On The Brink with Castle Island - Fred Hsu and Michael Ho (D3) on Creating Efficient Domain Name Markets (EP.614)

Episode Date: April 16, 2025

Wyatt sits down with Fred Hsu and Michael Ho of D3 to talk domain markets. In this episode:  The existing domain name industry and legacy systems An interoperable marketplace for domains New financial promitives around domains and RWAs More about D3

This is Wyatt from Castle Island, and today on the podcast, I was joined by Fred Shue and Michael Ho, founders of D3. D3 is building the first unified platform to allow domain name to trade and exist as tokenized real world assets in place of the current fragmented domain name landscape. I hope you enjoy this episode. Matt Walsh and Nick Carter are partners at Castle Island Ventures. All of these expressed by them or the guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Castle Island Ventures. Guests and host may maintain positions in the assets discussed in this podcast. You should not treat any opinion expressed by anyone on this podcast as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy,

but only as an expression of their personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees, will be liquidated. The federal government loans American International Group, AIG, $85 billion. This is a different kind of market, and the Fed is asleep. The federal government is stepping it to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants, the have been threatened by the housing crisis. The Bank of England has pumped 75 billion pounds more to Britain's ailing economy with a new round of quantitative easing.

You print a couple trillion dollars and all of a sudden people start to worry. So out of this worry, we have something called a Bitcoin. Brett and Michael from D3. Thanks for joining us on the podcast today. Really excited to chat. I think it would be helpful to kick off with backgrounds. Fred, if maybe you want to go first and then Michael would love to hear about you personally and what you're working on in the space.

Thanks for having me or us, Wyatt. My name is Fred Shue, CEO co-founder of D3. A little bit about my background. I'm like a domain OG. What does that mean? Pioneered a lot of the old domain services like dot com.net domain names back the day, including stuff like aftermarket brokerage, domain monetization, also noticed parking, did a lot of the domain portfolio management in the 2000s.

I started a company based in L.A. called Oversea, which kind of directly informed me on some areas to build over at D3. of course, the Blashing side. So I call this my unfinished business in the domain industry after starting it 24 years ago. Hey, Wyatt, nice to be here. My name is Michael Ho. I'm a co-founder of CBO at B3 as well, co-founded the company with Fred. I spent most of my career in traditional finance and the financial markets. So worked really early on at Golden Sachs with some of the largest internet and tech businesses across various strategic transactions, which include M&A and capital markets, so raising debt and equity for them. And through that time period, I was able to observe firsthand the rapid rise of software and internet-enabled platforms that have really minimized user friction, how quickly they grew and seen the impact they've made within just a matter of years.

And some of these platforms and companies are some of the largest known web-through companies today like Coinbase and Robin Hood. So more recently was an investor at a VC firm during, I would say, the second bull cycle of crypto in 2017. And that's when we really witnessed the marketplaces and some of the defaults. protocol is achieving such rapid product market fit by just simply eliminating intermediaries. So I was super excited to start this venture with Fred because that's exactly what we're doing with the domain of industry is making it faster, better, cheaper, and more scalable.

I got to mention, Michael, the first time I met you is a VC event. I was sitting on a panel was in Santa Monica. I was at the old SVB office in Santa Monica. Michael was the first one to teach me some of his Web 3 VC lingo. I love it. I still use it to this day. Yeah, you have any example? connective tissue and enablement layer.

So that's quickly become our little inside joke. I'd say when we're talking with folks in the industry, oh, you mean connective tissue, right? Enablement layer, Michael, Sparrala internal calling card. I thought this is kind of funny. It's funny. I actually tried to write a check for Fred,

but I ended up joining him starting the business. I'm kind of so compelling and really empathize with some of the core problems and pain points. Makes sense. I always loved your stories like that where you just get so excited about it. Fred, can you talk about a little bit what it meant to be a domain portfolio manager? You drop that line, but I think folks would love to understand what that means better. Yeah, mass scale property managers and oftentimes landowners.

