The Wolf Of All Streets - $1 Billion NFT Domain Unicorn | Matthew Gould, Unstoppable Domains

Episode Date: September 20, 2022

I’ve been using Unstoppable Domains for years, so having Matthew Gould, its CEO and founder, on my podcast was especially interesting. Listen to this episode if you want to know the difference between web2 and web3 domains, how Unstoppable Domains will survive the crypto winter, and how they will spend their recent round, which valued the company at $1 billion and made it a unicorn. Matthew Gould: https://twitter.com/matthewegould Unstoppable Domains: https://unstoppabledomains.com/ ►► Get 20% off on your ticket to W3BX. Use my code: WOLF20. Register here: http://web3expo.live/  ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER https://www.getrevue.co/profile/TheWolfDen  GET UP TO A $8,000 BONUS IN USDT AND TRADE ALL SPOT PAIRS ON BITGET FOR ZERO FEES! ►► https://thewolfofallstreets.info/bitget   TRADE ON THE WORLD’S BEST DEX, BULLISH: ►► https://thewolfofallstreets.info/bullish/youtube  Follow Scott Melker: Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottmelker  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wolfofallstreets   Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.io  Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe  Apple podcast: https://apple.co/3FASB2c  #Bitcoin #Crypto #Trading The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and should in no way be interpreted as financial advice. This video was created for entertainment. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision. I am not a financial advisor. Nothing contained in this video constitutes or shall be construed as an offering of financial instruments or as investment advice or recommendations of an investment strategy or whether or not to "Buy," "Sell," or "Hold" an investment.

If you're like me, then you probably find it incredibly annoying to have to send crypto to a complicated address, sweating over every single number and every single letter to make sure you get it right. Well, Unstoppable Domains, they've made it simple. You can just get scottmelker.eth or yourname.crypto or.nft and send your crypto there without having to worry. But that's just the tip of the iceberg of what Matthew Gold, CEO of Ansappel Domains, is building. You don't want to miss this conversation because you're going to be using this endlessly in the future. So when did you register your first domain name and what was it? Oh, wow. This is somewhere in the 2000s, maybe even the 99s. I'd have to go and check. And like everybody else, I let it expire. So I can't remember what it was. And actually, I remember it was in high school because I actually had a friend of mine who was like,

we should register domain names because we'll be millionaires one day. And then we registered a bunch and I probably spent 500 bucks just registering all sorts of ideas. And they were probably around sports. Like I was trying to register things like, you know, uh, soccer and football, like, and, and all that type of stuff. And, uh, I let them expire. And I actually think that one of the domain names that, uh, and it's actually my co-founder, Brad, believe it or not, we're still working together 25 years later. Um, I know that one of the domains he bought, he actually got an offer on from all the way back then. So all the way in the 90s, right? So I've been buying domains for a while and I haven't had a single winner because I gave up and they expired on me and then I didn't renew. And now I own, I probably own personally, I'd have to check only a couple, but for the company, we own a couple hundred to protect our brand or whatnot.

And the only thing I know about domains is I get that email that says, hey, we just auto renewed it for you and charge you more money for doing nothing. Although it used to be a lot more expensive now. I think adjusted for inflation, maintaining a domain name is actually pretty cheap or renewing at this point. But I used to do the same thing. We used to try in college. It was in the 90s.

I had a friend who was super passionate about it and thought we were going to become millionaires by flipping domains. And we bought a bunch of stupid ones and then had to carry them forward. And after three or four years, completely gave up and realized that nobody wanted them. But listen, you have a company that's offering a similar service now, obviously very different in Web3 than in Web2. But do you find that people are actively speculating on domain names in Web3 as well? I think people are taking the analogy from Web2 into Web3. But the market is very different. So Web2 is catering. So we're going to dive right in here. But typical domain names are for small businesses, right? And small businesses are, there's like 20 to 50 million

small businesses. I think if you look at GoDaddy's filings and there's about 150 million registered dot coms, maybe 300 million, 350 million total registered domain names. And those are mostly small business catered. When we talk about NFT domains and unsolvable domains, we're working on NFT domains for users. We think these are going to be digital identities in the future for you on the internet, like your gamer tag or your Twitter handle, think about it like that. The market here is actually people, right? So it's like end users. So it's a different type of domain. And then if you look at the size of the market, we're talking about three to 4 billion people on the internet, right? So three to 4 billion people with an internet connection who are going to want to have some sort of NFT domain that they're going to use

as their personal identifier across all the different apps that they interact with. So I think the market is 100x bigger, to be honest. And yeah, of course, people are going to see a market like that growing at the speed of crypto and think, yeah, this is something maybe I should dive into. And we've had some people who have gone pretty deep into this and building all sorts of tools around trying to understand the valuations of these and where they think they're going to go in the future. who have gone pretty deep into this and building all sorts of tools around trying to understand the valuations of these and where they think they're going to go in the future.

What's better than listening to the Wolf of All Streets podcast? Listening and watching the Wolf of All Streets podcast live. Well, they say what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but this time that's not the case because I'm hosting a stage at a conference from October 10th to 13th.

That's the WebEx conference. I'm going to be bringing you live podcasts, live panels, masterclasses from the leading minds in the industry. This is going to be absolutely epic. It's going to be live streamed, recorded, and presented to you live. You can come have a happy hour with me, eat dinner, potentially play golf, and watch all of your favorite content being recorded in real time. Guys, the link for this is web3expo.live. That's web3expo.live. Use code WOLF20 to get 20% off your ticket.

WOLF20 for 20% off your ticket. Guys, let's hang out in Vegas, October 10th through 13th. When you talk about having your individual identity and owning it on the internet or in Web3, why is that so important why did you start doing this what problem did you identify that you saw that needed fixing so uh we people are spending about 50 of their time in front of a screen and if you think about your digital assets like the things you own digitally it's probably less than one percent of what you own and that trend we think is going to, it's here to stay.

