Matt Gould on Unstoppable Domains expanding to Polygon network

0:01i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investmentpitch media and the cryptocoin show and today on blockchain interviews with matt gold the founder and ceo of unstoppable domains matt welcome to the show and thank you for taking the time to come on today thanks ashton happy to be here i'm excited to dive into the world of decentralized domain name services

0:22bringing the power of internet and websites back to the people where it belongs uh i would love for you to kick off the conversation by talking a little bit about unstoppable domains uh what your platform is solely focused on and how you got to this point great yeah well at unstoppable domains we create nft domain names and this is nfts just like all the nfte

0:45hype you've been hearing this year and these are blockchain systems for domain registrations and we think this is a huge step forward the current domain system is very centralized a lot of people don't know this but com for instance is actually owned by a company called bear sign uh and all those registrations go through their process and you don't really have a lot of control

1:07over uh your own domain name and the genesis of this company was actually to make it a lot easier for people to send and receive cryptocurrency to each other uh and it may be non-obvious but uh once you buy your first bitcoin or your first ethereum or your first whatever cryptocurrency and you try to send it you're going to be hit with this really long uh hex address it looks like a bank

1:29number and uh we thought when we started the company four years ago that was a terrible user system wouldn't it be great if we created a naming service so that the first time you ever go to send a crypto payment you're not afraid and you don't have that anxiety when you do that and so that's what we started out with so we built these naming systems um

1:47on different smart contract blockchains and it allows you to make a mapping between all of your cryptocurrency addresses so if you have a lot of different cryptocurrency you can map them all back to a single domain so for instance i have mat dot crypto if you want to send me some cryptocurrency you can type mat.crypto into a wallet it supports unstoppable domains and

2:07that way it's so much easier for you to tell people verbally or in a short text message how to send crypto from one person to another so that was the beginning and then this has evolved to a full naming service that we think is going to ultimately compete with the likes of dot com uh for a lot of reasons that we can get into all the goals amazing matt and yeah you know what i

2:26was following unstoppable since the beginning and that function with the wallet address is incredible to have multiple different blockchains being able to map to an address and just being like yeah it's ashton.crypto and you can send bitcoin ethereum whatever it is that i think is a huge step in getting people into cryptocurrency that are uh scared of the technical details and

2:50wallets and hexadecimal addresses and it shouldn't have hexadecimal addresses anyway because people try to type them and they type them wrong or something goes wrong so i really do love that function as well but i know that the bread and butter is the decentralized domains as well and i have been using the platform myself um i would love for you to just talk a little

3:10bit more about the ease of use of getting your own domain getting your own website and not having it being controlled by dot com or any of the other dot uh top level domains and i know they do have a variety of top level domains as well yeah so we sell we offer a lot of different extensions we have everything from dot bitcoin to nft to dot crypto to

3:33dot x there's about 10 different extensions that users can choose from and we did focus in originally on that first use case which is uh there's no way that three billion people on the planet are going to be using cryptocurrency if they have to send and receive that cryptocurrency to these complex uh hex addresses so beyond just being easier for people we actually

3:53think it's a requirement for adoption for people to actually use this and there's a couple of insights that come from that you know the first is that these domain systems are going to be a lot bigger than the traditional domain systems because we're talking about a system in which every person who has a crypto wallet which is going to end up being all three billion people with an

4:12internet connection on the planet is going to need to have one of these domains for sending or receiving cryptocurrency um and then you also realize that uh every single person this is likely going to be their first nft and we actually think that this should be a part of the wallet onboarding experience so if you look this past couple months we've announced several

4:32really large partnerships we had the wallet alliance with over 30 different wallets that have joined in to resolve unsolvable domains we also have a announcement with blockchain.com where we're going to be as part of the onboarding experience ensuring that every new user to their wallet and they're the largest self-customer on the planet is going to end up getting one of

4:52these unsolvable domains uh why it's because people in the industry when you ask them what are the big problems in crypto uh on the top three list is gonna be uh ux like it's gonna be the top three if you get any any ten people together in a room talk about crypto ux is going to be up there you know fiat onboarding is another one there's probably a couple other areas

5:13but ux is going to be one of those top three problems and that's what blockchain domains help us solve uh what happened is is once we realized that we were going to get a blockchain domain name in every person's wallet we started thinking to ourselves what else can you do uh because these are actually self-custody domains like you own them in your wallet they're your nft you

