The Pomp Podcast - #865 Taking Control of Your Online Identity w/ Brad Kam

Starting point is 00:00:00 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. Now let's kick this thing off. Brad Kam is the co-founder of Unstoppable Domains. In this conversation, we talk about digital property rights, domains that can't be taken down by anyone, and a number of the new product initiatives that Unstoppable Domains is in the process of launching. I really enjoyed this conversation with brad and i hope that you do as well before we get into this episode though i want to quickly talk about our sponsors first up is lmax digital the number one institutional crypto exchange they offer clients the deepest pool of crypto liquidity on the planet underscored

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Starting point is 00:02:49 Connect MetaX in your browser or within the OKEx app to explore DeFi, NFTs, and play to earning gaming, the world's most powerful crypto exchange. Whether you're just learning about crypto, you're a seasoned DeFi degen, an NFT enthusiast, or a pro trader, you're all invited to a better future. Go check it out today and let me know what you think. All right, let's get in this episode. I hope you guys enjoyed this one. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his

Starting point is 00:03:32 personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Brad, I know that you guys have been doing a ton of work over at Unstoppable Domains. Maybe just give us kind of a quick overview as a reminder for folks in terms of what Unstoppable Domain's mission is and kind of what the product suite looks like today. For sure. And good to see you. And thanks for having me. So our mission is to onboard users onto Web3. And what we believe is that users need to own and control their identities online. And we build NFT domain names, which allow this to happen. So your NFT domain name is your username for Web3.

Starting point is 00:04:14 And so you store them in your wallet and you control them and you can receive money to them, etc. I've got Brad.crypto as an example. Got it. And so when you start to think about what people have been using this for, talk to us about kind of consumer trends you guys have seen or various things that kind of stick out to you anecdotally as really cool use cases for this. So I think it started with payments. you know payments is this problem that exists in crypto pretty much everybody who uses crypto for the first time sees these long addresses and thinks to themselves wow that's pretty scary

Starting point is 00:04:44 like what if i said what if i type in one digit wrong and now i've lost uh you know tens of thousands of dollars or whatever um so i think pretty much everybody who interacts with the technology uh thinks themselves wow like this is this is kind of hard and there's probably going to be an easier way uh well an easier way would be an nft domain name that you type in instead of your crypto addresses. And then they then resolved your crypto addresses. So payments is definitely number one. Number two is all about identity. And I think this is just like a huge missing piece of the current internet that it's very hard to prove that somebody is a real person, a unique person, et cetera. There was a report pretty recently saying that Facebook wipes out

Starting point is 00:05:30 half a billion fake accounts every single quarter. I think they actually targeted me with an ad, uh, thinking that that was a, like a positive that they were like, you know, cleaning up the network. Um, but I took that as, you know, wow, the, the regular internet, uh, identity is totally broken. So identity is going to be the number two big use case. Got it. And so when you think about identity, walk us through kind of how you guys think the, uh, the existing system is broken and then what you guys are doing to, uh, to fix this. Yeah. It's really all about not being able to have information that you know is true and then being able to use it across applications. So what winds up happening is, you know, Facebook will verify something about you and then that

Starting point is 00:06:12 information is trapped inside of Facebook's network. Like you, Facebook owns that information and then you're sort of trapped inside of their ecosystem. What's going to happen in Web3 with identity is the user controls their username, which is their NFT domain name. The user attests to certain information about themselves by signing a message with the private key that controls the domain name. They're the only one that can do that. And then they can share or not share this information. So what winds up happening is, is you're going to have this kind of like bottom up identity where you're going to say, you know, hey, this is me and here are my, you know, here are my crypto payment addresses. You know, here are my social media handles that I have verified

Starting point is 00:06:59 that are also tied to my wallet or to my domain name. Things like this that you can say to apps, hey, here is information that is true about me without having to share what that information is. So I think that's kind of like the key thing that you get to do in Web3 is you get to own your information share it with apps when you want to and because it's provable you can share a proof of the information without actually sharing it uh yourself and i'll give an example to make it a little sharper in a second all right what's the example so the example is this new is this new feature that we're launching which is called humanity check and so the way this works is uh there's like sort of a traditional uh like a you know traditional id check that you do uh that data

Starting point is 00:07:45 is that the identity provider says, okay, you're a unique human. Uh, and then that is tied to your wallet, not the data, just the fact that you have been checked. And now what you can do when you log in with a wallet, when you sign into an app with a, with a wallet is you can say, Hey wallet, Hey app, uh, I'm a unique human. I don't want to tell you who I am. Maybe I'll tell you certain attributes about me. Like I'm over 18. So I'm able to, you know, use your financial services app or whatever, or I'm from this country or some other attributes about me so that you can give me some sort of a special offer. But ultimately, knowing who a unique person is rather than just knowing what a wallet is in crypto is a huge missing piece. New customer acquisition is like

Starting point is 00:08:34 the core of e-commerce and crypto apps today don't know if they have a million customers or 10,000 customers with 100 wallets each. So give me an example. Like I go to a website, right? And I've got this humanity check. Why would I want to use this versus like just put my information in that I normally would?

