The Pomp Podcast - BREAKING NEWS: Coinbase Is Now Supporting Human-Readable Domains!
Episode Date: August 9, 2020Bradley Kam is the co-founder of Unstoppable Domains, a company focused on popularizing blockchain-based domain names. This is a special "breaking news" episode of the podcast where we discuss the re...cent announcement by Coinbase Wallet to support Unstoppable Domains as a replacement for cryptocurrency addresses. You can learn more about the company and their product at unstoppabledomains.com =============================== Pomp writes a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://www.pompletter.com
Transcript
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What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp.
You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off.
Bradley Cam is the co-founder of Unstoppable Domains, a company focused on popularizing
blockchain-based domain names. This is a special breaking news episode of the podcast where we
discuss the recent announcement by Coinbase Wallet to support Unstoppable Domains as a
replacement for cryptocurrency addresses. You can learn more about the company and their product
at unstoppabledomains.com. Don't forget that I also write a daily letter to over 50,000 investors
about business technology and finance. I break down complex topics into easy to understand
language while sharing my personal opinion on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe
at pompletter.com. Again, pompletter.com. All right, let's get into this episode with Bradley.
I hope you guys 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 Bradley back for round two.
What's going on, man?
Thanks for doing this.
Thanks so much for having me.
Absolutely.
So for the people who missed out and didn't watch our first episode together,
maybe just give a quick kind of two minutes on your personal background
and then what you guys are building at Unstoppable Domains.
Sure.
So I'm from Atlanta.
I moved out to San Francisco to do the startup thing in 2012.
I was working on a company that was not crypto related but I moved into this building called
20 mission which was a early bitcoin hacker house the second bitcoin exchange in the U.S.
was launched out of our basement Vitalik was giving talks in our courtyard before Ethereum
launched basically everybody I met when I moved to San Francisco was some sort of a crypto fanatic
And so I bit the bug sometime in 2013 and was going to sleep every night thinking about it, even though I was by day working on marketing software.
And eventually went all in full time on crypto in 2018, started working on unsolvable domains.
So there's a lot of people who would say you had a front row seat, you know, 2013 all the way until 18.
What kind of held you back from going full time?
Was it just what else you were working on was so attractive or were you waiting for something to happen to kind of jump in?
I think, you know, when it was when it was kind of the early days and it was, you know, mostly Bitcoin and exchanges and things like that, you know, I'm not really a finance guy.
And I think that most of the stuff that was happening was really more around finance, exchanges, stuff like that.
I thought it was cool. I thought it was great, but I didn't really see a direct role for myself in terms of contributing.
once it got around to 2017 ish and we got to the sort of smart contract phase uh where people were
starting to build pretty cool applications that were actually functioning in the world and we're
doing all kinds of things that's when i could kind of get my head around you know how how i
could participate when it kind of moved maybe past this really hardcore protocol phase and more into
the uh let's build some apps that people are going to use phase that felt more uh more like
an area that I can contribute in. Got it. And so talk us through today, what does Unstoppable
Domains do and kind of what is the product and how has it been going? And then we'll get into
some of the recent announcements. Yeah, yeah, for sure. So Unstoppable Domains is onboarding users
to the decentralized web. And for those of you who don't know what the decentralized web is,
it is one where you control your own content where you can put up a website and no one can
take it down other than you with the traditional web you've got your dot-com domain and GoDaddy
can take that away from you VeriSign the creator of it can also take it away from you Amazon Web
Services can turn off your websites you've got all of these ways that the current internet gets
to control what you're allowed to say and what you're not the decentralized web is one where
you control it and so what we've built is a simple registrar like kind of like a godaddy
unstoppabledomains.com where you can go and you can buy domains we've also built our own domain
registries we have dot crypto and dot zil where you can these are smart contracts on the blockchain
you can register domains store them inside of your wallet and now we're building out simple
website tools so think about what happens after you go and you buy a domain and a traditional
registrar, they then say, hey, you want these tools to launch your own website? We're doing
the same thing, except for your websites are going to be on IPFS, on decentralized storage.
So we've got a whole, it's the idea is, is that unstoppable domains.com is a hub for you to go
and do everything you would want to do on the decentralized web.
