The Pomp Podcast - Brad Kam, Co-Founder of Unstoppable Domains: A Corporate Ethereum Dystopia

Episode Date: October 11, 2019

Brad Kam is the Co-Founder of Unstoppable Domains. In this conversation, Brad and Anthony Pompliano discuss free speech, censorship, China, the societal impact of Unstoppable Domains, how it works, and what the technical challenges were. BLOCKFI-----BlockFi allows you to keep your crypto, put it up as collateral, and receive a USD loan funded directly to your bank account. They do loans ranging from $2,000 to $10,000,000, and they're perfect for helping you reach your financial goals of all sizes. Visit BlockFi.com/Pomp to learn more about putting your crypto to work without having to sell it. CRYPTO.COM-----Crypto.com is a pioneering payment and cryptocurrency platform that seeks to accelerate the world's transition to cryptocurrency. With the vision of "cryptocurrency in every wallet", the Crypto.com App offers a full range of financial products with competitive pricing, well designed UX and high security. It is the best place to buy, sell and pay with crypto. COINMINE-----The Coinmine One is like an Xbox that turns your electricity into Bitcoin. You just plug it in, connect to wifi, and tap on the crypto you want. It’s so easy anyone can do it. Everything is controlled from the Coinmine mobile app and the Coinmine keeps getting better with over the air updates that add new coins, features and services to your Coinmine.  Visit coinmine.com/pomp to get a Coinmine and earn crypto for powering a new world. ETORO-----This episode of Off the Chain is sponsored by eToro, the smartest crypto trading platform, and one of the largest in the world. Join 11 million other traders and create an account at etoro.com and build your crypto portfolio the smart way.

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off The Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off. Brad Cam is a co-founder of Unstoppable Domains. In this conversation, we discussed free speech, censorship, China, the societal impact of Unstoppable Domains, how exactly it works, what the technical challenges they overcame were, and they also announced a new domain extension, .crypto. I'm really excited about what they're building. They're replacing crypto addresses with an easy-to-remember domain name. And right now, they're running a buy-one-get-one-free domain offer, starting with the launch of this episode.

You can check it out at unstoppabledomains.com. I'm going to grab pomp.crypto, and I hope you grab one as well. Enjoy the episode. Skrrt, skrrt! always. Ever wanted to get into mining and didn't know how? Don't worry, your boy Pomp's got you. Everybody got some electricity and Wi-Fi. All you got to do is go to CoinMine.com. You buy a CoinMine. It's like an Xbox or a PlayStation that helps you turn your electricity into Bitcoin. That's right. You purchase it. It shows up at your doorstep. You pull it out of the box. You

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Ethereum, and others. With the smartest trading tools and the ability to connect with the best traders around the world, there's no better place to build your perfect portfolio. If you're new to Bitcoin and crypto, you can test the waters with their $100,000 virtual trading feature. But if you're more experienced, you can create custom technical charts and use eToro's social feeds to inform your trading decisions. They've got transparent fees, and so you never miss out. They also have an easy to use application available on iPhone, Android, or any web browser. You can get started today in just a few clicks at eToro.com. Again, that's eToro.com. Get VIP access to Bitcoin and crypto markets today. 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'm super excited. I've got Brad here with me. He's working on probably one of the more powerful ideas that I've seen in the crypto and blockchain space. So I'm excited to kind of go over what Unstoppable Domains is and kind of what they're up to. So thanks so much for taking the time and

coming to do this, Brad. Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited. For sure. Let's start with your background and kind of what you did pre-blockchain cryptocurrency and Bitcoin. Yeah. So I've been an entrepreneur since I was in college. Started in the real estate world, bought up some houses during the last economic crash, 2009, 2010 era. 2012, moved to San Francisco to get into the startup game. Worked on a startup called Talkable, which is a referral marketing software company. So I spent six years working on that, but was spending a lot of nights thinking about crypto. So it was time to get in the game. For sure. And do you remember the first time that you ever saw Bitcoin or a blockchain and kind of what your thought was?