So if you're going to spend half your time in front of the, you know, cell phone or your computer, you're going to have much more things that you own digitally. You know, you're going to own things in the metaverse. You're going to own your gaming items, all this other kind of stuff. Web3 crypto is making it so you can actually own it. Like you can own it on the blockchain or something like that. And we think one of the first things you're going to want to take full control over is your name. And what's really nice is if you have a NFT domain that you can use as like your identity for the internet,

that can be the same across platforms. So one of the problems that people have is they want to make sure that their Twitter handle matches their Instagram, matches their Reddit, matches their whatever. Well, what we're trying to say is instead, users should actually pick what name they want to be called. And then when they log into those apps, those apps should use that name. So we have domain names like matt.nft or scott.nft or scott.crypto or scott.x. And the future that we're seeing is all of these, all the internet is going to interact with blockchains and you're going to be able to log into those applications just using SSO. And they're going to look up and see, oh, yeah, your digital NFT domain is Scott.x. So they'll display that, you know, so your Twitter handle would actually be Scott.x instead of being

whatever the Twitter handle system is. And that way, you could be the same person across all these different apps. So basically, we think the rise of influencers, the amount of time that people are spending online, means that there's going to be a lot more digital property that's going to be owned. When one of that first piece of property we think you're going to want to own is your name so that you can build your brand across all these platforms. That makes perfect sense. It's interesting. I was one of your probably first customers. I've owned scottmelker.eth. If it tells you how old, I own all the.zil addresses as well. I own probably 15 or 20 of them, Wolf of Wall Street and Scott Melker across the board. But when I first bought them, we weren't talking about them as NFT domain

names, right? I think the NFT part has kind of come into vogue and is now sort of a part of the pitch. Back then, it was more about having a simplified address for people to send coins to, right? Obviously, instead of this very, very long and complicated address, you could just send some Ethereum to scottmelker.eth or any ERC20. And about, obviously, censorship resistance and the fact that you could own it yourself. It sits in your wallet like any other asset and holding your private key. So it seems like you guys have expanded massively the scope of what's possible since your initial offering. Yeah. Well, if we go back and look at our 2017 pitch deck, which I actually did this morning because I was onboarding, we do it with new hires. Actually in that pitch deck, we talk about SSO and we of course say the first use case is going to be for simplifying crypto payments. And when

you have a new technology, you want to find your first set of users. And we said that for NFT domains, and back then, you're right, it was before people called them NFTs. NFTs existed. No one thought NFT was going to be a cool name. Turned out we were wrong. And we were even working with them when they were ERC20s, right?

Like when these things were, you know, previous versions of these tokens, but the technology has evolved. And, but we always thought that these would be great ways for you to build up your reputation. So if we have like slide, we have a slide in there.

It's like, oh, you could add your Twitter handle to it. And you could add your discord and you could add your whatever. And, you know, at some point in the future, unstoppable domains can start adding additional services to really make this more of an identifier for you on the internet. But we started with crypto payments, we you know, we want to stay hyper focused when you're a small company, we just said, Listen, every single person on the planet is going to be using cryptocurrency in 10 years, right? And if that's the case, then they're not going to want to send crypto back and forth to long

hex addresses. And you have multiple hex addresses, Dogecoin, Lite, BTC, Ethereum, right? You have all these different coins in your wallet. And it's so much easier to have one name like mat.x to send all that stuff to instead of having to copy and paste hex addresses, which are impossible to remember. So we still think that's one of the most important core use cases for the very first pioneer group of cryptocurrency users who are adopting these technologies. But when we're looking at medium and long term, we still believe and now we're willing to message to customers that these are actually going to become their NFT identities. And the reason why is because consumers have started using them that way. So you don't really

want to start marketing the product before the market is ready. But now we're starting to see it. People are starting to switch their Twitter handles and apps are starting to pull that information when you log in. And so we think people are ready to start taking that next step for where this technology is going to go. Everybody's.eth on Twitter now, it seems. It's become almost as popular as having a board ape as your PFP. It's really interesting to see that transition. Actually, now that I think about it, it sort of echoes the way that the crypto industry sort of developed in the first place. People were Bitcoiners first, and it was all about censorship resistance and short to

bankers, long Bitcoin and not your keys, not your coins. And I think that's, to your point, how you get the very core audience. But once you have them locked in and they understand those important things, the only way to go mainstream is to start talking about, obviously, NFTs and your identity online and all the real potential here. And it's really incredibly exciting. I mean, you talk about billions of people could be using this. Yeah. And it's not just that it's billions of people that could be using these. We also think that the utility for NFT domains is going to be increased massively over the next couple of years. We just closed funding from Pandera. Very excited about that, obviously. We closed our billion

dollar round, making us an official unicorn here, 65 million. And we're basically putting, you know, tremendous amount of effort into engineering resources so that your NFT domain is not, you know, it works in every wallet. Like we want to work in every single crypto wallet for sending, receiving crypto. But then also, you know, it works in every dApp so that when you sign into dApps, you can see your name there. And then even more like expanding into all these Web2 companies, building up our BD team, really reaching out to Web2 and saying, hey, you need to integrate this type of, you know, blockchain crypto tech into your app so that users can bring their IDs. And then, you know, they're also their property with them because a lot of people want to use NFTs inside their apps now. You know, Reddit has an NFT platform. GameStop is the launch one. And this is going to keep happening. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. I mean, listen, I own scottmelker.com and thewolfofallstreets.io, and those are my historical web addresses. What are the advantages to someone, as far as certainly a censorship resistance of buying an address from you and utilizing that as their identity rather than a Web2 standard address? So Web3, the number one thing you do right now

is cryptocurrency payments, right? That is the big differentiator because that's the first use case. And then the other thing you could do with it that's very different from a regular one is actually log in. So we now have, we have a login, like login with Unstoppable.