Got it. And in terms of kind of how people access this, do they do that through like a Google
Chrome browser? Do they need a decentralized kind of enabled browser? How does that work?
Yeah. So you do need browser support because it's not part of traditional DNS.
And so what's happening is that browsers with the decentralized web, browsers are kind of like the
gatekeepers. They decide, they opt in to support this. And so we have our own Chrome extension.
There are some other tools that you can use, but there's also browsers that are natively
integrating. So Opera Browser for Android integrated in March. I believe that was the
first time that any major browser has supported a non-ICANN DNS domain extension. And there's
several more browsers that are looking at this pretty closely. Mozilla actually just ran this
Fix the Internet program that we were part of over the past few months. And so they're looking
very closely at decentralized web. There's been kind of a turning point this year where browsers
are taking it seriously. Browsers are looking at crypto wallets seriously as a method for security.
So it's a pretty, there's a lot of these ideas that the crypto community has been talking about
for years that are finally converging and finally going mainstream. So when people first hear this,
you know, and I've talked to a bunch of people, they hear the advertisements on the podcast.
The first thing they say to me is like, that's a great idea. No one's ever going to do that. Or
that's going to take 20 years for people to start to adopt. You guys are a shining example
of like, that's not true and have had quite a bit of success. Maybe talk to us a little bit just
about like what metrics you can share publicly in terms of the adoption that you've seen and how
popular this is today and not something that's going to happen in 20 years. Yeah. Yeah. I mean,
people are already playing around right now. So there's more than 260,000 domains registered.
There's more than 20,000 websites live. Some top websites are like kyber.crypto, kyber network
dex there's switchio.crypto there's myetherwallet.crypto i think we got some of your
podcasts up on pomp.crypto so there's a whole bunch of uh of apps that are already up and out
there but there's also just a lot of people playing around and i think the reason why
this is going to move faster even than the traditional internet did is first of all it
has the benefit of the traditional internet exists and we can use that for distribution
You can post your decentralized website on Twitter and tell people to go check it out.
So we have the benefit of distribution from the old system, but we also just have the
current internet is falling apart, honestly.
We have Twitter hacks that just happened.
We've got Chinese sensors.
We've got all of these things that are causing the regular internet to just break in front
of our eyes.
And that's causing a lot of companies to take it seriously and start building.
So if you're a dApp, you don't actually have a fully decentralized application if a company
can, like GoDaddy, can just come in and take it down.
Like, you know, you may have your smart contracts on the blockchain, but if no one can access
it, how does that help you?
So there's some real use cases right now.
We also are seeing a bunch of bloggers.
and if you think about blogging it's like the most basic form of free speech you know here's
what i think and a lot of people in the world if they were to go and publish on the local blogging
tools that they use uh depending on what they say if it pisses off some important person that might
go down and that's not going to happen here and i think as as the politics around the world has
gotten so much more extreme uh the demand for this has become so much clearer uh i think it's
in the zeitgeist now you know even two years ago when we talked to people about this they're like
is internet censorship really a problem you know is the internet is the internet really that bad
it seems like everything's going pretty well and this would be that was more of an american
perspective than it was a global perspective but now i think even when we talk to people in america
they're like yeah man the internet is the internet's in bad shape you know 17 year olds are
getting control of, you know, Barack Obama and Barack Obama's Twitter account and stuff like
that, man, we have a problem. And guess what would solve that problem? If you had a private key that
was securing your account, that's how you unlocked it. So, you know, we have the solutions already
in our world. We use them, you know, you and I probably use them every day. So the solutions
are there. The problem is glaring. And now we just have an onboarding problem. And that's,
that's really what we're trying to solve. We're just, you know, one by one trying to bring users
over. And so obviously the .crypto or .zil domains, these literally unstoppable domains,
which is a great name for the business, are able to be used for kind of the destination or the
public address, if you will, for a website. But you also can use them for wallet addresses as
well. And so maybe talk a little bit about how you can use, you know, pomp.crypto or whatever
uh for a wallet address yeah think of think of them as like the the gateway to the decentralized
