Hashing It Out with Brad Kam (Transcript)

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[0:45] Corey Petty: Welcome back to another interview of Hashing It Out. As always, I’m your host, Dr Corey Petty and today we’re gonna talk about Unstoppable domains and we brought on Bradley Kam, co-founder of the platform to help walk us through and answer questions that I have about what Unstoppable domains is and what it seeks to do and how it differentiates itself. So, Bradley, welcome to the show, why don’t you start off by doing the normal thing, telling us how you got into the space and a brief intro as to what Unstoppable domains is.

[1:18] Brad Kam: Yeah, sure. Thanks for having me. So, I got into the crypto space. I moved to San Francisco in 2012 in order to work on a marketing software company, nothing to do with crypto, but I moved into a Bitcoin hacker house called 20 mission in San Francisco. It was like 30 people. They were shooting horror movies when I first moved in there because the building was like falling apart and it didn’t actually look like real residents were there. There was a call to the police at one point saying there were a bunch of squatters there and we’re like, no, we’re actually paying rent. It was kind of crazy, but the second Bitcoin exchange in the US was launched in our basement. Pretty much everybody there was working on a crypto project of some kind. A couple years later Vitalik gave a talk in our courtyard before Ethereum even launched so I was fortunate. I moved to San Francisco and I basically just fell down the rabbit hole, you know, maybe two or three weeks after I got there. I thought crypto was the coolest thing I’d ever seen and started playing with it, buying it. Playing around with ideas and just kind of couldn’t stop thinking about it ever since then.

[2:30] Corey Petty: How in the world did you fall into that house?

[2:35] Brad Kam: I was very fortunate. I had a good friend who had just moved there. He had been living this relatively nice life in the Richmond. He broke up with his girlfriend and moved into this place. I think he was like the eighth or ninth person there and he was the only person I knew in San Francisco. So, he said, come here. So, I did.

[2:56] Corey Petty: Funny how that works out sometimes. Being at the right spot at the right time. Actually, I think a lot of people that I’ve interviewed that have been around for a very long time, it’s kind of got a similar start. It’s like, I just happen to be in the right spot at the right time around the right people and was interested by the tech and here I am.

[3:12] Brad Kam: It’s pretty wild, because it sounds so improbable. To some extent, it does require or it’s helpful if somebody advocates and so that happened to me and then I read the white paper and kind went down that normal path and here we are.

[3:35] Corey Petty: Let’s talk about Unstoppable domains. Why a naming system or first off, what is Unstoppable domains? Like how does it work? What does it do?

[3:43] Brad Kam: Yeah, so Unstoppable domains is a domain registry. We’re similar to a .com, except for our domain registries are on blockchains. They are not part of the traditional DNS system. Domains are part of smart contracts and they’re stored inside of your wallet with your private key. So, for example, we have a .crypto registry and domains are ERC 721 tokens, so you store them inside of your Ethereum wallet.

[4:13] Corey Petty: And currently, you are set up to be work with both the Ziliqa network and Ethereum. So, you have a .zil a .crypto top-level domain that people can register domains under. Does that mean is it still on Zilliqa? Are you still using the ERC 721 standard and it’s like whatever smart contracting imputations on Zilliqa.

[4:34] Brad Kam: So, we have a separate registry .zil on the Zilliqa blockchain and the best way to think about it is that the blockchain is your asset registry. So, you’re issuing domain names on the blockchain and then you’re attaching records just like you would a DNS record to your domain name but you’re writing that record to the blockchain and then people using the blockchain as the source to go and look up the record associated with your domain name. So, if you have a traditional domain name, you type it in, you go through a series of paths, and then eventually the DNS servers will give you the appropriate record. Here. You just go read the Ethereum blockchain or the Zilliqa blockchain and you find the record. So, it’s replacing the DNS servers with the blockchain as like your public database.

[5:30] Corey Petty: I have a ton of things we can go into here. Hopefully we get all of them in a second. Luckily enough, I think we’ve had Tieshun from Namebase which is basically one of the interfaces to the handshake protocol to register HNS domains which is a way to do decentralized top level domains. This isn’t necessarily the same here, but it’s under the same vein of a naming system, and the routing associated with how computers do lookups with human readable text to something that’s not necessarily human readable or not easily human readable. Then applying assets to those things is a very interesting and hard problem, especially when you try to add censorship resistance. Why build a new one, when we have something like ENS for Ethereum?

