Matt Gold, welcome. Happy to be here and just chat with you today, Pete. Yeah, this is great. Thanks for taking the time to have this conversation today about unstoppable domains. Your co-founder would love to begin with your origin story. How'd you get into crypto and having to found unstoppable a bit later. Yeah, so I got interested in crypto back in 2013 when I was out in San Francisco. It was the thing that everyone was talking about after work. And if you were around in 2013, Coinbase had just gotten up and running maybe 2012, 2011. There were still, I think, less than 10 people working at Coinbase. And there were events for Bitcoin. three times a week in San Francisco, because everyone was like, what is this new money, right, that people have admitted for the internet? And everyone was very excited about having a digital currency online that we could use for e-commerce potentially. And I was working at a startup that actually worked with e-commerce companies. So I got into Bitcoin early, just being at the right place in the right time. And over the next four years, just learned more and more about Bitcoin until I was ready to take the leap and start my own company and left the startup I was at to go start unstoppable domains. idea behind Unsolvable Domains was I wanted to make it easier for people to send crypto. And if you've been, I've been using crypto for three to five years at that point and just sending it from one person to another, copying and pasting those hex addresses was very confusing. Every normal person I interacted with, the first thing they said is, what is this really long hex address? It was the most confusing thing. And if we could replace that with an easy to remember domain name, just like they replaced IP addresses with .com domain names, I thought we could help adoption. And that led to the founding of Unsolvable Domains. We actually started the company, or at least working on things, in 2017, but officially launched January 2018. And we've now been in business for five plus years. That's awesome. fixing that, that sounds like an intractable problem to deal with initially, but you guys have addressed that pretty well. What was some of the, I guess, some of the technical challenges in addressing that problem that you just described? Well, I think there's a couple of big problems. So I would say one of them is people have a lot of different cryptocurrency addresses. So you don't just have one, you have five or 10 or 15 or 20. And so we had to build a system that would let you link up all your different cryptocurrency addresses back to a single domain. And we did that using Ethereum because they were the first smart contract platform that allowed you to build something that was more expressive. So that was one of big challenges, just linking up a bunch of addresses together. And it didn't matter what network you were on. Like if you were a Bitcoin address or an Ethereum address or a Litecoin address at the time, right? It didn't matter which of those you were on. You could use the same name. Matthewgold.crypto to find my cryptocurrency address on any of those different networks. Then one of the next challenges that we came across is people were concerned about their privacy. Because if you associate all your crypto addresses back to your name, then people could easily identify who you were. And so we worked our ways for you to be able to rotate your cryptocurrency addresses linked back to your name. And then also worked on ways to work with privacy-focused blockchains, like Monero, for instance, so that you could have a cryptocurrency address that was someone could still look you up by your domain, know, Matthew.crypto or Pete.crypto or whatever, but the address would show up would be different each time so that people couldn't necessarily trace back a transaction to you. So those are the two like big concerns. And then on the technical side, and then there's the network side, which was a big problem, which is getting applications to resolve your domain names. And that's just going around and talking to all the wallets and browsers and in web three and crypto and saying, Hey, we should make it a lot easier for people to send cryptocurrency around. Why don't you start using these blockchain domain name systems in order to send and receive crypto inside of your app? And we got wallets like blockchain.com and Trust Wallet. And we just got Metamask with their Snap extension this past year. Phantom Wallet, for instance, to resolve our domain names. Opera browser, Brave browser. And slowly but surely just trying to build that network out for these new domain systems on web three. So. That was a lot of it, and we're still working on extending out the network now. We recently just branched into DNS domains. So now you can use your .com domain. You can use magiccool.com, and I can use that domain name for sending and receiving cryptocurrency inside of crypto wallets as well. And trying to merge those two systems together, the Web2. traditional domain industry, those domains will work inside of Web3 and just kind of extending out the number of places that your domain can be useful. So the business has evolved from just being 100 % crypto focused to now this cycle, we're starting to cross over more and focus on some of the more traditional domain names and bringing them on chain. And that's been a big story the past, I don't know, 18 months for us. And that evolution sounds like it makes a lot of sense. First addressing the needs of the Web3 audience and then later extending your product services to products and services to Web2. Now let's go back to the beginning as you were speaking with the Web3 audience. Did you do a customer discovery process and maybe meet with several users as well as with other projects on what their needs were so that you could create a product that would meet their needs. So we were our first users, right? So I was our first user. And that's really helpful when you're making a product that you want yourself. That makes it a lot easier to know what the requirements are when you're starting. When we designed the first product, we knew immediately we want to have a very easy to recognize name. We want to be able to store at least five cryptocurrency addresses, if not infinite number back to it. We want it to be represented as an NFT on chain so that it's easy to look up across different exchanges. We just had a lot of things that we knew because we were our users. When we had to talk to partners, that's where we had to do the explaining. So when we went to our first wallet and said, you need to start resolving Web3 domains to make it easy for your customers to send cryptocurrency to each other, that was when we had to explain because these are wallets. They know about cryptocurrency, but they're tech providers for people who are using wallets all the time. They don't necessarily, they're partners as opposed to being into customers and explaining to them like, we can improve the user experience inside of your application and selling that. And they would have questions for us like, how many people use their domains? How frequently