web so you know a blockchain domain can be used for your website it can be used to receive money
kind of like your venmo account uh it can also be used for messaging uh we just launched a chat
protocol where you'd be able to message me brad.crypto we can message back and forth
brad.crypto and pomp.crypto and that's a decentralized encrypted uh encrypted messaging
system and so when you do it that way you've got so you can send me money to brad.crypto you can
check out my website so if i'm you know showing you some sort of marketing advertisements when
you pay me you'll know that you're paying the same person when you message me to discuss it
you'll know you're talking to the same person so you don't have to go back and forth across
platforms and that prevents all kinds of these phishing scams that we see you know i got to talk
to you on telegram over here i gotta send message to some email box over here i can't tell if i'm
talking to the same person we can guarantee you're talking to the same person in this paradigm but
the way that it works on the money side is so i've got brad.crypto i attach all of my crypto
addresses my bitcoin address my ethereum address my litecoin address whatever i can attach up to
i think there's 70 currencies supported right now and theoretically any currency and then you can
just go into a wallet and and pay so i don't need to ask you anymore what currency you want to
receive. I don't need to ask you what your addresses are. I can just pump .crypto. I can
just type it in and send money. And so you actually have this big announcement now with
Coinbase. Maybe talk a little bit about what exactly is the announcement and how does it work
for users and also technically? Yeah. So Coinbase wallet now supports
sending money from using .crypto and .zil domains. And so the way this works is I can just go into
the send field uh inside of any currency inside of coinbase wallet type in brad.crypto and send
money and what's happening i mean it's so it's so simple to the point where it's hard to imagine in
10 years people are going to be using addresses uh just like no one uses ip addresses in order
to find websites and i think it's going to be the same here because this is easier and it's just as
secure because the domain name is an asset on the blockchain too it's stored by you so any
information that you update any crypto address you add whatever you have to sign a message with
your private key so any updates you're the only person that can make the update unstoppable can't
make an update unstoppable can't take the domain away from you your wallet can't make an update
your wallet can't take the domain away from you and so because you have that dynamic it enables
you to trust a a human readable system instead of a not human readable system and it may be that
people will still use addresses like machine to machine uh but maybe not even there like maybe
it'll actually be a good idea to give every single smart contract a name too just just to have just
to have you know simplicity um when you're writing code so i don't see why the current addressing
system is going to be used much for day-to-day payments in the future.
And so I guess as part of this, it's kind of history repeating itself, right? Which is there
was a point in time where to use the internet, you had to use IP addresses to get around. And
so literally you'd have to either have memorized or have written down, here is the exact sequence
of numbers in order to get to a certain destination. When we had URLs used that were
kind of human readable, complete game changer. I don't have to remember, you know, a random sequence
of numbers. I now can just know google.com, right? Or unstoppableindomains.com. And so that is an
inflection point in terms of internet adoption and usage. I'm assuming that you guys expect
something similar here, but maybe just talk through, you know, once everyone is able to send
cryptocurrency to a human readable domain what's the impact and kind of how do you guys think about
how this kind of sequentially plays out and if it is an inflection point i think what we're seeing
here is a little different than what we saw with the traditional internet where we're actually
seeing convergence so you know in the old world you know you have you know your website address
over here you've got your payment address like your venmo or your paypal account over here
you've got your communication address which is like your facebook messenger account or your
email address or whatever all of these are separate things and what you're getting with
the decentralized web is everything's rolling up into this one thing so this the domain can do all
of those things and so what's going to happen is is that you're going to have this uh identity so
to speak that can do all of these different things and so it's going to help all of the use cases
Because I know that when I'm sending money to Brad.crypto, it's the same person whose website I'm looking at. It makes me more comfortable to send. So the usage of decentralized websites will increase the usage of crypto payments. The usage of decentralized messaging will increase the usage of decentralized websites. The increase of crypto payments will increase.