[6:35] Brad Kam: Yeah, it’s a good question. So, the first demo product that we ever built was a registrar for .eth. So, we were inspired by .eth. We loved the project and the thought was that we wanted to try different things with a registry strategy. So, we had a couple of innovations that we thought were missing from the marketplace. One of those was that domain names don’t need subscriptions. So, if you buy a domain name, you own it forever. There’s no subscription and the reason why we wanted to eliminate subscriptions is because there have been issues where the registry can raise prices, or even potentially raise prices to such a point that you would lose the domain name. So, we thought that the concept of subscriptions was introducing a potential censorship risk. Whereas if you own your domain name forever, it doesn’t actually matter what happens to Unstoppable domains anymore. So, once you have one of our domain names, you don’t need to care about the health or wealth of Unstoppable domains again. All you need to care about is the Ethereum blockchain essentially. So, that’s one thing. We also introduced this concept of multi-currency payments, this hadn’t existed previously. Where the way it works is, is that I have my .crypto domain, and I can attach my Bitcoin, my Ethereum, my Litecoin, all of my crypto addresses to this one domain, and then you can pay me inside of wallets. So, right now this works inside of Trust wallet, MyEtherWallet, myCrypto, many others where you could pay me in dozens of different currencies, all to Brad.crypto. This is something that didn’t exist until we built it. So, we have a lot of respect for .eth, and we include them in our tools. But we had some new ideas that we wanted to introduce into the market, and we think that the market is better for that now that there’s kind of two versions. But you don’t really need to choose, the tools tend to support both of us. Why not? We’re pretty early in this space. It’s really much more about trying to provide an alternative to DNS.

[8:53] Corey Petty: Absolutely, I was just curious about kind of the differentiating features within Unstoppable domains like you said that kind of pay anything. How does that work? Is that like an integration with decentralized exchanges? Or are you routing to various keys? What’s the mechanism in which someone sends payment to say, CoryPetty.crypto and it’s automatically routed based on the assets that’s sent.

[9:19] Brad Kam: So, it’s actually really simple. What’s happening is you are assigning a message with the private key that controls that domain name, and you’re writing the address on the blockchain. So, if you were to go look up Brad.crypto on the blockchain, you would see BTC equals address LTC equals address etc and so, when I type in Brad.crypto, a wallet reads the blockchain, finds the associated address and drops it into the send field. So, if I’m in Trust wallet and I type in Brad.crypto into the BTC field, it knows to go and grab my BTC address. Same thing, if I go into Litecoin fields. So, it’s really just a look up on the blockchain and the Ethereum blockchain is acting as your public database. Lookups are free.

[10:08] Corey Petty: Okay, so the client is still responsible for crafting the appropriate transaction depending on the asset.

[10:19] Brad Kam: Yeah, but all they’re doing is they’re making a request to the blockchain itself.

[10:25] Corey Petty: It’s a great registry to find information based on an individual and the addresses they’d like to be paid at for whatever they want. What else is available outside of like, what kind of records can you add to a specific domain?

[10:43] Brad Kam: So, the idea is, is that is that the two primary use cases right now are payments and websites. So, you can attach any cryptocurrency address, that’s for the payments use case, but you can also attach your IPFS hash for your website. I think one of the other things that we focused on a lot as a company that I think we felt was somewhat missing from the market previously, are tools to make this stuff easy. So, Unstoppable domains.com is like a new version of a registrar where you can inside of our UI, go and add addresses, sign a message with your private key, and right crypto addresses to the blockchain. So, you can set up your domain in this way, you can also attach your IPFS hash. There’s also tools to, with a couple of clicks and a little editor launch your own IPFS website very easily. We have an extension where you can view .crypto websites .zil websites inside of Google Chrome. So, it’s this sort of broader tool set of things to make all of this stuff easy. Let’s kind of get back down to, what do you actually write to your domain name, its crypto addresses and hashes, which is essentially decentralized storage.

