Web3 Domains and the Future of Web2 with Unstoppable's Matthew Gould | Saw.com

Speaker 1: 0:00

Today I have the CEO and co-founder of Unstoppable Domains, matthew Gould. I got to sit down with Matt for the first time at the ICANN conference in Puerto Rico and I admit I did not know much about Unstoppable and I really haven't invested a whole heck of a lot of time in Web3 domains either, and the reason because of that is I kind of feel like it's just a big money grab. But after our meeting I have to say what I have heard from Matt about Unstoppable and what they're planning on I'm actually pretty impressed with. They have big plans, big goals and they certainly are not fly-by-night. Unstoppable domains are awaiting approval from ICANN to become a registrar. They have plans to invest in the next round of GTLDs and they're innovating. They're invested in this industry and plan on being here for good.

Speaker 1: 0:48

Matt and I discuss his story crypto Web3 collisions with other Web3 extensions. What happens then Web2 collisions with Web3 when the GTLD auctions come around in three years and I hit him with some challenging questions, concerns and objections in general regarding Web3. Some of those questions are why did you only charge one year for one of your unstoppable domains? What are you going to do if another namespace starts a matching extension and another entity wins the auction for the same extension. What do browsers like Safari, chrome or Firefox have to say about unstoppable domains or just Web3 domains in general? How do I contact a registrant on one of your domains and have you ever considered tokenizing unstoppable? And finally, we touch on domain lending and I hit him with a bunch of questions and discussion points about that as well. So this is a good show, great guest. I learned a lot and, I hope, him with a bunch of questions and discussion points about that as well. So this is a good show, great guest. I learned a lot and I hope you do too. Thanks for listening.

Speaker 1: 2:02

Today on the Uncomfortable Podcast, we have Matthew Gould, the CEO and co-founder of Unstoppable Domains. He's leading the charge in providing the World Web 3 domain names. Matt has grown the company to over $100 million in revenue and a billion-dollar valuation. Prior to joining the domain industry, he founded multiple companies across many different sectors, and these can range from a Y Combinator-backed business called Talkable Tom's Shoes Bonobos Pura Vida, and he also holds a Bachelor of Science and Finance from Georgia Institute of Technology. I've known about Matt for quite a while, but we finally got to meet in person at the last ICANN in Puerto Rico where we had a sit-down conversation about Web3, about Unstoppable and just about domains in general, and I thought it was really interesting and then I invited him on the podcast. He said sure, so welcome my new friend from the business.

Speaker 2: 2:58

Well, thank you, I'm doing well and thanks for that intro. And, just to be clear, I founded founded several companies and then some of those are actually companies that I've worked with when I was at Talkable Right. So, like I work with Tom Shoes and Bonobos and Pura Vida, these are in their e-commerce brand. So my background is actually in like on the tech side, is in e-commerce and you know, I started founding companies when I was as early as 15. I think I can go back and find my first. I actually have my very first business plan here in my office. I actually keep it and I'm going to frame it. But you know, and it was for a company that used software to identify undervalued houses it's called Holden Properties.

Speaker 1: 3:41

Right, I was also a poker player, and you did that at 15.

Speaker 2: 3:45

So the genesis of that business was like a services company, right, and then that evolved into a property management and acquisition one as I got into college. So when I started the services company when I was still in high school with a friend of mine and we cleaned out foreclosed homes, right, and that's what we'd spent our time doing in Atlanta. And then we evolved that into property management and then, because we like computers, we wrote software to kind of analyze what was worth buying in Atlanta. So, and then all the e-commerce brands.

Speaker 2: 4:17

I actually was post moving to San Francisco and my friend Alan found it talkable and took it through YC and I was one of the early employees there's, like you know, definitely less than 10 people. I may have been employed like five or six or something and he brought me in to run the analytics department, right. So I was the first data analytics person and then I ended up growing into like director of operations I think it was my and I managed to be for all the product development and the engineering teams as well as the analytics teams and all the testing and everything. So really grew me in my career on software on that side. So yeah, it's been. It's been a fun journey and unstoppable, evolved out of my love and hobby, which was crypto. Like so, if you saw me in San Francisco in 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016, I would be working 50 hours a week at a startup, and then my nights and weekends were always at crypto events. I was very early. I was buying Bitcoin under a hundred bucks.

Speaker 1: 5:22

Oh, you bastard yeah.

Speaker 2: 5:24

I was working on Ethereum when it was on test net, so I had Ethereum when it was under a dollar. So I was like super, super early in the space and I wanted to contribute. So 2017 rolled around and I left the startup I was at to go start my own thing. I took some time there to try to figure out what exactly that was and I ended up landing on domain names. So, and you know, domain names are interesting for a lot of reasons which you know we can get into, but I think the biggest improvement for domain names is it's just wonderful UX. You know, as everybody knows, you don't want to type an IP address into a Chrome browser in order to find a website. You don't want to type in a text address to find somebody's wallet. That was the intuitive, just really high level 10,000 foot view. And then since then, we've gotten really into the guts of what it means to build blockchain domain name systems and kind of how that might impact the market or the internet over the next decade or two.

Speaker 1: 6:27

Let me ask you this when you went to California with your friend Alan and you're working in analytics at Talkable but obviously you still had the entrepreneurial itch you probably got to a point or a crossroads when you said to yourself I'm out of here, I'm going to go do my own thing, not in a bad way, but like when was that time that it kind of just became obvious that it was time for you to go and leave? And why was that?

Speaker 2: 6:57

Well, I had a different vision for where the product should go.

Speaker 1: 7:02

Right for where the product should go right.

Speaker 2: 7:02

The thing is is when you're working at a company every day. I find it's easier to work at a company if you are 100% behind the mission, and when you join a company, you're always 100% behind the mission. That's why you joined in the first place. But then, as you get better at building things and understanding how the market works and just to be clear, my first two years at Talkable were fantastic. Every day I walked in I learned something new, right, and that was the reason why I moved across the country from Atlanta out to San Francisco to try something new is because I knew I needed to extend myself and honestly, I looked at it and I said software is the future, right, and instead of trying to make like a real estate business that's software enabled or something just make a pure software business.

Speaker 2: 7:51

That was kind of the you know the like light bulb in my head. So yeah, move across the country. You know, sell everything. Sold my holden properties company right, close it down like everything, just sold everything all I had was a suitcase and a backpack. You know, uh, get a tiny little room in San Francisco for, you know, 650 bucks a month, and if you know San Francisco, you know it must've been a pretty awful.

Speaker 1: 8:08

That might've been a shoe box. Yeah, it didn't say Reebok on the side of it.

Speaker 2: 8:12

Yeah exactly, you know, just outside the city, but still on the train line Right.

Speaker 1: 8:16

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 8:17

And then just really deciding I'm going to put the, I'm going to put the 50 hours a weekend to learn how a software business is run. And so you know, there's a lot of things about running a software company that are different than running a real estate company or anything other company, right? So the first two years was just pure learning how the game works, right. And then after that, I started to develop my own product sense right for software. And once I started developing my own product sense for Software, I remember going to a Shopify event and this is before.

Speaker 2: 8:46

Shopify is the beast that it was today and Shopify was building a product that was complementary to what we were building. And I said to myself this is going to be the winner in the space. And I went back to Alan and I said we should pivot the whole business and we should build Shopify. Now you got to understand this is 2013 or 2014. It's pretty early in the business and we should have, honestly, if we're looking back, still my opinion. But we were in a really good position to build that same type of software. And then, after it was determined, no, we're going to be a marketing analytics company, which was our niche and where we're at and where they still are today. They still exist today.

Speaker 2: 9:28

That's when I started looking right, because it's kind of like I felt like this product was not going to be able to compete in the market versus shopify and I could see the writing on the wall that like we were going to hit a cap because of that, um and yeah. So that's when I started letting my mind wander. And crypto was my hobby, and I do think that if you have a hobby that you're spending 10, 20 hours a week on anyway, then that's a really good place to turn into a business If you're the kind of person who can still enjoy it if it's a. You know some people if they turn their hobby into a business, they no longer like their hobby, but I don't have that problem, right? So so for me, it was a good idea to turn my hobby into a business.

Speaker 1: 10:04

So problem right, so, uh. So for me, it was a good idea to turn my hobby into a business. So, um, I find it. I find it interesting, though, that you you were, you know, largely into crypto. Crypto at the time. I mean the amount of money that started pouring into crypto. The new business ideas are being based on it, the new coins are being launched, the you know the buzz that was happening, and then you decide to choose domains as part of it seems a little opposite. You know, it's kind of like building a new age library. You know it's just not as like when you hear about a lot of these other companies that were using Bitcoin or blockchain. You know, domain, bringing domains to the blockchain, doesn't sound to me as exciting as what some of these companies were talking about doing with their own coins or Ethereum or whatever. So I find that a little. Why domains?

Speaker 2: 10:54

Yeah, so-.

Speaker 1: 10:56

Being a registrar, like being a registrar of domains, or really a registry of domains is not the most exciting company in the world. When I explain it to people, their eyes usually roll into the back of their heads, you know.

Speaker 2: 11:09

I've got.

Speaker 1: 11:09

I've got.