You can log in with your name, your domain name, like matt.nft or whatever. And that's now in a couple of hundred partners up from zero. We just crossed 400 integrated partners with unstoppable domains. We expect to be into the thousands, if not the tens of thousands over the next couple of years. And so that's completely different. Like you don't log into a website with your domain name, but you are going to log into

websites with your NFT domain name. And when you do that, you can actually see different pieces of data that you can share. And people are like, okay, well, why would I want to do that? Well, just think about DeFi. So if I log into a DeFi application, right now, I do a lot of DeFi trading, right? What if there's a bug in the protocol, they have no way to email me, right? They have no way to contact me. But with your NFT domain, when you when you log in with that, you can actually give them the permission to send you an email and the user controls all that. And then you get that email, hey, there's a bug, go make an update. That's huge opening up that communication channel. And then when we look out into the future, we see loyalty and rewards programs built in with NFT

domains. So they can see, hey, you're a loyal customer, like right now, there's not really any tracking for web three for that. But you can share that data with those apps so that you can qualify for airdrops, right? Or even for compliance. And I know a lot of people are against regulation and compliance in the space, but I think it's coming. And so if you're working in a DeFi app and you need to make sure that you're compliant when you log in with your domain name, you could optionally share your KYC data with that DeFi application so that they can stay legally compliant and function inside the US. So all these different types of verification products

built on top of an identity system for your NFT domain, we think are going to make experiences better for users. Sounds like you have much more control of your data and identity than you would otherwise. And also, I know one of the things that was most exciting about it for me in the beginning was you can't be taken down. You can't be deplatformed if you own your own.eth or.nft address. Yes. And so this is hugely important for social applications because right now when you're using Facebook or using Twitter, they've really got you locked in. Right. Because they have all your followers.

Right. And YouTube, same thing, all your subscribers and everything. And then if they determine in their sole discretion that they don't want you on your application anymore, they are the ones who control all that graph data that you have about who your network is and you're gone. And then those customers may not be able to find you if you want to launch on a new platform because you're going to be a completely different person, but like a completely different user. But if you are, you know, Matt.x on YouTube, and then or Matt.x on Twitter, and you decide to move to a new social platform, well, you're still Matt.x over there. So all those people can find you. And we're actually hoping to be able to build systems so that you can actually port your following account too.

So you can actually find your followers on those new platforms and add them in as well. And what this does is it takes away these walled gardens for these social networks and makes them much more competitive. And so we just look at this from a market perspective. We want all of these social networks to compete for you to make the best possible social network for you to build your following, post your tweets, whatever.

And right now they're not having to do that because they got you locked in and they know that they can take advantage of you. And they just change the rates, right? On YouTube, they just change how much they got you locked in and they can they know that they can take advantage of you and they just change the rates right on youtube they just change how much they pay you um they they could change the visibility of your posts on twitter or facebook or whatever all this without your permission and i think as someone who loves markets it's because they don't have enough competition and the reason they don't have the competition is because they have the address book because and and the reason why they have that

is because you know they're creating those username systems but if you have a portable identity system like portable usernames across, we can help break apart some of that market power that they have for the network effects of your followers that you've built. And if you can take that with you, all of a sudden, we're going to make the internet a much more competitive place for the social applications. They're going to have to do a better job. Is the transition of Ethereum from proof of work to proof of stake driving more interest in this, would you say? I think that the transition there is actually making people much

more interested in blockchains generally. There was a huge narrative around the ESG impact for blockchain uses and power consumption. And I think proof of stake really just offers a really great counter-narrative to that, producing the energy intensity by 99.9%. I know a lot of people may not agree with either side of those arguments, but I'm just saying that was a narrative that was being used to negatively paint the crypto industry as being irresponsible. So I think taking care of that argument was really big. I also think a lot of people are now interested in earning a rate of return by holding their

crypto. That happened with the DeFi. And so adding that in is also very interesting just from a savings perspective, especially with everyone experiencing very high levels of inflation, not just in the US, but literally almost every country on the planet right now. That makes perfect sense. We've had these genres appear in somewhat bubble and pop over the last few years, obviously, in crypto as is the cycles. We had sort of NFT summer last year. Facebook rebranded famously as Meta, and then Metaverse coins went absolutely crazy. And now we're in the midst of this just relentless,

seemingly bear market, which has obviously a lot to do with macro and global and the inflation that you mentioned before. Have you seen, as much as I ask if the merge has driven the narrative in one direction, have you seen a lot of this lose its shine and actually you're having to sell a bit harder or really push the narrative for people to understand why that's important because we're in this bear market? The whole market has cool, right? So that's across the board in NFTs and unsolvable domains. Yeah, yeah. And unsolvableains is no exception. We do have the history. We launched in January 2018. So if you go back and look at the charts in crypto,

it was nothing but a straight down market for the next 18 months, right? So like when we were founded, we actually were founded in the depths of that bear market and experienced that last time. So we have a lot of experience going through these. We know what you do here. What you do here is you focus on your core products. You just keep building. You know that the market is going

to come back in these cycles. These cycles are very violent in crypto. And you learned a lot. We just learned a whole ton of information in the past 18 months about people's excitement around NFTs and where would they think utility is. And so we're going to build those new use cases like we were talking about earlier to just continue to increase the value of these things. And we know that this market is coming back in the medium to long-term. Short-term, obviously, it's pretty bad. So that's also why you want to make sure you're in a good position financially. That's one of the-

Right, that's the story. Right, exactly. And that's part of the reason behind the recent funding. You just want to make sure you're in a good spot. And otherwise, we're going to be just building. And we have faith in this product. Nothing has really changed for us fundamentally for NFT domains. If anything, we think the identity market is more attractive now than it was five years ago, because people are starting to clue in

this might actually solve some of the fundamental problems that we that we're experiencing our web to experiences. Sure. And I mean, it's sort of people love to point at this crypto bear market as if it's happening in a vacuum, but it's a bit disingenuous, right? I mean, everything's down. The luster is off of all assets and everything people were excited about a year ago. The NASDAQ was down more than Bitcoin at one point or something. I was like, you know, like the NASDAQ, I think then the unprofitable tech index or like maybe it was, maybe that was Cathie Wood's fund or something. But like what I'm saying is, yeah, yeah, right. Exactly.