do they use them? Their customers, if they were also our customers, we'd ask their customers to say, hey, we want this and reach out to them. We would partner with them on giving domains away to their customers and using it as a marketing opportunity for them. Try to say, hey, why don't you have your own branded TLD for your wallet? Like blockchain has .blockchain. Or why don't you have your own branded TLD for your community? penguins has.pudgy and trying to sell the benefits to your partners because domains are only as good as the number of places you can resolve them in. And that applies to Web3 domains. And that was actually a lot of it. And getting the buy-in from those applications was a lot of work. And this is before there were a lot of Before there were lot of other ways of doing this. This is just basically cold calling, right? Up wallets. just cold email people, cold reach out on LinkedIn, cold reach out on Twitter and said, hey, let's work together and see if we can do some marketing and some promotion around this web 3 domain idea. And then setting up different agreements with them on rev share and how we can sell through the wrap. just like they do for DeFi, right? It was just another product line for wallets and applications to offer to their users and potentially monetize it. What was the reception initially as you did outreach to these wallet providers and other networks? Well, so I will say the most fun I had was actually 2019-2020 right before the big rush because everything we were doing then was new. No one had done it before and there's a tremendous advantage to that in a market because if you're the first person to do something new inside of a market when you talk to people about it, they just want to listen. So when we would reach out to people We'd say, Hey, you should have web three domains for your application and you should offer them for your users for sale through their application. They'd say, wow, I've never heard of a web three domain. me, let me think about that. I would like, let me get on a 30 minute phone call just so can talk to you so I can understand what you're doing. Right. Cause it sounds interesting. And if they were cryptocurrency user. the pitch was usually pretty easy. like, hey, have you ever tried to send crypto to your friend? Yes. Did he have to text you his address? Right. And then you had to convert it and everything. And that was that annoying? Right. Yes, that was. Wouldn't it be great if you just hit, had a domain name and you could send it to that. Like, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Right. And so we got all the way there and that helped us really get a lot of traction. And Those conversations mean we're talking, we're still really small company. know, 2018, we did less than a hundred thousand revenue. I'd have to go back and look at 2019, but I think it was under 2 million, right? And then I think 2020 was under 10. And so like, these are still very small years for us. And the team of, you know, 15 people max, right? Is what we had and executing on that vision. And then we had the bubble happen in 2021. and 2022 for NFTs. And that was just a completely different level of crazy post-COVID. Hard to explain really, unless you were there and experienced. It's the closest thing that our generation had to the dot-com bubble, I think. And that had a whole other set of, I think, interesting effects on everyone in the industry, which we're still working through today. FTX is actually just paying out claims in the next month or two, supposedly. So that kind of still lives on. at first, it was really just new. People wanted to talk to you because what we doing was new and different. It seemed like there was a reasonable value prop. A lot of people said, sure, let's give it a try. And then their customers wanted to have it inside of their application. So we have a cohort of really enthusiastic customers. And there's a lot of them who are domainers out there who collect these types of things. They help push us out throughout the entire ecosystem and get into a lot of these different wallets and applications. the building a business like yours is there's always complexity in having to build kind of both sides of the network. You've got the buyers that buy domains and then you've got on the other side, which is more of a business development kind of effort and building partnerships with these networks. How did you go about prioritizing like what to do first, which market to go after first as well as which networks? You mentioned Ethereum post Ethereum, like after Ethereum, How did you prioritize which networks to support? Well, this is back when different blockchain networks were giving out grants for building on their chain. So we built across like Zilliqa, for instance, because they had a grants program. We built on Polygon because they had some incentives for us as well. And everyone was a little bit different. so also at this time period, building on these blockchains super hard compared to now it's much easier. So for us to launch on a new blockchain today, it's like a three month thing to get the right infrastructure in place. Whereas back then it would take fully a year, right? Because they just, you did not have a RPC API provider like Infura for these different blockchains. You did not have a block explorer like EtherScan, BlockScan or whatever, right? So these things didn't exist. So we prioritized a lot of it based on technical effort. And I think that that is true for a lot of early industries and only later on. do you start to be able to prioritize things based on business outcome? So we actually just announced that we're launching on Solana. And I think that's an example of prioritizing business outcome. Because Solana as a blockchain has been around for a few years. But. It's been notoriously difficult to develop on until the last maybe 18 to 24 months where a lot of improvements have been made. And so now you don't have as much technical problems on going live on something like Solana as you may have three years ago. So yeah, I think unfortunately in new markets in tech, a lot of decisions are based around. what are the engineering bottlenecks. And that actually determines a lot of outcomes. And it's wild when you think about it because, for instance, why do DeFi protocols launch on Ethereum? And it's not necessarily because Ethereum is the best network for doing DeFi. it's because that's where the money is. So you have this historical legacy lock-in for these things that don't necessarily make the most sense. mean, just objectively, if you want to build DeFi, I think Solana is probably a more interesting place to do it. And then I'll go even further out in saying some of these more modern blockchains also have some interesting things too. Like Sui or Sui, S-U-I, right? I think is another place where there's a lot of interesting developments going on. Base chain, although they are getting a reasonable amount of development on base chain as an L2 for Ethereum. So there are a lot of places that are interesting, but you're still in the situation where you kind of have a lock-in to some of