Speaker 2: 11:11

I've got a lot of reasons why I ended up in domains. So, number one I did not want to build a finance app, okay. So if you look at crypto, I would say 50% of what's going on is finance, right? So I just made a decision as an entrepreneur I don't want to build a finance app because it's extremely highly regulated, right? It's just a lot of excess regulations and I didn't want to spend my whole time just dealing with that. And if you look at Coinbase, coinbase has one of the largest legal departments as a percentage of headcount of any startup. It's like it's like one out of one out of 50 people at Coinbase is a lawyer, right? And like that's wild, if you think about it. Like that's a really high ratio. It might be even one out of 30. Like they've got a very large legal team. So you know. So if you're asking, like I got into crypto, why didn't you do one of these other crazy things? Well, one I didn't want to do anything with finance, so that that eliminates that's the united states.

Speaker 1: 12:05

Yeah, and I and I know someone from draft kings and you said their number one expense is legal. Yeah, exactly, not marketing.

Speaker 2: 12:10

Legal, yeah, yeah, so like uh, I don't like all that regulation because I think it. I mean, and that makes sense, right? I launched a blockchain domains company we've talked more about. You know, administrators and regulators in the block, in the domain, in the regular domain industry. We'll get there, but that was it. So like finance was off the table. And then the other thing I kind of like I wrote down a list of things that would really improve the crypto market. I said I wanted to say what are the top five things you need to have in order for crypto to be globally adopted.

Speaker 1: 12:41

Okay.

Speaker 2: 12:41

This is 2016,. Right, 2017, when I'm doing this idea of formalizing.

Speaker 2: 12:47

And number one was, you know, needs to be easier to buy crypto, like get money in the system. Well, that's finance and that's Coinbase, right. And then another one that was sometimes tied for number one but always came in in the top three was UX, right, so UX was always number two or number one, depending on how you rated it. And then number three was regulatory clarity, which I had no control of. So when I went around and I asked, like, what are the top 10 problems in crypto? I asked a bunch of other people, right, and I have my own opinions too, but I like to get external validation.

Speaker 1: 13:23

And.

Speaker 2: 13:23

UX. Yeah, ux was the one where I could tackle because I didn't want to do finance. So that's onboarding crypto. I have no input on regulators and that just leaves UX. And then looking around at UX, domain names make a lot of sense because you're copying and pasting these crypto addresses and I've actually copied and pasted a crypto address incorrectly these crypto addresses, and I've actually copied and pasted a crypto address incorrectly. I've actually had software insert the wrong hex address when I was copying it back then so that I sent it to the wrong person. So I actually have lost money doing that back then Was it a lot of money.

Speaker 1: 13:55

in the moment you hit submit, were you like, oh shit. Or was it just?

Speaker 2: 13:59

It was like a thousand dollars right. So which is not unreasonable amount of money.

Speaker 1: 14:04

There's enough that I remember right you're living in a six hundred dollar a month apartment in san francisco. That thousand dollars probably meant a lot. Well, this is.

Speaker 2: 14:11

This is 2017, so this is like three years later right and yeah, yeah, yeah career advanced.

Speaker 2: 14:16

You know I was doing significantly better in my life at that time, right? Um, so uh. But so that that came up. And then it just so happened that at the same time, I was going and doing a lot of events on the side with friends, right Hackathons on the weekends and so forth and playing around on the blockchain, and one of the things that Brad Cam, who's one of the co-founders of Unsolved Movements, and I always came back to from a business perspective was tying reputation to blockchain addresses is a really kind of cool thing to do.

Speaker 2: 14:48

And remember I said regulation was one of the top three concerns and we were saying, well, if we had and this is also back then people were saying the worst part about crypto is if you send money, you can't get it back. There's no chargebacks, right. And so we were talking about if you had reputation added to you know crypto addresses on the public blockchain, then you would know who you sent it to and you could ask them to send it back if you needed to, and then that would also help decrease fraud and scams, which we thought that regulators would also be interested in on the blockchain, right. So, like you know, adding reputation data to blockchain addresses we thought was a market that no one else was addressing, and so we actually built projects with others that did exactly this. Like there were some Reddit clones back then where people would tip in crypto. It was like a big deal back then. People wanted to build like a Reddit, but with crypto, and every single one of those we ended up building a naming system for.

Speaker 2: 15:46

So you have to understand, I'm sitting here and I'm like collecting my list of problems in Web3, and one that always comes up is UX. And then on the other side, I'm like building hackathon projects on the weekends and I actually built a few exchanges right, like Dex's and so forth, with some friends. Again, I didn't want to do finance, but I was trying to see what was what we could do. And then we were doing reputation stuff. And then this connection was kind of made and it was like oh, if we make domains for blockchain addresses, we can make the UX 10 times better for people to send crypto to each other. It's a very easy pitch. It's like why do you need to have matcrypto, right?

Speaker 1: 16:19

Because if you have matcrypto, you don't have to remember your Bitcoin address or your theory address or your Litecoin address Super easy pitch. But doesn't that kind of go against the whole point of blockchain and all that, the decentralized nature of it all? Now you're centralizing yourself by creating a history of how you are and the way you're acting. It's the same as a possible public embarrassment of getting caught doing something illegal or bad or being rude to someone on Twitter and someone calls me out and says you know, jeff is a womanizing asshole. Look at these tweets like that. You know it would hurt my reputation, right. So you're bringing it's kind of contradictory, don't you think?

Speaker 2: 17:01

No, because you can still have privacy too, right. And so when we're thinking about making it easier for sending around cryptocurrency payments, and then we were also thinking about giving you the option to publicly display reputation data, like revealing who you're interacting with, and then we finally thought and if you wanted privacy, some of that data you could store off-chain. And if you look at unstoppable domains right now, as of today, when you go on profile that you set up for your crypto address.

Speaker 2: 17:31

You actually have checkboxes that say like, do you want this to be private data or do you want this to be public data? Right, and we give you a little warning. It's like hey, this is going to be public, so anyone can see it. And you have both options, so you actually can store private data and you can store public data. And then my final statement here is people are going to say, well, if you send any transaction on the blockchain, it's completely public, right, and as a technologist, I will tell you yes, it is today.

Speaker 2: 17:57

But privacy tools are coming for the blockchain in this decade, and tools are coming for the blockchain in this decade and it is technically possible to send transactions privately, even on chain, and there have been demo applications of this done. Brad has actually done a demo with sending Monero to a domain name, and Monero is a private cryptocurrency. So if you tie Monero to your unsolvable domains, you can actually send private money right now, and then that same technology that's being used there will be implemented on other chains. So someone's already implemented it on Ethereum, although it's clunky and nobody uses it. I believe that the same tech can be implemented on Bitcoin and we're going to get to privacy rights on the blockchain at some point. I mean, the EU is pretty strong about these things and I think we'll get there.

Speaker 1: 18:52

Okay, so going back knowing what you know about crypto and you're talking about blockchain and privacy we have, obviously, the new ETF that has come out a few months ago, which has made Bitcoin go wild. When these financial institutions are buying these giant blocks of Bitcoin, how does that look on the blockchain? And is it by the individual trade, or is it the individual owner of that ETF? Is it just the finance house, the auction house that looks like? Is the owner that owns and holds the Bitcoin, or do they have to give it to the individual and put it into a separate wallet for that person? Who's holding the Bitcoin? Do you know?

Speaker 2: 19:31

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 19:32

Is it in a ledger wallet, in a safe at Bank of America? What did they do with it? I mean, it could be trillions of dollars that could get heisted.

Speaker 2: 19:42

Well, so it depends on the ETF, right? Yeah, so Fidelity actually has their own wallet software. Everyone keeps them a multi-six, right.

Speaker 1: 19:51

Okay, so like Abby Johnson, CEO of Fidelity, you know like has.

Speaker 2: 19:56

Yeah absolutely.

Speaker 1: 19:57

You know where like, so they have individual wallets for each individual person.

Speaker 2: 20:02

No, no, no. So they so the ledger of so most, and I can't speak for all of them cause I don't run the ETS.

Speaker 1: 20:09

Yeah, of course.

Speaker 2: 20:10

Uh, all the trading happens off chain. So when you're trading on New York stock exchange, the ETF or whatever, or you're trading on Coinbase, or you're trading on finance or Kraken or anywhere else, it's all off chain. And then what they do is they just settle it up in a day between customer accounts, all off-chain, on-chain. All you see is the deposit address for Coinbase or the deposit address for Fidelity or the deposit address for BlackRock, and it's all stored in there cumulatively. There's actually some pretty cool ETFs.

Speaker 2: 20:39

I forget which one does this. I'm going to guess, and if I get it wrong I apologize. I think it's VanEck and VanEck, actually, and I could be wrong, but it's one of them and they publish customers own 1 billion in Bitcoin, right, and here's a link to our Bitcoin addresses with $1 billion in it, right, and so you can actually see how much money they have by going on chain and seeing that they hold the amount of money, unlike gold. Gold, like one of the biggest problems about the gold etf for people who are gold bugs out there. They're like, oh, you don't know if they actually have your gold. They could just be lying um for these etfs at least one of them, and you can check which one they actually publish every day, how much their customers own and then the blockchain address. We can go see how much they own right, yeah and you can verify those two things.

Speaker 2: 21:21

So it it is, in my opinion, a step above holding gold inside of an ETF, because you can verify that the custodian actually has as much as they say that they do.

Speaker 1: 21:31

Got it Okay. So let me ask you this how many extensions does Unstoppable Domains have today?

Speaker 2: 21:47

right um and and we expect that number to grow right. So if you come back and talk to me in a couple years, I wouldn't be surprised if we have over 100 um. We're seeing a lot of interest in branded extensions, so we most recently just launched up pudgy with pudgy penguins. We have blockchain with blockchaincom. We have several other branded TLD announcements coming up and that's been a huge focus for us. If you remember, back in 2011, 12, 13, I can't remember the last auction, a lot of brands bought their extensions but they actually have no idea how to use them, a lot of them being dropped or they're being just sitting there.