That's all really domain names are. Think about them as your OG real estate, but the digital version, people in the domain industry treat these like famous or well-known easily to remember.coms like chat.com or rainbow.com like they're babies. And people do pay millions for them and they sell them for millions all the time. But think about it like land. And to go back to some VC lingo, is this a million dollar, billion dollar, trillion dollar, multi trillion dollar type asset class? And what scale are we at today? And how has that evolved over the lifecycle that you guys have overseen? I think what we do know why it is that there's just under 400 million of these assets. And

ultimately the customer profile is quite widespread. institutional investors of these assets. You have folks that want to build real businesses and will assign a high dollar figure to owning that core domain. And then you have the long tail of users and a lot of different business models built upon this. But what we do know is that the average domain name today, a high quality one is over $3,000. So if you take an average approach or a Belcroft approach, we're talking over $300 billion of asset value just on the internet today. And we expect this number to double or triple over the next five years as you've seen a lot of the interesting use cases with AI, machine learning, and interoperable paradigms to leverage domain

and from a market structure perspective, should people really only care about dot com or dot org, XYZ, whatever you want to call the five largest domain sources? Or is there a longer tail that also carries significant value? What's the best way for people to orient their understanding of that? There are about 169 million.coms. It is the sort of granddaddy. It's the most recognizable. Everybody knows about comms, but starting about 10 years ago, 12 years ago, there's a large ICANN application and delegation process in which extensions like dot app.xyz.cash.network.finance that ironically, one of our co-founders, Paul Stura, are created. And Fred, what is ICAN? ICAN is the internet corporation for assigned names and numbers. They're about a 400-person plus

nonprofit. For keepers of the internet, headquartered here in LA, ICANN. They are the OG decentralized org, getting 200 plus countries together is probably the most successful decentralized org out there, I'd say, even prior to blockchain coming about. Got it. So if I have it right, ICAN is responsible for the delegation of all these other, what you'd call top-level domains beyond.com. So you'd theoretically get to a dot BTC, etc. Think about anything with a dot in it.

Wyatt.com sending to frid.bc to Michael. Saul, all runs on the DNS system. So you have this existing system, which is a bit like real estate. Can you talk about how D3 fits into the world of domains and what online property is in the sense of domains today? So D3 is building this, what we call a financialization layer for domain names. It's called DomainFi. We see it as the next trillion dollar plus opportunity. In the context of real estate, real estate is something like $30 trillion plus just in the United States, a lot more globally. Think about growing a $300 billion industry to $2 trillion, which we think we should. be able to pull off with right stakeholders, right traction, this whole asset class, it seems to

pale in comparison. It seems pretty doable. So our mission is with DomainFi, create more liquidity for these dormant asset classes, and to make even premium domain names like chat.com or rainbow.com more accessible through things like fractional ownership, through borrowing, through lending, smart contracts. And with that goal of creating an efficient economy, really, for the trading of these domain assets. Is it more out of the commercial opportunity from you guys that these assets should be brought to transact on a blockchain and that unlocks their commercial potential? Is it because

you see the legacy faults in the domain system? Or what's the inspirational driver for you? Well, I would say the inspiration behind D3 was born out of the pain points that we have all experienced somewhat personally. So I myself consider myself a retail portfolio owner having less than 100 domains. Fred has managed millions of these. But we've all been through some of the incredible friction, the delays, the high cost it takes to even simply transact and manipulate some of these domain names, which is why I think there's this common policy of domains being just perceived as websites. But in fact, they can be actually used for much, much more. So the benefit of what we're doing with leveraging smart contracts and blockchain technology

is to make these domains more composable and liquid digital assets that can be used both for financial use cases as well as identity and interoperability. And can you guys speak to the cash flow elements because I think that's a piece that I didn't appreciate for a long time, but the amount that these can be cash flowing assets for someone who owns them and operates them. We work with large portfolio owners of domain names that regularly buy these things and renew these things like dot coms for $10.00 and they flip them for $80 to $150. These things are constantly being expired. People drop catch them, expiring domain names, and you pick them up and you can basically use them or you can resell them.