So I'm saying, I'm saying like, you know, to, to point the finger at crypto in particular is I think you're missing the point here. And if anything, crypto likely because it doesn't have a fundamental, there isn't like a structural issue, except for maybe some of the DeFi over leverage that we had this earlier this summer, which seems to have already been cleared out, is actually in a really good place for growth from these levels. And I don't think we're going to have price growth, but I mean, in terms of market adoption and utility. Seems like a lot of that was CeFi over leverage even more than DeFi over leverage. So I think that a lot of the problems that we've had have been self-inflicted

wounds where we basically replicated systems that were already proven broken in 2008 in global markets. And then we did it with less regulatory rails. So I think that we got a little extra downside because of our hubris. And I think actually DeFi hummed along pretty well, minus the hacks and exploits. I mean, when it comes to the leverage, there was collateral, it was liquidated, and all the protocols continue on. Yeah. And I would just say there is a lot more infrastructure now than three or four years ago. And that was the case. That's more than there was eight years ago. And that trend is up into the right. And that makes it easier to come back is what I'm trying to get to because there's so much more infrastructure for building new companies and deploying capital. If you came back in 2013, you're like, I want to deploy

a $2 billion fund into crypto. Everyone would be like, what is wrong with you? Bitcoin's only worth a billion dollars. Andreessen Horowitz just raised $2 billion. Pantera raised $2 billion. Right, exactly. So they literally now have, there's so much more infrastructure now where you can deploy $10 billion of capital every year into this industry to build new stuff. And I think that cannot be overemphasized in terms of its impact on growth. So I think that the growth is definitely going to be accelerated. We have more challenges now because we have to interface with more normal users as we cross the Chasm. And that's very difficult, especially at scale. But there's also a lot more infrastructure to kind of meet those needs.

We also have to interface with regulators and legislators now because we're very much on their radar, certainly. It's become kind of a meme, but it seems that you talk about building in the bear market through 2017 and 2018. Well, now in the depths of this bear market, every time I talk to the CEO or a builder or an entrepreneur, they say, well, it's kind of nice actually, right? Prices may not be up, but we can actually get things done now when everybody's not FOMOing in and out and expecting prices to go to

the moon all the time or whatever. And that this actually is the best time for a company like yours to build. And to your point, you now just became a billion dollar company on a massive investment in a bear market. Yeah. And the noise is gone, which is just super helpful because when you're in a bear market, it's hard to know what's real, what's not. I would raise my hand and say, I never would have guessed that PFP projects like Bored Apes or these CryptoPunks would have been the leading lights for an entire new industry that got developed with NFTs. You can't guess. But now that the tide's gone out, you can see a lot of those other things are not really that important to invest time in.

So you know what people, what's going to persist over a longer time period. So it also, it's not just there's less noise. It's also like the stuff that's remaining, you know, is impactful. So you can really focus on getting those things done and not wasting effort. It seems like in a bull market, you're chasing the most recent crazy idea, especially people will tell you, I remember in the bull market, they're just like, I have to stay on Twitter 18 hours a day or I'm going to miss the next mint, right?

All that's gone. So like, if you're interested in learning about the space, now is a much better time to do that. And I think it's going to be that way for the next two, three years. And I am more sure of where this space is going now and how this is going to be integrated into the rest of the internet web too. Companies are starting to bring these things in now than I was at any point in time. And we're seeing it across the board, everything from regulated stable coins. And I actually think the regulators are

going to come around. I'm a very optimistic person to all the way from regulated stable coins and regulation for these markets, fidelity, offering Bitcoin to retail customers, all the way from that to the other side of LA and all the artists and entertainment industry really picking up on digital property rights through NFTs to build brands, which is what we're seeing now. Yeah. Not only is Fidelity talking about offering Bitcoin trading, direct Bitcoin trading to their retail customers, but it was just announced recently that Fidelity, Charles Schwab and Citadel are launching an exchange. Well, like I said, I mean, they can't get into the market fast enough now that they have more than the whales. They don't do that if it's going to zero. Right. Exactly. So the going to zero thing, I think, is a meme of the past. And I'm seeing a lot less death of Bitcoin articles. I'm seeing a lot more Bitcoin price may go up or go down. But the death of Bitcoin articles, they just seem a

lot less credible now. And it seems like this is the first bear market where that's been the case. Even in 2018, 19, it was literally going to zero, according to the mainstream media. And that was a repetitive narrative for years. Yeah. So it literally took just 10 years or more of Bitcoin just taking punches in the face before they finally accepted it. It's like, okay, this is here to stay. And now they're trying to figure out how to integrate it into the rest of the systems. And I think we're going to have a lot of cool stuff come out of this. And I think it's going to save people a lot of money on the finance side. And then we're hoping that it's going to save them a lot of time on their digital experiences on the identity side. You talk about how this is really for the individual and the potential market here is

obviously the billions of people on the internet, but is there still a use case where this is superior for businesses as well? Because we know that small businesses love web too, large businesses love Web2, but will they also purchase these addresses and find unique and innovative ways to replace their Web2 presence? I think businesses are really going to want to interact with digital identities. And so what do I mean by that?

So you're a business, you're running a store online. When people come to you, you're going to want to be able to read the data about that NFT identity to make a better shopping experience, right? Or a better experience just overall on your website. So just imagine you have shoestore.com, right? And you sell shoes.