5:33control them you're the one who sets them up you determine what address they point to you determine what website it points to if you have a website you determine what information you attach back to it and when we started thinking critically about what that meant we said hey you know what this is more than just a domain like people are used to thinking about it this is a domain with

5:51superpowers uh that can actually end up being your digital identity on the internet um if you take a look at all these social platforms you'll have a username on twitter you'll have a username on reddit you'll have a you know username on instagram and ticktalk tiktok and with these uh blockchain domain systems you could actually log into all those other different applications while

6:13keeping the same name across those apps and that's kind of this sso login identity uh product that we think that nft domains are going to move towards over the next three to five years and we're really excited about that so something that started out very simple this is usually how it happens with good ideas you start trying to solve a specific use case uh and you're like we

6:32need to make it easier for all three billion people on the planet to send and receive crypto has now evolved into uh we really think that this is going to be the first nft that people own and that this could potentially uh function as a form of digital identity for you know the one billion plus people on the planet who don't have um the ability to prove who they are or send and receive

6:52money or publish information that they think is important definitely and that's a great point matt i love how you bring that up that it's really more than just a domain and a wallet and the digital identity itself you know so many people use that function of you know log into this website through facebook or through google and people that have used that

7:11they i've i know people that have used that for the convenience to have a single identity but in that case their facebook account was deleted and then all of those accounts they've lost access to because they didn't actually own their own identity on facebook which is horrible to lose all of your accounts and with it your own digital identity that you actually have

7:30ownership of through the nft obviously that's not going to be a problem and i'm curious to hear a little bit more about the nfts because i know that you were working on unstoppable domains before nfts really exploded you know they were around but did you see that at the beginning that it was going to be an nft and it was going to be a wallet a domain identity and even more

7:52and how is that shifted now that nfts are really moving into the mainstream with profile pictures and other nft functionality yeah so um we have continued to evolve the product and uh the functionality as the industry has evolved and we've been working on this since 2017 like you're saying that was right when nfts were first uh invented and actually ryan from our team

8:15was one of the developers who actually worked on making the very first uh domain name that wasn't nft uh and that was part of a hackathon that he participated in and then our domain name systems from the beginning have been constructed to be nft so we were there at the very genesis and it was actually called erc721 tokens back then uh that's the technical standard um and

8:35so you know now everyone refers to them as nft domains and it seems so obvious but at the time it wasn't really that straightforward and here we are if you had asked me four years ago what was going to be the thing to take crypto mainstream i would not have picked art and i will be completely open with that like there's no way i would not have guessed art it just would not have been

8:53the first thing on the tip of my tongue and that's really been incredible this year to see people adopting these pfp profile pictures and we recently added support so that you can verify your board crypto punk or what have you back to your blockchain domain name and then that picture will show up on your domain as well uh and this is what we're talking about about constructing

9:17identity from the bottom up and what we've learned is is that if you have a name on the internet and like that's what people are going to use to look you up and find information about you then you can then attach all sorts of information to that name uh and you know that can be everything from you know your board if you have one or some other pfp project you can attach your

9:36twitter profile we actually worked with uh chain link which is another company the ecosystem to verify twitter profiles back to domain names um we see a future we can verify all of your social profiles your reddit your your instagram what have you to your domain and the reason why we want to do that is if you're sending a payment to somebody it would be great if you could

9:56see you know maybe their picture or a link off to their uh their twitter profile so you can feel more confident about uh sending money to somebody um if i send money on like my paypal app or on vidmo or something i can look up a little bit of information about that person to get more comfort around sending those payments so it's all back to you x for users how can we make this

10:17a lot easier experience for people to send and receive cryptocurrency to get involved in web3 to own their first nft and then also to have control about what data they want to share about themselves so there's a lot to dig into on all these different places but at a high level if you just think about it uh you spend about 50 percent of your time staring at your screen or at your

10:38phone and you probably need to have an enter you need to have a id on the internet so that you can start providing more information about yourself and getting paid for that information online i completely agree matt and you were mentioning the partnerships earlier i think that's a huge uh it's going to be a huge factor in expanding into the current services

11:02exchanges wallets that are already active and you mentioned blockchain.com i we spoke with them i know they have even just on twitter alone over a million people following them and for cryptocurrency that's quite a lot um so congratulations on that and i was looking into the other partnerships and and what the team's been working on i saw the integration with polygon network which

