The Pomp Podcast - #543: Brad Kam on Bringing Crypto to Developing Markets

Episode Date: April 28, 2021

Brad Kam is the Co-Founder of Unstoppable Domains. In this conversation, we discuss human readable domains, the recent Opera browser integration, NFT galleries, and bringing crypto to internet users in the developing world.  ======================= Public Rec is the first to bring tailored sizing to leisurewear so that you don’t have to choose between comfort and style. They make leisurewear in waist and inseam sizes because they believe comfort starts with a better fit. And when things fit better, they look better. No tailors. No settling. No stress. Comfort and style, all in one. Check out publicrec.com/pomp and use POMP10 at checkout for 10% off your order. Step into a better fit today with Public Rec. ======================= As one of the largest and oldest Bitcoin exchanges in the world, Kraken is consistently named one of the best places to buy and sell crypto online, thanks to our excellent service, low fees, versatile funding options and rigorous security standards -- but this is only part of the story. We’ve been on the forefront of the blockchain revolution since 2011: http://www.kraken.com ======================= Unstoppable Domains makes crypto easier by replacing your address with [AnyName].crypto. They allow you to send and receive over 70 cryptocurrencies, including BTC, ETH, and LINK with a single blockchain domain. Go to unstoppabledomains.com and get [YourName].crypto to make your crypto life easier. =======================

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. Brad Kam is the co-founder of Unstoppable Domains. In this conversation, we discuss human-readable domains, the recent Opera browser integration, their new NFT gallery product, and bringing crypto to internet users in the developing world. I really enjoyed this conversation with Brad, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is Public Rec. They simply have the most comfortable clothes in the world.

They're the first to bring tailored sizing to leisure wear, so you don't have to choose between comfort and style. Everyone knows I love comfort, and now I'm stylish. They make leisure wear in waist and inseam sizes because they believe comfort starts with a better fit. And when things fit better, they look better. No tailors, no settling, no stress. Comfort and style all in one. Check out public rec.com slash pomp and use pomp 10 at checkout for 10% off your order. Again, public rec.com slash pomp and use pomp 10 at checkout for 10% off your order. Step into a better fit today with public rec. I wear it daily and so should you. Next up is Kraken. They're one of the largest and oldest Bitcoin exchanges in the world.

Kraken is consistently named one of the best places to buy and sell crypto online. thanks to their excellent service, low fees, versatile funding options, and rigorous security standards. But that is only part of the story. They have been on the forefront of the blockchain revolution since 2011. They are one of the largest and oldest Bitcoin exchanges in the world. I've had Jesse, the CEO on the podcast before. They constantly are helping to fund Bitcoin development and just embody everything that surrounds the Bitcoin ethos. So go check them out at kraken.com again kraken.com last but not least is our friends over at unstoppable domains they've teamed up with okx to make crypto simpler by supporting dot crypto domains on their exchange

unstoppable domains allows you to receive over 70 cryptocurrencies including bitcoin ethereum chain link and others with a single blockchain domain name this makes it so much easier for millions of users to send and receive crypto by using their name like pomp.crypto it's the stress free experience needed for mainstream crypto adoption. Plus, .crypto domains are NFTs that are stored in your wallet so you permanently own them and can transfer to your other wallets as needed. Go to UnstoppableDomains.com and get your name .crypto today to make your crypto life easier. UnstoppableDomains.com, go and get it. All right, let's get in this episode with Brad. I really hope that you enjoy this one. 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. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Brad back from Unstoppable Domains. Thank you so much for doing this. Thanks for having me. For sure. Let's just remind people, Unstoppable Domains, you guys are essentially creating human

readable domains, but you explain it way better than I do. So just what is Unstoppable Domains mission? And kind of what have you guys built so far? Yeah, so we build domains on blockchains, we believe that users should be in control on the internet, not companies. And that starts with your domain, which is like your identity online. So You control your domain. It's an NFT stored inside of your wallet. Just like a cryptocurrency, nobody can take it away from you. Nobody can move it around. Nobody can make updates to it other than you. Very different than a traditional domain name, which is stored by GoDaddy. GoDaddy can take it away from you. GoDaddy can get hacked. GoDaddy can get tricked and somebody else can be