Speaker 2: 22:20

Right, exactly, and we think that this decade there's actually a consumer use case for brands, which makes more sense.

Speaker 1: 22:56

And so we think we're seeing a resurgence in brand TLDs and we're actually actively reaching out. So if you're a brand and you currently own a TLD and I can consumer or fintech, where it makes a lot of sense for you to consider the launch of your TLD now with a Web3 product focus, that hasn't made sense in the past decade. Now there's other companies, like Pool, that were selling that or talking about selling that service. You know, obviously you're offering that too, but what's stopping? You know, if it's fidelity? We were just talking about fidelity. So what's stopping you saying to them you need to get your fidelity extension and then fidelity goes and gets it with ICANN in the next round in three years and you've got them fidelity. What's stopping someone on Handshake doing it? Or maybe you know someone else in another namespace, someone on Handshake doing it, or maybe you know someone else in another namespace. Well, so yeah, and now it's like whack-a-mole for a large company like Fidelity saying you know what the hell?

Speaker 2: 23:33

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 23:34

So this is why we really like branded extensions, right? So I think it's going to be very easy for brands to be able to assert their intellectual property rights over these extensions, even in Web3. And there's going to be fake TLDs launched all the time. Fake TLDs have been around for a while now. I mean, there have been just fake ripoff TLDs. There's even a com on Bitcoin. Right now there's a Bitcoin-based. You just be aware People are going to make fake TLDs on-chain all the time.

Speaker 2: 24:08

Some of these people are not serious. They're just people who are they're trolls, software developers. I think the com one, for instance, was just a software developer who was playing around on Bitcoin and trying to see could he make an extension service Because he's not trying to actively market? Could he make an extension service Because he's not trying to actively market that right? So because he knows better. So there's going to be a whole bunch of these fake extensions, just like there are fake product handbags in New York when you go down and shop. That's just how it is. They're going to happen frequently in the blockchain space. That's just part of the business and sometimes, every now and then, you're going to run into some people who are going to try to cause some issues with that. But you know, the way to approach this is to disclose the collisions to customers that there are a possibility and that they could happen, and then try to inform applications as best as you can to make sure they're resolving the correct one, and then have apps acceptance be the thing that determines it, right. So in the case of unsolvable domains, we're already accepted in a thousand plus applications, right. And then any other knockoffs were currently resolved in like zero applications or maybe like five or 10. So that's going to hopefully be how it is.

Speaker 2: 25:21

Now, if we start having consumer harm, I think that that's when some of the regulators will kind of step down and then try to say you know, this is okay, this is not. But I think right now they're kind of letting the free market met things out to see you know what the results are. You know they don't want to step in too early to kind of say one thing or the other. Yeah, so that's. But I think brands are in a very good position. Like you know, you don't want to launch a com on the blockchain, right? Verisign would be very upset with you and I do think that they have recourse. And then there's the same thing here for fidelity right, or, and especially, for banks. You know, california, for instance, has special rules for what you can name things if you're a financial institution, right, and so there's like special protections for that because it's people's money, and I think that ultimately we're going to find out that, you know, the law feels the same way about that when it comes to wallet addresses for sending money around.

Speaker 1: 26:16

So and that's scary, though, is when, if you have collisions and you're using decisions and you're using an unstoppable domain as a wallet, and someone goes to send me money and it has a possibility of someone else creating a wallet for themselves and making themselves look like me and having the same domain as me, and then they could obviously pick that off, that's a legitimate concern, especially to the uneducated person like me, when it comes to Web3 domains.

Speaker 2: 26:50

Yeah, well, that would require apps to resolve it, right? And I think that any apps that are resolving are going to resolve what's seen in the market as being the one, as being, uh, like the one that people expect it to be, or or they're gonna, uh, have different options for people to be able to select where they're trying to send things to. So, uh, and just to be clear, we have not had a single reported incident of this happening yet, right?

Speaker 1: 27:23

so.

Speaker 2: 27:24

So, for all the fake copycat collision TLDs that have been created, we have not had a single customer report of interacting with an application that routed the payment to the wrong place, and so you know. If there is one, please let me know immediately, because that's the type of consumer harm that we would want to make sure that people are aware of so that we can add. You know we can advocate for it and help protect it. But we know we're out in the market telling people like, make sure you're resolving the right one, make sure you're telling the consumer where that thing is going, uh, and then have some ability for the consumer to check and make sure it's safe.

Speaker 2: 28:03

I'll give you another example here like inside of our APIs which are reading off of Web3, and this is where we encourage people who are Web2 companies if you want to start resolving domain names in your applications, go check out Unstoppable Domains APIs. We have safety features in them and what happens is, if you're reading off our APIs, we'll let you know things about that domain name, and I'll give you an example. It's like we're working on this right now and this is something that I don't have a release date for. But if we know that the address is owned by a squatter and not the brand, we throw that back in the API right.

Speaker 2: 28:39

And so you can imagine that when we talk to other applications in the space, the other big applications, the big exchanges, the Coinbases, the OpenSeas, these people in the world we say we have an API where we're doing the work for you to identify potential issues in the space for brand protection and brand safety and that can help you prevent customers from being scammed.

Speaker 1: 29:03

And this is also a.

Speaker 2: 29:04

Thing that I don't think domain people are thinking about, right, like you're used to doing brand protection and we're doing a lot of work in brand protection behind the scenes by the way, you'll see that over the next month, because we're taking it very seriously and you think about brand protection you're like oh, I don't want someone to build a website and pretend to be my brand, right, and what I'm telling you is you don't want someone to build a wallet and pretend to be your brand.

Speaker 1: 29:27

That's what I'm more concerned about Right.

Speaker 2: 29:29

Absolutely. And so you, um, we recently, uh, we recently signed partnerships with several big people in this space, uh, brand protection companies. Um, you may have noticed that we are now in global block, uh, uh, which is, you know, which is the brand safety alliance, and all the big players are in there GoDaddy, et cetera. So we're in there as of now. And then we're also working with Mark Monitor, we're working with several brand protection companies and we are providing additional services to these companies to help protect brands. And I'll give you another example Someone squats on your domain name, someone squats on your eth, right, so they go and register Coca-Colaeth.

Speaker 2: 30:06

This is a common problem, probably the number one in the business, that people come to me about. They say, matt, how can you help me? What we're doing is enriching our APIs so that when, if we get a notification from a brand that says, hey, that's not me, right, we throw that out in our APIs. So when OpenSea is reading that, right, when Coinbase is reading that, when anyone else is reading that, they get the information hey, this is not legit. So that way they can protect their customers, print them and be accepted. And this is the thing. When I go to the domain industry and, like you know, unstoppable domains and saying, hey, we're stepping in the domain industry, we want to do the right thing. This is one of the areas where we're actually focused right now. That, I think, is a really good thing for people to look at and kind of see what we're doing and how we're trying to help, and I think that's going to be a big thing. Like I said, pretending fake websites are bad, wait till you see fake wallets right, and that's what's coming.

Speaker 1: 30:53

That's really bad. So let's back up here before we keep talking about the fraudsters and squatters and people like that when we were talking about a little bit of collisions, right? So in three years um, I have a dot link sticker here, I'm an investor in dot link. In three years there's going to be another round for people to apply for more new gtlds. They're not new anymore, they're 10 years old, but they still call them the new gtlds and apply for more. So one of them that's probably going to be the most applied for will be dot crypto. You have dot. You have crypto right now at Unstoppable right. Are there other cryptos right now out there? I'm sure there's quite a few right In Web3.

Speaker 2: 31:36

I mean, I have not looked as of this date, but it wouldn't be surprising that there are. I mean, like I said earlier, Wannabe copycats. I mean I'm sure, yeah, the people are all over the place.

Speaker 1: 31:48

But let's pretend that another namespace I know ENS can't do it, they can only do eth. But let's just say they came out with their own crypto today and they are kind of considered legitimate as well, and they're pushing it Now. You have it kind of considered legitimate as well, and they're pushing it, now you have it. And then we go to the auction and let's say a private equity firm comes in with unlimited money, or Coinbase comes in and says we want Dark Crypto and they win it in the auction for a hundred million bucks. What happens then in that kind of a situation?

Speaker 2: 32:21

Well, we're not going to lose it, right? So it's an existential thing for unstoppable domains to make sure that we secure our TLDs and auction and we'll be willing to pay whatever price is necessary in order to secure our real estate in those. So I think that, like you know, let's see what happens in three or four years, but I feel pretty confident going in that we're going to either, you know, pick up all of those ourselves or work with partners to pick up all of those and make sure that we can continue forward offering those extensions. I will point out, if you look at what we're doing, we no longer launch generic TLDs like we used to. Right? So when we were out in 2019, there was no path to launching a new TLD for the crypto community inside of ICANN.

Speaker 2: 33:03

There was not even a scheduled date really for the next ICANN auctions and a piece of lore about Unstoppable that most people may not know. When we started out in 2018, we actually tried to acquire an existing GTLD and we found out they were too expensive. We went and talked around with people and they're like we want 500 grand for this and I said, well, my angel round was 180 grand, right. And then, not only that, the only ones that were existing that had nothing to do with crypto, so there was no path forward other than going out with our own extensions. At that point, and now that we're a little bit more mature and we kind of see how the market works, we understand that launching, launching generics we're going to be faced with a pretty hefty bill in the next auction and that's just something we're going to have to deal with. And fortunately, we've got reserves in order to go after those hard. And, if we have to, we'll go out and find those really aggressive private equity companies and work with them right, because we're going to be the ones who can extract the most value from those TLD extensions at the end of the day, especially if we continue on our growth path. So that's how we think about it and I'm also very interested in how the auction process will look right.