I read a Wired article in 2011, the rise and fall of Bitcoin, and I didn't think much of it. But when I moved to San Francisco in December of 2012, I moved into this place called 20 Mission, which is like a Bitcoin hacker house. I think the second crypto exchange in the U.S. was launched out of the basement. Some of the earliest crypto meetups were there. So when I moved to San Francisco, just basically everybody I met was a Bitcoin fanatic. And I bit the bug pretty soon after and haven't been able to stop thinking about it. That was almost seven years ago. So that's awesome. All right. So what'd you, what'd you do first in the crypto space? And

then how did you eventually come up with the idea for Unstoppable Domains? Yeah. So at first I was really just a investor, advised a couple of companies, kind of tinkered around. And then in 2017, my co-founder Matt came up with this, this idea to, to build, to build domain names on blockchains and to kind of turn it into this, into this, into this sort of, you know, consumer friendly product. And I got roped in somewhere a few months after. Got it. And I think a lot of people probably heard of Unstoppable Domains. They've seen the press coverage, et cetera. Let's start from the very beginning. Like just what exactly is it and how does it work? Yeah. So Unstoppable Domains is a registry business. So it's very

similar to like AveraSign, which owns dot com, except for our domain name systems are on blockchains. And the idea is that blockchain domains do two things that regular domains can't do. The first is to simplify your crypto payments to replace all of your crypto addresses with the single human readable name. So you could have like Pomp.whatever. You can attach your Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, all of your crypto addresses to this one domain. You tell it to me. I type it into a wallet and pay you. I don't need to know your addresses. I don't need to see your addresses. I don't even need to know which crypto you want to receive because you've already attached the currencies that you accept to your domain. So that's payments. You can also use them to build

on censorable websites. And the way this works is you can point your domain to content on like a decentralized storage network like IPFS. And then the domain is essentially an asset on a blockchain. It sits inside of your wallet, just like a cryptocurrency. So the combination of having a domain that you control that's self-custodied by you and content that's on a decentralized storage network means you can build a website that only you can put up and only you can take down. And this is really different from the way that traditional domains work, where if you have like a dot com, you have a registrar like GoDaddy or something like that. They're your custodian. They can move the domain around for you. If they get a court order,

they're going to take it. Same is true for your content. Your content is probably sitting on like Amazon Web Services or something like that. Same thing. If they don't like what you're doing, they can flip off your website. It takes only a few minutes. Or also, if they get a court order, that website's coming down. Not a huge deal in the United States, but around the world, there's a lot of places and a lot of people that are putting up things that you and I wouldn't think are wrong that are getting censored and taken down. And the user tools are the tools themselves are built in such a way that companies and governments have complete control over. Yeah. So we'll get to some of the censorship stuff in a second.

let's dig a little deeper into the technical components of this right because i think the idea is pretty easy to understand of just hey there's going to be unstoppable domains you know great naming on your guys part um but uh how does this work from a technical standpoint and how do you actually prevent there being somebody who has the control to take down the domains yeah so what happens is is we launch our registry on a public blockchain so it's a smart contract on a public blockchain. Each domain is essentially like an NFT. It is like a non-fungible token. So each domain is unique. Each domain is an asset that sits inside of your wallet, just like a cryptocurrency. So it has the same security model as you storing your own Bitcoin or you storing your own Ethereum.

So you need the private key in order to move it around. And the same is true for when you add information to it. So what you're really doing is you're pointing your domain to your content and your content is sitting on a decentralized storage network or something like that and the way the way it works is is you sign a message with that private key the same private key that controls the domain and you say my ipfs hash equals this and so because you're the only one that can write that ipfs hash to your domain you're the only one that can update the content and so the domain is just like a cryptocurrency someone needs to get your private key in order to move it And then your web content, same thing.

Someone needs to get your private key in order to update it. Got it. And so as you're doing this, can you do it on Bitcoin, Ethereum, kind of any public blockchain? Or is this specific to just a certain few of them? So in order to make this really robust, you need to launch the smart contract on a public blockchain like an Ethereum or something like that. But it doesn't really, from the end user perspective, what winds up happening is you can attach any cryptocurrency address to a domain that's sitting on, say, the Ethereum blockchain. So if Bitcoin is the primary way that you receive money, fine. Attach your Bitcoin address, Ethereum address, Litecoin address.

It doesn't really matter. So basically, any single domain, any single domain name that we create has the ability to receive any cryptocurrency. Got it. But it's all built on top of the Ethereum blockchain is where this exists and works best right now. So we build on multiple blockchains. We built our first system on Zilliqa blockchain, which is another smart contract platform that does sharding. We're building our second one on Ethereum. Got it.