Right now, when I go to that website, they know nothing about me. But if I sign in with my NFT domain, maybe they could know my shoe size so that they can personalize the experience. Personalized shopping is really something that gets talked about. We can talk about financial things. Like, you know, if I assign onto cars.com and I want to buy a car, maybe they can pull me off of my digital identity. They can see what my credit score is so that they can tell me, you know, financing or whatever for my, or imagine I go to a financial app like DeFi lending or I'm on Robin hood or something. And they want to see if I can qualify for margin trading and they want to see if I have the requisite training to trade options or whatever. I don't think Robin, well, I won't make any comments there, but I'm just saying they could check my education levels and see if this is a financial product that maybe I should be

taking a look at. And then all of that information, I'm talking about all those verifications are going to be proof checked on the blockchain. right? And so that's what I... So I think businesses are going to have a very strong interest in interacting with NFT domains in order to exchange data with users. So that's where I think they're going to deal with it. And I also think they're going to issue them. We have a good example, blockchain.com. We just announced with them, we launched the.blockchain.tld a little while back. And every single one of their users is getting a dot blockchain domain as part

of their onboard experience for that wall to make it easier for them to receive crypto payments as a first step but when we're talking to them we're really saying what we enable you to do is add identity information to your products so like blockchain.com in the future we want to continue to build our system so that you can use your blockchain.com app to log into your charles swab right online or vice versa. In order to verify different financial information to get even more access to products much easier. Instead of having to fill out a bunch of forms or send a selfie of yourself with your passport to Southeast Asia or somewhere in order to get onto an exchange. It's a lot easier if you can just verify that in a safe and secure way using an NFT domain.

And that would have sounded crazy. But now, as I said, Charles Schwab is literally launching a crypto exchange. I mean, all the things you're talking about that we seemed crazy for for years are happening. They're just happening in the bear market and they're not garnering the same level of excitement that they would have. But inevitably, I think when prices go up, everybody will be FOMOing back in and excited again. It's literally tied to price, unfortunately. The big corporates are paying attention right now, just so people who are listening and they have one to three year product cycles, right? So they're not trying to make a decision tomorrow and they take a long

time to do it. And you have to have those conversations. And that's why at Unstoppable, you know, we have a whole BD team. We've got Sandy Carter on a team. She came over from AWS. She ran a big program over there. We built, you know, a 40 person team behind that. We are having all those conversations and a lot more crypto companies are doing that now than they were in 2013. Coinbase is lobbying. And this is the difference in the industry today between where it was previously. And honestly, these Web2 companies and these traditional companies, they are smart and they want to have a Web3 strategy. And they're going to get in here and they're going to make a ton of money getting into these product lines. And that's part of the motivation for them to get here.

And everyone in the crypto industry who's helping to provide services and onboarding and educating are going to benefit from that as well. So it's happening right now. And the good news is we still have 10 to 20 years of build out. So because it's trillions of dollars of infrastructure that has to be built, we're talking about new financial rails for everything, new rails for all sorts of information transfer. So it's not only is it a growing trend, is it a fast-growing trend, it's in a really huge market that I think is totally worth spending your time in because it's going to be here for decades. This is not like a, it's not like pogs or something like this is going to be here for a while.

Which is funny because most people who come into crypto think they're going to be extremely rich in one year. They don't want to hear a 10, 20 year timeline. Well, you can be extremely rich in one year, but you can also be extremely rich in 10 to 20 years. And it's about your risk profile. Like some people like to put it all on black, but what I'm trying to tell you is for people out there who are trying to step into this thing, learn about it, become educated, and really make a longer term investment, there's

also that opportunity. And that's what is really unique about this market is that there really is that much depth here. And you see that you have entries in Horowitz with multi-billion dollar funds with seven-year timeframes to deploy that capital. That's the type of... I like those markets personally. So I'd rather... I like getting rich and I like getting rich slow or getting rich fast, but I like having my options. And in crypto market, you really... There's a lot of ways to win. I mean, Andreessen, I think, raised a $4.5 billion fund, right? With a five, as you said, five to seven-year deployment. That's actually really hard to deploy that much capital in this space now with the size of market caps, especially when seed rounds for smaller companies. I mean, maybe as the biggest VC,

you get in for a million, $2 million. You're talking about them literally having to deploy capital into hundreds of companies over the next few years. Yeah, but they found ways to do it, right? And you look at like OpenSea, for instance, I mean, there was an easy $100 million plus check. You look at some of these other big, you know, FTX has had no problem deploying. Like I'm saying, the rails are here in a way that they weren't previously. I do think that that dry powder is quietly

what's going to drive the next bull run. Yes, and I will say that I do think for the next short term, and I'm talking six to 12 months, dry powder is going to stay dry because there's no reason for them to commit to decisions. Yeah, exactly. And they're on a seven-year window. I do think their best checks that they're going to write are going to be right now.

The absolute best time for VCs in this market is going to be this next year, just because they're going to get the best companies at the best valuations with the most serious people. Does that mean that this is also the best time for retail to continue investing and to deploy their own capital? Not financial advice, everyone. Yeah, not financial advice. Well, retail is usually later in the cycle, right?

So you have to understand most retail, even though they claim to be long-term, they have less than one year investment horizons. And when we're talking about VCs, so it's really about your time horizon. When we're talking about venture capital and private equity and like long-term money, you know, with five plus year time horizons, I would just put it that way. If you have a, if you, if you were on a, on a five-year time horizon, then I think that this is a very good time to, you know, put in, not, you know, don't put everything in at once, but this is a very good time to look at this market and make some smart decisions. And you have to decide.