11:23is huge uh and i would love for you to talk a little bit about how that changes people purchasing domains uh how else polygon network and unstoppable domains can work together to make the product even better well you know anyone who's in the crypto space this year will know that there's just been a huge increase in traffic for use for crypto products and that

11:44actually caused the fees for using these networks to go up so we had fees on some of these blockchains go up 50 100 x and in some cases people were paying yeah 10 20 30 40 50 a hundred dollars in order to add information about themselves uh to domains right and erc721 tokens and it just was uh it was untenable so we spent this whole year and it ate up

12:08literally 10 months of our engineering roadmap to look at alternative solutions for making it much much cheaper to interact on chain and we ended up working with polygon which is a layer 2 solution for ethereum they have a lot of different tools coming out in order to make this easier to interact with and that dropped our costs down so low in fact that we're now covering all

12:29gas fees for users um and so you know people who are on openc or playing around with nfts like oh man it's 20 for this transaction fifty dollars for this transaction you don't have any of that at unsolvable we will pay a hundred percent of fees um you know the fee cost for us is in the pennies and we actually want to own that part of the user experience uh we think that users don't

12:50know how to know how to program or write or write this software in order to make it cheaper so we're going to internalize that if you buy a domain name unstoppable it's one-time fee of that domain name and we will pay for your transaction fees on on polygon amazing uh that obviously is gonna make it easier especially if the domain is only twenty dollars and the transaction

13:11fee is more than twenty dollars uh a little bit uh unbalanced there but it's great to hear that you're paying for that and you mentioned there that it's a one-time fee i'm pretty sure like with normal domain names you have to pay you know godaddy or whoever like every year uh yeah forever so it's not like that correct so our domain names are nfts and

13:32just like any other nft you buy on the internet you buy it and you own it and ownership is a real big part of crypto ethos and if you have renewal fees you're not really being true to that model and also you're potentially introducing some security problems uh because if you have renewals then there's a chance that you could potentially you know revoke that that

13:51domain at some point in the future by raising the fees so high so we thought that it was very important to uh stay true to ownership the ownership model of the crypto economy uh and therefore when we sell your domain name you pay once you own it uh and longer term for our business if you look at other internet service providers other name services 80 of

14:12their revenue is going to be on things like selling you email or websites or what have you so we have a we have a plan in place for uh to long term make the business model make sense uh and then we're adopting this piece for the business because we think it's core to being a nft domain company is not charging that renewal fee so also i i've lost several domains from forgetting to

14:32renew them and just as someone who's experienced that as a consumer i was like i don't want anyone else to ever have to experience that we were sitting around when we were building this and people are like what's the thing you hate the most about domain names and they said renewals because i always forget or like i hate having to pay 12 bucks a year or whatever um and so just

14:48you know we're we we own domain names ourselves uh and we just didn't want to build a system that had renewals baked in totally and i feel like people don't fully get the gist of you know a domain name they hear like well what if i don't need a website right like i i'm just i work for another company and i don't really need my own website but from what i understand you know if you

15:11want that uh that named id for your wallet or if you want the digital identity you know it's actually multiple things for like the same price as you would pay normally for a website yeah for sure and the way that i think about it is traditional domain name system that you know icann.com they are built on an older tech stack and they simply haven't evolved for 30

15:35plus years so you know point out something to me in the tech industry that hasn't changed in 30 years there's not very many things right like so it just makes sense that now we have this new technology um this area is ripe for innovation when we decided to launch this business it's actually in my pitch deck i was actually saying like domain name industry has not innovated 25 years

15:55it's time uh and these things can do so much more and it is it is theoretically possible to build a much more advanced naming system on top of like com but they're using such an old tech stack it's going to be really hard for them uh and whereas if you use this new text deck for uh smart contract platforms for domains all sudden it's you know 10 times easier to build these advanced

16:17features like receiving cryptocurrency payments or digital id for people like my dad out there and i'm trying to explain why you would want this name there's usually two things that make a lot of sense to them one is i say if you think that everyone on the planet is going to use crypto in the next 10 years like if you just believe that as a thesis then surely everyone on the

16:38planet is going to want to have an nft domain so it's easy to send and receive more so that's that's pretty easy and then the other one i tell them is wouldn't it be nice if when you went to all the websites online you didn't have a different passcode for all 50 different websites and instead you had a single name like map.crypto and you could use that to log in to all 50