[11:56] Corey Petty: Okay, great. Tooling is definitely something I want to get into here because like one, congratulations on the recent announcement of the partnership with Opera. Them facilitating resolving .crypto addresses within the search bar. That’s fantastic because one of the main barriers of entry is popular tooling that people use that they don’t really understand. It’s just what’s available to them. Allowing them to get access to this space without having to download a bunch of extensions like native integration of these things that make web3 discoverable. It’s things like that, that definitely help people access this content without having to add a bunch of steps, right? Like, it feels like doing the same thing with a bunch of steps. So, I guess it’s something like an Opera integration or native integration. They just type in your name.crypto. I’m assuming you do subdomains too, is that correct?

[13:00] Brad Kam: Yeah, subdomains are supported. The real idea so Opera is 80 million. It’s only on Android so far, but it’s still 80 million monthly active users. This is kind of the biggest step forward I would say for the decentralized web so far. This is the biggest opening up for a native decentralized web experience and so you can go in right now, you can type in MyEtherWallet.crypto, and you can interact with the full MyEtherWallet application on the decentralized web, you can just type it into the Opera browser. You can also go to Kyber.crypto and you can interact with the Kyber protocol and do decentralized exchange. These are the types of things that make the decentralized web so powerful, like these are DApps that are attempting to be censorship resistant. But they previously had this DNS or this Amazon Web Services problem. They don’t have to have those problems anymore.

[13:56] Corey Petty: Yeah, it’s a big issue with many conversations that I’ve had with people who are building alternative naming systems outside of DNS. How do you get people to query the right name servers? To get whatever they’re using to resolve correctly, right? Because like, say, for instance, you use your standard ISP given name service, it’s a regular DNS name server, and you want to query this stuff, your browser is gonna be like, I don’t know what that is, it’s nothing, so you don’t get anything back. So, you have to have that additional tooling and infrastructure readily available, so that anybody who’s interested could just type in the address and it resolves appropriately. Until that happens, it’s relegated to the enthusiasts like me and you to run our own name servers, to download extensions, and do it for our friends and families. It’s been a very large barrier of entry, since the birth of all of this technology. Is the infrastructure and tooling associated with getting people to use it quickly and easily.

[15:07] Brad Kam: I agree. I think it’s a huge problem. I think the thing that has been really positive, though, that we’ve seen from the market is that browsers are already looking at this stuff. We’ve seen a lot of browsers integrate Ethereum, for example, we’ve seen a lot of them looking at IPFS. So, we’ve seen them trying to get these networks plugged into their software, even for other reasons. So, like Opera, for example, they started with a wallet. That was their first focus and then okay, well, we’re already reading the Ethereum blockchain, wow, it’s actually not going to be that much harder to also resolve websites.

[15:43] Corey Petty: Yeah, but for anyone who spent any reasonable amount of time trying to query the blockchain and pull information from it, it kind of sucks. It’s not fun. Jason RPC is not amenable to caching. We have services that if you’re on Cloudflare running proxies that run a bunch of middleware to help make that look up faster. But it’s kind of going back in the direction of centralization. Do you see any improvements with this infrastructure and tooling in the space coming up that moves away from this centralization risk, but definitely there’s centralization in terms of how people access information, not necessarily where the information is stored.

[16:30] Brad Kam: Sure, I would say that just in general, philosophically, like we think that people should be looking up stuff directly on the blockchain, it’s not ideal to have those types of things in the middle. But at the same time, I also think that the world is likely going to have a lot of different versions simultaneously. So, just like we’ve got Bitcoin it’s censorship resistant. A lot of us store Bitcoin with our own private key. But some of us for reasons of convenience or other things like that might use a custodian for some portion or whatever or for some period of time. That doesn’t negate all the value of Bitcoin and I think the same is kind of true for a lot of these gateways like, it may be that what you’re going to want to have is you’re going to want to have some IPFS, you’re going to want to have some level of distribution across IPFS nodes to make sure that your content is fully distributed. But not everybody with an IPFS node in their browser actually looking up the content directly themselves. They might use a gateway for feeding convenience, but they know that even if that gateway were to go down, they still have maybe a clunkier, but still censorship resistant backup. So, I think there’s just a lot of different versions of the world that can coexist. But we are very excited about this idea of for example, people having IPFS nodes inside of their browsers and we actually launched our own browser as kind of a demo for the market that has an IPFS node inside of it. If you were to go to Brad.crypto and you like my website, you can with one click, turn on the node and store and share that website to the network. So, basically, the more popular my website is, the more people are fans of it, the more decentralized it becomes.