Starting point is 00:08:54 Like give me, help me understand the difference between let's call it like the web two or the old way to do this versus what this empowers me to do. Yeah, so I mean, at the start, I think that the like, let's look, we'll take from the consumer motivation. I think the consumer motivation

Starting point is 00:09:07 is going to be all about rewards. so uh right now uh all the airdrops that you see in crypto those are all loyalty programs those are all saying hey you have used my dap for the past two years that's really awesome thank you here's the special reward um but the lifeblood of commerce is around getting new customers and this there's no mechanism for this in crypto right now uh so what's going to happen is is i'm going to see that this is a unique person. I'm going to see that, hey, they've used Uniswap over the past year. They're like a Uniswap whale. And I'm SushiSwap. So I'm going to want to go and give them some crazy reward for trying out SushiSwap for the first time. New customer rewards is going

Starting point is 00:09:52 to be the thing that drives this whole ecosystem. And you could imagine things like an app would say, okay, I'm going to give $1,000 reward to a new customer. But hey, you, Anthony, you've got you know, several hundred thousand followers on Twitter, I'm going to give you a $10,000 reward. Got it. And so what is the relationship with this data? Like where does my data or information reside when I use something like Humanity Check? And then how much ownership or control do I have over it versus other people have ownership or control? It sits inside of an identity provider. Unstoppable Domains does not have it. The apps do not get it. But the way to think about it is, that there's this on-chain data that we don't need any third parties to help us with because

Starting point is 00:10:39 we can just go read it on-chain. And then there's some off-chain data and there's going to be some experts. And we're going to want to use that off-chain data to be able to enhance our digital crypto lives. And so one example would be, I might want to know how many Twitter followers you have. And the way to find that information is to ask Twitter. So Twitter is the expert on how many Twitter followers you have. They are the source of truth for that. You're going to have a lot of these sources of truth. I think the important thing is to keep it in a silo. So there is one identity provider that has it. You can of course request to delete it whenever you want, but that's the only company that gets it. And the way that it works right now on the internet, if you were to go

Starting point is 00:11:20 and if you were to go around and prove your real identity, the way you would do that is expose all of your information to every single app. That can stop now. You can have your one source of truth, the identity provider, they can keep that information private, and you can then prove things about that data without having to share it. Like you could tell an app, hey, you know, I'm over 18. And the identity provider can verify that without sharing what your actual age is. Got it. And so when we started to think about this, what does this empower from an application standpoint? So if I'm a developer or I'm a startup team,

Starting point is 00:12:00 like what should I be thinking about in terms of how this now leverages me, the ability to do something that previously wasn't available or kind of build products in a certain way that may be different than what I was doing previously? Yeah, I mean, going back to this, going back to this, so there's two things.

Starting point is 00:12:15 If you're trying to get new customers, you're going to want to know the value of these customers. So this is kind of like the future. This is like Web3 marketing. Web3 marketing is, hey, I know that you're a unique person. I know that you're a Uniswap whale. I know that you've got 10 po-ops from this event. I know that you own these four or five currencies. like this is the marketing information that i'm going to use in order to uh try to get you to uh to try my product and the difference here is that previously i would pay facebook and now i'm going to pay you the user directly in the form of rewards so i think that the customer acquisition is going to be this the the superpower here um it's the thing that basically all marketers spend all their time on how do i find the right people uh for my app so uh this is the building block

Starting point is 00:13:12 that's going to enable uh enable apps to do that so i think that is going to be kind of like the the where all the where all the fire is there's a there's a sort of a theoretical thing that happens here too which is that you now know um you know one username one person uh so you can actually know how many know whether or not someone's a real person like that's going to make a much safer social media app. Like that's going to make a much more secure dating app in the future. So I think just from a security perspective, people on the internet are going to want to know, hey, am I actually dealing with a real person or am I dealing with a bot or am I dealing with a bot farm? Am I dealing with some company that's created a million fake profiles

Starting point is 00:13:53 in order to manipulate public discourse or whatever? All of these issues I think that we have on the internet can, can be boiled back down to, uh, we have an identity problem. We don't know when someone is a real person. So I think that's what you're going to see. You're going to see rewards and then you're going to see, uh, this verification that someone is real, uh, in order to feel more comfortable, uh, interacting. And I think dating apps and social media apps are going to be, uh, you know, that's, I think those are going to be, uh, you know, very, uh, very popular use cases. Joe, John, what questions you guys got? My question would just be around human verification in general when it comes to crypto and Web3. Like, why is this? Why does this matter