And you can also do things like parking. Domain parking has been a big domain revenue generate for the past several decades. But those type of yields in the crypto context far exceed your typical 5%, 6% USDC yield side to treasuries. Who would have known? What is domain parking exactly? Can you explain that further? Domain parking is a concept that I actually invented and patented 20 years ago. Shortly out of college, you visit a website like rally.com, R-A-L-L-L-Y.com.

You'll see basically Google Ads. You see Google ads, and then you'll see a little button that says inquire about this domain name if you want to buy it. If Rally Road would love to buy Rally.com, you'd visit Rally.com and click on the Inquirer about this domain name. And at that point, you go through basically a slow, antiquated process, nothing close to a Web 3 modern transaction flow. You bring up a good point here, too. So how do these things transact in the existing domain world without the existence of blockchains? Well, we've joked about this a lot decades ago. First of all, don't email.

a random who is and pretend to be 12-year-old cousin of some other guy who's looking for the domain name because that's the natural tell. The industry is pretty good about figuring out who you are if you have money and even the tonality of your email response. But emails used to the first point of contact. If not that, you're not reaching on your own. You're basically using a network of brokers that will charge anywhere from 20 to 30 percent. Take four to eight weeks to close your transaction and only deal with wires, Viat, no crypto, usually. 20 to 30% is a pretty good spread. If you can imagine real estate costing 20, 30% transactions fee, rather than your typical

whatever 3 to 5% to blow your mind. And thinking about the trading side, what's the legal classification of domains today? Are they securities, commodities, or... Property with natural utility. It's like land. It's like a home. Every home is different. That makes them arguably well suited to be put on a blockchain, unless I'm missing a piece

of that. I call it the most profitable database entry that sits on a digital ledger. usually that's what's called a registry, like.xyz or dot com, and digital first, known to man. Every year you're having to renew these things because they're valuable, universal, and renewable. Domains are the best kept secret on the internet is what we like to say, why. Because they're not securities under the current frameworks. They're actually closer to, I would say, commodities, but with unique characteristics

and fundamental utility, right? So absolutely they're the best type of asset to own. Oh, and it's not even technically your property. Basically, you license the right to utilizeawaiat.com from ICAN, from the registry. So it's probably even better, but I'm no legal or accounting expert. And can you speak to the cadence of, to my understanding, ICAN has essentially approved a certain number or a certain amount of domain coverage under the dot com name and under other domain endings, to put it simply, what is ICAN's cadence to releasing access to new domain names?

It usually happens once every 15 years, and this pent-up demand that builds up, people want these new extensions for whatever use case, identity most of the time. In the future, it could be the rise of agents each having their phone number and each other having their domain name. Branding, security, everything that the DNS system has been good for for decades. And there's a window coming up. So what's up for grabs in this next ICANN window? So we are preparing now, in projects and companies now, for an upcoming round that opens in April 26. And so the official guidebook will be published in May of this year. So from now, until roughly a year from now, it's going to be D-Day.

It's going to be a land rush. The last was 2012? Yes, 2012 and delegated in early 2013. That's when you saw the likes of dot app was owned by Google and dot XYZ, which one of our co-founders grew from zero domains to millions. So anything that wasn't really a core idea before 2012 is up for grabs here. Yep. Got to know how to do it. You've got to come with a bank roll.

It's actually quite funny because we view TLDs very similar to blockchain ecosystems. Essentially, the use case for them is there are these communities that created people that evangelize all come around a certain string and a cause. So a lot of these ecosystems have created these strong communities and drove inherent demand for a lot of these TLDs. So part of our business is actually working hand in hand with some of these large ecosystem projects to allow them to create an interoperable name space that is rooted on. of you and S.