Speaker 2: 34:07

So you know there was a lot of competitive bidding in the last auction round in 2013. And a lot of people made out with a lot of money for just driving up prices. So you know that's going to be an area of concern for Unstoppable Domains. Like, we're going to want to make sure that the bidding process is a little more thought through. You might see how they auction spectrum. We think there's a couple of examples. Those auctions are pretty complex but you have to think through the game theory. But I will say that Unstoppable Domains will be coming to those auctions with the intention of running a TLD for an existing community. We're not coming there to just bid up prices for other people and I'll just let other people know, like who do you think is going to be able to make more value for those domain names? I think it's certainly us right and you know, if you're, if you, I mean some people would disagree.

Speaker 1: 34:51

They, you know. If GoDaddy says we want it and we could do a better job, you know, you just don't know. Or Coinbase wants it and they think they could do a better job, obviously you have the clientele and the people that are into this stuff all day and you've exemplified that over years of building your business to over 4 million registrations.

Speaker 2: 35:11

I'm optimistic. I also think there's a pretty high probability we can find someone in the space who goes. You know we could do this even better with Unstoppable than by ourselves. People are going to have a lot of things um to consider in that round and listen. The round's going to be competitive and we're aware before we go any further.

Speaker 1: 35:29

Um so, due to my recollection again almost 10 years ago here that, unless otherwise other I think there was different options for the auctions. But one of the options for an auction was everyone bid in the auction. So it could be 10 people and let's say Doc Crypto sold for 10 million bucks in the auction. The losers, based on the proportion of what they bid in the auction, would get that much money of the $10 million back.

Speaker 2: 35:58

So in essence, you would get paid to lose an auction I would love, I would love to be paid to lose that sounds. That sounds amazing right yeah, and there were.

Speaker 1: 36:06

There were people I'm not going to get into it that applied for a lot of extensions, but the application process was done prior to people knowing about how the auctions were going to work out, so people weren't didn't apply knowing it was going to be this way, but in a lot of ways it worked out well for especially the little or smaller guys that didn't have as much money.

Speaker 1: 36:26

And I think, going into it, there were a lot of people that obviously kept, you know, the um, their lips sealed, that they were even applying or only applied for one or two, and then others kind of revealed themselves as applying for like 30 of these or 50 or whatever it was, and then they started to almost create little like alliances and things like that not to bid each other up.

Speaker 1: 36:49

And again the game theory began and you know, I think the problem is is, if you do that again, you're obviously going to have people who are only going to apply and they're going to go for crypto, crypto and these others that are probably going to be your biggest dark coin, possibly. You know some of these others, and that's not the right thing to do it way to do it right. And then there's the discussion of if you're in the auction and you lose I heard this at I can was what if you still had to pay what you bid, even though you're a loser? And it's like, okay, well, who gets that money then? Does it just go to ICANN? Like that's insanity.

Speaker 2: 37:22

You know that doesn't make sense, I think this is probably the number one inside baseball thing about the next ICANN. Thing that hasn't been thought through is how they run the auctions. I think it's going to be massively important and, you know there's going to be all sorts of crying about how that's done.

Speaker 1: 37:43

And I can't think of a way that everybody's going to be happy with it, because if, if ICANN walks away with all of the money from the auctions, that's not really fair either, that they get the hundreds of millions of dollars that that generates, right, and I think they're still sitting on the 500 million from the applications from last time I've heard so, um, you know, so they're going to be getting another $500 million or more because the application fee, the guess it's not 100%. It's at like $250,000 or $300,000 a piece now, up from $180,000. And it's not in writing yet, but that was the gossip.

Speaker 2: 38:15

Yeah, and Unsolvable Demand is in an unfortunate strategic position because you can go on our website and you can look what TLDs we offer, right. So if you look at us that's why I was saying earlier we're really focused on branded right, on a going forward.

Speaker 1: 38:31

Yeah going forward.

Speaker 2: 38:32

And then, if you look at it, there is a branded TLD application process which we will be filing for right For the brands. And if you you know, if you, if you happen to be dot fidelity, please reach out Right, Because, like you know, I would just give you like that's a great one, Right, and that's the type of thing where you know this it's pretty well established who fidelity is, or dot BOFA, or dot PayPal, or any of these people who are established FinTechs or consumer brands that are interested in getting in. Like, we think there's a very clear path. I mean, you'd have to be crazy to try to contest one of those guys going into these auctions. And so that's where the business focus has shifted over the past three years.

Speaker 2: 39:08

And listen, when you run a business, you make the best decisions that you could at the time, and we're aware of oh wow, we're going to have to come to the auctions with a lot of money and that's fine. We'll do what we have to in order to make that happen and I think we're going to have a really attractive business, honestly. So the most valuable domains company in the world is GoDaddy and VeriSign. They're worth $15 and $20 billion respectively. You give us three years to get to the auctions, we might be there, and so we'll be able to be coming at the auctions just as hard as anybody else.

Speaker 1: 39:42

So let me ask you this question you mentioned earlier that VeriSign wouldn't be excited if you took com and you used it in a way onto the blockchain. But what's stopping like? You probably have met with the folks, joe Algana and Tess Diaz from ITcom. Why not be selling the subdomains and allowing people with their wallets on there and it attaches to you know, web3 there, where you probably don't fall under the ICANN rules why wouldn't you do that? Why wouldn't you do that now and make money and do this before these auctions and buy yourself, like you know, a good $5,000 crypto name?

Speaker 2: 40:22

I have a very strong opinion that consumers are not going to want subdomains and this is actually backed up by evidence and we have our number one competitor in the space has been trying to push subdomains for five years.

Speaker 2: 40:34

Five years they've been trying to put them and the adoption has been extremely low for usage. Whenever they've done subdomains they've given them away for free. Anyone who knows how tk works knows how that works out, right, you just get a bunch of registrations from people who are squatting and no value add, and people don't use them, right? So people do not want to be advertising somebody else's brand, especially if it makes it even longer for you to remember the person's address, like, would you rather have a five-digit name or a nine-digit name? Right, and because if you add the dot and then three more characters, you're there. So, yeah, I just think subdomains are not going to be very popular. And if you look on the internet, there's a couple of places where it's worked like uk, right. I look on the internet, there's a couple of places where it's worked like dot, uk, right, I think you know what I mean.

Speaker 1: 41:24

Like there's a couple of like like dot ukcom. Central nick was selling that and then dot uk came out. So now you have couk and now you have dot uk and now you have dot ukcom.

Speaker 2: 41:32

Yeah, I I just think that most consumers aren't going to want to have, uh, subdomains. The internet works that way too. Um, most businesses don't have a subdomain right and and you get a subdomains. The internet works that way too. Most businesses don't have a subdomain right and you get a subdomain. If you sign up for some of these site builders like Wix or Shopify or something like that. Everybody upgrades to, not a subdomain right. So, like you know, yeah, it's probably an okay user onboarding place to get people started, but everyone ends up upselling and so it's just when I talk to my team, I'm I have this actually posted in our corporate Slack. I have a note. It's like things we don't work on subdomains in that list, right? So, like I'm serious, it's up there. It's either number one or number two on the list. I think it's number one. Subdomains are something we don't work on subdomains because we do not believe it, and that's a personal product decision. Like I told you earlier, I developed my product sense and I was like, I have opinions about things.

Speaker 2: 42:22

I have opinions about that one.

Speaker 1: 42:24

I think it makes sense what you're saying Now. So you brought up tk that the adoption rate isn't high at all. Right, people are registering those for nefarious things. People aren't building businesses on them. Renewal rates are probably quite low. So I brought up 4 million registrations. I always felt that when I heard about Unstoppable Domains and some of these other Web3 companies that I just thought the majority of people buying them weren't even using them for wallets, that they were just hoping that they can flip them for a certain amount of money, especially knowing you don't have to carry a yearly renewal. So out of your 4 million or so names that you guys have registered on Stoppable, how many do you think are developed or actually in use?

Speaker 2: 43:05

right now, yeah, so we have to cut this up a couple of ways. So, first of all, most people register between five and seven domain names.

Speaker 1: 43:13

All right, Out of time.

Speaker 2: 43:16

Well, no, most people buy like one to be perfect, if I look at not most, but like the plurality. Someone comes through they buy one domain. They're like is this real Right? And they buy one then they, like you know, play with it, see if it works or whatever, and then they buy like another five or six, and that's typical, like if you start a new company or something or you want to set up your personal website, you.

Speaker 2: 43:37

So, first of all, so they take that 4 million number right, divide by, let's divide it by six, right, and so then you're going to end up with right at 700,000, right, and so of those 700,000 that you end up with, about one third of those end up configuring right, so, and that means that they're setting up 210,000.

Speaker 2: 44:01

Yeah, something like that. So remember, like out of so 700,000 is kind of closer to the number, total number of customers. Our total number of customers is right around 700,000. That's actually funny. We backed into that. It's less than a million now. So and then out of those less than a million customers we have, you know, 25 to 35% of them I would actually say it's closer to 30, is setting them up and configuring them to use in Web3. And then the others are parking right.