these older technologies. And I think that that's, you can't believe how much of the world around you is because of historical reasons and not because it's the best way to do things. And I think that crypto is currently trying to digest a lot of those problems in this cycle. And you know. It's definitely, you can see it, especially if you're on crypto Twitter, people argue about it all the time, right? And that's like, we're going to have to work through it before we really get much more adoption. it is not just which blockchain is also which standard is the patterns around user interface. There's a huge divergence between wallet types. as another example, people call it UX, but I think UX is maybe the wrong way to think about it. Smart account abstraction and backup and recovery and all these different types of designs for users to actually get on chain. Coinbase's wallet is a really good example of this, where they have their own flavor of account abstraction, which is a little bit different from... Pretty, which is another pretty famous provider for how they're doing things, which is different than Byance's Trust Wallet, which is like fully self custody. So these things are still not solved for the on-chain economy. And I don't know if they will be necessarily. It's hard for me to predict because I thought that by now we'd have a set of standards that everybody agrees on, but that has not been how things have worked out. You know, you brought up a couple of things there that I want to double click into. You mentioned you recently support Unstoppable now supports Solana and you made an announcement on .wif. Would love to hear about that and did you launch with any specific campaigns to get the WIF community involved? Yeah, well, we actually launched .wif with their team. yeah, so the people who are running their Twitter and their Telegram, so it's very community-oriented. Same thing with several other TLDs we've launched with other communities. Recently, we've had a couple go out on Base Chain, for instance. They have a couple of meme coin communities. Actually, I think we announced Retardio and Solana as well recently. So we're going around to all these different communities and trying and educating them about why it may be good idea to have a branded domain system, naming system for their. for their specific community as a way to identify each other, right? Because you can see, oh, that guy's got a dot with, he's in the same group I am. And then it's just a benefit to offer to their communities. Like, you know, we're working with them on low price domain names so that they can have something to signal they're part of that group. And I think... just longer term and just philosophically, naming has not evolved very much in the digital world over the past 30 years since DNS got set up. We don't really have the concept of... like consumer identity and we the problem that we see is people don't want to have a single consumer identity online they want to have like seven right so so they you end up having your Twitter handle your Instagram you may have multiple different accounts and that makes the that makes naming much more complex and you'll see a lot of people think you should just have There should be one universal naming system across everything. And that's what people should use. But that never works. And there's a famous programming cartoon where there is a cartoon and it's like two programmers. They say, man, there's 12 programming languages. We should make one new language and replace all those other 12. And then. the next frame it's like, and now there are 13 programming languages, right? And it's the same thing with naming systems, where people look at naming systems and they go, oh man, this is wild. You have a name on Twitter and Instagram and your website and TikTok and you have one for your wallet and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they say, we should just replace all these with one more. And then you just end up with another naming system. And the thing that would really unlock a lot of power would be to make these systems more interoperable. And we are trying to get DNS on chain. And so we made a big push on DNS because I looked around at what are the biggest ... more open naming systems and DNS 300 million plus registered domains. So it's a naming system with 300 million entries. A lot of value there. Dotcoms routinely sell for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars. So that's definitely the biggest naming market. And the thing is, if we can get that one on chain, then I think it'll be easier for us to get. Twitter handles on chain, Instagram on chain. We can start moving more naming systems on chain. And why do I care about moving naming systems on chain is that once they're on chain, they're much, much easier to make interoperable. And I feel like if you believe there's always going to be dozens of different naming systems because people seem to want to have a bunch of different It's just the way that the world works like different communities want to have their own special naming system So if we're gonna be in a place where we have dozens of those Then making them interoperable is the way that we can finally kind of get some standardization on them And that is a very long-term product for us all so we kind of reach that conclusion Maybe two years ago right after the last 22, but bubble pop. It's like, what do we do from here? well, we need to just bring things on chain. And so we had a big thing about bringing DNS domains on chain that we pushed in 2023 and 2024. Got all our licensing so that we could properly do that. And now we're executing on that strategy. And it's going to take us several years. And it's not obvious to a lot of people. I try to tell people. Yeah, it's kind of boring putting domain names on chain. But if we're right and doing this helps us open up and make these systems be able to talk to each other better, then I think we open up a lot of opportunities to go back and revisit digital identity, which is what we kind of wanted to do, consumer identity with. We had three domains back in 2020, 2021. The work involved in putting domain names on chain. Do you have to work with ICANN for that? Or excuse me, not domain names, but DNS. Yeah, So, well, I mean, yes. And we have gone through their licensing process to get our registrar license, which is good, because it means that we know all the rules, right? And we have all the... proper licensing and coverage and all that kind of stuff in order to interact with domain names. And then they also let us know what they think is in bounds and what's not. And ICANN, of all places, is probably one of the best to work with. Because you could imagine trying to work with some of these companies like Facebook for instance or Twitter and you could say like let's put Twitter handles on chain or something like this and the problem is you basically have to know Elon right or you'd have to know Mark and and then you would have this issue where it may look like a you know Facebook naming system or a Twitter naming system, whereas ICANN DNS has been kind of like a