making updates or changing it or doing something else. What's cool about blockchain domains as opposed to regular domains, they have all of these different use cases. One that is close to my heart and close to the crypto community's heart is that it's kind of like a decentralized Venmo. You can send me money to brad.crypto. You can send me Bitcoin or ETH or any other cryptocurrency. And you can check out my website at brad.crypto. Same domain, does both things. We'll do many more things in the future. About 700,000 of these have been registered so far. We've been at it for a couple of years. And yeah. So one of the things that just immediately jumps to mind, and we've talked about it in prior episodes that you've been on, is this idea that

the wallet addresses are really confusing. They're long strings of letters and numbers, very similar to what IP addresses used to be where people would have to type in 121.10.746, whatever. And then when somebody came up with human readables, I could just type in www.google.com that made the internet much, much more usable, much more user-friendly, and obviously led to an explosion of various types of products and companies that were built on the internet. You guys are essentially doing the exact same thing here, but it really serves two purposes. One is for wallets, so I can send money to, you know, Pomp.Crypto, or it can serve as a domain name. But I know that recently you guys announced this brand new partnership with Opera.

So maybe let's just start kind of with, like, what is Opera, and why do most people not know what that is? So Opera Browser is actually one of the top five browsers in the world. It's just not as popular in the U.S. Now, there was a period of time, I think, maybe 10 years ago, where techies in the U.S. were really, really into it. But they have kind of moved to other browsers. But in Europe, it's extremely popular. Around the world, it's extremely popular. I believe it's the most popular browser in Nigeria now, which is also one of the top countries for crypto.

So I think there's potentially a link there. Opera Browser has leaned extremely heavily into crypto. And I think essentially all of the browsers that are not owned by giant trillion-dollar companies are looking deeply at crypto right now. And that's just something that should be on the entire crypto community's radar, that the browser community is looking really closely at our space, building wallets, trying to get into the crypto business in any number of ways. Opera's been doing that for the past couple of years. They've been on the forefront. And now they're going deeper. And what Deeper looks like is you can now resolve .crypto websites inside of all of Opera Browser's properties.

So this is over 300 million internet users that can now just type in a .crypto and it works just like a .com. It also works for the payment use case. But this is kind of a big deal for decentralized websites. Yeah. When I was at Facebook in 2014, 2015, we used to make fairly simple changes to the user experience, whether it was just shortening the number of clicks it took to do an activity, making something a little bit more easily accessible or visible. and there would be these massive increases in usage on the Opera browser specifically. Some of that I think was due to kind of older versions of phones and people weren't walking around with an iPhone, but also some of it was just the sheer size of the audience, right? And so I think you've said that one-tenth of all internet users use the Opera browser. Is that

accurate? Yeah. So I think the published number is a little over 300 million. So I don't know the exact number of current internet users, but I think it's pretty close to one-tenth. Yeah. And so when you think about kind of the importance for crypto, is there a thought process here that like the emerging countries and developing countries are actually better suited to adopt these types of technologies? Is that's a better place to focus on or what really kind of drove the idea between going and doing this partnership with Opera? You know, I think that there's a lot of opportunity around the world. us as a company, you know, we're a San Francisco-based tech company. It's just easier for us to operate in US and Europe. So that is kind of where we've been focusing, but that's mostly because of language. Most of us are English speakers. And so it's hard for us to market in

other languages, not because there's not amazing opportunities there. So Opera Browser for us is probably mostly about the European market. And then there's of course, other things that we're working on that are going to be directly impacting the US market in terms of browsers. So that's been our focus. But there's a ton of opportunity there. And I'm sure we're going to get there eventually as we continue to grow. Yeah. And so will people be able to use the domains for the exact same things that they can use on other browsers in the Opera browser? Are there any sort of obstacles to the full usage of the product? No ifs, ands, or buts. No change this setting. No make this update. You just do what you would normally tell somebody what you

would normally tell them about a website, hey, go check out my website. And what's so fascinating, what's fascinating to me about this is, in the kind of Western developed world, you still have to go to a web three experience or some kind of the decentralized web in some cases. Here, if this is the default browser for, you know, again, a 10th of the internet users in a lot of these countries, now by proxy, unstoppable domains essentially becomes the default domain system that they could use if you continue to see penetration in the markets, right? Absolutely. And is the thought process that people will choose unstoppable domains utilized via the Opera browser over kind of the traditional domain system, simply from censorship resistance and some of the benefits