17:01different sites and then when you log in it would show your name is matt.crypto on twitter and that dot crypto on reddit so you can just get rid of all those 50 passwords and instead use your nft domain and then sign and then sign in you know with your with your crypto wallet and that's so those two use cases i think make the most sense to people i will just tell them that there's a lot

17:21more depth there into uh how this is going to function in helping you authorize permission to your data there's also a lot of areas where this can be super helpful for privacy it's also very helpful for businesses in gdpr compliance in europe i think it's going to be helpful for a new business models that allow users to make money for sharing their data i

17:44think it's going to make shopping easier online so i think it has a lot of places that it touched because it is at the base level you know a naming system is at the very bottom of these systems making it easier for people to uh just basically easier ux across the board so but yeah the two cases i point out is typically the login because everyone hates having 50 passwords and then just

18:05simple sending payments and you really don't need to go deeper than that to understand the first cases of uh of domains and the rest of it's going to come along too so you'll get that as a bonus definitely great bonus and it seems like there's a lot of people that are continuing to register uh these decentralized domains and pick up nfts overall you know 2021 has really

18:27been the year of uh the most adoption for retail and it looks like it's only going to increase are you seeing a lot of organic traffic of people buying more domains or are you also doing marketing and incentivization uh and specials for people to get more domains that do not have one yet uh we are doing all of the above and then on the organic part i'll just point

18:49out uh this month is likely going to be a record month for us the most it means ever uh sold or registered we've already crossed a hundred and forty thousand i think registrations this month uh and uh the growth has been steady uh the growth has been three to five hundred percent year-over-year the last three years we're projecting the same thing next

19:08year it's actually been closer to four to five hundred percent uh and if you think about it the number of people with cryptocurrency something like 200 million the number of people with a nft domain name is something like 200 000 so we have and then and the crypto market is growing uh a hundred percent year over year so we have to grow three to five times faster than

19:29that just to try to catch up with all the people who need to have one of these um so when i'm looking next year you know i tell my team we're registering a hundred thousand domains a month we're doing 140 000 this month uh but i expect to be registering at least 10 times that many in the next year so i should be registering a million domains a month by next year um

19:46and at the beginning of this year i said i thought we would have over a million registrations by the end of the year and we blew past that we already have 1.5 million this year so when i look out next year i think we're going to have 10 million plus registrations we'll see hopefully we can blow past those numbers we need to get more people on as far as

20:02specials we do have cyber monday coming up so um it is we have a bogo event on cyber monday so please come check us out uh hopefully uh we'll be able to hit that and that should that's traditionally one of our biggest sales days of the year uh and so i would definitely say check us out one day um and then as far as just access i do want to make a statement

20:25here i think it's important for all three billion people on the internet to have a chance to get an ft domain so uh through these partnerships with these wallets it's going to be part of your onboarding experience you will be able to get a domain name uh it'll be kind of like an email address you know you can get yahoo address or gmail and you get like ashton259 you know at gmail.com so

20:45we're going to have that too as part of the wallet onward experience where you'll be able to get you know matthew six two five you know some sort of alphanumeric combination um so that we're not going to prevent anyone from being able to use this technology uh however if you want to have your name like ashton or matthew gould or or whatever dot crypto and you want to have

21:04something shorter then you're going to need to buy it and that's part of our our model so we can monetize the users who want to have the more premium you know the rolex like names a lot of people are trying to buy these three and four character names so they can flex uh and then we can we can use that to invest in the technology and make sure that we bring

21:21along everybody and don't make this a purely exclusive tech definitely incredible growth matt great to hear that you're growing so quickly and i like that you mentioned the premium domain names there as well i know many people in the dot com days who bought domains early and now they are set for life so uh the the same thing could be happening we're so early right

21:42now in unstoppable domains yeah it has been an amazing growth story we're very excited about where this is going we see a lot of people tuning in now from the traditional industry as well as just the crypto people we bill ourselves as wanting to be one of those crossover companies we think it's our job to help educate the market you know d web back web3 uh and how that how you can

22:13you know a billion plus people we're not trying to keep this small amazing well thank you so much i will leave the links for unstoppable domains and the sale for cyber monday all in the description box below all the best with the growth and let's follow up in the near future all right thank you esther