nonprofit organization for 25 plus years. So if we get innovation happening in ICANN, and it's still a big if, but if we can prove out some interesting things about putting names on chain there, I think it'll make it easier for others to join in and add their naming systems onto the tools that we build out for ICANN. So it's kind of a proof point for us. Let's talk about the name unstoppable domains. Now it's an important part of your messaging and positioning to the web three audience. Tell us what thoughts the kind of the thought process that came into, you know, naming your your company and stoppable domains. Well, if we just go back in time, there was a tremendous amount of censorship happening online, right, at this point in time. And one of the things that we wanted to highlight about... on chain, we have three domains, is that they were controlled by the user's wallet. And so if you had complete control over your domain name, there were a lot of people who were interested in that back in 2019, 2020, 2021. And you've seen a huge shift in the culture. So we went from, I this is in the heat of it, 2020, 2021, COVID. the amount of online censorship that was happening is probably the highest that it's been in the past 20, 30 years. And so Unstoppable just kind of captured the zeitgeist of, if you don't like how these legacy systems are treating you, then why don't you work on a more open system on chain? And then in those more open systems on chain, it is transparent. you are going to have to be, people are going to be able to see it's your wallet. for instance. But on the other hand... you're the one who gets to decide what updates you make, right? To that, to your wallet addresses, to any content that you're pointing to on that domain name. And so that was the idea behind Unstoppable. And then from a branding standpoint, it's kind of evolved with the brand. We really wanted people to feel empowered to own their online identity, right? So you couldn't be, you know, if you got suspended from Twitter or suspended from Instagram, because a lot of people were getting kicked off, you could still have your domain name. And so we were trying to tell people, just the same way that you want to make sure you own your distribution by having your substack, or having your distribution channel for your users, you also wanted to own your digital identity online so that thing could not be taken from you. And you know by anyone like even if you got kicked off of if you got kicked off of Twitter It's okay because people would still know where to find you with your domain name, right? And that's one of the really big reasons why you should own, you know I Think you guys have block by block dot show right like you want to own your domain in addition to having block by block on Twitter and block by block on Instagram and block by block on TikTok or whatever you also want to own that domain name because if you got kicked off a tick-tock for instance people could still find you on By going to black by black block by black.com and so that was kind of how the brand evolved I think an important thing for founders is Your first name is not your last name so When we started on stoppable domains, our name was BIAF domains, B-U-Y-E-T-H domains, right? And we were focused on Ethereum-based domain names at the time. And we changed our name to unstoppable domains like a year later. I think it was like within 12 months, right? And I think that it's important to launch your product. And do not be afraid when you're early to just pick a name that works for you to get started, right? And then be okay with doing a hard rebrand within the first year or two. You'll figure out what it is. I have lots of friends and acquaintances who have changed the name of their product post-launch, everywhere from within three months to three years later, or even five years later. So I think that people will get hung up on a name just your product, get customers coming to you, and they will find you when you decide to update your brand in the future. That's just one of those things that I remember when I was starting out. I was like, man, my name is so important. It is important, but you can always improve it if you want to in the future. I think that's really good advice for entrepreneurs is just to start and then figure it out as you go. And there's definitely time to do a rebrand. When you first launched Unstoppable and you identified your primary audiences as the Web3 audience that are already familiar with how to use a wallet and move crypto back and forth, did you have a vision at the time of maybe a non-crypto user and how they might use Unstoppable at that point? Or did that eventually evolve into where you guys are now and maybe tell us about that evolution. Well, at first, we thought everyone was coming on chain. So I believe that that has not happened the way that... maybe people in 2017 or 2019 had envisioned it. So 2017, 2019, when I'm going full-time crypto, I bet my entire career on this because I said, everyone is going to be on chain in 10 years. And I said that in 2017. So we're at 2025. Everyone is not on chain. And so we didn't, it's been eight years. They're not here. And they're not on chain every day either. Like you're not using your phone to send. money using crypto every day, most people. I would say the number of people who do that is less than 1%. It's higher in other countries. I know this. If you go to Vietnam, for instance, or a couple of other, I actually don't know that, maybe Nigeria. There's a couple other countries where the adoption is quite high. But it's still not everybody on chain all the time. So we thought that if everyone was going to come on chain, that they were going to just adopt the new on chain designs and they would get. web3 domains on chain. And so I really thought we would have a billion plus web3 domains that people would be using for their wallet addresses. Because if you had a billion plus people on their phones sending crypto every day in their crypto wallet, and those wallets were our partners, and they were giving people domain names as part of onboarding, we could have several billion domain names. So that's how we thought that was going to go. What's changed? Well, The number of people coming on chain is less. We have the ETFs now, the Bitcoin ETFs. The majority of new people getting exposure to cryptocurrency are buying Bitcoin in the ETF, right? Like everyone's just throwing in their 401k. So it's become like a financial investment. And the on-chain activity is a decade behind where the Bitcoin store value narrative is. Bitcoin's a decade ahead. you if think about it, DeFi and everything didn't come until after Ethereum, which was six, seven years after Bitcoin was invented. you know, all the on-chain stuff is another decade behind what's happening with Bitcoin. And so we've taken the approach that we need to bring more of the Web2 traditional industries on-chain, and that will help get more people here using... on-chain primitives. And that's been our focus, bringing .com on-chain the past couple years. And we're moving in that direction. It's just a longer