So all of these use cases are going to be playing into each other in this way. And so I think that this sort of onboarding phase is the shift that we're going through right now, where we're transitioning from a kind of developer-focused set of products where, you know, we have to learn, even non-technical folks have to learn, you know, all kinds of stuff about private keys and whatever,
uh into a user-focused state where we can communicate to people hey here's your you
know blockchain id essentially you can go and use it for all of these things so we're in early days
of that shift but the shift is now possible so i think that what we're the the phase where we're
at if i were to define it is uh we're in the tunnel and we can start to see the light like
we can start to see like, what is this going to look like in 10 years? How is this going to work?
How are these two or 3 billion, you know, internet users, how are they going to adopt? And I think
it's going to be through, through stuff like this, you know, go, you get an ID, you share it with
your friends, you use it for all of these things. It's very tangible for people. So I think that's
where we're at the beginning of being able to see what the future looks like. Yeah. And the part to
me that's so interesting is similar to how you can put your website URL out in the world and
you may send it directly so I could send you an exact URL and I want Brad to go and visit it or
I could post it on my Twitter account and anyone who comes across it can click and do that that
kind of one-to-one vert and also one-to-many adoption of URLs created opportunity to do things
that we just didn't ever imagine right so we've seen people do all kinds of crazy stuff with the
internet. It seems like this is very similar where today most addresses are used in a one-to-one
scenario. So you say, hey, I want to send Pomp some money, right? I go ahead and I send you my
address, you then send it. When all of a sudden now I can simply post Pomp.crypto anywhere,
you really can open up the use cases for cryptocurrencies. You can drastically
increase. You also make it easier for businesses, right? You probably reduce a lot of kind of fraud
and all the craziness and so it feels like this is just a net positive across many different facets
of the crypto world um and getting coinbase on board makes it you know not only the net positive
but it's like you know on steroids because you've got the largest u.s exchange uh supporting this
now yeah and i think that one to many is very astute i think that is a very that is a powerful
that is a powerful dynamic that hasn't really been unlocked yet in crypto and i think what
we're going to start to see relatively soon are things like uh like viral donation campaigns
you know like hey crypto community let's all get together and let's donate you know million
dollars to this cause and you could have the payment address go viral on social media you
You don't even need, you won't even need to offer any more steps.
You'll just say, hey, here's this, you know, awesome cause, pay here, nothing else.
Like that alone is all the information that you need.
So it's really, really, really concise.
And I think that's, that's going to be powerful in terms of Coinbase.
You know, I mean, I think it's, you know, obviously it's super exciting for us.
Coinbase is, you know, you know, pinnacle crypto brand.
But I think what we're really seeing at this point is we're seeing ubiquity.
for uh for blockchain domain names like pretty much you know pretty much every major crypto
wallet at this point is is adopting this technology and so we're getting to this point where you as a
user are going to be able to really not not really worry too much about you know which app you're
using or having to think too hard about that that it really is going to be this uh this uh this
feature that you can just use across the crypto ecosystem without thinking about it and i think
that's what's required in order for it to really uh for it to really catch on you know it can't
work in 10 of apps you use it needs to work in you know 90 so we're getting to that point
and in terms of uh if i go ahead i've got a coinbase account i want to attach uh pomp.crypto
can i send that to people and they can uh basically on coinbase go ahead and just send
me bitcoin or whatever uh and they can do it from their google chrome browser or do they also need
to be in a decentralized web-supported browser? They don't need a special browser for this,
but you do need to be using Coinbase Wallet. So this is Coinbase Self-Custody Wallet,
not Coinbase.com, which I know is a little bit confusing for folks because they have similar
names. So this is Coinbase Wallet Self-Custody Wallet, which supports a bunch of different
currencies. And so you don't need a special browser or anything like that. You just need
to go and use it for your phone. So if you don't have Coinbase Wallet already, I'd suggest you
check it out. It's a great wallet. It has a great Dapp browser. A couple of other cool things about
it. You can also store the domain inside of Coinbase Wallet. So they have a little collectible
section. The domain shows up. You can see a list of them. And if you go to unstoppabledomains.com
from within the Dapp browser, you can manage your domain. So because your domain is sitting
inside of your Coinbase Wallet, when you go into the Dapp browser and you want to make an update,
you can sign a message with the private key right there. So Coinbase Wallet is this like
one-stop shop where you can do, it's essentially, you've got access to a domain registrar where you
can do all of your updates. You've got a little storage mechanism where you can see it. And then
of course you can use it for payments. And in terms of individuals versus businesses,
where have you guys seen? So you mentioned, you know, 200 plus thousand kind of domains registered,
20 000 plus usage all that kind of stuff like are you seeing businesses adopt this stuff yet or is
it still mainly individuals who are kind of at the forefront of usage there's a lot of crypto
companies there's a lot of crypto companies that are putting up uh either you know if you're a dap
you're going to put up a front end you're going to put up your front end on ipfs and so you can
have everything kind of fully function as long as you don't have a back end it's extremely easy
um so we're seeing a lot of those cases daps we're also seeing a lot of these kind of i would say
it's kind of like smbs almost you know people who are working on various types of crypto projects
that are relatively small not as professionalized as maybe an exchange or a wallet uh that are
building apps and websites and then you also just have the kind of crypto enthusiasts so it's a mix
But in terms of the raw number, it's more of this like SMB individuals.