You can't just YOLO in. And you'll be happy in the future. That's my personal assessment. But you should definitely be patient putting it in. The big boys are patient. They're not trying to write all their check in one check. They're going to dole this out over the next couple of years here to get comfortable with the new market conditions because the markets are different now. It's interesting for you guys because you're a unicorn now when valuations are absolutely destroyed, right? So you kind of wonder what

your valuation would be in the heat of a bull market if you were raising. That's a good thing. Yeah. But I would just say that we didn't take the highest offer because when you're looking in these spaces, you want to make sure that you're working with the best partners. And if you look at market conditions, we decided to go with Pantera, who's an absolutely amazing crypto fund and has been in the space for a decade. So you really want a long-term partner in the market right now. That's a little bit different too, but that's a different conversation about founders. So I would just say that we're very excited about that. We think it's a good reflection of the work that we've put in. And honestly, we think we've got plenty more to go from here. There's so much more we could do. Right. With an infusion of over

$60 million, what do you do first? I mean, what's the plan for that money? How do you make sure it sustains through the bear market? What do you build first? What are you most excited about to be able to use that money? Well, given these market conditions, you want to invest in product and engineering, and then you want to invest in distribution channels. So if you look at where we're spending the money right now, we're spending the money on business development, working with other companies, integrating our product into their products. Because NFT domains, the more applications that resolve for sending and receiving cryptocurrency, the better. You want every wallet, right, is where you're getting at. So you want to invest in those distribution channels, and then you want to invest in product improvements. So we're still early in the

blockchain space. There's a lot of middleware that needs to be built to make it easier for companies to read data off of blockchain. So our engineering team is growing rapidly. So the engineering team is going from less than 20 to more than 60 by the end of this year. So that's a huge investment for us. And if you count the product and design team, it could be over 80 by the time we get to December. So that's the type of stuff that you see us putting our money in longer term things. A lot less consumer marketing, right?

Like now is not the time to be buying stadium rights, right? So like that's the difference between the markets. Some would argue that January also wasn't the time to be buying stadium rights in hindsight, but that's always 2020. Yeah, that was probably one of our signals alongside laser eyes, right? So yeah, I think that that has been certainly cooling off to a great degree. You talk about every wallet, right? Being able to handle every wallet. That comes, I would imagine, with some major challenges considering that interoperability is still in its infancy. How do you make sure that people understand what coins they can send to what wallets doesn't get lost? You don't send

Solana to an ERC-20 address, things like that. How do you make sure that one day somebody can literally just send everything to one address and not have to understand the underlying tech or make sure that they don't do something stupid? I mean, I think we all know that we are our own worst and single point of failure. Yeah. I would say very carefully because you just have to write a very long checklist and go through everything. Like what if the user does this? What if the user does that? And like some of the challenges that we're facing just to maybe give some more details here, like exchanges, right? So exchanges rotate your cryptocurrency address every single time

because you want to have a fresh one. So we have to have a way for exchanges to work with users in a T domain names and then verify that data on chain in a safe manner so that you can have that crypto address rotation every single time. So those are the types of products that we're working on. Another one would be hardware wallets

is another like whole class of wallets because that hardware wallet does not connect to the internet except for certain times. So we actually have some patented tech that we're working on right now to make it so those hardware wallets can interrupt with NFT domain.

So these are the areas of investment. And just like we are committed to covering the earth with NFT domain names. So it's like that joke, that paint company or whatever, I can't remember what it's called, but we need to get this absolutely everywhere for resolution.

We were even talking about like, how could we resolve these in the Oculus, right? And like, how would an NFT domain resolve the Oculus? So that's where the engineering investment comes in to really build the libraries and the APIs and the documentation about how these can be read everywhere. And there's no shortcuts there. It's really, you got to knock on every door. You've got to make it as simple as possible for those

businesses to get in. And that's a large part of the reason behind the investment. And that's also a reason why I think unstoppable domains for NFT domains are one of the better providers to stand behind because there's a lot of people out there trying to build NFT domain systems in the space. And one of our differentiators is that we've been here for five years. Yeah, they're just behind. Yeah. And we're going to be here for the next five years. And we have a plan around what needs to be done. We take this very seriously. And this is something that we're very interested in solving. So we're going to put time and effort behind it. So it's not just the domain name that you're buying. It's also the protocol, right?

So we're actually selling all the tools and stuff that we're building to make that protocol work as part of what you get when you get an unstoppable domain. And these things are going to become interoperable over time. And we're building all that tooling as well to make that easier for users in the future. Are you able to use the existing bridges? I mean, obviously we've seen wormhole at hacks

that deploys all these things or do you literally have to build all that from scratch for yourselves it's a combination so we've built some from scratch we've used some like we use polygons bridge for for zilliqa we built our own uh and and so like it just depends on on which chain and which bridge technology and we work with bridge technology providers um all the big ones we have talked to at one point or another to figure out how that might work and that technology is getting all the big ones we have talked to at one point or another to figure out how that might work. And that technology is getting a lot better. And then as far as interoperability, we're also expanding out the use of your NFT domain to even more interesting chains.

So like Solana, for instance, so log in with Unstoppable, which is currently tied to your NFT domain name. You can now use your Solana wallet with that, that's attached to your unsolvable domain. And so we're not just expanding the applications that you're in, we're also expanding the different types of, even the chain inside your wallet that you can use with your NFT domain. And so that expansion, so now it's Zilliqa, Ethereum, Polygon, we just added Solana for the wallet. In addition to, we already resolve 250 plus cryptocurrencies. So you can easily attach your Bitcoin, Litecoin, whatever address, but you could also sign it with different

of those keys as well. So that's a new thing they're trying to do on the back end to really kind of, crypto is about crypto. It shouldn't be one chain versus the other. And Unsolvable Domains is an application that we really want to try to make it work as much as possible across all the chains. Right. If people are even aware that they have to be concerned about which chain or what they're doing, then we still have the major UX UI problem that I would argue is the biggest problem we still have in this space, right? What we just discussed is a conversation for crypto natives who've been here for a long time and understand the tech. It's not for grandma. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, honestly, friends shouldn't let friends send crypto to naked addresses. Really, you should get everyone using NFT domains. And as an industry, we need to let people know that's the case. Like you need to tell your wallet that they should be resolving NFT domains. You should be getting one yourself. You should set that thing up. You should start using it because it's our responsibility to as a community to improve the UX for crypto. Otherwise, we're just going to keep having what we have. We don't insist on having improvements here.