journey to get there. On the, from a technical perspective, if I had, if a user had a.com through unstoppable domains and they also had a couple of, let's say a.crypto, maybe a.with, is that, how does that mapping work on the backend? And is that something that the user chooses to map and maybe describe for the audience what that looks like? So yeah, for DNS domains, .com domains, we handle the mapping for you. So if you have a .com domain name on a sample domain, we put it on chain for you. You don't have to think about it at all. And we make sure that the mapping is consistent between the off-chain records at ICANN and DNS and the registries and the on-chain record. And then for the ones that are on chain like .wif or .crypto, they don't have any off chain records yet. Now we could have off chain records in the future. You know, through ICANN, for instance, if we're able to acquire those TLDs, we can match them up and then we'll keep them consistent. The same way that we're doing with .com. And the nice thing about putting the record on chain, is it makes transfer a lot easier for, know, if you transfer a domain name now from ICANN and DNS domain like a .com, transferring between registrars can sometimes take a week or sometimes longer depending on what the registry is and the register, depending on what domain name it is basically. And it's actually, believe it or not, hard to keep up with all the different domain names that are registered because most people don't know this, but dot com is a company called VeriSign, right? Dot org is a company. I think is a different company than dot com. Dot IO is a country code and all these different. TLDs like .com.io.org, they all have different servers for keeping track of who the owner is. And our hope is that if we can get more of these domains on chain, people will realize, wow, tracking the on chain record is a lot, a lot, a lot easier than doing these lookups across 30 different servers. And so we'll see. how well it works. And that's what we're doing now. It works pretty good for us in our system, but getting others to adopt it over the next, let's call it four five years, and getting them to see the benefits of having one place to look on chain in order to know what's the status of this domain name. and why they might want to do that. So it will reduce transfer costs. It'll reduce knowing who the owner is, so title. And just like any real world asset, like real estate or something like this, there's actually a lot of friction. And when you sell a domain name right now, the fees on the secondary market for selling a domain name are anywhere from 5 % to 25%. It's actually someplace that the charge 30. And if we can get all the domain names on chain, we think that those fees, instead of being, you know, let's say it's on average 15 to 20, because that's probably the average. I think that fee can come down to be closer to three to six percent. So we can actually save a lot of money for people in the domain name industry, domainers specifically, by having all the records for who owns what. on chain. so, yeah, but convincing the industry to move that way, they're not in a rush, Pete, because they're making a lot of money doing what they're doing and have been doing for 25 years. So if you know somebody who's run a small business for 25 years and they make money every month, they're like, I'm not changing anything. And that is basically the entire domains industry. takes that approach. when we go in and we talk with ICANN or we talk with the other people in the industry, the first thing we say is you don't have to change anything. We'll do all the work and then we'll show you the results. And then if it looks like it's beneficial to you, you can adopt it when you want to. And I think that trying to do a hard sell, wouldn't work, right? Because these guys are making great money. If you look at VeriSign, I actually think Warren Buffett just made an investment in VeriSign. And we can verify that. But I actually think I saw that go around in the last month or two. That was one of his big purchases. And you know Warren Buffett doesn't buy anything unless he is very confident that it's a monopoly. So you're talking about an industry where they make good money. They don't need to be innovative. And they're a little, they're hesitant to change because they've got a good thing going. And that kind of change management problem working in an industry where they really don't need to change. That is so, so hard. Your approach, the soft sell approach, how's that working so far? It's interesting because everyone wants to keep track of what could potentially disrupt their industry. And then when you have conversations with them, the only thing they care about is, is this going to hurt my business? And then once they say, OK, yeah, it's not going to hurt my business. And that was actually the first thing we had to convince people, like, hey, it's not going to hurt you. Then they say, OK. You go do your thing and then come back when it's working. Right. And then they basically ignore you. So it's a very weird situation where when we first came in, we got a ton of scrutiny and it took us a year to get our licensing with ICANN because they gave like normal approval processes for six months. It took them 12 plus months with us. And it's cause they just took extra time to say, Hey, what are you guys doing? And again, like I explained to you, it's like we're, what we're doing is we're taking domain names. following all the rules that you have already outlined. And then we're going to match the off chain records to the on chain records. And we think that this can improve the consumer experience, especially on a secondary market. And then potentially we think you can open up new things, like defy for domains. which I think is an interesting place to go to and maybe on a longer time horizon and help develop more of this digital real estate over time. And that's how I kind of view the company now. And so it was amazing, you when you come into an industry that doesn't want to change and you're an innovator, my experience has been huge amounts of scrutiny when you come in the door, right? And then they're just trying to determine is this guy going to hurt my business? And then if you're not going to hurt the business, then the amount that they care drops from 10 to zero, right? And like, so now they don't care at all. And they're just, and they're keeping in touch and they check in every three, six months, hey, what's going on? Anything we can do to help. Actually, it's very helpful industry once they don't view you as being a threat. Anything we can do to help, anything we can work together. And I just give them an update on where the tech is, what we're seeing consumers respond to, how we've changed, right? And then that's basically it. I can give you one example. For instance, we... You're going laugh at this because this is something only a crypto person would do. It used to be when you put your .com domain name on soppledomains.com, when you bought one, we said, download a wallet to your phone. Pete, you have to understand these are domainers. These