And as you're building this, what were some of the technical challenges that you guys had to figure out or kind of get around that maybe other people either hadn't figured out yet or you guys had unique solutions to? Yeah, I think it's sort of like the biggest problem as we see this is it's really more around. There's two things. There's the kind of the ecosystem problem, meaning that you need to get lots and lots of applications inside the ecosystem to support it. And then there's the user tools problem. So this idea of decentralized domain names, I think, has been floating around in the crypto world for a long time. There was Namecoin very early on. There were some other attempts on smart contract blockchains as well. But the problem has been, how do you get all the applications to connect together and how do you make it super easy for users?

So a lot of the things that have been difficult that we've been solving for are how do we make it super simple for users to be able to do things like sign messages with their private key, store domains easily, easily in a self-custody way. All of these things, it's really about making what are otherwise difficult things easy in the UI. And so if you were to go, for example, to UnstoppableDomains.com and manage your domain, we have a little management section. You buy a domain. You can check out very easily with crypto or a credit card. The domain gets transferred to a wallet that is rolled into our application. It's a self-custody wallet. And then with a couple of clicks, you can copy and paste like a Bitcoin address and click save.

And then it writes, it signs a message and writes a message to the blockchain. So you as the user don't even realize necessarily that that's what's happening. All you see is I saved an address to my domain. What's really happening is there's a transaction on the blockchain underneath. One of the things that we did is we covered the fees, which helps to make this a little bit easier. But getting it all the way down to this really simple user experience has been probably the most challenging thing. Got it. And so how's it going so far in terms of you guys obviously built this, it works, the technology's there, you've got a great name,

Maybe you've raised some capital. What are you seeing from a user adoption standpoint? Yeah, so I think things have been rolling pretty fast. So we started selling our first domain name system in March. As of today, we've registered more than 100,000 domains. So this is essentially the fastest pace of any blockchain domain name system here to date and also pretty big for any registry business, even for the traditional domain name world. So people are buying domains, claiming domains, adding addresses,

and starting to use them for payments. Very cool. And so walk us through how you guys actually make money in this system, right? You go from zero to 100,000 domains. What's kind of the business model and how do you see that evolving? So we sell domains. It's quite simple. The domains are priced between $20 and up to $10,000 for the most premium domains. It's a one-time fee though. So over time, we'll be launching some subscription services for advanced features. They'll be optional. You'll always be able to just buy a domain, interact with it, control it forever yourself. Got it. I'll start doing some math in my head. 100,000 times 20 is a big number. So I think that, you know, where you guys can go with

this, there's kind of I look at it like you guys are coming up on a fork in the road. Right. And you can take this a whole bunch of different ways. Right. There's the payment angle. There's the domain angle. There's a whole bunch of things around societal impact that we'll get into in a minute. What's kind of next for you guys? Yeah. So I think that the really powerful thing about this is that so in the traditional world, you've got payments and payments is this very separate concept. You have to integrate Stripe. You have to do all this kind of crazy, crazy stuff in order to get payments into your website. In the blockchain world, payments and websites are essentially the same concept. So you're going to have your domain,

and you're going to have pumped out whatever, I'll be able to send money to it. You'll also be able to host a website there. And when I send money to it, I know that the web content where you're advertising, let's say you're advertising a product or a service or whatever, I know that when I pay you, I'm paying the same person that put up this website. So it's basically like this concept of payments and websites become one. And if you actually need both, so if you want to have a truly uncensorable business, you need to be able to receive money and you need to be able to host content. So and I know there was another question there in terms of what's next. So one thing that I'd love to share with your with your community, because I think they'll be they'll be

excited about it, is that we're getting ready to launch our second domain extension. It's going to be on the Ethereum blockchain. It's called .crypto. And the idea is that it is going to be the blockchain domain system for the entire crypto community. So you could have like pump.crypto. And, for example, we'll make sure that you get pump.crypto. And the other thing is that as soon as this show goes live, we're going to be doing a one-for-one where you'll be able to buy. Our first domain extension is called .zil, so you'll be able to buy a .zil domain, and you'll automatically get the same .crypto domain for any domain that's larger than seven characters. So, something that I think as soon as the show goes live, that'll be something that the community will be excited about.

For sure. So, help me understand, how hard is it for you to add new kind of domain names, right? So, .zil, .crypto, et cetera. Is this something where you can add hundreds or thousands of them in the future? Or is it something where you'll kind of stay concentrated around four or five? Like, what's the plan and how difficult is it to add more? It's difficult from an ecosystem perspective. Our goal is not to create a lot of systems.