Speaker 2: 44:25

So like I don't think that's too bad, especially for, like a new product in a new category. I know a lot of people buy a domain name because they have an idea to do something with it and then they just say, oh wait, no, I don't want to do that, end up never putting the website up. So I think that's pretty common and we're happy with that usage and the use is actually much higher than you would think. So we have I'd have to check the number on configured domains and the number of configured domains is probably at a million. I know we just talked about active domains or whatever Configured total. I could go look I would bet it's at a million. And we have over 30 million requests per week per api for resolution right so so like now that's tiny for the internet.

Speaker 2: 45:08

The internet has 30 million requests a second I don't know what's not. It is ginormous, right. So, like. So we want to be like dns for money right, then, like, that number should be super high too. But 30 million is not nothing on a weekly basis to our APIs, and that growth has been pretty good. And then the other thing I'll point out is we just went through a massive two-year bear market, right.

Speaker 2: 45:29

So all the speculation in the 2021 bubble it kind of went into 2022, that popped. I think it popped right around February 2022. You can go back and look, but all that speculation on that bubble got drained out of the market. So people coming now are much more serious about what they're trying to do with these domain names than back then, and so we had speculative fever and we didn't know it at the time, but there was definitely that time period where it was rampant people coming in. But that has drained out and you can see the crypto market coming back now. So bitcoin's up 3x or something like that, but our registrations are actually growing at a more stable rate than what you're seeing for bitcoin.

Speaker 2: 46:11

So, like I think the market has finally broken off. Uh. Cryptocurrency speculation from web3 domain. Uh, right, I think, I think that that I think that some of that has been separated out over the past couple of years, because the two things are not the same.

Speaker 1: 46:27

So looking at your business and your business model and you're talking about hopefully getting and continuing to grow as a business and having the money that's similar to GoDaddy or some of these other major players and going into that auction. But when I look at your register, I want to register one of these domain names. You only have a one-time registration fee and I mean you might've done great during those highly speculative times and then you have these people that speculated and bought a lot of the good one, words and things like that and then they're gone. You know, the idea is, even if you were charging a buck a year, you at least could turn over some of the inventory and the good stuff, cause it's probably people that bought stuff from you that they forgot, if they even own it or can't even access it anymore. So, like what was behind the thinking of a one-time charge for life model time charge?

Speaker 2: 47:20

for life model yeah. So if you're gonna have, like, a business that really makes waves in the market, typically not good enough to just have new technology, right, like, having new technology is great, but what you want to have is a piece of new technology that also changes the pricing model, right. And if you have a combination of new technology plus new pricing model, that's when you really get disruptive. And if you look at what happened online, a lot of online services moved to being free or freemium right in the early 2000s and then that ended up just eating the lunch of all these.

Speaker 2: 47:53

And Salesforce is another great example, like the idea that you could buy sales team infrastructure seed at the time. It was very revolutionary at the time. It was very revolutionary at the time. So they had like a new software, saas plus a new pricing model. And so Ensemblejs did the same thing with this market. And when we looked at the revenue and I actually pulled up GoDaddy's filings I think I forget what it's called. It's like a. You know they have their quarterly filings. So I actually pulled them up and I looked and I said how much money are they making and where? And 60% of the revenue is services on domain. Maybe it's 50 to 60. And then 20% is domain inventory sales, like domain sales, and then 20% is marketplace. So majority of the revenue for the largest domains company in the world was not from the domain name registrations.

Speaker 1: 48:40

It's actually from selling Microsoft Word or a website Email and website builder and hosting and all the other jazz.

Speaker 2: 48:48

Exactly. So how do I want to disrupt the market? And I said well, you know, what is great for crypto and marketing and go-to-market strategy is no renewal fees. Very simple, straightforward value prop you can communicate to anyone on the planet no renewal fees for these domain names. And then the goal is to build a model where we can make money on services for those domains. And like what are the money on services that you can make for domain names? We're launching a wallet product. We already have a custody product for these domain names, security products, which I've been talking about with you. I saw it. Yeah, apis, branded domain name TLD management. So imagine we come to the next ICANN round and we are the registrar and technology provider for 100 plus brands for their Web3 strategy. And that's where I'm trying to make money. I'm not trying to make money on the renewal fees for these domain names. I'm trying to make money as, like, an infrastructure provider for Web3 enablement for the domain name industry broadly, and so I think that's the kind of long term vision that I have for the company.

Speaker 2: 49:56

And then, as a user, I just hate renewal fees. So, like on the consumer experience side, very early on it was like what's the thing that sucks the most about domain names and it was paying the annual fee. And if you took like a survey of people who have domains, like, what are the things you hate about domains the most? Like the stupid annual fee is probably top three on their list. And now we have removed that.

Speaker 2: 50:18

And then I've said this before but on a tech side, once you register the domain name on the blockchain, assuming that the consumer is self-custodying that asset, there's no more cost to me to provide that service, right? So, like my infrastructure cost is zero after the initial registration if you're self-customing that domain name. So I don't want to be charging you for something that doesn't cost me very much money. Now domain names get into ICANN. Icann has annual renewal fees of like 40 to 50 cents, like 25 cents plus whatever. So you know, if our domain names and we've told our customers this if our domain names are integrated into ICANN, there will be a yearly fee for the whatever the charge is to get that service onto your domain name, and so there's some things that might be there, but domain should be cheaper. You should not be paying $14 a year in order to just keep your space in line and hopefully I can sell you $100 a year in services on top of your domain name, and that's where I want to make the money.

Speaker 1: 51:21

So I'm trying to shift how the industry makes money, in addition to adding new technology, because I think that's going to be much more disruptive have you ever had the conversation with um like apple regarding safari or google regarding chrome or firefox, regarding apple regarding safari or google regarding chrome or firefox regarding their browser, and asking them to resolve some?

Speaker 2: 51:47

of your tlds. And what? What do they say? Yeah, so we've talked to um.

Speaker 1: 51:50

Well, I mean, I don't want to say all, there's like 100 browsers, but we talked to a lot of the main main ones, like if you pulled chrome, I understand that would legitimize a hundred percent your business and it would be that would legitimize 100% your business and it would be overnight and I think ICANN would be shocked. That would be a pretty major thing.

Speaker 2: 52:06

And everybody knows that. That's how com got in. Everybody knows that com paid. What was it Mindspring or whatever? What was it Netscape? Was it Netscape? I think it was Netscape. Everyone knows com gave Netscape 1% of their company back in 1992, or whatever it was, in order for them to resolve com in the browser, and that's how Netscape got in right. That's how com happened.

Speaker 1: 52:30

I didn't know that.

Speaker 2: 52:31

Oh, wow, yeah, that's how that works. So, like BearSign, that's how they got in. Business was by making those partnership agreements. So we think that's totally a viable path to, uh, global acceptance, acceptance for our web3 domain names, like we think it is. However, we also think that people are going to defer to I can't and um, and that's where they're going to stay, at least for the next three or four years, right, and they're not going to try to pick a market winner in this space. Now, some of the browsers that are smaller are willing to go ahead and resolve Web3 domain names.

Speaker 2: 53:07

So Opera Brave and Opera are too right, and so some browsers are willing to take that the big ones that are owned by the slower moving companies. We don't think they're going to make that move. I just think they're going to wait till after the next round of ICANN auctions. So Web3 domain names, in terms of global acceptance, are going to be on hold until the industry develops more. That's yeah, that's my. I mean, I would love it to be otherwise and you know we love those teams and think they do great work, you know, at Firebox and at Google Chrome and at Safari, but we're just not a priority. All those companies are doing right now is investing in AI. Everyone knows what's happening at Google Domains, and that's because the entire company's focus is on AI. I just think we're outside of the window of being important enough to care about in the domains industry, which is a blessing and a curse.

Speaker 1: 54:04

Do you think that if a company like Chrome that doesn't just cater to people like more tech, people who are more tech savvy like you or I, since it caters to the masses, allowing Web3 domain extensions on there with the possibility of collisions would potentially create more headaches for them than benefit? Do you think that's a possibility when they look at it?

Speaker 2: 54:29

I don't think that's their consideration at all. No, yeah, no. First of all, I think their primary consideration is they just don't care enough about the market, right yeah?

Speaker 1: 54:39

But do you think they're going to make more money by adding you? That's another question. Does it really benefit their business?

Speaker 2: 54:44

I don't think that well. So you're talking about business. I mean, google is just a very strange case, so it's easy to talk about. They don't care about a business unless it can do a hundred million a year sorry, a hundred billion a year in revenue no-transcript.

Speaker 1: 55:31

And then you have some of these other major players. Yeah, I think they're probably all probably thinking the same thing. So let me ask you this. I'm a domain broker. I need to ask a selfish question here. You know, from time to time we do have people that have asked us about some of your names. How the hell do we contact the registrants?

Speaker 2: 55:50

Ah, great question. So there's a. Well, there's a couple of things right. So if it's a brand through brand protection, right Then, like we're, that's where we're spending most of our effort in order to try to place right. So if it's a brand looking for brand protection and they want to contact a registrant, I would advise them to go through our like, like our brands program and that's linked on our website, and then we actually go through the effort of trying to track down the owner in the cases where we can. For just you're trying to register a domain in general, expect to see that contact information displayed more prominently on marketplaces over the next year or two, and I'll tell you it's because the people who own them currently actually want the exposure, and so it's just right.