Company-wise, there's just not enough crypto companies.
So there's, I think, maybe a few thousand crypto companies that have claimed domains,
of which, you know, people are in various stages of building websites.
And how do you think about, you've got Coinbase now supporting this.
There's, you know, probably hundreds of wallets that are out there.
um kind of you guys methodically walking down and getting uh each one of these walls to support
uh unstoppable domains well we want everybody to support it and so we're you know we're we're
talking we're talking to everybody and if we're not talking to if you have a wallet and we're not
talking to you yet please please reach out um we'll we'll make sure and find a way to you know
find a way to work together that's that's exciting and beneficial for everybody um but yeah i mean
we're, we, we are reaching out. The goal is to have, you know, a hundred percent adoption
across the wallet community. I think that's what the user expects. I think anything short of that
is actually a little bit, a little bit of an inferior user experience. So we're, we're going
to keep, we're going to keep pushing until we get there. I continue to tell people that it's scary,
right? If you send any sort of real size of money or Bitcoin, you end up literally kind of your
heart's uh pumping really hard and you're like i hope i don't mess this up right you've got to
check every single uh you know letter and number and an address yeah and it's a it's a it's a
stressful way to have to to have to send money and it really it's really it's not necessary like
there we can get we can get feedback loops so what the wallet is doing right now is when i type in
the domain the wallet is reading the blockchain and finding an address but the wallet can go and
confirm any number, you know, any number of bits of information before I send. And that's much
closer to how it works in the regular world. You don't just, you know, send random money to an
anonymous account without having any kind of feedback. Like you, you have some level of
assurance that this is the right person. And, you know, with crypto networks, I think you can do
that times a hundred, you know, you can have data provably, you know, verify provably verified. You
can have multiple data data types provably verified so i think uh this is a temporary problem
for sure and uh before we go on to talk about kind of the future uh anyone who is watching
please go and uh try it out it's awesome i've got pomp.crypto but go to unstoppable domains.com
you can go and get a url there um brad let's talk a little bit about uh kind of what unfolds next
Right. So we get to a world where every wallet is supporting or a majority of wallets are supporting these human readable domains.
Obviously, people start to actually build websites. Do you think that that leads to kind of mass adoption of the decentralized Web browsers?
Do you see kind of the New York Times and The Washington Post and kind of really large organizations starting to create a mirror version in the decentralized Web that they have centralized one?
like where are we going i think we're going to see a few kind of uh circles of adoption i think
adoption circle number one is the crypto community uh the crypto community absolutely needs a
decentralized web like if you're a defy app if you're a dap of any kind like you have these
points of failure your domains are at risk it happens all the time there's been all kinds of
crypto companies that have had issues with their uh domains or with hosting services or whatever
Another crazy thing is, is that some of them have jurisdiction issues where they don't
actually want to be in control.
You don't actually, you know, let's say you have a DAO or something.
You don't actually want to put one individual in control.
You can actually put a group of people and they can vote on control of the domain.
So you can actually take it out of the, you know, take it out of the control of any one
individual.
So I think where we're going right now is crypto community is going to adopt because
they need this technology.