that we previously talked about? I think it's more about consumers having control of what they're doing online. So it might not necessarily be that you're concerned about being censored, It's that you're concerned about you having complete ownership because, you know, all around the world, we have these, these registrars that have all these kind of crazy laws and regulations and, you know, they get, they, the, the amount of hacking that happens amongst these registrars around the world would, would, would, would shock people. I mentioned GoDaddy probably earlier, GoDaddy had a big hack in November of 2020, and that's probably the most, one of the most secure domain name registrars in the world.

So there's just all kinds of problems baked into this world. But the other thing is that you just can't prove anything about the user because of this security problem, because you have this custodian. You don't know 100% that the web content that you're looking at is presented to you by the person that you were intending to go and see. So I think blockchains in general, like their superpower is about verification. Like, you know, 100% certain things about what you're looking at, what you're using, who you're interacting with, etc. Yeah, it's absolutely fascinating. Another thing that you guys have done recently is you've basically empowered the ability for people to use their .crypto domains to create these like NFT galleries. And you've shown me a couple of them, and they're pretty damn cool. Explain kind of what the thought process here was and then what the actual technology allows someone to do. So I think it all comes back to this idea of verification. So I've got Brad.Crypto.

I've got a bunch of NFTs in my wallet. And we built this feature that allows you to generate a website on IPFS, a decentralized website. It takes a couple of clicks. Super easy. You can do it right now. And you can go and see my collection. So the app, what it does is it goes and looks inside my wallet, finds the NFTs that I own and displays that as an art gallery.

And I've got one up right now at Brad.Crypto. And what you know is when you're looking at Brad.Crypto, you know that the owner of the domain is also the owner of those specific assets. And that's something that you don't get with Web2. That's something you don't get with the traditional web is that you don't have any assurances about the content that you're looking at. And so in this new internet world, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go around on the internet and I'm going to flex. I'm going to say, here are the things that I own. They're digital sets. Here are the things that I own. And I'm going to be able to prove to you 100%, yeah, these are actually mine. It's not just pictures. It's not just copies. I'm not somebody standing in. I'm not a fake identity. I am the person that owns this stuff. And I think that's the secret superpower of the decentralized web that I think everyone should be focusing on. And how much of this is going to be dependent on you guys building out kind of functionality

or some of this kind of auto-generation versus users can do that themselves, right? Like, could somebody have gone and done this before you guys added the functionality on the NFT gallery using their own .crypto domain? Or is it something where you guys, you know, as you kind of push forward, you'll continue to launch more and more functionality and just make the .crypto and the unstoppable domains much more attractive to people. It's all open source. Anybody can build whatever they want. People have built their own versions. I've seen like virtual galleries that are like in VR where you can go and check out people's art. I've seen all kinds of cool stuff. The problem, I mean, most of that

stuff's not commercial ready. So what our goal has been with all of this stuff is that we want to see the market. We've been sitting around jamming on ideas for how this stuff could work. you know, over the past couple of years. And we just want to show people some examples to inspire and get people kind of get the, get the wheel turning. Uh, but ultimately like the work is going to be done, uh, by thousands and thousands of web developers, just like with, just like with the traditional web, like we're not, we're not a web company, you know, our, our goal is domain names. Uh, and this is really just a way to, to kind of get the creative juices flowing. Yeah. What's been the most surprising thing to you, both from the opera launch and also the NFT galleries? Is there anything that just kind of blew you away or was something you weren't expecting, but it's pretty cool?

people are obsessed, uh, with this, uh, with, with the art that they own. And I have not personally been, you know, gone super deep into, into art. It's something that, you know, I've had friends and family that were, you know, big fans and they've kind of, uh, evangelized it and tried to, to, to get me excited. And I, I, I get it and I appreciate it and I get involved, but, uh, I have just the amount of, uh, emotional energy that it can grab from people. Like I've seen just with some of these galleries, I mean, I've seen people sit there and study a single gallery for 15 or 20 minutes. And like that, that's a lot of time on site. You know, if you're, you know, if you're building, if you built a website and you get somebody to stay there for

