Brad Kam on Unstoppable Domains’ blockchain domain names

0:00I'm Ashlyn Addison from event chain for investmentpitch media and FinTech news network and today on blockchain interviews we have Brad kam the co-founder and head of business development for unstoppable domains Brad thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show it's a pleasure to have you here today thanks so much for having me you're very welcome I'm very excited to

0:19dive deep into unstoppable domains creating blockchain domain names I think the best way to start off the conversation would be answering what is the difference between a regular domain name and a blockchain domain name and what makes blockchain so important in this sense sure so a blockchain domain name is part of a smart contract on a public blockchain and each domain name

0:44is NFT like a RC 7:21 token similar like crypto kiddies or gods Unchained or any of those if you're familiar so the domains are stored by you inside of your wallet your etherium wallet a traditional domain name is part of a centralized system called dns and you are required to have a registrar company like GoDaddy storing the domain for you so the biggest difference is custody

1:11very similar to you know Bitcoin versus US dollars in the bank okay quick start by you bank is your custodian very interesting and are there a lot of problems with the current domain system having these registrar's holding the domains for you yeah yeah I mean in the u.s. you know I think it's you know not as bad as in in other parts of the world the u.s. is you know you know generally

1:35speaking a very good protector of free speech but around the world there's all kinds of problems so when the Catalonian independence movement was pushing for boats and things like that they were using a registry called cat and the dock cat registry was rated by the spanish police and taken down as part of this and the CTO is still on trial for sedition today Wow

2:00so at Europe crazy so the the goal of putting your domain on the blockchain essentially is to take control back to it of the domain yourself and you know there's this aim uncensor below mains you know does this essentially you can put up whatever you'd like in free speech and and nobody can take down that domain yeah so the domain is stored by you with your

2:27private key so it means it has the essentially the same control as you do over your aetherium or your your other cryptocurrency when you're storing it yourself and then the websites are put on IP FS or other peer-to-peer storage networks instead of on Amazon Web Services or something like that and so the net effect is is that instead of just having my website being stored by

2:50one company it's stored by dozens or hundreds of different people and you can even just be stored by you know fans you know you could have your videos up on the decentralized web and your fans could store and share those videos with the network so the more popular you are the more decentralized your website become mm-hmm well sounds great and I have already started with the crypto

3:12coin show domain that I was testing on unstoppable domains and it seemed relatively fast and easy to set up but if you could explain to you know the thousands and thousands of people that have traditional domain names usually they have a lot you know exactly what is the process in terms of having your domain name and now putting it on the blockchain yeah so the way it works is

3:33you would so the the starting point is you need to search for a domain pick one that you want so you would go to install domains com there's a search bar it's gonna look like that's like our version of GoDaddy so it's gonna look basically like how you would expect if you bought a domain name before so you can search you can select people are mostly getting

3:52you know their name some sort of a you know social media handle they might use company business ideas you know similar things is you would sort of expect from traditional domains you can pay either crypto a credit-card domain start at 40 bucks a piece it's a one-time fee no subscriptions there is no need for a subscription a blockchain asset should be controlled by you forever and you

4:15never get to worry about doing anything again so its own free and clear forever unlike the traditional domain where you're renting them mm-hm and then after you buy the domain you see a few fields you can add your crypto addresses the reason why you want to do this is because I've got Brad crypto right now you could type Brad down crypto into the send field at trust

4:38wallet or my ether wallet or coin o me or atomic or many others and you can pay me in Bitcoin aetherium white coin if they have got 15 currency set up something like that so it works as kind of like this Universal payment gateway for all your crypto yeah but at the same time you can also attach a website from a peer-to-peer website so if you were to

5:00be at unsampled immense calm you would click manage your domain you would copy and paste your crypto addresses you would copy and paste your website hash you click Save you sign a message that goes that information goes to the blockchain and now when you're when I'm in a wall and I want to pay you that wall looks up the looks up the record on the blockchain and when I'm in a browser

5:22and I want to go to your website you type in Brad crypto you as the user will see similar experiences you would to a calm but what's really happening in the background is the browser's going and checking the blockchain and finding my my website location hmm very interesting so it's multi-purpose for the first time to be able to accept payments as well as

5:44host your website right and with this blockchain domain name you can't access that through can you access it through Chrome browser and Firefox and traditional web browsers so by default traditional web browsers are just looking at DNS but this is changing because this is new stuff this is new stuff that was just invented and in general I think the browser community is

6:07pretty excited about you know decentralized web stuff so you'll see native integration soon but right now what people are doing is they're using Chrome extensions so we have a Chrome extension that we've created also a brave extension they'll be more coming there but we're also working on native integrations with browsers so they'll work just like you'd expect but for now

6:30it's going to be kind of a limited a limited set of apps that you're gonna need to use in order to be able to see these websites and then over time you'll see it kind of spread out and have the similar you know same integrate she says the additional bit mm-hmm that's great and you mentioned trust wallet and some of the other wallets you must be working with the team to deliver