are very normal people who are just going to buy pete'spotatoes.com. Then we're like, now you have to download a wallet. Then the wallet was like... But then you download the wallet, it's like save your private key, right? And it had all these steps for you to do and they hated it. asked, so we launched that last year, maybe like June of last year or May and people absolutely, all the way up three people who had .crypto domains and .wif domains or whatever. And they then bought a .com domain name. They're like, no problem, I have a wallet, right? Do, do, do, do, do, no issue. Every person who is a .com domain and didn't know anything about crypto. was terrified that they were going to lose their domain. And we had to explain to them, well, you can't lose a .com domain name. And then we also had to change how a wallet worked. So we actually built a product where we essentially keep the DNS domain names in custody, which is fine because the domain name record is off chain anyway. So even if you lose the key on your .com domain name, it doesn't matter because there is an off chain backup, because it's a .com. And so we just had to rebuild the system so that we had a full recovery method for that. This way that people who are playing with domain names don't have to have a wallet. So you can imagine we were talking to partners, and the partners were like, we're ready to put domains on chain. well let us launch this wallet product and see what consumer feedback is first. And Pete, I am glad I did that because we launched the wallet product and people hated it. And I'm so happy that we didn't have a partner. like one of the big registries or registrars in the DNS world try to do the wall thing with us because they would never talk to us again, right? So you have to be very careful when you're innovating in a traditional industry. And domains is a lot less risky. It's not like health care or something. But when you're trying to innovate inside of a regulated older industry, you need to make sure that you don't burn bridges by accident. So you've got to be careful when your product releases. think that's a really good lesson. what an amazing thing to learn too from the user, know, like what works for them. And this is to the non crypto, the non crypto user for using a wallet for the first time. And I have to tell you, I mean, when I first got into crypto, it's like, it's such a huge pain and it's a cognitive burden having to deal with that when they're used to, you know, a user flow that's so much easier. They're used to not having to be responsible. But you have to understand, I'm not saying that in a negative way. But it's actually really great to buy Bitcoin in the ETF, for instance. And then you don't have to worry about where your key is. And now I understand the reason why Bitcoin is great is because you can have your own key. Right? Like, I understand. Like, I get it. And like, that is what makes it great is because it's a bearer asset that you can easily move anywhere right around the planet in the blink of an eye. And you know the supply and it's fixed and all these, these are all great things. in modern finance people traded having that bearer asset for having really good security guarantees and an easy use. So if your money is in your bank, in the US at least, if someone steals that money from you and you're just a normal consumer, it's the bank's job to go find that person. And that's great because now it means that normal people don't have to think about securing their money every day, right? And so now they can just think about, you know, investing in their business or, you know, shopping or whatever it is they're doing. And so their cognitive load, and I think you hit on a good point there, is it's just, it's much less. And so you have to understand that we're going to have to have that same capability. on chain for people to, you know, because some people are to want to cognitive load, right? Lower that. And then they'll give up some other properties, maybe interest, right? And I actually see this with stable coins happening. You know, like people don't want to have the cognitive load of watching prices go up and down. So instead they use stable coins on chain. And these stable coins, like if you own USDC in your wallet, and I've got a few thousand dollars in USDC in my wallet. all that interest is being made by Circle. So in exchange for me not earning interest on my own money, I now don't have to, I have an easy way to store money on chain. And then another one I'll mention because I've saw this recently, which is pretty cool, is you have an asset on chain and you actually deposit. basically onto an on-chain bank. And they mint you a copy of whatever that asset is that you have. And that way, if you lose the copy and you can prove yourself, they'll give you back the original and then delete it. Does that make sense? So that's another type of primitive, and I just saw that one recently. But I think a lot of people are playing around with how do we reduce the cognitive load by reconstructing things on chain to make it easier. And we had to do it in a solvable with our wallet. So our MPC wallet on the back end, we had to make some updates to make it easier for people to, we basically, not to get too technical, but we basically white listed a bunch of transactions types inside your wallet where we said, hey, if you're doing one of these transaction types, which is like updating a domain or something, then the person doesn't have to go through. these wallet signature processes because we can save a signature for that and feel okay with saving that exact type of signature because it's not going to result in loss of property or something like this, right? And so figuring out what those things are that you can do to reduce the cognitive load is a lot of work. And I say this all the time. Yes, it was nice in 2021 to just be able to start an NFT collection and sell it for $10 million. Who doesn't like that? What a great thing. But that's not the reality of the market that we're in in 2025. And people are really looking for things that are going to increase utility for them in some way. so, yeah, it's more work. But it's also much more traditional tech company now than it was a few years ago. What was the response of your customers when you made that trade off of creating a whitelist on behalf of the customer so that they don't have that cognitive load of having to deal with their... Yeah. In fact, it was so positive that we've had customers who previously took self custody of a lot of their domains. They actually transferred them back in, right, to a custody wallet. So you have to understand, they went the extra step, like they had already taken it to self custody. they're like, actually, this is so much easier. So I know for a fact that there are people who are both on-chain, know how to do everything on-chain, and also know how to do regular things, and they're choosing which one suits their needs. So, yeah, I would say it's been very positive, and we continue to find more ways to make that easier for them. like, making updates inside of our marketplace, I'll give