[18:24] Corey Petty: So, you’ve made a browser. Can you give me some details on the tech stack of this browser because it’s running a node inside of it, which means that like if I go on your website, Brad.crypto, which attached to the IPFS hash, and I retrieve that thing, I can then pin it myself to then increase its availability across the IPFS network. That’s a massive thing that needs to be done because reliability of information across a unincentivized network because Filecoin has not launched yet, is very difficult. You can’t, unless you pin it yourself and then what’s the reason? Right? So, you need more accessible content to give you better data availability, which is something like what you just said, browsers that have nodes in front of them. Based on people liking them, sharing with the burden of hosting those things, or increasing their availability across the network. Can you talk about what that browser is and how it’s built?

[19:23] Brad Kam: Yeah, so it’s a Chromium fork and it’s open source. Anybody is free to fork it, play with it build off of it. We’re not attempting to be a browser company. This was meant to be kind of a developer tool and an example to the browser market. So we built an IPFS node inside there and then really, the only other feature that we introduced was this idea of the voluntary pinning, and we were trying to show that there are other dynamics besides pure monetary incentivization to incentivize content to get on a lot of different nodes. We’re already seeing content creators that we’re talking with, wanting to offer this where, for example, they might say, like, here’s my video, here’s like my decentralized YouTube, because YouTube’s been having all these issues recently where they’ve been taking down crypto creators. Where they can put their content up on the decentralized web, and they can charge for it. But maybe, if you’re willing to be a node and serve that up, then you get a discount, or you get it free or whatever. So, there’s all kinds of interesting ways to create incentives that don’t necessarily require you to pay this node, you know, 10 cents or whatever.

[20:43] Corey Petty: Yeah. Personally speaking, I work for a company that is actively looking into building out new services and making it the backbone of our network, right. Having a desktop web3 browser and wallet and so on and so forth is part of the mainstay of what we’re trying to do. So, I’ll probably be looking into this to see how it’s done and asking you questions outside of this. I feel like having a registry that has so much links to it has a few potential gotchas in terms of how that information is used, and who controls it at what points, like Unstoppable domains definitely gives an insinuation that people can’t take it down. There’s a large amount of censorship resistance, are there weak points in this like, in the process of purchasing a domain, at what point is it mine and no one else can take it and no one else can manipulate it and take it back from me or change the records that I have associated with it.

[21:50] Brad Kam: So, you’ve got two steps, you’ve got purchase, and then you’ve got claim. So, in the span of two minutes, you can buy the domain and then claim it to your wallet. Once that transaction has gone through on the Ethereum blockchain, and you have the domain in your wallet, that’s it. Nothing Unstoppable domains can do.

[22:11] Corey Petty: That’s an ERC 20 token in my wallet. That is no longer part of the platform.

[22:16] Brad Kam: ERC 721 tokens. These are non-fungible tokens and so typically users are storing them inside of Metamask. But some users use like the DApp browsers which have good UI for for NFT’s you know, so like Coinbase wallet, Trust wallet, there’s several others that are great, but that’s what we encourage. So, basically, once you bought the domain, you put it inside of a self-custody wallet, hopefully one that you already use and are comfortable with and that’s it. It’s yours

[22:55] Corey Petty: Great and then you can basically use the contracts that are on board to then look up the registrations and resolve whatever is associated with it.

[23:04] Brad Kam: Yeah, and those don’t depend on us either. Those are on the blockchain. The registry is already on the blockchain. Anyone can just go and read the blockchain, find the records, if you the user associated those specific records with your domain name. That’s your choice. Anybody can read it. That’s their choice.

