a little bit, a little bit of an inferior user experience. So we're, we're going to keep, we're going to keep pushing until we get there.

• 24:04Anthony Pompliano?

  I continue to tell people that it's scary, right? If you send any sort of real size of money or Bitcoin, you end up literally kind of your heart's pumping really hard and you're like, I hope I don't mess this up, right? Got to check every single, you know, letter and number in an address.

• 24:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. And it's a, it's a, it's a stressful way to have to, to have to send money and it really, it's really, it's not necessary. Like there, we can get, we can get feedback loops. So what the wallet is doing right now is when I type in the domain, the wallet is reading the blockchain and finding an address, but the wallet can go and confirm any number, you know, any number of bits of information before I send. And that's much closer to how it works in the regular world. You don't just, you know, send random money to an anonymous account without having any kind of feedback. Like you, you have some level of, of assurance that this is the right person. And, you know, with crypto networks, I think you can do that times a hundred. You know, you can have

• 25:07Speaker 02

  data provably, you know, verified, provably verified. You can have multiple data, data types provably verified. So I think I, this is a temporary problem.

• 25:18Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. And before we go on to talk about kind of the future, anyone who is watching, please go and try it out. It's awesome. I've got Pomp dot crypto, but go to unstoppabledomains.com and you can go and get a URL there. Brad, let's talk a little bit about kind of what unfolds next, right? So we get to a world where every wallet is supporting or a majority of wallets are supporting these human readable domains. Obviously, people start to actually build websites. Do you think that that leads to kind of mass adoption of the decentralized web browsers? Do you see kind of the New York Times and the Washington Post and kind of really

• 26:00Anthony Pompliano?

  large organizations starting to create a mirror version in the decentralized web that they have a centralized one? Where are we going?

• 26:09Speaker 02

  I think we're going to see a few kind of circles of adoption. I think adoption circle number one is the crypto community. The crypto community absolutely needs a decentralized web. Like if you're a DeFi app, if you're a DAP of any kind, like you have these points of failure. Your domains are at risk. It happens all the time. There's been all kinds of crypto companies that have had issues with their domains or with hosting services or whatever. Another crazy thing is, is that some of them have jurisdiction issues where they don't actually want to be in control. You don't actually, you know, let's say you have a DAO or something. You don't actually want to put one individual in control. You can actually put a group of people and they can vote on control of the domain. So you

• 26:52Speaker 02

  can actually take it out of the, you know, take it out of the control of any one individual. So I think where we're going right now is crypto community is going to adopt because they need this technology. It's a core problem they have right now. Then I think the next wave are people around the world that don't have access to a free internet. People who are in places where takedowns are are common. And I would think about places like India and China, Russia. Actually, most of the world actually unfortunately lives in a place where the internet is not free. And so there's a strong need, whether it's blogging, whether it's e-commerce, whether it's, you know, kind of whatever you're trying to do online, it's hard to do.

• 27:36Speaker 02

  And you're getting restricted, you're getting taken down, you're getting blocked, you're having to ask permission from this or that government official for months and months. So the next wave after the crypto people is going to be people who are struggling to use the regular internet. I think the final wave is going to be the kind of New York Times or these other like enterprise companies. And the reason they're going to do it is because it's cheaper. And the reason it'll be cheaper is because right now, when you want to buy hosting, you call up Amazon and Amazon says, yeah, I built another server farm in wherever and I'll sell you some space. But in the future, what's going to happen is, is you're going to be able to access anybody's storage space anywhere in the world in a marketplace.

• 28:20Speaker 02

  And it's going to be far more efficient and far more cheaper and far less risk of of takedown, of DDoS, of all of these issues that we have right now, because you'll have your content distributed. So phase one, crypto companies, because they absolutely need it and they're also native to the tech. Phase two, people that are getting censored, they absolutely need it. They're not native to the tech, but they'll figure it out because they don't have a choice. And then phase three is going to be, hey, this is just a better way to run newyorktimes.com than the current system that you're using. And that is way further down in the future. But mathematically, I think it's, it's very easy.