That's really interesting. How do you guys see the wide market demand for domains altering, adjusting in the face of technology shifts? And how do you think new trends will see along the lines of agents, payments? How does that impact what the demand will look like, what level of demand we should expect, who will be owning domains? Explain all the factors at play here. Most domains today are owned by people and orgs.

We think that if there's going to be an AI revolution, the number of domains could easily explode from 360 million. to 10 billion. And the infrastructure would not skip a beat, being able to resolve something quickly, whether you're using for your website, your wallet, or email should happen in a distributed way. Like what's happening on my phone right now, there's a ton of network activity going on and TNS resolution going on.

People just don't know about it. You go to a website to verify the fact that you're really going to this exchange. First thing it does is tell you, are you truly visiting whatever, MECC.com, check your browser. If you are doing a 2FA, just to make sure you're truly getting account access, guess what? you're checking your email, which is a DNS lookup operation. So just imagine the future, a very robotic or autonomous future, utilizing domain names. That's what we get excited about on the utility side.

And the idea here is that the domains will essentially offer these agents to do things otherwise could never do. Yeah, and I think humans and agents will be vain or have value vanity as well. It shouldn't just be one random number and hyphens for my AI bot. should be something recognizable from human to agent and agent to agent and the agent to human. Yeah, have some humanity for the agents. Exactly. Thank your agents.

Anything Mike wants to add? I think this is a really great tailwind when we talk about AI and payments. Essentially what we're talking about is the emergence of a plethora of new system-to-system platforms that enable interoperability. So we talk about generally an uplift and value that we are going to expect on the longer tail of domains. So right now, everyone knows the value of the value. over premium.com. But perhaps the longer tailed domains haven't really been populated yet. But with the rise of agents and autonomous entities, we can see more and more use cases and the needs for

even more domain spaces, but just more domains in general. So it goes back to what Fred was talking about. A lot of these new use cases will drive more adoption of domains beyond just websites. Yeah, that makes sense. I was thinking, I feel like the search engine era very much favored of what you would call those premier domains or even top-level domains. And I feel like as we start to retrieve more information from AI-based querying, that probably benefits the longer tail of domains to some degree, I would imagine. Yes, absolutely. The utility value of domains for a lot of businesses,

they use domains as Google authentication right now, for the work spaces and embedded text record verification, SSL certificates use domain names. So we think simple things like walled mapping, enabling payments of destruction, using DNS infrastructure is absolutely something that should be table stakes. Makes sense. And do you think that in that reality, you will have these large batch-type buyers of domains that are available on the marketplace? And maybe is that something you have today where you see an individual actor organization that's just going to go and be a purchaser

of millions or hundreds of millions worth of value? I think history will repeat itself. Institutions have been buying and managing and renewing and selling domain names for decades, hundreds of millions of dollars. is worth. There's several public companies that do only this. I'll tell you that China is a huge market. They love their two-letter and three-letter.coms. And there's a pretty healthy liquid multi-million market going on right now. You just don't see it. So if you expand it out into the autonomous world, AI and stuff, I can see a lot of automation going in and scooping up online property programmatically. And when you talk about all that volume we're not seeing, do you think eventually

there's a single source of truth type venue here? Do I think there's going to be a massive and easily accessible Oracle system. I joke to folks, I mean API. I talk to Web 2 people. Web 1, Web 2 people I need to say. They mean API guys. When they're like, what is an Oracle? It's not that Oracle database that Larry Ellison does.

And we're like, no, no, let's have this internal translator from Web 3 to Web 2. Can there be better appraisal systems, better way to vet's value to see transactions? We do think that blockchain is good for that. And in that sense, the inventory will all be written to a blockchain, at some point or how does the migration of blockchain system happen? And what role do you guys play in that? DOMA is essentially our solution to, I would say, first, enhance the distribution of domains. And we talk about why you mentioned how domains are quite fragmented because of the existing

registrar interface. So we first want to eliminate the high friction of just simply transacting domains. And so once we're able to ensure that everyone in the world is able to get easy access without having to go through a lot of these manual payment or transaction processes, we can then focus secondly on evolving how domains are seen, how they're utilized, how they're leveraged as universal composable assets that are on chain. So in our opinion, the blockchain can provide a shared source of truth without requiring one single point and venue of distribution.