you another example. Our marketplace used to only pay you crypto. That was the only way you could get paid. Okay. And so one of the complaints that our customer said, like, I want to be able to get paid with a wire, right? That's what he said. He's like, I want you to get, and we didn't realize that there's a lot of customers who would actually prefer the wire. So we're rebuilding our marketplace now where you can choose. like when the transaction happens on chain, People can pay in whatever cryptocurrency they want, Bitcoin, you can pay in WIF, so it doesn't matter what you pay because it all goes through a big converter, like a DeFi converter, and then sticks it into USDC. We just go through and convert it out to USDC. And then the USDC is sitting in your wallet. And now we have a thing where you can say, yes, I want to get paid in crypto, so you get the USDC, or I want to get paid in my bank. That's what we're working on now. This is another example of... And all of these things create more complexity for your app. I tell people that crypto is like the Rube Goldberg machine of software development because you have hundreds of different blockchains. You have... tens of thousands of different cryptocurrencies, and everyone is mad at you if you don't support theirs, right? And it's like, you have to understand the amount of engineering effort and engineering load there is to support all of these things is tremendous. And it's not just unstoppable, right? If you look at the major exchanges, Coinbase, Binance, if you look at the major marketplaces, OpenSea, Magic Eden, right? They have trouble supporting new protocols. Ovensea, I think to this day, does not support Ordinals, which is crazy. If you look at Binance and Coinbase, they don't support Ordinals or Runes protocol. OKX, think, does support some of these things. If you look at Solana support, believe it not, Solana support on Coinbase is still bad compared to Solana support on other exchanges. And Solana support for general transactions still not available across a lot of the major exchanges, meaning you may be able to send Solana to or from an exchange, but they may not support with, right? Even though they support other ERC20 tokens, which are Ethereum-based on their exchanges. the, yeah. It's actually just kind of, it's kind of, it's probably the thing that's, one of the other things that's really holding the industry back is how much effort. there is in connecting all the legacy pieces together for all the different ways that things have been built in blockchain. And people don't talk about that enough, but one of the reasons why crypto is held up is because you have to support 10 different blockchains and 10 assets on each blockchain and a thousand currencies on each of those. So that also slows things down. People say like, what are the big things holding back crypto? Everyone says UX. I actually think that's true. Like we were talking about cognitive load is maybe like a better way of saying UX. And then the other one is the engineering work is just tough. Like all the middleware doesn't exist yet to connect all these things together easily, although it's getting a lot better than it was five years ago. So yeah, and know, consumer education, I'd put up there, so. Anyway, I think there's a lot of things that could be better in crypto, but progress is being made slow and steady. It is a marathon and it's not a sprint. and Bitcoin is making tremendous progress this cycle. And I think that people are continue to underestimate it. Every time I go on Twitter, everyone's always screaming, no, Bitcoin price down 5%, right? Or something like this. Like every time I see that, I just laughed to myself. It's like, I remember when Bitcoin was a hundred bucks, right? So like, This is like seeing Bitcoin at 90,000 or whatever. It's like, I'm pretty confident it's going to keep going up because I've been watching this thing from $100 go from 100 to 90,000. I feel pretty good about the long-term prospect of this. If you can just kind of tune that noise out. It's truly been an incredible 10 years that I've been here to witness it. I think that perspective of having seen something over the last 10 years has been probably helped you a lot in building your own business and stoppable domains. What do you look forward to in 2025 and beyond? Well, we have a, so there's a lot there. So this is gonna be a very interesting year in the United States for regulation. And I'm not the only person who's saying that, but you know, it's a really big deal. I've been here since before ICOs in 2017, right? And we didn't do an ICO because... I thought it was kind of dubious, right? And not a risk I was willing to take personally. And we could get some clarity on issuing equity on chain, right? Or issuing tokens as part of your capital structure on chain or... know, all sorts of ETFs that are going to be created for all these different crypto assets. I I feel like there's a Solana ETF coming and a Dogecoin ETF coming. Like, I feel like these things have to be down, you know, coming soon. So that's big, the regulation change, and that impacts everybody. For Unstoppable, this is our first year as a licensed registrar because we just got approval. fourth quarter last year, right? So we're looking a lot at, you know, we're having a lot of great conversations and a lot of learning around how the domain industry works. And there's a lot of details in there that are just not interesting to anyone, but people who are in domains. And, you know, it's fascinating how this has worked. And if you step back and you look at the industry as, this is the digital real estate, right? And that's how I kind of frame it now when I'm thinking about it. And, you know, it's been digital real estate for a while, but most people don't talk about it. I mean, these dot com domain names are here selling for millions of dollars in some cases or hundreds of thousands and a lot of them sell for 10,000 plus. And everyone wants to have some digital presence. Everyone wants to have a domain name where people can look them up and go find their store and buy their products or download their podcasts or something like this. And that's just becoming more more true with time. And so us like really understanding how the domain industry works, where we can come in and do some innovation, how we can help. And I'm excited about trying to learn how we can connect. the domain name industry to specifically all the financing opportunities that exist in crypto. DeFi is one of the really interesting things that crypto can do. And I think that like trying to connect the traditional like digital real estate industry up with on-chain finance is going to be something that I'm going to have fun unlocking over the next couple of years. One other big thing that's coming out, and this is specific only to domain names, is 2026 and 7. is when they will actually release new top level extensions. So like you have .com, .net, .io, they're going to actually open it up for auction. So you're going to have a bunch of new ones come out. And so Asobl domains is very interested in getting the TLDs that match our