• 29:06Speaker 02

  It's very easy to see that a distributed web and distributed storage is going to be far more cheaper, far safer and far more performant. So the current web is going, is not, is not going to be able to compete. But that is, that is going to be a Longer term transition. I think we're on a, we're on a 20 year ride here. And I think we're in the crypto phase right now, which could last even for the next, you know, we can be on, we can be in the crypto phase even for the next three or five years. But the nice thing is the crypto community is actually quite big. I mean, I'm sure you feel this sometimes, you know, if you, if you go out and you start talking to, to normies and you want to start talking about what's been going on and you realize, oh, wow, I have to like, take it from the top. I've been so deep in my bubble for so long.

• 29:49Speaker 02

  Uh, but it's a really big bubble. So I think that, um, we have this conversation with people sometimes where they're like, you know, if, if this is just a crypto thing, how big is it? And we're like, do you realize how big crypto is just today? Like, we could build a massive, fully functional alternate web right now, just with crypto people. And so that's why we're just so focused on that. Um, because we, we think that's where the, that's where the most growth is going to be in the short term. So, uh, long answer, it will replace the current internet. You will be, you will get to a place where the New York Times is decentralized too. Um, but not anytime soon.

• 30:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And then what about, uh, mobile applications? So we've talked a lot about kind of more web type applications. When you think of decentralized web, uh, a great example would be like the TikTok, uh, controversy right now. Should it be banned? Should it not? Uh, I think kind of hits home or is more obvious to, uh, people in the United States than, than other examples. Um, can things in the mobile space, uh, whether they're mobile first or mobile only, uh, can they benefit from the decentralized web today? Or is it just things that are more web based?

• 31:02Speaker 02

  They could and, and, and, and it, it gets down to the architecture of how it actually, of how these systems actually work. And the problem with TikTok is the data is sitting on TikTok databases, uh, not sitting with you. And so a future decentralized TikTok would have your videos, your profile data, your likes, all that sort of stuff, sitting on IPFS or another decentralized storage network controlled by you. When you go and open up decentralized TikTok, you'll sign a message with your private key and you'll give that application some permissions to do something with that data. But you'll control it. So if you say something that decentralized TikTok doesn't like,

• 31:47Speaker 02

  Nothing they can do about it. You control that. You control that data. Now, they might try to ban you as a user, but you can just go to decentralized TikTok number two and you still have your data. So you take the power away from the company and you put the power in your hands. And we see this with YouTube already, like YouTube has been going and just knocking down crypto, crypto influencer after crypto influencer over the past few months. And the reason why that's so, uh, why that's so harmful to those influencers is that's the place where they are on the internet. Those videos oftentimes aren't anywhere else. So you go and take that down. That's their database of their content.

• 32:28Speaker 02

  And now it's just gone inaccessible. In the future, it's not going to happen like that. You're going to control your data. YouTube gets permission to show it to their users. And if you don't like what YouTube's doing, you go to YouTube number two or maybe YouTube number 45, because that's really just a UI. We need to take this power. The, the reason why companies, why tech companies have gotten so powerful and have gotten so abusive is because they control the data. They are also a database. They're an app. And they're also our database storage. And we need to pull that database storage piece out of their business model and let them just be these apps. But they're actually pretty good at being apps.

• 33:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And, and so let's go back in, in, uh, before we close up in terms of Coinbase itself, this announcement, talk to us about, uh, kind of what you guys have had to do technically to make this viable for Coinbase? And, and what is your pitch to, uh, individuals who have a Coinbase wallet? In terms of why they should be using an unstoppable domain rather than the, uh, the traditional wallet address?