6:52partnerships to the hundreds and hundreds of wallets and applications that would all use cryptocurrency addresses is that your main business development is just getting more partners for people to access on the cryptocurrency payment side of the domains so I think there's kind of three three areas that were tackling all at once I know it's a lot one is the payment side so getting

7:16wallets to support and that's been a big focus and there's you know I think 15 or so wallets and many more coming soon another side is browsers so you can use them for websites and then the third is tools so it's easy for you to launch your own websites so we have a template marketplace and we're working with various to centralize web building building companies to make it easy to

7:42give you tools to make it easy to launch websites so like it's kind of like decentralized Wix you know so profile page so with a few clicks you can just go and build your website yeah I think the website the website we're building for you I think we're using one of our of our web builders so it doesn't actually require a developer in order to in order to do it it's like drag and

8:01drop images add some text move the design around there's a whole bunch of stuff there though there's basically like everything that exists in the traditional Internet we need tools for that for the decentralized web we don't need to go we can plug a lot of that stuff in we don't need to go and rebuild everything it's so early that it's just starting so we're really focused on

8:19decentralized web tools and getting developers building stuff that's great bread and for the viewers that are looking at building websites I saw on the site that the top-level domains were you know dot crypto but also dot Zil can you speak a little bit about what is this zelicah integration or partnership and how it's different from dot crypto yeah so Danzo was our first we we did a

8:44partnership with the silica foundation and we launched Dogzilla mozilla kabak chain it functions very similar lead to crypto except that in general the blockchain is extremely cheap to use they really high throughput but they don't have the same level of integrations and developer tools as etherium does whereas aetherium is expensive so crypto is on aetherium both

9:10can be used for any sending any cryptocurrency so I can still send Bitcoin aetherium litecoin all my crypto address all my cryptocurrencies to both I can use them both for websites the difference is really just that their own – from Bachchan's mm-hmm that's great and speaking of blockchain domain names you know etherium had first come out with some ens you know aetherium name

9:33service is that a similar blockchain domain name service and does unstoppable domains compete with them especially on the same blockchain so yeah Daddy 'the was we actually built a demo of our of our service on top of daddy's initially back in back in 2018 before we went live with our registries and ultimately we decided to build our own registries because we wanted to try

10:00out some different designs things like no subscriptions but no we're big fans of we're big fans of deeth and we support it and in a lot of our integration tools and things like that mm-hmm that's great and in terms of the business model you guys look like you're branching out into three you know different courses as you explained but on the subscription for domain names I

10:26guess that is fueling the the $40 fee for the domains is sort of one of your guys main sources of revenue is that right yeah so we domains are a one-time fee so there's no subscription it's just you buy the domain and it's yours so right now there's no there's no subscription business model domains will always work like that where it's one-time fee we think that's just kind

10:49of important from you know from an ownership perspective that you don't have any kind of risk that the registry could raise prices in the future this just happen with org they just tripled the prices for every nonprofit every major nonprofit in the world essentially well they're all stuck because that's the website they've been using and that's the the you know

11:08so we kind of want to eliminate those risks from users so yeah I know subscription at this time and and is it tougher to transfer or sell your domains having it on the blockchain is way easier so in the traditional system you have I think a 60-day transfer or at least a 60 day period before you can update the IP record it's this really kind of goofy system you need an escrow

11:31agent somebody you can trust to send the money to in order to transfer a lot of times people don't even do that for smaller deals they just send the money in advance and whole person sends them domain if it's a blockchain domain it can you know transfer in under a minute the cost is you know a few cents whatever the mining fee is and it can be done trustless lee with a no escrow agent so

11:56you know just I don't know million times better yeah okay awesome and you have this service live right now people already purchasing domains people already using this in over 15 wallets what is next on the development roadmap for unstoppable domains in terms of features or expansions yeah I mean so right now we're really focused on the decentralized website stuff so we

12:22launched our template marketplace we are encouraging developers to add apps you can offer apps to our users we essentially have so we have more than 220,000 domain registrations so we have a lot of people that are coming through getting domain names and then saying hey where do I go to build a website so that's why we have the marketplace and we're looking for people who have

12:45already built tools or who want to build tools who want to launch websites with those tools because it's really early but you know it's the stuff works now so there's there's browsers that are getting into it too it's like you know everyone's been talking about the potential as web for for years and years and years well there there is actually a point where it's it's it's kind of

13:07working you know you can you can start to play around and you can see it it doesn't look I mean yeah it's definitely behind the traditional web right now but it has a lot of features that the traditional web just doesn't have so over the long term this is just just gonna work a lot better so are you then expanding your team in that sense to help grow in that area or

13:27marketing people and or are you just looking for more end-users and how can they find out more information yeah I mean I think we just so we just we're 21 people we just expanded our team a bunch over the past few months and we're now we're now heavily focused on on user growth so yes unstoppable domains com is a great place to learn more but also our

13:49telegram unstoppable domains there's a conversation there and we're also a Don stop old web on Twitter which is a another great place to see all of our announcements awesome thank you so much Brad for the interview it's been a pleasure that's all the time that we have today unfortunately but let's follow up in the near future thanks so much for having me