And I selfishly, but also really do believe that just changing the naming system that we're using for sending around trillions of dollars of assets is an amazing first step. It's a huge first step. I would even argue that we have to get to the point where we're not calling them NFT domains, right? And the word NFT disappears in the same way that any of these others sort of like use your phone. You don't think about the underlying tech or you don't think about voice over IP when you and I are discussing these things. You don't think about how email or the internet work. Maybe there becomes a time when you don't even talk about it as an NFT domain. It's just your domain, right? It's just your identity. It's just your address. 100%. I mean, we used to call them, what, car phones and then cell phones and then smartphones.

Now we just call it a phone. And I think it's going to be the same thing with these NFT domains where we're just eventually just going to call them your domain or even maybe your name. We'll see where it goes in order for people to find you online. You've talked about a lot of these sort of exciting possibilities and things on your radar that most people probably wouldn't have thought of as possible by simply buying scottmelker.eth and such. But given that you're talking about a 10, 20-year timeline, what are the most insane, grand, ridiculous things that you can think of that this could be used for that aren't even on our radar yet? Well, so I've got a couple of

interesting ones. So one is dating. So that one's going to be a funny one for people. But imagine if when you're dating, a lot of people want to know more about you. And if you have a digital identity, guess what? There's a lot of reputation about yourself that you could bring with you into this application. So I think that's more the fun, interesting one that people can think about because there's all sorts of things there. Like dating is super personal, right? I mean, just imagine all the crazy stuff you could exchange about yourself for dating profiles that people don't currently do so there's a lot there that's going to be the fun one to think about and then maybe on a more practical level i actually think that you're going to see

this um in apps so like i talk about you know what if uber integrated this so that you could look at your uber driver and have more context about who's picking you up because a lot of people are afraid you know like who is this person? Am I getting into a random car? Maybe I'm in a foreign country. Having that additional type of context so that you can see like your Uber driver's name, .nft or.uber or.x or whatever, so that you can bring in additional context for that person, I think is going to be pretty interesting. So there's a lot.

There's a lot that's going out there. If you want one to think about with your friends over a couple of drinks, think about dating in the future when everyone has digital identities. And then otherwise, I just think it's going to improve your applications across the board for adding more context to your digital interactions. Yeah. I mean, you talked about obviously using it as a login for your Twitters, consolidating Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, all of these by having one login or one address. What do you think about decentralized social media? Do you think we'll get to a point where we don't even need those web two sort of ancient, they're not ancient now,

but they feel ancient social media platforms where people actually start to control their data and identity and interact with social media in a truly like web three native and safer manner? Yeah, I think it's going to be an iterative process. I think step one is taking away the power where they just absolutely own everything about you. And then we'll see what happens. Because I think as soon as you have your portable data across those, it could be that those Web2 applications become a lot better because they have to compete with each other. And so maybe they evolve into things that are better, like they I do think you're right. Like Web3 will continue to eat their lunch and just start tearing apart all the different services that they're currently providing around connecting you and your social network or, you know, distribute your data or whatever, you know, I guess like the feeds that they create and they could be completely broken out. But I think the number one thing that's going to happen is it's going to increase competition because they're just going to not have that lock in.

So you're definitely going to see more that lock in. So you're definitely going to see more apps, whether those apps will be web two or web three or a combination of the both. I think it's probably a combination, but you have a lot more choice. I mean, Facebook's already rebranded as meta. So clearly there's a trend in web two of understanding that their lunch is going to be eaten as you so eloquently said. Yeah. And I'm looking forward to seeing you, Scott Melker.NFT in the metaverse on, you know, like walking around and seeing, seeing your name above your head and be like, ah, you know, and then maybe even another crazy one is you could actually see, you know, how you have like social presence. You can say like,

you can actually see like, Hey, Scott's currently into central land or Scott's currently in Facebook metaverse or whatever. And then it'll be easier for you to find your friends online. Like they're currently on this Reddit forum or what have you. That might be a little bit interesting too. You know, location tracking is a little creepy when it's real world, but maybe location tracking for like being able to see your friends currently playing this game

so you can join them digitally might be something that would be cool too. Right, that's kind of a form of decentralized social media to my point before. I mean, if you could actually find your friends, go interact with them, that's really what that is. Is that your vision of what you think the metaverse will actually be? Do you think it'll be siloed, you know, Decentraland and the sandbox and Reddit, as you said, and all these others, and you'll just sort of go between them? Or do you see a ready player one, all encompassing

metaverse? What's your vision? I see the first version. And again, I'm a huge fan of markets. So I really like the idea of you being able to choose and being able to exit from places you don't like and go somewhere else where you do. And so I would personally think it's a much healthier ecosystem if you just have tons of these different ones all competing to create those.

Like instead of having just one ready player, one universe, you have ready player one through 100,000. And that's the future that I'm working to create in this space. And that's because that's, I think that's better. And that's why we think you need to be able to take your stuff with you, right? You're agnostic, you're agnostic to the winner, if you build something that people can choose to use in any of those contexts. Exactly, exactly. Which makes it actually, I mean, that that is really, really interesting. I just,

I think people are starting at least to some degree to become aware of all the problems with Web2 and their data and social media and deplatforming. And so it seems like a natural sort of evolution, but maybe I'm overestimating humanity and they actually don't really care. I think they'll care when it saves them some time and some money. And like, it's just, you know, it's annoying also to have all your stuff siloed on different platforms and then not being able to move it around. So we're really focusing on soft domains and we're really pragmatic about this. And I'm not trying to go out there and force anyone to use Web3 or crypto

for, you know, philosophical reasons or anything. I'm just like, let's just save you some time. And then I think that you're going to have people just move over because I mean, this is a lot easier for me to port my contacts in using an NFT domain than it is, you know, trying to get Facebook to give me my data or something.