Speaker 2: 56:41

Now there's not good marketplaces for Web3 domain names. We're trying to change that this year and we're talking to all the major marketplace players and we're also providing more information inside of our metadata on our APIs, and so, for instance, in our metadata and our APIs, we now display registration price right, so like, just as an and like we're looking to display registrant contact information too, right, and so, like we have to check the price. We have to re-ask our users to enter in their information so that they can consent to having it publicly displayed, right? But we want to surface that. So, basically, who is for Web3, we do think that we will. We do think that we will get there.

Speaker 1: 57:21

But there isn't a like. I can't just search a domain name, click a button and then I just put in my own email address and a message and it sends them that that doesn't exist.

Speaker 2: 57:30

So what we? It does not, because these things do not come default enabled with an email address, but we recently default enabled them with a messaging inbox. So we actually attached a web free messaging service to the domain names. Again, we're thinking about these as consumer endpoints, so like if you buy a domain name and then people send you crypto, they probably want to be able to message you right to talk about the crypto. They're just like hey, I just sent you the money, did you get it right? So 100 of our domain names, when you configure them, come with a messaging service right so like we actually have messaging built in.

Speaker 2: 58:01

Um, I think messaging is going to be how you contact people, as opposed to email for web3, because it's much more consumer product. Like, a lot of consumers don't even check email anymore, like gen z, they just don't even look at their email inbox. If it's not work, uh, and so you know, you've got to hit them up where the message displays in one of their messaging apps right on their phone, and so messaging, I think, is probably going to happen. Messaging and marketplaces so the combination of marketplace features, messaging and then getting our users to include their opt into having their contact information displayed on their listings and then in our API, are areas we're trying to make that better.

Speaker 2: 58:37

But I know that's bad right now or areas.

Speaker 1: 58:41

We're trying to make that better, but I know that's bad right now. And then when I worked at Uniregistry with Registrar we had millions of names there there was a gentleman that handled abuse and before I worked for Uniregistry I never really realized how much abuse there really is.

Speaker 1: 58:54

So you would see, we would have law enforcement calling, we would have whatever, some really gnarly stuff that people put up and we would take it down all the above. He would go through this every day and I wouldn't want his job. So when there is an abuse call from somebody saying there's something, whether it's a trademark infringement or illegal activity, or someone asking you about whose wallet is this right, it's on this name what do you do and how does that work?

Speaker 2: 59:23

So we have a pretty complex abuse system right now, right.

Speaker 2: 59:27

So, we're plugged in. If someone registers in abusivecom, we're inside of that system now. So we get the email that says like hey, this is abuse, need to take this thing down right. So we're already set up. We're set up to be a registrar, you know, pending a few things. So we have those systems in place. For the typical like dot com type stuff Abuse takedowns. We're integrating that into our system. Right now we have the ability for brands to flag things as abuse, like I was talking about earlier that we're hoping to expand out through our APIs so that we'll also be able to flag them when people go to those websites. So that's not a takedown, but that is a flag on those domain names and then on our support team they actually have abuse email reporting and so those things come into the support team, they get manually reviewed and then the support team flags something as abuse and we actually had one this morning. So I just talked about this.

Speaker 1: 1:00:23

So it's every day right.

Speaker 2: 1:00:24

So every day there's abuse and it came up on the standup and you know we had to decide how we're going to handle this and we basically flag them internally, email the owner, say, hey, can you respond to this abuse claim? And then you know it's on, it's been, we'll. We'll basically put it into a pause state while we hear back from the owner, right, and then we resolve it like you would typically do it with ICANN.

Speaker 2: 1:00:47

So we're trying to replicate as many of the processes as we can. The biggest difference with Web3 is that someone buys a domain name and puts it in their wallet and then runs away with it Right now in the system because they're not ICANN compliant. There's nothing we can do about that, but once we move the domain names to be ICANN compliant, we will have systems in place in order to make sure that we can trace those out for individuals.

Speaker 1: 1:01:12

So you'll be ready to. So technically you can't take those names down.

Speaker 2: 1:01:19

So we do take them. What do you mean by take down? So we do take them. What do you mean by take down? So we do take them down from our APIs and we do take them down from resolution inside of our libraries. Now the record of that blockchain existing on chain will be there, but that's also a thing that could change in the future. So if some of these things want to upgrade into ICANN compliance, then those extensions on a per TLD basis that are integrated into ICANN will follow ICANN rules for takedowns.

Speaker 1: 1:01:49

And so.

Speaker 2: 1:01:49

Ensaful Domains has always been very clear about this. We will follow all regulations in the jurisdictions in which we reside. You know we're a United States-based company and, yes, ensaful Domains still has, you know, complete control over our suite of smart contracts and we do upgrades so and some of our legacy stuff is locked right and then when we upgrade our contracts, we make we make changes on the rule set. That's happening and right now we're in the process of adding upgrades for com domains, because we have com domains names on our site right now and com has a different set of rules and so when we tokenize com domain names on chain, they will be 100% I can't comply. So we have a registry system, we're adding com TLD.

Speaker 2: 1:02:33

That TLD will have a different set of rules than what we have for x, .888, eth, right. So it's going to have its own rule set and that will include for com, and no one should be surprised. You can, that on-chain domain name for com will 100% be revocable, right.

Speaker 1: 1:02:50

Got it.

Speaker 2: 1:02:51

So people who think that just because something is on-chain does not mean it. You can have on-chain systems that follow 100% of all the regulatory rules. And yeah, just another example in the space is Circle. They have USDC coin.

Speaker 2: 1:03:05

And inside of Circle smart contracts for USDC coin. They have an administrative pause function. So if someone sends USDC coin to a terrorist group they can pause it right and that's to follow the money laundering and other terrorists you know. So same exact, very similar concept here is going to be applied by a subtle domains, forcom, and then any web free registries that we work sorry, web two registries that we work with to be on chain 100% compliant.

Speaker 2: 1:03:31

That's what I'm trying to say there's this misperception in the industry that because you put something on chain, it can't be compliant, and that is wrong.

Speaker 1: 1:03:47

And we're going to make sure that whatever we make will be 100% compliant on chain. And then one of my last questions I have for you what really separates you from the ENS guys? I know they just have eth and that's it. So what else other than more selection and I believe they can only do wallet with Ethereum, but you offer money, different currencies, with your wallet. What are some of the other things that you offer?

Speaker 2: 1:04:06

Yeah, so I mean, they're one of our competitors in the space. They have a lot of support from the Ethereum community and the Ethereum Foundation itself, which has been very helpful for them. Like we've both been innovating, so ensemble domains was the first one to do multi-chain. It's like supporting all the different, like dot, you know, sorry, supporting bitcoin and and litecoin and ethereum and solana all to the same address, right? Um, we were.

Speaker 2: 1:04:30

We moved to a cheaper blockchain, so we're on a it, an L they call themselves a layer two and that means that our transactions are much, much cheaper. So if you try to register a e domain name, you may pay $50 in gas costs, plus the $5 for the gas for the registration itself. So you're paying, you know, 10 times more. And for us, we actually cover the gas fees for the registration of ours because we moved to a cheaper blockchain. Us, we actually cover the gas fees for the registration of ours because we moved to a cheaper blockchain.

Speaker 2: 1:04:56

I think we're also currently in more applications on the long tail, so we have like over a thousand plus integrations. They have fewer, but they are in some of the larger Ethereum based applications, but as some of these other blockchains become more important this year. You know we're continuing to grow, so it's just kind of like a different strategy for go-to-market and growth. And let me think if there's anything else. Oh, and this is probably a big one, eth does not have a path to integrating with ICANN because it's a reserved geographic domain name for Ethiopia, right, and so there is no path forward for eth to get acceptance into the global namespace community.

Speaker 2: 1:05:41

So eth uh, and I think Nick Johnson's even posted about this they're going to remain a uh username system for web three, whereas unstoppable domains is pursuing aggressively giving um, I, I can integration over the next five plus years for our plus years for the TLDs that can be compatible. So that's maybe another big one for domainers. It's like e does not have a path forward in the next UTLT auction round to resolve in Chrome browsers and crypto does right, and so I think that's a pretty big differentiator there for us.

Speaker 1: 1:06:17

So yeah, do you think that the ENS guys can can go and lobby Ethiopia for them to then Ethiopia to say we want to start using our extension now or they don't allow three letter. Do they not allow? I think they don't. Do they not allow three letter country code? Is that why I think they don't do they? Not allow three letter country code. Is that why I?

Speaker 2: 1:06:36

think it's been deprecated, but I mean absolutely. I think that community has like a 10 year plus path, right, If they were to get started today and move in that direction. But the leadership over there has said that they're not interested, right? So they don't think it's a necessary step for them and we just take a different take. We, you know, we basically decided hey, we do need to work with ICANN and move these forward.

Speaker 2: 1:06:59

So you can see, on our website, like we now clearly delineate. These are web three only. You know, .888, x go because they are outside of the what's going to be acceptable in the next GTLT round. And then you know around and then dot crypto and the others that we think are going to make it.

Speaker 1: 1:07:16

Absolutely so. What else are you guys working on? These days? Sounds like you got a lot of stuff, but are there any other bells and whistles that you'd like to tell our listeners about? And about more about your company, rather than me hammering you with questions?

Speaker 2: 1:07:28

Yeah. What's different about Web3 for our domainers? Maybe so yeah, wallets is different, the types of domains that people want to register are going to be different, the way that marketplaces are going to work for domain names in the future is going to be different and I think, lending is going to be different. So, for people who love domains and you want to stay on the cutting edge of domains, those are the things that clue in with Web3. I mean, those four areas I think are going to transform the industry over the next five to 10 years.