Because as Fred mentioned, domains are just database entries in the DNS. So they shouldn't be restricted to one simple end user interface. They should be easily accessible. And we've seen some of these pilot use cases, even integrating on social apps, giving folks free domains as an entrepreneurial identity. So some of these use cases are emerging pretty quickly. And overall, they promote more registrations and more renewals, which is what we're found of. And in terms of the adoption of DOMA as a new, call it almost a ledger system for these domains, is it something where you think you build it and they will

come that the inventory and the key industry players will start to use that? Is it something where you start to drive momentum of the first adopters and then they'll come? Or what is the adoption curve look like there. It's work because this asset class is fundamentally tied to the DNS system. We're simply extending that system. So, for example, if you have a Wyatt.com that you manage on GoDaddy, there'll be a mirror. There'll be a tokenized representation of your domain name that doesn't currently exist today. Part of the strategy is to tokenize the world's in all the domains in the world. Every.com, XYZ AI name plus all the future stuff, like dot sole.bTC, whatever, first and foremost at that primitive level.

And maybe this evolves as you have a marketplace in this sense where all of these domains exist. But in that context, what do you look at as being the value driver? Because I think that it's probably a little bit more up for debate when you have a fragmented market like this, but then you have market discovery and hopefully a little bit more of a transparent and marketplace where all participants can have a slice. What do you think drives value? To clarify, distribution for domains is fragmented only in the market.

that there are 4,000 registrars out there. Registrars are like the retail storefront where you may buy, manage, use, renew, a dot XYZ name, but they all follow a standard rule set. That's the I-can handbook. For example, if your registrar goes out of business, there's going to be certain rules for you to not lose your domain name. If you're registry like dot XYZ or dot ours is dot VANA, VANA, named after I believe Van V-A-Wight, if we go to our business, there's going to be a backup registry operator that will

take over it right away so the end user don't have to worry about anything. You won't lose your data. You won't lose your domain name. That's why the DNS system goes up 100% of the time. You don't hear about dot com going down. So the registrars truly are going to be, if they can get together and agree on certain protocols, agree on certain APIs for this stuff at a fundamental level, then there should be, to your question about multiple marketplaces or a marketplace, there should be a bunch

of marketplaces building on top of this protocol. There should be a bunch of escrow companies, a bunch of pricing oracles or APIs built on top of this stuff, just like what we call it. driving domain fly economy. Yeah, it makes sense. Ultimately, it boils down to the target customer. And as we mentioned earlier in the podcast, why the owners of domains can be varying between institutions and users,

business owners. A lot of these retail interfaces, these marketplaces have been modified based on who they're targeting. So even as something as simple distribution, you'll find it hard to believe. But these interfaces do matter depending on the customer you're serving. So for our native marketplace and app that we're building, we're focused on enabling Web3 Composibility, but there are definitely a host of embedded Web2 retail storefronts

that have captured audiences that are very loyal because of a certain set of features. That's why we believe that it's all about distribution. Yeah, I love the purpose-driven domain marketplaces because I think at the moment it feels like you just go around and look at where there might be inventory. Yeah, to your point, registrars are really good at putting inventory in front of users,

and it's been this way for decades, even with expiring domain names. I don't know if you can see Mask Green, but this company called Domain Smoke, they basically deal with, hey, what's going to expire soon? And people need to look to see what's in the store, catches their eye.

Registores are really good at doing this. You go to go to ID.com, you look for Wyatt.com, a guarantee you it's taken. And they're going to tell you, they're going to tell you it's taken. It's a self-reinforcing fomo mechanism, which is brilliant.

That is brilliant. Usersguide.com, that's a good one. Ultraboats. Oh, I might want to create something. I had that idea about a boat shop. People think like this, retail things like this, and civil agents, for example. Drives an entrepreneurial spirit in you.