15 minutes, that's not bad on the internet. You know, I think average time is like 10 seconds or something like that. So just the, the addictiveness of, of seeing this stuff has been probably the most surprising part to me. I think the second part, and this is kind of like the macro crypto part is how deep browsers want to go into crypto. Like, and this is just something I can't emphasize enough. Like these companies are looking for a path forward and they see crypto as a core strategy for them, whether that's, you know, building a wallet and enabling financial services and these companies have tons of users like you know you you add a zero or add two zeros on a crypto app um these are not necessarily you know native crypto users these are just internet

users but there's so many people in these companies and these companies have really low margins so they're saying we have this super active user base uh they have all these issues on the internet uh crypto can help solve them let's go add a wallet and then all of a sudden we can enable all this stuff uh opera is an example of that brave is an example of that And I think we're going to see more of that. And that piece right there is just like, I mean, that's just another just massive, massive community that the crypto world is onboarding and has been onboarding over the past year or two. And it's just one of the many massive onboarding waves that we're seeing in crypto. Yeah. What's fascinating to me about this entire thing is you get what most people would have thought as kind of legacy infrastructure that is still run by technologists. And the technologists

understand the benefits of the technology stack that's being built in crypto. And they're starting to say, hey, how can I incorporate this into that legacy product? And so the Opera browser is actually a fantastic kind of example of this, where they've got the built-in user base, they've got distribution, they understand that they've got centralized infrastructure, and they've got some kind of failure points along the way. And if they start to actually replace it with decentralized type infrastructure or crypto infrastructure,

you can really actually kind of supercharge your legacy business and adapt and thrive in this new world rather than simply sit there, take it on the chin and be disrupted. And they're all looking at Chrome and these giant companies and those companies aren't innovating. Like those companies don't care about their browser business.

Their browser business is not, that's not where they make their money. So there's not any reason for the large incumbents to, to go and innovate. And then there's this massive, massive, you know, new, you know, Web3 oriented, crypto oriented user base that is looking for tools and a browser is a very natural place. If you're thinking about where to store your assets, maybe even where to store your domain so you can be using it for various things online, that's a very natural place. So having money inside of your browser is kind of a no-brainer for users. And that's something that just started being enabled over the past couple of years. And that's your wallet following you around on the Internet, all in one application. So it's when you think about it that way, it feels somewhat inevitable that those things would come together.

But but now it's kind of finally out there in the market and you can play with it. Yeah. The other part that I think is so fascinating is when you integrate a lot of this crypto infrastructure in with legacy products and it's done in a thoughtful way. Now, the user doesn't necessarily have to go kind of be indoctrinated into crypto infrastructure. they don't have to go do a lot of kind of the nuanced stuff that makes the user experience and adoption more difficult or has more friction. You basically are getting them to onboard onto the infrastructure, but they're doing it through a user interface that they're very familiar with. They may not even know that anything's changed and therefore you can drastically increase adoption at a much faster pace. Right. Absolutely. Yeah. All right. What, what do you want people to know

or what should people go do now that you guys have this opera integration and you have the nft gallery uh well first of all you should go check it out go check you can go check out brad.crypto as a starting point but there's of course tons of uh tons of other websites out there mine's nothing special um but you should go but you should go check out uh check out a bunch of new websites coming out we'll be posting about them um and go launch your own it's like it's like three clicks um all you got to do is have your domain in the same uh same wallet as your nftr collection and then boom click click and you're live i love it listen you guys are continue to push the pace of innovation i think that uh human readable domains obviously uh are

a huge leap forward so please keep it up uh because i think that you guys can help on board uh literally hundreds of millions of new users to this ecosystem by simply just making it easier to use the infrastructure so uh i've been uh cheering you guys on from the sideline for a while i will continue to do that and appreciate you coming on where can people go and follow you uh or learn more about unstoppable domains yeah go check out uh at unstoppable web on twitter that's a good place to follow whatever's going on and also check out unstoppable domains.com awesome brad listen thank you so much for doing this we'll have to do it again in the future thanks a lot