I think that two is probably plenty for a while. There may be some reason or some new features. The biggest reason might be to go and launch on a new blockchain if there's a new blockchain that winds up being more efficient than Ethereum. But for now, the plan is to stick with these two, .zil and .crypto. And we think .crypto is essentially the premium domain name system. And so we'll be heavily focused on that. I'm holding out for pump.bitcoin. I like it, though.

All right. I want to get into some of the meat of this, which is the societal impact, right? Obviously, like I said in the beginning, this is a really powerful idea around unstoppable domains. Let's start with the positive side and the part that I think is non-controversial, especially in the developed world, Western world, which is you guys are going to take a big swipe at the ability for people to censor content, prevent access to information, to prevent freedom of speech, et cetera. Maybe just talk a little bit about how you guys philosophically think about this impact and kind of how you think it actually will play out in reality.

Yeah, so this is the reason why we started this business. This is the reason why I'm motivated to wake up in the morning and do this is because we believe that anyone in the world should be able to publish and transact without fear of censorship. Companies, governments, there's no one group or one person that I trust to decide what is okay on the internet. And this idea of allowing companies and governments to be our gatekeepers has continued to escalate. The internet, I think, started in the 90s and 2000s with this very anarchic ethos and over time has become extremely centralized to the point where it's becoming kind of dangerous. It's becoming dangerous to people around the world, but I think

it's also becoming dangerous to people in the U.S. as well. And it's getting worse. And as we see sort of a rise of authoritarianism around the world, I think it's connected. I think it's connected to the centralization of data and that this is this might be one of the biggest risks we face. And our only hope is to decentralize it. We need to take the power out of these groups. Yeah, and so it's a really interesting way of looking at – I think a lot of folks are saying, hey, the fact that we've given up so much data, the fact that we don't have access to this data is a huge problem. I think what you're saying is it's not so much that we've given up the data or given access to the data. It's actually that we've given it to a centralized authority, and that centralized authority we have, one, no recourse against, and two, they're able to do a lot of maybe not nefarious things as much as just things that you or I wouldn't agree with. Yeah, and I think the context, again, in the U.S. is quite different.

You know, in the U.S., it's you know, there aren't that many groups of people that are being censored, at least not for legal activity. But if you look at it around the world, it's very different. You know, there I would say more than half of the world does not live does not live in a free society. And so legal speech or what we would consider to be legal or OK speech, you know, political opposition, other unpopular ideas, these types of things, or even unpopular businesses that are considered legal are getting censored all over the place. They get censored at the domain level, they get censored at the website content level, and they get censored at the payment processing level. And a blockchain domain name system solves all those problems. For sure. And so is the idea here that not only, one, you can kind of give people a peaceful way to fight back, right, against a lot of that authoritarianism?

I said that word wrong, but that's fine. Everyone will laugh. and then also the censorship, or is it a thing where, or kind of additionally, there will also be this whole ecosystem built on top of Unstoppable Domains, and you'll kind of get some of the old existing world to be able to fight back, but also there's a whole new world of content and folks who will use the Unstoppable Domains to build new things as well. Yeah, so I think it's actually really similar to Bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general,

where if you look at the history of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, You know, it started out with use cases around, you know, heavily censored activities, people doing things that they just couldn't do in the other world. But over time, we're starting to see, you know, more traditional businesses move into it because the technology actually works better. It's cheaper to send a transaction. It's faster to send a transaction. The technology is more robust than what we've currently been using. And the same is true here for blockchain domain name systems, where it may be that early on it's going to start with Chinese political dissidents that are not able to publish in any other platform without it getting taken down. But over time, we'll find that this is just better. You can sell a domain name.

You don't need an escrow agent. You can transfer a domain name in 30 seconds without those types of rules that exist in the current world. you'll be able to ultimately you'll be able to store content in a cheaper way because you're not only having to go to amazon web services you'll be able to access anybody in the world's computer who wants to put up who wants to offer their servers for storage space so ultimately this technology is more robust and we definitely see a future where traditional businesses move over to this because it works better. Want to know who has the best URL? Crypto.com. That's right. Crypto.com. They're a crypto platform with one goal, motherfucking mass adoption.