Starting point is 00:14:38 so much? Because this is the anti-fraud measure for the Internet. Today, half a billion fake Facebook accounts every single quarter. We do not know who we're interacting with online. This has led to global hackings, massive scams, political interference, all sorts of social problems all come back to the fact that we don't have verified real data. And what blockchains are really, really good at is this. Now, I know that this is a slightly different view than some people have about crypto networks. But I think that you're going to see all sorts of off-chain data becoming really important from these third parties that are able to be so-called experts. And once again, Twitter is an expert at what my Twitter username is and how many followers I have.

Starting point is 00:15:36 Um, so I think this is sort of like a underappreciated, uh, set of data that is going to be extremely important, uh, for services that we have, uh, services that we get online. So, um, I hope that explains it. John. Yeah, Brad, can you discuss kind of the privacy behind all this and how users can have that full privacy, but, um, you guys can still kind of do that background check? So you have to give your data to one company. You have to give your data to an identity provider, just like any. So this is sort of like what happens is that you have these third party providers that are experts in a certain thing. There are ID companies that are experts in verifying identities and securing that information, and that's what we're using. So we don't have the data. The apps that request information about your identity don't have the data. One company does.

Starting point is 00:16:34 That's the silo. Very similar to Twitter. Twitter is the silo for your pseudo-anonymous social profile. Same idea. Brad, when you start to think about building this out, how much of the kind of quote unquote go to market as you go and you get the users to adopt a humanity check versus you go and you actually get the companies to build for this type of technology and then it attracts people to go and adopt humanity check? How much is this like B2C versus B2B2C? You know, I think that there needs to be a motivation for consumers to want to use it. So rewards are going to be coming from Unstoppable.

Starting point is 00:17:13 We'll be giving you rewards as well as apps. So I think that's going to be your motivation. And then it's going to go both ways. So you kind of need both at the same time in order for people to use it. But this is on the back of a really big push that we've been making towards login and authentication with your domain name. We launched a login with Unstoppable a couple months ago. And all of this is the building blocks for decentralized social media and decentralized commerce. So instead of log in with Facebook, log in with your domain name, and then you can

Starting point is 00:17:52 add a humanity check on top. So what's going to happen is you'll be logging into apps. The app will be like, hey, are you a unique person? And you can sign a message and say, yes, I'm willing to share that information. Yes, I am a unique person. Now they can offer you a service based on that. And where it's going to go is, is you're going to layer on more stuff. You're going to layer on on-chain behavior. You're going to layer on off-chain behavior, like how many Twitter followers you have. All of this is going to shape these custom experiences that we're going to get online. And it's all going to be user control. So like everything that an app has, everything that an app can see about you, it's all up to you. The app asks you

Starting point is 00:18:32 for permission, you say yes or you say no. So it's this very user-centric version of usernames and profiles and identity. I think the use cases are going to be quite broad, but we're going to start with rewards. Got it. And then when you start to think about what the downsides of this are, like obviously the identity in the legacy world, there's a lot of positives the way it's been done, but there's also a lot of downsides. What, if any, downsides do you see or think people should be aware of as they go to adopt a product like this? I mean, I think that there's like a theoretical, there's like a theoretical perfect state where maybe there's some way that algorithms or, you know, would be able to identify a unique human in a way that, you know, no company

Starting point is 00:19:18 needed to be involved. And that would be sort of some perfect future state. The tech does not exist for that to be possible yet. But I think that if we could ever get to a point to where we could eliminate the company that stores the identity data, we would absolutely want to do that. It's just technically not possible at this point. So then you have to ask yourself, is this 10 times better? Is this a step function better than what we have today? I think absolutely. Is it the perfect version of our decentralized future? No, but none of the tech that exists today is. So the question is, do you want to move forward or do you want to wait for some hypothetical perfect state. I would argue that there are going to be all kinds of consumer

Starting point is 00:20:03 benefits, and this is going to lead to your identity information being much more siloed than it is currently today. I think most people have done many, many identity checks at various exchanges and other things like that. So their identity information is being spread across the internet right now and i think we can pull that back put the user in more control uh and improve experiences at the same time got it and so when you start to think about um kind of the early signs have you guys seen anything uh in terms of what the reaction's been uh it's going live today well that's what i mean like have you guys seen anything yet so far this morning uh i think it's going live in like 30 minutes so we got 30 more minutes to go