• 33:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, in terms of the actual wallets, we're trying to make it super easy. So we've got integration tools. We've got libraries and things like that. It's pretty lightweight for, for wallets. So it's really just a, you know, it's really just a decision for them to make. Hey, like, do I want to support this, um, this new tech? I think it's, you know, it's usually like a, you know, a couple day kind of adventure for them. It's not a, it's not a very serious thing. It's, it's similar to other types of reads that they're probably already doing on the blockchain. So pretty simple. Uh, in terms of users, I mean, I think you, um, you know, the value to users, I think you, you, you said it. Every single time you want to send money, you need to sweat and stress over every single digit and every single letter and make sure that it's right.

• 34:18Speaker 02

  And maybe you'll make a mistake and lose your money. And so if you are sending to a domain, you don't have that problem. You can just use your, you know, use your eyes and check the word and make sure that the word is right. And then you're fine. So I think that's the, that's the value proposition is this is the way to safely and easily send each other crypto.

• 34:44Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. And, and I guess kind of in closing, are there examples of either individuals or companies that are doing this really, really well that you would say, hey, if you're interested in this and you kind of want to see an example or two that people can either go see, or is the best thing to do, just send them to unstoppabledomains.com and they can kind of see some examples there?

• 35:07Speaker 02

  I would go to unstoppabledomains.com. I would also just open up Coinbase Wallet and type in brad.crypto and just see it. Don't send me money. I don't need a tip. I don't. But I'm just giving you a short domain name to check out. That's the easiest mental, that's the easiest way to take the mental leap. If you just see it, you'll be like, yeah, that, that feels kind of like Venmo. That feels much more like how I think payments should work, much more so than copy and paste some random address from one wallet and then put it into, and then go and take it into another wallet and then double check and triple check and, and all of these steps. So I think that's just,

• 35:50Speaker 02

  I, I think it's obvious once you see that, once you see it in action.

• 35:54Anthony Pompliano?

  I thought you were about to pull a fundraising move right there and just say, hey, just send me all your money.

• 35:59Speaker 02

  No, we got to be really careful. So I never, and I'll just say this now, I never ask for money. Should, yeah, just.

• 36:10Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm the exact same way. All right, guys, listen, you know, obviously Brad and I have recorded an episode before and I was really, really intrigued about what they're doing. To me, this is a no brainer, right? It's something that does kind of three things. One is it heavily incentivizes people to move into the decentralized web. Two is it makes it super easy. Like you don't have to be a genius. You don't have to have memorized these long strings of numbers and letters anymore. You now can use these human readable URLs. And then the most interesting part to me is integrating these human readable URLs with existing products. So Coinbase wallet is a no brainer and probably kind of the top product to go after.

• 36:50Anthony Pompliano?

  But I think that you'll end up seeing this in a bunch of other, you know, products that you use. And so the number one thing when people ask me about it is just go get your domain. Like that's like step one, right? Is if you want to believe that this is going to happen or you've got a deep belief that it is happening, go get your domain. It's just like on the normal web, you run over to GoDaddy or any of these services and you try to get the URL of your choice. There's only one of them. So go head on over to unstoppable domains and grab your domain. Brad, any last closing words here for people as we hopefully have shed some light on this momentous occasion for you guys and for Coinbase?

• 37:35Speaker 02

  I mean, we're obviously super excited, but I would just say the decentralized web is actually happening this year. 2020, 2020 is the first year where we can say that with any kind of confidence, like we're seeing real apps, we're seeing websites. We're seeing, we're seeing domains out there in the wild, like it's very different than even a year ago. So there's a lot of, there's a lot of action. Don't sleep on D Web. Everyone's talking about DeFi. DeFi is amazing. I'm a huge DeFi fan too, but don't sleep on D Web.

• 38:05Anthony Pompliano?

  That might be the best tagline of all is don't sleep on D Web. All right, my friend, thank you so much for, for taking the time to, to do this. I think people are really going to enjoy it and everyone go check out unstoppable domains.