That's why we're all here. We're trying to get crypto in every wallet. Crypto.com is helping people do that through buying, earning, lending, and card payment. Everything you could want at crypto.com. Go help your boy out. Tell him Pomp sent you. Download the app or visit crypto.com. Pomp's got you always. Ever wanted to get into mining and didn't know how? Don't worry, your boy Pomp's got you. Everybody got some electricity and Wi-Fi. All you got to do is go to coinmine.com. You buy a CoinMine. It's like an Xbox or a PlayStation that helps you turn your electricity into Bitcoin. That's right. You purchase it. It shows up at your doorstep. you pull it out of the box you plug it in connect to your wi-fi five minutes or less you're mining

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get paid an interest rate of 6% in return. Go check out BlockFi.com slash Pomp. Again, BlockFi.com slash Pomp to sign up and start earning interest on your crypto today. So that's a lot of the kind of positive societal impact. I think that there's a lot of nuance in there. Each situation is different. And the devil's kind of in the details. I would be remiss if I didn't ask about kind of the detraction to a lot of this, right? I think the people who see, oh, an unstoppable domain, yes, there's probably a positive impact, but also there could be negative sides, right? What if the kind of this technology or this product falls into the bad actor's hands, right? So whether it is somebody who's posting child pornography or human trafficking, right,

all this kind of stuff that today it gets censored by being taken down or prevented access to for people. If the domains are unstoppable, one, can that content persist? And how do you guys think about that as, you know, product creators and kind of the impact that could be used by these bad people. Yeah. And I think the same, you know, the sort of the same arguments were thrown out about Bitcoin itself and cryptocurrencies early on. And I think that there's, you know, there's a few things. I think the first thing to keep in mind is that the majority of people around the world are using these tools and want to use these tools because the current tools are not able to serve them. So the majority of us and the majority of uses are not for these bad actors. I think

that's an important thing to keep in mind for crypto. And I think the same will be true for blockchain domains. But the other part of it is that these things, these bad things, they happen on the regular Internet, too. They already exist and persist in the world. So I think it's challenging to get it to zero no matter how hard we try. But we will try because we don't want those things to happen. The reason we're doing this is because we want to promote global free speech. We don't want to help bad people do bad things. And there's a lot of ways that this will work that I think will ultimately be better than the way that the current internet functions. And the way it works is that at the protocol level, you can do anything. Anybody can interact

with the public blockchain. Anybody can sign a message and write information to the public blockchain. Theoretically, anybody could read that information. But in reality, with the commercial internet, with the commercial decentralized internet, what's going to happen is applications aren't going to serve up stuff that they object to or stuff that is illegal. So what's going to wind up happening is your browser will choose, you know, will essentially choose, okay, this is content that we don't want to serve you. And that'll be way better because you don't get one view on what's okay. You know, this browser over here might say, you know, might take a specific moral opinion on this or that content and show it to you or not show it to you, this other browser

might take a different view. And what's going to wind up happening is you'll choose your browser, you'll choose your application, your application will choose your internet, but we're going to get dozens of different versions, hundreds of different versions. And through that, we'll wind up getting protected from cases where things that we really should see or things that we really want to see, we're not going to be stopped from seeing them. And so is this almost like when you're describing this, the first thing that jumps to mind is like it's like a product stack or technology stack for a certain ethics, morals and perspectives, right? Where you'll say, hey, this protocol with this web browser, with this application in the web browser, et cetera, gives me access to a certain view of the world, whereas somebody else may not do that. Is that a fair way to kind of look at like a technology or product stack on a specific perspective, ethics or moral kind of spectrum?

Or do you look at it a little bit differently? Yeah, I think maybe we look at it slightly differently. So the way that we look at it is that technology tools themselves should not take an opinion. Technology tools, the only way to get a 100% safe and secure system is to have a system where the user controls their own activities completely. If any company, any individual, any group, even unstoppable domains, if anybody gets to decide or get, then that's going to be, that's going to break down the safety and security of the system. So the system needs to be agnostic. Now, we also live in the real world, as does everybody. And what's going to wind up happening is you and I are not going to want to have a completely anarchic Internet where all of this terrible stuff is served.