Absolutely. What are the other benefits here in a post-domo world? Well, for one, I would say the table stakes requirements is that the transaction costs will lower significantly, which enables more liquidity for these assets. We believe settlements should be instant. It shouldn't take longer to settle domain transaction than it takes to sell house, physical real estate.

How long does settlement take today? So the funny thing is it depends on the interface and how this domain is transacted, whether it's through a broker, or registrars, they use some of the integrations there. So anywhere from four to eight weeks, I would say on average. But Fred has, I don't know if you have any anecdotes that are longer. It's like going to Chipotle, getting your breederable blind. You stumble upon, you're going to have like 20 different touchpoints because you're bumbling around like a pinball.

And eventually you may get your food and you got to worry about consuming it or using it or eating it. It is that way right now. It's easier to basically buy real estate than it is to buy a premium domain name today. It shouldn't be that way. Sorry, Michael, keep going, but that's helpful. No, we talk about composability. That breeds more market liquidity and depth for these assets, better price discovery. We do think on average, a lot of these blockchain native platforms increase the amount of bidders and sellers of these assets. So we can apply domain file, which is defy for domains, provide new innovative monetization models that only enhance the value proposition of what we're offering. So if users can trade and leverage domain names as these

interoperable hyperliquid RWAs, then I think we'll consider our mission quite successful. Having everyone not only owned just one, but many, many domains in their portfolio, just like they own fractional shares of stocks today in the equity market. There's so much opportunity when you think about an asset class that has demand that is ongoing, at least as far as the last 25 plus years goes. And at the same time, is very much something that people are under-exposed to from an allocation perspective. Can you talk to some of the partners that you've worked with seemingly DOMA and D3's Vision opens up the ability for companies to get behind having domains that are associated with them

or to take on almost a go-to-market approach in its vein? So can you speak to who potential partners would be on that front or who we can expect to shake things up in this new ecosystem? One partner is Solana. We're super sad to be working with Solana. Salon Foundation, there will be a day where you can send me money to Fredshu.sall. I will reserve Fred.d.sau for a much bigger whale than me. But being able to basically buy, trade, use the stuff with low latency, low cost, trade it,

use it, build apps on top of within the Solana ecosystem. We think is super exciting with DOMA, of course, being more like a coordination layer, like a messaging or layer like a wormhole, like a layer zero. And also existing partnerships with companies like our co-founder's company, Pauls de Hura who owns Dot Football. There's a company called One Football that has about 180 million user audience. They're basically the premier news site and app for football, the European Football, the one where you kick.

And today, I believe you can actually log in and get a dot football identity, but it's not the real dot football. So that's a very natural tie in to make sure that that app identity, that social identity, is truly interoperable Web3, Web 2. But these type of partnerships, thinking deeply about creating this canonical naming system within Web 3 and ubiquitous and having to be interoperable first and all the use cases for Web 3 that we can bolt on to these Web 2 players are super exciting for us. It is funny on Salonah today, for example, you have Gito.network and Pameo.com and Pinno.com and

the dot sole thing seems very intuitive. The first step is to bring the revelation of a lot of these new namespaces to the Salon ecosystem, and then we do view that D5 should and can exist natively as well. on that Native Belt 1 as an example. Thanks. That's helpful. How do you look at the impact that you guys will have, hopefully, on the crypto industry more widely, let's say, beyond domains,

and how do you look at this fitting into the progress, or maybe in your view, the non-progress that the industry's made? I think domains are, of course, unbiased, are the best digital first asset class with true revenue-generating potential in ARR. How many crypto projects have ARR? and you're not having to carry and deal with physical goods and shipping, Stodiline. It's like one of the easiest things it gets and use.

So excited about it becoming a really exciting real asset for Michael's RDA point with just this obvious tokenization construct for it. Excited about having a bridge traditional industries. I think I read one of our investors I was on a podcast with him. His name is Drew Rosner. He stated that the entire digital economy is something like $20 to $30 trillion. And guess what? It all runs on domain names.