Speaker 1: 1:08:00

So let's talk about briefly. You brought up not just use of wallets, but you also brought up game name tags, right, and that's something that people definitely keep throughout there. I mean, I still when I log into my PlayStation I have mine from when I was a kid. I'm not going to tell people what my name was, but you know that's like my username on different accounts and I think as gaming gets more and more popular part of fabric of society, you know that name becomes important. So that's one thing right. What else is there?

Speaker 2: 1:08:28

Yeah. So all right, let's dive in. So, first of all, I think let's just tackle, let's just take it from the top. So wallets I think, first of all, when you check out with a domain name in the future, like when you check out right now, most people add a website right. They're like I want a Wix to go with my, with my web, with my domain purchase and what we're saying at Unstoppable Domains.

Speaker 2: 1:08:49

When you check out in the future, there's going to be a good portion of people. There's going to be a good portion of people and it may be 90% of people buying a domain name who are going to want to add a wallet. And why do I say it's going to be 90%? It's because there are 500 million people using crypto right now. That number has grown 10x in the past five years and if it grows 10x again over the next 10 years, that means we're going to have 5 billion people using crypto wallets. Every single one of those wallets is going to want to have a domain name to make it easier to receive cryptocurrency. And so that means, if I'm right, and we're really going to have 5 billion consumers who are going to want to own a domain name for their wallet. That's going to 10x the size of the industry, and that also means that in the future, 90% of all registrations for domain names are not going to be for businesses, and this is the thing that domainers need to think about, like you need to think about this. Is you know? Is this guy potentially right that 90% of domain name registrations in the future could be consumer instead of business, right?

Speaker 2: 1:09:48

So what does that change? Well, that changes the game for registrars, because if 90% of people checking out are no longer buying a website, they're buying a wallet. They need to start working ASAP with unstoppable domains right To get a wallet product, because we have one and we have a buy API and you can buy it from us and we can make it super easy for you to integrate that into your product. So that changed the whole checkout experience, because most people are buying domains for wallet addresses as opposed to being a business, so there's a different type of products that's going to be sold when you check out.

Speaker 2: 1:10:15

What else does that change? The type of domain that you register you just mentioned. You have a username that you use on Xbox, or maybe use it on steam or whatever. That looks a lot different than a domain name for a business. When I'm registering a domain name for a business I want to have, like Decatur pizzacom, because people who are shopping for pizza in Decatur. I want to be able to target those people to get them to my website. But if you want to have a domain name for your personal identity online, when you're on your social apps, on social media, inside of games and people sending you money that looks like I don't know if I like it your name's like Twinkie the Kid.

Speaker 2: 1:10:54

Yeah, yeah know, I don't know if I like your name's like twinkie the kid, yeah, yeah yeah, it's like, and it's also like, uh, you know, uh, the I might go with like gold bond 007, right, because my last name's ghoul, right. And and that also looks very different because you know, if you look on gamer tags, people use alphanumeric, right. And if you talk to a domainer right now and you say, are alphanumeric domains worth anything? Most of them like, if I tell you I, and you say, are alphanumeric domains worth anything? If I tell you I have an eight-character-plus alphanumeric domain name, I want you to broker it for me for sale. You would say it's worth zero, I'm not going to broker it.

Speaker 1: 1:11:27

Probably not.

Speaker 2: 1:11:28

I wouldn't really be that interested in it Exactly, but some of these famous YouTubers have handles that are eight characters that are alphanumeric, and how much do you think you know? How much is that worth brokering? That might actually be worth something. Yeah, and so you're going to have a lot of unused real estate that exists right now in domain land. It's all of a sudden going to become useful, right.

Speaker 1: 1:11:50

I think the thing is, though, when you get down to the consumer, it's hard to get a premium out of them. Is that, when you get down to the consumer, it's hard to get a premium out of them, you know, and it's hard to get them to pay, like what you're asking for on your, on your, on your unstoppable domains, is is reasonable. Yeah, once you start getting into the thousands of dollars and that's where you know a um domainer is making their margins they got to be selling names for at least a thousand bucks. Well, and then it doesn't work, I think think you're wrong.

Speaker 2: 1:12:16

We have sold domain names to customers for six-figure sums that are their representations online and there's so many more registrations, right, like, if I'm I mean I'm not saying there's, I mean this is the thing that I'm saying that is ridiculous, right, like, that is really out there is that we're going to have 3 billion new registrations. So you know, like 3 billion plus, like we're going to 10 exercise in the market. So I think, if we're going to have 3 billion plus registrations, there's going to be somebody who wants to have the number one, two, three, dot, whatever, and they're going to be willing to pay a million dollars for that because you know, know, people pay a million dollars for that license plate. Oh, I agree, definitely, yeah, and I think, and I think that, because the volume is going to be so high, you're going to have more of those than you think. So there may be less for consumers, but there's so many more consumers, if that makes sense.

Speaker 1: 1:13:09

Um, because, yeah, that's, that would be my counter to that so, with your, with your connections in the crypto community and your knowledge from the crypto, which you've obviously exemplified here. And talking about your past, have you ever considered tokenizing unstoppable domains?

Speaker 2: 1:13:25

Absolutely, Absolutely. And the thing is, when I started the business, I actually said I think we're going to have regulatory clarity within five years, Right, and then it's going to be very easy for me to make that decision. It's been six years and we still have nothing, Right. So you know our advice. Our advice has always been like just play the long game, Right.

Speaker 2: 1:13:50

So like, however long it takes, we'll play the long game and then if you see what coinbase is doing, I think you know that's probably you know leadership in the space right now for how you go about it and you'll recognize that coinbase is ipo. But they also have a blockchain, now called base chain. Maybe you're not aware and that's okay.

Speaker 2: 1:14:11

Well, they actually have their own blockchain now and it seems pretty clear to me that there's a path towards tokenization for Coinbase using this model. And we're lucky in Unstoppable Domains because Coinbase was started in 2013. We were officially founded in 2018. So Coinbase is five years ahead of us on this path and we can watch how they're going with it, right? So, in terms of like, when Unstoppable Domains would be looking at something like after coinbase goes through it and gets all the regulatory clarity done, you know, and coinbase tokenizes, which I think is inevitable at some point in the future.

Speaker 2: 1:14:41

Maybe I'm wrong 90 chance, right? Um, that'll give a really good example of how to build your business. And the other thing is, if you tokenize too early and you and you create the incentive structure that's incorrect for your business, then then you can get stuck right and you can have, like a bad design, the wrong economic incentives, and then you also have regulatory problems. So we thought about it a lot. There's a lot of interesting ways to do it. We continue to think about it. You know. We consistently check in and say like it's now the time, what's the right design, and I'll tell you that the thinking around it has changed probably every six months for the past six years and it's gotten better. So you know, as we think about how we might roll something like that out, but yeah, not in a rush to do it.

Speaker 2: 1:15:25

you know no plans to do, no plans to do a token out of today, but constantly researching it and you know, I think it could be very interesting for a lot of reasons. So, and I can't, you know, as far as I would want to do it in a way that would help the development of the industry, right so, and it would be legally compliant, and I think that that is possible. But no rush to get there. There's plenty of things to build between now and then.

Speaker 1: 1:15:52

Got it.

Speaker 2: 1:16:01

All right.

Speaker 2: 1:16:01

So now let's talk quick about lending, and we can, we'll wrap this baby up.

Speaker 2: 1:16:03

Lending yeah, this one's actually pretty easy, but might not be obvious is we're in the digital real estate business, right, and there is no mortgage lender, right, and I think the reason why there's no mortgage lender for digital real estate is that we don't have really good marketplaces and settlement right, which causes too much friction.

Speaker 2: 1:16:20

So, like, when you're trying to buy and sell something, you're a domain broker yourself, it can be a lot of hassle to kind of get these things closed. We move everything on chain for marketplaces, settlement transfer, verified ownership then I think we're going to be in a much better position for lenders to come in and provide more liquidity to the domain name industry, and I think we're seeing that growth and so Unstoppable Domains is in a really neat place, because we are at the intersection of the crypto industry and the domain name industry, and if you know anything about crypto, they're really good about finance right and so we think there's a very good path for us to help bring liquidity into the domain name industry through lending over the next let's call it two years and you'll see us start experimenting with that in the future.

Speaker 1: 1:17:05

And just so people know the numbers.

Speaker 2: 1:17:07

Nft Finance, which is a brand new industry didn't exist three years ago has grown from a less than $10 million a year business three years ago to they did over 100, sorry, they did over 1 billion in originations in 2023. And I suspect they will do over 10 billion originations in 2024. Now, that's aggressive. Maybe they only do five, but I'm telling you the market is growing really fast for on-chain lending.

Speaker 1: 1:17:32

What's the name of the company?

Speaker 2: 1:17:33

Oh no, there's not just one.

Speaker 1: 1:17:35

There's a whole segment of the whole sector.

Speaker 2: 1:17:37

Nft finance is like the sector, growing super fast. My only comparable here would be if you go look at stable points, you know there was a there was in the last cycle before 2021, less than there's only a couple of billion of stable points and then all of a sudden you saw it grow to over 100 billion stable points in like three years and I think that NFT finance may be that for this cycle. So we could see that inflection of sub-billion dollars in lending. Now lending is different than stable coins. The notional value of loans is significantly higher than the actual refinancing, but I think you could see a huge, tremendous volume growth in lending on-chain over the next three years, which I think might catch people off guard and we want to bring that to the domain industry right. So that's one of the things that we are actively researching and we're going to try to put all the things in place so that we can do that in a compliant manner.