It's a core problem they have right now.
Then I think the next wave are people around the world that don't have access to a free internet. People who are in places where takedowns are common. And I would think about places like India and China, Russia, actually, most of the world actually, unfortunately, lives in a place where the internet is not free.
And so there's a strong need, whether it's blogging, whether it's e-commerce, whatever you're trying to do online, it's hard to do. And you're getting restricted, you're getting taken down, you're getting blocked, you're having to ask permission from this or that government official for months and months.
So the next wave after the crypto people is going to be people who are struggling to use the regular internet.
I think the final wave is going to be the kind of New York Times or these other like enterprise companies.
And the reason they're going to do it is because it's cheaper.
And the reason it'll be cheaper is because right now when you want to buy hosting, you call up Amazon and Amazon says, yeah, I built another server farm and wherever and I'll sell you some space.
But in the future, what's going to happen is you're going to be able to access anybody's storage space anywhere in the world in a marketplace, and it's going to be far more efficient and far more cheaper and far less risk of takedown, of DDoS, of all of these issues that we have right now because you'll have your content distributed.
it. So phase one, crypto companies, because they absolutely need it. And they're also native to the
tech. Phase two, people that are getting censored, they absolutely need it. They're not native to the
tech, but they'll figure it out because they don't have a choice. And then phase three is going to
be, hey, this is just a better way to run newyorktimes.com than the current system that
you're using. And that is way further down in the future. But mathematically, I think it's very easy
it's very easy to see that a distributed web and distributed storage is going to be far more
cheaper far safer and far more performant so the current web is going is not going to be able to
compete um but that is that is going to be a longer term transition i think we're on a we're
on a 20-year ride here and i think we're in the crypto phase right now which could last even for
the next you know we can be on we can be in the crypto phase even for the next three or five years
but the nice thing is the crypto community is actually quite big i mean i'm sure you feel this
sometimes you know if you if you go out and you start talking to to normies and you want to start
talking about what's been going on and you realize oh wow i have to like take it from the top i've
been so deep in my bubble for so long uh but it's a really big bubble so i think that um we have
this conversation with people sometimes where they're like you know if this is just a crypto
thing how big is it and we're like do you realize how big crypto is just today like we could build a
massive fully functional alternate web right now just with crypto people and so that's why we're
just so focused on that um because we we think that's where the that's where the most growth is
going to be in the short term so uh long answer it will replace the current internet you will be
You will get to a place where the New York Times is decentralized too, but not anytime soon.
Yeah. And then what about mobile applications? So we've talked a lot about kind of more web type
applications. When you think of decentralized web, a great example would be like the TikTok
controversy right now. Should it be banned? Should it not? I think kind of hits home or
it's more obvious to people in the United States than other examples. Can things in the mobile
space uh whether they're mobile first or mobile only uh can they benefit from the decentralized
web today or is it just things that are more web-based they could and and and and it it gets
down to the architecture of how it actually of how these systems actually work and the problem
with tiktok is the data is sitting on tiktok databases uh not sitting with you and so a future
decentralized TikTok would have your videos, your profile data, your likes, all that sort of stuff
sitting on IPFS or another decentralized storage network controlled by you. When you go and open
up decentralized TikTok, you'll sign a message with your private key and you'll give that
application some permissions to do something with that data, but you'll control it. So if you say
something that decentralized tiktok doesn't like nothing they can do about it you control that you
control that data now they might try to ban you as a user but you can just go to decentralized
tiktok number two and you still have your data so you take the power away from the company and you
put the power in your hands and we see this with youtube already like youtube has been going and
just knocking down crypto crypto influencer after crypto influencer over the past few months
And the reason why that's so, uh, why that's so harmful to those influencers is that's the place
where they are on the internet. Those videos oftentimes aren't anywhere else. So you go and
take that down. That's their database of their content. And now it's just gone and accessible
in the future. It's not going to happen like that. You're going to control your data.
YouTube gets permission to show it to their users. And if you don't like what YouTube is doing,
you go to YouTube number two, or maybe YouTube number 45, because that's really just a UI.
We need to take this power. The reason why companies, why tech companies have gotten so
powerful and have gotten so abusive is because they control the data. They are also a database.