So that's where we're going to stay focused. Honestly, I think that's how most technology happens. Let's just make this thing stupid cheap and stupid easy to use, and then make it so that it provides a lot of value to customers. And then everyone's just going to eat it up. And we're already seeing that with stable coins. I know a lot of people may not like those, but stable coins made it really easy for anyone on

the planet to get some US dollars. And guess what? That was a really good app. There's 100 billion of them now and that's only growing. So I kind of like that model a little bit. And that's where we're trying to focus is just on that end value for users. Yeah. I had a recent podcast with Joshua Frank from the Thai and Jeff Dorman from ARCA. And our consensus was that the killer app so far for blockchain is stablecoins. I know Bitcoin maxis don't want to hear that people in Venezuela where there's hyperinflation actually just want dollars and to send things cheap from one person to another. But that really has been the killer application. And it went from effectively a zero market cap

a few years ago to hundreds of billions of dollars. Yeah, I think it's going to go to trillions on the next cycle. So I agree. I mean, I think it's a fantastic app and we should embrace those apps in the crypto community. Like whatever's working, the market is telling you something here

and we should listen to the market. Don't pretend like we know the answers for other people and let's try to meet them where they are in their applications. And like, listen, they'll get there. I'll just tell you that going from stable coin to buying Bitcoin or Dogecoin or Litecoin, a lot easier than going from, you know, Argentine pesos to Bitcoin, right? So like those people are one step closer to the DeFi and all these other tools. And that's great.

We need to make all those little steps easier for people to get into. Frankly, it's also a hell of a lot better than, listen, I only came in in late 2016, early 2017. But if I wanted to buy something, I had to buy Bitcoin first, send it to somewhere, understand the value in sats versus dollars and buy it with Bitcoin. It just makes the entire market so much easier. The only problem I think for a lot of sort of the Bitcoin max list thinking is that they don't want to admit that maybe it's a better payment system. Well, you know, again, I've just looked at the data. So whatever's moving the most money, it's a better payment system. And I will admit wholeheartedly that Bitcoin is definitely working as the better gold. If you just look at the performance, if you look at the performance of Bitcoin versus gold over the past,

you know, several years, it's not even close. So, you know, like if, if we're talking about just looking at what happened and what the facts are, you know, facts are Bitcoin is absolutely destroying gold as a store of value.

And I, and I'm a gold person myself, but man, ridiculous. And then, you know, stable points. Yeah.

And then, and then stable points are doing a really good job competing with cryptocurrencies for, you know, transactions on, on these networks. That's fine too. And everything else is going to find its niche over the next couple of years. And I'm happy, man. That brings on more people. This is good stuff. I know you said that

you love markets. Have you found it as frustrating as I have that it's been so utterly correlated to this downturn in global markets? And now that we, yeah, I think we had all these beautiful years where we could sort of trade or invest in crypto without thinking much about what was going on in the rest of the planet. Now you really have to become a macro economist to invest in the crypto market. Well, I think we're lucky that this technology is here at this time because, you know, we people built this crypto technology out to give us more options in financial markets. And yeah, it's been highly correlated, but I'm just happy as a technologist that we actually have this tech, because I think it's going to help with some of the excesses that might be in the system. I mean, I personally think that if there was not a way for people, if there wasn't a plan B,

right? Like if crypto wasn't sitting here, able to suck up excess market liquidity, then maybe the central banks and the governments would be acting even worse, right? But they know that if they print a bunch of money, people are going to find alternative sources of value like Bitcoin. And we actually saw that during the pandemic. They printed a bunch of money, price of crypto went straight up to the right. And that's great because that means that money wasn't making its way into the financial system that would inflate prices even more. So I actually think that if crypto hadn't been here, we're having 10% inflation in the US or whatever, maybe it would have been 15. And a lot of people don't give crypto credit for sucking up that excess liquidity in the system. But as a buffer, I think it has done really well. And yeah, it's frustrating to watch the markets go up and down.

The pandemic was awful. The most recent war in Ukraine has been terrible for everybody. And I wish that these types of things didn't happen and all these other financial crises out there. But you just got to plan for the worst and be ready to handle whatever comes at you. Oh, yeah. I think that we all know that, or at least hopefully people know that it's just another market cycle. And eventually it will all go back to the right parabolically once again.

Yeah, stay committed to what you know to be true. So I do not think that this is the time to change your long-term investment thesis. Now, if you have short-term positioning needs, yeah, you need to make some adjustments there because the market's different, right? Yeah. But long-term, you stick to your guns and ultimately that typically pays off if you've done the research. Absolutely. So I think that we've probably gotten a hell of a lot of people really interested in what you're doing. So where can they actually go get their address, start to learn how to do this, start sending

some crypto to their name, things like that? How can they get involved? Perfect. Well, definitely go check us out, unstoppabledomains.com. We have domain names on there from as cheap as $5 that you can pick up to kind of get yourself into digital identity. We have a lot of ways to learn too about how to use it. Check us out at unstoppable web on Twitter. That's our Twitter handle. You can find us there. I'm also there at Matthew Gould, if you'd like to follow me.

And we have a pod, we have a podcast as well. You can go back. We have over 100 episodes that you can listen to. We have a lot of introductory things on crypto as well. And then join our communities, Discord, Telegram. We're as many places as we can get. And start learning. Like really start learning about this stuff. This is going to change the future. It's still early.

I know a lot of people say that, but it's true. And we'd love to have you as part of the Unstoppable community. Well, thank you so much for taking that time to have this conversation. Obviously, I've been a fan and a user for a very, very long time. So it's great to finally have this conversation with you and get you on here. It's been long overdue. I really do appreciate you taking the time. Oh, glad to be here, Scott.

Thank you so much. Let's go.