Speaker 1: 1:18:31

Got it. So when I worked at Uniregistry, part of that was representing Frank Schilling's portfolio of 350,000 names. So in essence we created a payment plan system and he was the lender right and because he owned the names outright and because we collected the payments and held the name, you know, and the risks weren't very high. The biggest, the biggest problem was is that on these smaller deals where you would say you can start using a name for you know, little to no money down, meaning like a hundred bucks or two hundred dollars a month or something like that, very similar to you see in the checkouts, like buy this t-shirt today from a firm for three dollars a month, um, we would find that after the, the default rates on the lower end names were almost 50 percent. You know these people would make two or three payments and then that dream they had or whatever it was, there would be a very small company like I'm just example atlantatowingcom would be some guy that got told at the bar that he needed to get a towing name for his business and so he got that and didn't do shit with it for three months and then he just lets it go. You know there are lenders in this business, one being Domain Capital. But you know, I think that they.

Speaker 1: 1:19:52

I think the problem is on a lot of these lower valued names. It's very hard for a lender who ends up holding the bag to get their money back in a reasonable amount of time. And I can sit here and I can say Atlanta Towing is a $5,000 name or $7,000 name, but you might wait three years to get your money back versus other places, and if you liquidate it in an auction, like on NameJetter, at GoDaddy or Expirey Auction or whatever, that name's going to sell for $150 or $200. It's not like selling cars where you know what you're going to get and you can base it. I mean, these people are going to really take some baths on that. So how do you see that working?

Speaker 2: 1:20:35

Well, a couple of things. My research that I've done is basically, if you're in the under $50,000 domain name value market, it's very hard to get liquidity. I think we can agree. When I was doing it, I actually think it's a very big opportunity for someone like usolvable Domains, because what we're going to do is automate it, so it's basically a click-through flow for being able to lend out your domain names, collect payments and then also repossess them.

Speaker 2: 1:21:07

And so my basic theory is the transaction cost is too high for giving the domain back and all this other kind of stuff for giving the domain back and all that kind of stuff. And so if we can just bring that transaction cost down to essentially like 20 bucks, then all of a sudden I think it makes sense. And so what you're describing to me is like oh, I have to talk to the guy and then he would rent the domain for three months and then he would default. I view that in the future as a marketplace feature click, click, click. I'm now renting this thing. If I miss a payment, boom, it gets automatically revoked and sent back to the other guy. Like that's how I view the future of this happening.

Speaker 1: 1:21:40

But you're not thinking of some bank coming in and paying that seller the purchase price when they put it up. That's not what you're thinking about. You're thinking you're paying this guy as the money comes in, right?

Speaker 2: 1:21:51

Well, so there's a couple of things here, right, that you were talking about, essentially lease to own, I think.

Speaker 1: 1:21:57

Yeah, anywhere.

Speaker 2: 1:21:58

So that's one of those things is lease to own. But then there's also a market around like just straight up borrow, and I think that that market can also be satisfied by reducing the transaction costs I really do and also a little bit more legwork on automated appraisals, which you'll see us do as well.

Speaker 2: 1:22:22

So I think the appraisal business is not great right now in domain names and everyone knows that If you try to do automated appraisals on domains with a hundred names, like a lot of the prices would be different than what you know no-transcript, like a lot of the prices would be different than what someone more experienced would give you. And then that combined with the transaction costs of making these things work. So I think if we can bring the transaction costs way down, it's super simple. So that'll make it easier for us to experiment on lending. And then we will be working vigorously on automated appraisal, valuation and other ways to kind of get like a cash price for these. That'll make it easier for people to take loans Exactly what you're talking about. So, yeah, I do think that people will eventually lend money against domain names once they feel more stable about the valuations in the market and the time to sell.

Speaker 1: 1:23:10

Yeah, I mean, hey, the credit card companies have made it work for years without securing anything really except for your credit. So, yeah, there's definitely a possibility there. Um, that's interesting, you know, I mean for me and and as a business and a business owner and a broker, and and seeing all these different ways of handling it where we've had buyers go to domain capital and borrow money to buy the name. We have, you know, deals that are in escrowcom or with other escrow companies, that our payment plans are happening, and you know it, it makes sense, and a lot of the times people have nothing but the best intentions to use the name and go out there and make a business happen and sometimes it just doesn't work out, or you know, um, or it does and they keep paying. So, you know, I think it's great and when I first got in the business, payment plans were kind of frowned upon and they're like people always groaned and you'd always have to ask do you want to do a payment plan? They can pay you what you want, but you have to wait two years while they pay you and they'd be like, oh, I don't do that, you know. But now people are a lot more open to that, and it's a setting that is available on different marketplaces so cool. Well, I think that covers everything.

Speaker 1: 1:24:17

Today I've learned a ton about your business and I think a lot differently than I did after talking to you in Puerto Rico and now today, and it's been great to get to know you better, and I hope that people listen to all of this and hear about how invested you are in this, because one of the things I said to other people was what's the guarantee that these extensions around 10 years from now, if I were to build a business on it or use it regularly or spend a material amount of money on a name, and people just say I don't know?

Speaker 1: 1:24:47

But now, obviously you're in this for the long haul. You have big plans. You know you're investing your life and your time into this. You're obviously very passionate and you're public about it. I think those are all things that people were hesitant about before meeting you. Right, and hopefully at least hearing this and they haven't met you in person that they can come into this more of an open mind if they have some extra money to invest in these extensions and see what you can do with it. I think it's a pretty exciting thing.

Speaker 2: 1:25:13

So thank you.

Speaker 2: 1:25:16

I appreciate that and I know that what we're doing is new and different, carries a lot of risks. We can't offer any guarantees around things or where they're going in the future, especially with the TLDs, but I do think that our thesis around what's going to happen in the domain industry is going to come true. I think people will use domains as wallets. I think that the types of domain real estate that people use as a consumer is going to be different. I think that you're going to have much better on-chain marketplaces and lending in the future and all these things are just huge opportunities for the industry because it would grow the industry to be at least 10 times larger and that's like a very strange thing to say Like the market's going to be 10 times larger and that's like a very strange thing to say like a market's going to be 10 times larger and that's really hard for domains people to get because it's been the same industry for 30 years and now, all of a sudden, you know if consumers come in here and honestly, as a domains industry, we should encourage it, right. So I'm talking to registries right now and I'm talking to registrars right now. I'm like guys, you should tell consumers they want to use domains as crypto wallet addresses, right, you should be telling them that, the same way that you market, like, if you go to any of these big registrars, like, get a website and launch your brand and launch your small business or whatever, you know it's going to take people in the industry to start telling people, hey, you know, get a domain name and connect your crypto wallet to it, and the domain industry can actually be one of the points of entry for people to start getting into digital currency, right, and getting on chain. And, you know, instead of seeing this as a potential threat to the industry, let's figure out our differences and, and, you know, let's talk to each other, let's start having conversations, let's try to resolve the conflicts where possible and then, you know, let's look at the opportunity together and, and, like, I think it's's pretty big.

Speaker 2: 1:26:55

So that'd be my message to people out in the domains world um, and we're open for business and would love to talk to you and we're very open-minded and we've already pivoted our business model several times. Like you heard us on, you heard me on this thing. It's like we originally went web three only now we definitely want to integrate with web two. We're committed there. Um, we we were. We're want to be 100 compliant on the TLDs. Now We've made some huge pivots in the business because we're here to make it successful and we're pretty pragmatic about that.

Speaker 1: 1:27:24

How many people work for you now.

Speaker 2: 1:27:27

We're in the 37. You're a real company.

Speaker 1: 1:27:34

40 people is a lot of people to be working at a company. That's a lot of payroll every month. It's a lot of investment. It's a lot of different departments and people doing a lot of work. That's great.

Speaker 2: 1:27:43

Yeah, and I think we're the. I think that the team is the best in the business when it comes to Web3 domains. We have some really talented individuals. They're really putting in hard work just across the whole spectrum, right. So we've got the whole thing and we're full press on this over the next couple years and we know the domain industry is a, you know, long-term business and we have the ability to see it through long term and I think I love it. I love being in a niche industry. They're like why domain names you know that's so much more boring compared to launching a crypto exchange or whatever and like I've always believed that the riches are in the niches, right.

Speaker 1: 1:28:18

They are.

Speaker 2: 1:28:18

And you want to be. You know, I always remember the stories like the garbage collection company, waste Management or whatever they're like a $20 billion company because no one wants to do garbage collection right.

Speaker 1: 1:28:29

It's not glamorous.

Speaker 2: 1:28:30

Right, exactly, and the domains industry has that same thing, where it's not glamorous to be in the domains industry but everyone's ignoring this thing, and I think there's a big change here that's going to grow the industry substantially. So, you know, that's why I love showing up to work and working on crypto domains, as opposed to working on crypto DeFi exchange something crazy, because that world is nuts, like the crypto industry is absolutely. It moves so fast. It changes every 30 days or something completely new. We just consistently work on domain names over time and we can invest here for a 10 year period. That's much better.

Speaker 2: 1:29:05

Maybe I'm just old I turned 40, right, I've got a kid now. So, like, maybe it's just me. Getting old is the biggest change. But, honestly, like, I love this business compared to anything else that I could be doing, and I think it's the best business for me to be working on inside of crypto and I'm here to learn more about the domain industry and bring, as an outsider, some of this new tech here, because I think it's going to help grow the opportunity space for everybody.

Speaker 1: 1:29:31

Sounds great. Thanks again. I appreciate your time. I'm sure everyone else will too, and good luck, thank you sir.