Starting point is 00:20:47 All right. So as part of this, the other thing I always ask, uh, kind of teams when they're launching products like this, it's like, what are the metrics in which you measure success? Are you guys looking at the total number of people who adopt it? Uh, the number of apps that are connected to it? Like how do you measure or what metrics are you guys looking at? Yeah. So, I mean, the, those are the two most important, how many people have actually gone through a humanity check, uh, how many apps support it, uh, and then what kind of rewards are being claimed. And I think that what kind of rewards are being claimed is going to be sort of the, that's the meat. That's the thing that shows that people are getting a lot of

Starting point is 00:21:22 benefit out of it. So we want to see really awesome rewards being given out to people who have been humanity checked. Apps all over the world, this is potentially relevant to you. Any crypto app, this is relevant to you. Do you have, would you like to market to a bunch of crypto users? Here is a bunch of crypto users that we can verify are unique people. They would love to try your app. So I think it's extremely broad. And that's what we're going to be looking at. And then I guess my last question for you is, as you kind of look forward, help us understand. We talked a little bit about like ownership, right in terms of the domains themselves. We talked about this idea of identity and obviously being an important part, like where else does

Starting point is 00:22:05 unstoppable domains go? Or what should we expect from you guys in the future as you kind of continue to build out uh the grander vision so there's these there there's this the the two big categories are um public on-chain data and then you know private off-chain data and so public on-chain data is you know kind of obvious what dApps have I been using what you know cryptocurrencies do I use uh what wallets do I have etc um or all my on-chain interactions and then there's all this off-chain stuff, which is what's my real identity, what social media handles do I use, what's my real website, any other things that I could use as my reputation in the off-chain world, academic credentials. So I think what you're going to see is that the user is going to be

Starting point is 00:22:55 allowed to add and verify more and more types of data about themselves. Eventually, you're going to be able to prove I went to this college. Um, these are my social media handles. This is my website. This is my blog. Uh, these are some other, you know, here are some other, uh, credentials that I have acquired. I am the, you know, I am a popular contributor of this subreddit, all of these, all of these, these things that could build up into my online reputation. Uh, we're going to be building tools to make it easy for you to verify that information and carry it with you in your profile. So your profile is going to become this, your Web3 profile is going to become this really, really meaty thing that has all of this very, all of this very important history

Starting point is 00:23:42 about you that, again, you can choose to share, but you don't have to share. You can choose to share, but you'll have it there in a provable way. So you're going to see just more and more types of reputation information that are going to get added to your identity. It's kind of like the opposite of the way that you might approach it in the physical world, where you would go and ask the person, or you would go and you get your government ID and all the stuff that just gets written in, and then it's kind of pushed down. The government says, hey, this is what's true about you. In the Web3 world, it's kind of the opposite. The user has their name, and then they choose what information to associate with it and they kind of build it up from the sort of it's

Starting point is 00:24:27 this sort of bottom-up identity i decide you know if i add 10 new things about myself there's now a richer version of me that's available and visible online so got it i lied i actually have two more questions people are asking and i feel like they're they're good ones so the first is uh who is the id uh provider uh or kind of the person holding the id uh information uh and then the other question is uh where if any oracles are being used and kind of what the dependency on those oracles are the company is called persona um it's a top id provider we have built systems with oracles before um like for example our twitter verification is with an oracle uh what we think is actually the best way is that the apps themselves they are the oracles uh like

Starting point is 00:25:18 persona is the source of truth for that identity. Twitter is the source of truth for your Twitter username, et cetera. So I think the Oracle step may be unnecessary here because what you really have are these third parties that are experts in some specific type of data, not all of your data. You don't want to trust Twitter for anything other than, you know, how many followers do I have and what's my username. But for that, those two bits of information, they are the experts. got it uh where can people go to start using this product in 27 minutes uh and uh then where can they find you online uh unstoppable domains.com uh you should uh you should see uh you should see a banner and be able to uh be able to check it out try it out and uh find us and and follow

Starting point is 00:26:05 us at unstoppable web on twitter that's the best place to to know what's going on awesome man thank you so much for taking the time to uh come on brad i always enjoy talking and uh as you guys continue to build products that help people own their own information. I think you guys are pushing this all forward, which is much, much, much needed, obviously. Thank you. Awesome, buddy. Talk soon.

Starting point is 00:26:26 Thanks, Brad. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you guys enjoyed this one. Make sure you're subscribed on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to try to transition to get a new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered.

Starting point is 00:26:40 Head over to palmscryptocourse.com. we've developed a curriculum with the top teams across the industry it's a three-week intensive training program with over 50 events packed into that three-week time period go to pompscryptocourse.com to learn more and i'll meet you guys for the next episode

The Pomp Podcast - #865 Taking Control of Your Online Identity w/ Brad Kam

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