They're an app, and they're also our database storage. And we need to pull that database
storage piece out of their business model and let them just be these apps. So they're actually
pretty good at being apps. Yeah. And so let's go back in, before we close up in terms of Coinbase
itself, this announcement, talk to us about kind of what you guys have had to do technically to
make this viable for Coinbase. And what is your pitch to individuals who have a Coinbase wallet
in terms of why they should be using an unstoppable domain rather than the traditional
wallet address? Yeah. I mean, in terms of the actual wallets, we're trying to make it super
easy. So we've got integration tools, we've got libraries and things like that. It's pretty
lightweight for wallets. So it's really just a decision for them to make, hey, do I want to
support this new tech? I think it's usually like a couple day kind of adventure for them. It's not
a very serious thing. It's similar to other types of reads that they're probably already doing on
the blockchain. So pretty simple. In terms of users, I mean, I think you, you know, the value
to users, I think you said it. Every single time you want to send money, you need to sweat and
stress over every single digit and every single letter and make sure that it's right. And maybe
you'll make a mistake and lose your money. And so if you are sending to a domain, you don't have
that problem. You can just use your, you know, use your eyes and check the word and make sure
that the word is right. And then you're fine. So I think that's the value proposition is this is
the way to safely and easily send each other crypto. For sure. And I guess kind of in closing,
are there examples of either individuals or companies that are doing this really, really well
that you would say, hey, if you're interested in this
and you kind of want to see an example or two
that people can either go see
or is the best thing to do,
just send them to unstoppabledomains.com
and they can kind of see some examples there.
I would go to unstoppabledomains.com.
I would also just open up Coinbase wallet
and type in brad.crypto and just see it.
Don't send me money.
I don't need a tip.
I don't.
But I'm just giving you a short domain name to check out.
uh that's the easiest mental that's the easiest way to take the mental leap if you just see it
you'll be like yeah that that feels kind of like venmo that feels much more like how i think
payments should work much more so than copy and paste some random address from one wallet and
then put it into and then go and take it into another wallet and then double check and triple
check and uh and all of these steps so i think that's just uh i think it's obvious once you see
that once you see it in action i thought you were about to pull a fundraising move right there just
say hey just send me all your money no we got to be really careful so i never and i'll just say
this now i never ask for money should um yeah just i'm the exact same way um all right guys listen
uh you know obviously brad and i have uh recorded an episode before um and i was really really
intrigued by what they're doing. To me, this is a no-brainer. It's something that does three
things. One is it heavily incentivizes people to move into the decentralized web. Two is it makes
it super easy. You don't have to be a genius. You don't have to have memorized these long strings
of numbers and letters anymore. You now can use these human readable URLs. And then the most
interesting part to me is integrating these human readable URLs with existing products. So Coinbase
blog is a no-brainer and probably kind of the top product to go after. But I think that you'll
end up seeing this in a bunch of other products that you use. And so the number one thing when
people ask me about it is just go get your domain. Like that's like step one, right? Is if you want
to believe that this is going to happen or you've got a deep belief that it is happening, go get
your domain. It's just like on the normal web, you run over to GoDaddy or any of these services
and you try to get the URL of your choice,
there's only one of them.
So go head on over to Unstoppable Domains
and grab your domain.
Brad, any last closing words here for people
as we hopefully have shed some light
on this momentous occasion for you guys and for Coinbase?
I mean, we're obviously super excited,
but I would just say the decentralized web
is actually happening this year.
2020 is the first year where we can say that
uh, with any kind of confidence. Like we're seeing real apps, we're seeing websites,
we're seeing, we're seeing domains out there in the wild. Like it's very different than even a
year ago. So there's a lot of, uh, there's, there's a lot of action. Uh, don't sleep on D web.
Everyone's talking about DeFi. DeFi is amazing. I'm a huge DeFi fan too, but don't sleep on D web.
That might be the best tagline of all is don't sleep on D web. All right, my friend, thank you
so much for, uh, for taking the time to, uh, to do this. I think people are really going to enjoy
and everyone go check out Unstoppable Domains.