Even if we want and promote global free speech, we personally, I mean, I don't want to see that stuff. You don't want to see that stuff. So what's going to wind up happening is we're going to want our applications to do this for us. And so that's how it's going to work. We'll be facilitating that and enabling that. But at its core, what we're really focused on is tools that take no opinion about what you do. And this is exactly how Bitcoin and Ethereum work. miners don't evaluate whether or not they think you're a good person before they process your

transaction. And that's the reason why we have a safe and secure system. Yeah, it's a really interesting way to look at it. And, you know, one that I think has a lot of validity. What do you think is kind of the first pressure test, right? In terms of as this happens, if there is some nefarious actor who comes into the system, like where do you guys anticipate some of those issues popping up? Is it more kind of in the conversation? So like in the press or general population? Or is it something from a more technical standpoint where there's actual security threats or something like that? I think it'll probably, I mean, this is just speculation, but I think it'll probably be more like a public opinion type thing. But I expect

that the first lightning rods we're going to see are going to be lightning rods around free speech, where there's going to be some people that want this thing to be said, and there's going to be other people that don't want this thing to be said, and there's going to be a fight about it. And I would broadly say, I would say that's a good thing. That's a good conversation to have. And it's okay for me to say this content is good and you to say this content is bad. You can choose your own internet. We don't all have to agree.

And I think that's going to make a more diverse world. That's going to make a more robust technology stack. This is going to be a better version of the future. Yeah, I think that's a very fair position to take. What do you think is the big inflection point here for the existing internet? So, existing corporations, et cetera, to say, look, I need an unstoppable domain. I want one of these on the blockchain. Is there something that you're looking at as that inflection point?

I think that what you're going to see most likely first is you're going to see traditional businesses playing around with this sort of technology for payments. Because they don't have good payment solutions right now, especially not international payment solutions. So cryptocurrencies and blockchain domains paired with cryptocurrencies for payments are something that's going to be relevant, I think, to the traditional Internet world relatively soon. The point in time at which they want to abandon their Amazon Web Services and all these other tools are going to be when this stack is more robust. And I think, you know, ultimately, if you look at it on a long enough timeline, open source wins. Open source will be better, more robust, stronger, cheaper, all of these things. But that's going to take time. And initially, I think these tools will not be those things.

And therefore, the people that will be focused on using them will be the people that have this heroin fire problem. They'll be the people that are getting censored right now. They'll be the people whose domains are getting seized from them. They'll be the people whose content is being switched off by various cloud service providers. So those are going to be the places where you'll see it first, I think. And then over time, it's going to be once the tech is better and there will be that inflection point in the future, that's when the traditional world is going to start switching over. For sure. Let's give you the benefit of the doubt and say you built everything that your

heart can desire. You and the team are wildly successful. What does this look like in 10, 15, 20 years from today? What is that kind of ultimate ambition for Unstoppable Domains? The ultimate ambition is to have domains and websites on technology that cannot be censored, meaning that you can build your website, you can put it up, you can take it down, no one can stop you. Anyone around the world can view that website if they want to. Basically, the entire internet switches over to this. The current internet, if you look at it from the sort of nuts and bolts perspective, is not a safe and secure place. I mean, if you just read the news, you will see these systems are not secure. A centralized

systems have this huge problem. They are not secure. And ultimately, this is the only way for us to get complete security. So I think the entire internet is going to switch over to this. I love it. I think that if you can do half of that, you'll be in a good spot. Before I finish up, I always do rapid fire questions. What do you think is the most important company in crypto other than your own? Good question. I would say probably one of the big exchanges. So I'm a huge fan of Coinbase. They've been a great company. And I think they've done it the right way in order to help spread crypto around the world. What's the one regulation you would change or improve if you could? That's a good question. I would say

probably just more clarity. I can't even point to a regulation. What I really can point to is fear. You talk to a lawyer, a lawyer says you should be afraid of doing this or that with crypto. It's not illegal uh it doesn't violate any specific rule but you should be afraid because of lack of clarity uh so i would say clarity that there is a category and it's called securities and most of the stuff in crypto is not that and uh and that uh that we're you know that there's that there's just clarity to operate for all of these different all these different parties uh what's your most controversial thought in uh in crypto if you say it everyone will go oh i completely disagree I am cryptocurrency and blockchain agnostic. I don't care ultimately which tools people use.