existing ones that conform with ICANN, working with partners to get ones that match for them as well. And then also potentially developing new extensions and building out that digital real estate for people to host future websites on. And just like you guys are on a dot show, like block by block dot show. developing that new real estate. And I think that that is interesting for us at Unstoppable Domains. And that's an industry-specific thing. So that's the next couple of years. mean, to get right down to it, I'm very excited to watch Bitcoin go to a million. So I don't know if Bitcoin is going to go to a million this cycle, but I do feel like it's programmed to get there over the next couple of years. And that's all specific to crypto. I would say outside of crypto, the most exciting thing is definitely AI. Everyone in tech is watching AI right now. You know, it's crypto. I feel like there's a lot of crypto AI stuff happening now. I think it's very exciting to watch that develop. I don't have anything invested in any crypto AI companies. I have some friends who are building crypto AI stuff. I think it's interesting. You know, one of the true things that people say is agents are going to need to have a crypto wallet because they can't get a bank account. Right. Well, that makes sense to me. And seeing how that kind of plays out, it's going to be interesting to see how AI potentially impacts the crypto industry. But I think that's the big thing in the room, because I think that crypto has a chance to impact the world of finance. But I think AI has a chance to impact basically every industry. Right. And so watching that over the next couple of years. That's kind what I have my eyes on over the medium to long-term horizon. I was going to end it there, but you brought up something that sounds super interesting. So with AIXBT, which is one of the big AI agents online, it manages its own wallet. Like how do you envision AI agents managing their own wallets and how could they work with Unstoppable? Well, it's very new. think, mean, simply giving an AI agent their own wallet is a big step. And, you know, how much these AIs are controlling their own wallet, I think is kind of up in the air. Some of them are like three or five multi-sigs or something like this, so I'm still not sure. From Unstoppable Domains, one of the things that we have talked about or like autonomous websites. So you can imagine a website that is, it just does a thing. A good example of this is PDFConverter.com. So it's a website and it just converts PDFs. And people pay to use this thing to convert PDFs into whatever format it is that they want. And it actually makes a good amount of money. And so when we talk about like, how AI could work with how that could change domains. You could imagine domains being fully managed by a given AI agent, right? And then you could imagine people buying and selling those domain names on chain and they buy the whole business, right? So they're not just buying the dot com or whatever. They're actually buying. all the underlying software that goes with that business. And that thing would have its own wallet and you could actually verify how much money it's making. So when you buy a small business now, it's kind of like you have to get checked the books. How much is your coffee shop really making? Open it up, talk to your accountant, make sure the guy's not lying, and then you close the deal. But if it's fully on chain, imagine how much easier it is to close a business deal. If you want to buy a small business as an investor, you want that small business to be doing 10 million a year minimum, because it's going to cost you 150,000 legal fees to audit the books, call the customers, do all the inspecting. But if you could imagine, like my example, PDFConverter.com, and then it has its code and it's just running, and then you can see its wallet, and you can see every time it gets paid, then your transaction costs for buying that business instead of being $150,000 could be 150 bucks, right? So that's a lot cheaper. So that's one example of how we talk about, but again, this is new, right? So like what's happening, how is AI going to impact the business and autonomous agents in particular. So that's just one idea. I'm not saying that I think that that's how things are going to work because I'm trying to stay very open-minded. The AI stuff is changing so fast that I actually... We have people on our team working on AI bots to help you better pick domain names. And we actually stopped doing that work because every three months, the models were getting so much better that we would have to throw all our work away and start again. And so 12 months ago, we actually had an AI bot built on ChatGPT that would help you pick a better domain name. And we stopped development on it 12 months ago. And we're waiting for. the context window to get to a certain size. And once the context window hits my predefined size, then I feel like at that point, it won't matter if it keeps getting better because it'll be good enough. So we're actually kind of on hold on, I know that sounds like a crazy thing to do, but we've put part of our research efforts on hold until we see the next generation models. And we're expecting, you just saw O3 come out and Chad GPT Pro. I'm expecting Jim and I to come out with a new one this year with a 10 million plus contacts window, right, sometime in the next six months. And I think that's really going to change things up. So hopefully those are interesting. These are crazy ideas, right? You just have to sit around with friends and you're like, what's a crazy thing, what's a totally ridiculous thing that you can imagine happening? And. I have a couple friends who are really good at that type of futurism stuff that I always have them on. Those are the guys in my contact list. And I just like, hey, give me something crazy. And we just try to kind of walk through how that might end up happening in the next five years. So yeah. Yeah, I've learned that what we think is crazy is like in a different universe is totally possible. I think we're in that space now with AI, it's just nothing is crazy anymore. It's now just kind of up to our imagination. well, Matthew Gold, thank you so much. Where can people learn more about unstoppable domains? Well, you should go to unstoppabledomains.com. All right. You can also find us on Twitter at unstoppableweb. And you can find me on Twitter at Matthew E. Gould. And I am a penguin, a pudgy penguin on there. So that should be able to help identify me. And yeah, just follow us on socials. Check our website out. Buy a domain. Everyone should have a domain. don't. I don't know anyone who shouldn't have a domain at this point. You should have at least one. We'd love to have your business on AssembleDomains.com. Check us out. We do at cost pricing. you're going to be hard pressed to find .com domain names cheap or very many other places. And give us a try. You can use it for your crypto wallet. You can use it for your website. Either way is fine with us. And let's see where this thing goes over the next couple of years. Amazing. Thank you, Matt. Thanks.