The entire world, all of humanity, the satellites in the sky run off the domain name system, and so does the NSA and 200 plus governments. We think it's pretty ubiquitous to try to leverage it or extend it using blockchain. We also think that it's going to be a model for blockchain. I was spending time on Capitol Hill meeting with various senators and congressmen a few weeks ago. I met the White House Executive Director of Crypto, Bo Heins as well, educating him as well on this asset class. I was meeting with more Democrats than was Republicans.

So I think that they're finally open to see a lot more use cases for blockchain than just meme coins and on-chain treasury yields. You guys need a DoD, Department of Domain Efficiency. That sounds good. That's inspired by my doge on my wall. Yeah. That must have you that idea, right? Yeah, that's where I got it from.

Well, I'll give you guys the chance to speak about your trajectory a little bit. What should we expect in milestones of you guys going forward and what's going to be coming out? Besides the commercial milestones that Michael will touch on a little bit more, we plan to take our leading domain team over here that spans Web 2 and Web 3, build a rock star team here in LA and branch out a little bit to San Francisco, maybe. The rest of this year, but just continuing to educate Web 2 on what really Web 3 means with certain glossary definitions as well, I'm sure needed. Plus on the Web 3 side, we're educating them on this domestic class, which for them, they also need a glossary. So I call it the Marco Polo East Meets West playbook. I'm sure I'll do a bunch of historical Wikipedia reading tonight.

Yeah, I would say on the technical side, we're super excited to finally launch Maynette for DOMA, which is the world's first blockchain that will truly enable a lot of these Web2 embedded institutions in the domain value chain to ramp onto any significant blockchain ecosystem. So I know we talked about Solana, but there will be countless other integrations with layer one and later 2 blockchains, where there are new web through users, web through liquidity that is interested in discovering domains as a investable asset class. So personally, we're super excited to enable the proliferation and growth of what we consider domain economy from 360 million domains to well over one to two billion

domains in the next few years. Awesome. And to close out, I want to know what keeps you guys excited and what keeps you up in night. We eat, breathe, live domain names. I see this internally a lot. talk domain names in my sleep. I mean, managed so many, and so we're super excited to make sure that people understand that this is the most exciting tokenization of a real asset since the beginning of, in my opinion, Bitcoin, and certainly since NFTs, since they were first launched.

Domain names are the OG NFT. It's online real estate, making those quick associations, our full ones, too. It's something that definitely keeps up excited. Fred, you must have hated the whole metaverse trend. What was the metaverse again? Just kidding. Yeah, I don't know. Too much my kids play games. I think I've always just thought about it like gaming, immersive gaming, and my wife has had tons of headaches wearing her previous generation Oculus, I recall.

So don't give it wrong. I'm sure one day, if I can have it, Metaverse built in my glasses and I can read off the script by looking at you right now or something, I'll definitely buy a product. Until that happens, it's still a little pie in the sky for me. Michael? What's super exciting is that we've been building this for years in stealth.

The mission has always been the same, And the biggest opportunity is to show that we can connect Web2 with Web3 communities. And that's the entire thesis of even what we've created with DELWR protocol is our ability to on-round institutions and users to new technologies, new solutions. They'll make better, easier, faster for them to interact with the domain-fied economy. So what we're seeing right now with the stable coin adoption, the rise of all these institutions, we're seeing a lot of those parallels within our own domain, pun intended. So super excited to be the forefront of this to wave a flag for DomainFi and educate the mass audience with what we're building.

Awesome. Thank you guys for coming on. Really enjoyed the conversation excited for everything ahead for D3 and Delma. Likewise. Thank you, Wyatt. Thanks, Wyatt. Thanks for listening to another episode of On the Brink with Castle Island. To find out more about Castle Island, visit castle island.

To listen to all of our podcast episodes, please go to On the Brink. or just click on the tab in our website. Thanks for listening.