I want the technology and the community to rise across the board. And you'll see this playing out inside of the way that we talk about our business and the way that we build. We don't actually care if you want to use Bitcoin. Great. If you want to use Bitcoin cash. Great. If you want to use Ethereum, that's great too. We don't care. In the tribalistic world of crypto, it's a very controversial thought, but one that is appreciated for sure. What's the most important book you've ever read? That's a good question. Have you listened to the podcast? All I do is good questions. I'm going to say one that sticks out to me and that I read recently, maybe not of all time,

But radical markets, radical markets really impacted the way that I the way that I think about, you know, what is an ideal economic system. And I also think that it's just this like amazing third way. You know, it's like it's not socialist. It's not libertarian free market. It's this it's this other thing that kind of can unite all the different views around a pragmatic version of of of how to build an economy that works. yeah i haven't read that i'll have to check it out for sure um i end each podcast letting the guest ask me one question but first we talk aliens uh believer non-believer i mean there's got to be some aliens is it worth the universe is just too big the uh the thing now that i'm

very interested in is uh if we came in contact would we end up being the superior uh species or do you think that we would be submissive and therefore maybe it's actually good that we've ever come in contact with them reportedly uh i have to believe that there's you know again just because of the vastness of the universe that there's probably both you know like i think we've been you know whatever we've been rolling as a species for maybe like 300 000 years something like that two or three hundred thousand years maybe you go back to hominids we got a couple million years there's got to be somebody that's been evolving or some group that's been evolving for like i don't know a few hundred million or a billion years so there's got to be some that are

ahead of us and some that are behind us so i i guess i hope we bump into the ones that are behind us. It's pretty scary to think about the idea that there could be some sort of sentient beings that have been evolving for hundreds of millions of years. Definitely. All right. What one question do you have for me to wrap it up? I mean, what's your what's your favorite crypto company? My favorite company, I always cheat and it's my podcast, so I can do whatever I want. I say Bitcoin just because I think from a market standpoint, you know, the market has determined that's the most valuable one by market cap today. But I do think that, you know, if you take what you guys are doing, or there's some other people in the market that are taking a lot of the ethos

of Bitcoin, Ethereum, kind of, you know, these ones that the market has determined are super valuable. So it's not the actual technology alone, it's the ethos of what they're trying to do. And you're applying it to frankly, kind of what I think previously was perceived as like nascent areas of crypto, right? So blockchain domains, et cetera. But they're very large markets in traditional world. And you take the ethos of these public blockchains and you start to apply it to these areas. One, I think that just like you guys have seen, you see very fast growth because there are a lot of people who want the ethos of the crypto world combined with the same services and products from the traditional world. But also, I think what you find is you're essentially

building a product for a global audience rather than a developed world audience. And we're sitting here in New York City and Manhattan, as far away from understanding the developing world as possible for most people. But I do find that a lot of people in crypto have actually done a lot of travel. They've spent a lot of time. They have friends all over the world. And so they're a little bit more globalist in mindset. And so it's pretty interesting to see companies like yours and others build along those ethos

for large markets in the traditional world. Yeah, that's really cool. And one of the things that I find the most fascinating about talking about this company is oftentimes, you know, we're talking about censorship on the internet and we're talking about these problems. We talk about it to folks in America and they're a little bit puzzled.

We talk about it to folks that live almost anywhere else in the world and they get it immediately. They're like, oh yeah, I've had a domain seized. Oh yeah, you know, you're not allowed to say what you want to say in my country. So it's basically only in the United States where some of these concepts are not completely clear. Yeah. It's, you know, Oh yeah. I had that blog where I wrote one time about the president. I

didn't even say anything bad, but they just took it down because it had the president's name in it. Right. Exactly. Awesome, man. Listen, uh, where can people find out more about unstoppable domains and find you on the internet? Yeah. Go to unstoppable domains.com. And as I mentioned before, there's essentially a, a buy one, get one free for the doc crypto as soon as this show comes out. So, uh, check out the website and, uh, and, uh, yeah, reach out to us. We're on telegram. We're on Twitter. We're, uh, we're all over the place. Awesome. Well, thanks so much again for coming to do this. We'll have to do it again in the future. Hey everyone, Pomp here. If you liked this episode of Off The Chain and want to help us take crypto to the top of the Apple,

Spotify, and other podcast charts, please do us a favor and rate, review, and subscribe. To review, simply go to the Off The Chain homepage, scroll down until you see the five blank stars. Taking 15 seconds to fill those stars in and leave a quick review goes a long way in helping us take the entire crypto ecosystem to the top of the charts. I appreciate you listening and see you next time on off the chain