[23:21] Corey Petty: I’m curious about the associated risk with that registry in two ways. One is something I already alluded to which I’ll get back here in a second. The other one is the control and security profile of that registry. Like let’s take for instance the parody bug, a parody multisig bug. Where all the multisigs have worked great, but the library that depended on got nuked in which they basically locked away all that ether. Is there such a situation where say the controller of the registry, can nuke it, change ownership, change it? Can it be self-destructed so that the registry goes away, which just like locks away all the value associated with it?

[24:06] Brad Kam: It’s impossible and we built it in such a way that that is impossible because the whole point here was to deliver a product that was a censorship resistant domain name. So, we built it in such a way that it really does not matter what we decide to do with the registry, the one thing we can do with the registry is we can turn it off in the sense that it can’t mint new domains. That is a power that we have in case there was some issues, but it still doesn’t change what happens to existing domains. There are several hundred thousand domains out there, there is nothing we can do. Even if we were to turn off future minting, which is something we would only do in extreme cases if we thought there was a bug or whatever else. But even that doesn’t affect users that already have domain names and so that was that was by design.

[24:55] Corey Petty: Has that gone through any type of security audit to help give some more confidence and reassurance around those like security guarantees? I’m a security engineer. So, I think about these things non-stop. Sorry.

[25:08] Brad Kam: No dude, they’re great questions. We had multiple security audits. We have one professional one that we published and we’re happy to share that sort of stuff.

[25:25] Corey Petty: Partly, because I’m interested, I just like looking at these things another one is because I work for products that would like to implement stuff like this. So, we need to before implementing anything into our product, I need to make sure that, like the users of what we do, can safely integrate this feature and allow them to start using it and not really have any worries about whether or not that feature will ever not work as intended. You know what I mean? So like, I asked these questions, not only for myself, but for anyone who’s thinking about trying to integrate something like Unstoppable domains that like once it’s theirs, and in their wallet, it’s theirs and in their wallet.

[26:07] Brad Kam: I think it’s a super important question, because I think one of the things that you would ask yourself as a developer is how future proof is the system? Can I rely on it in 5 years, 10 years’ time, whatever. So, I think those are great questions. I understand why you wouldn’t want to move forward without those things and we’ve found this as we’ve been working with wallets that we do wind up going through a pretty serious security review, especially with the larger ones, where they’re looking closely at the tech before they’re willing to implement for the same reasons you mentioned. I mean, people are sending money with these things. People are building web presences, like it’s important stuff.

[26:51] Corey Petty: They’re relying on that look up to work as intended, especially if they’re hosting critical infrastructure or popular sites. They want to make sure that these things can’t be rerouted to something else or taken over, changed, and so on and so forth. So, like having that type of guarantee, which in my opinion, building naming systems like this is, if done properly, inherently more secure than traditional ones. Because like signing certificates, you get rid of CA’s, you get rid of all these like, kind of ad hoc infrastructure that we’ve built that makes the internet work today as it works with something that’s natively using cryptography in a way that’s particularly useful for proving ownership and maintaining assets.

[27:38] Brad Kam: CA’s are gone, custodians are gone and the custodian thing is quite a big deal. Like you can have your DNS registrar get hacked. You could have them make an accidental update that causes an issue. They could react to a court order and shut you down. There’s so many different ways that that system can fail currently.

[28:05] Corey Petty: So, say with something like Handshake, right. Which is a decentralized top-level domain registrar. So, I can I can get like .petty or .corey or .whatever, .hashingitout and then build subdomains and hierarchical subdomains on that. How do you get them to not make a .crypto and then start fighting you for that top level domain and the infrastructure that resolves it?

[28:35] Brad Kam: I mean, I think in general naming systems have had this problem around collisions. Broadly speaking, the way that we should view it as a community is there’s no reason to collide. There’s only 1500 traditional domain extensions out there. There’s about four blockchain domain registries and it’s not in anyone’s interest to have collisions. Even worse, it would actually potentially harm millions of users who currently can send money using .crypto or .zil domains and they could potentially send it to the wrong address. So, it would be a massive harm to millions of crypto users, if that were to happen. So, I think that we’re relying on the judgment, of course of people to not do something that could be pretty socially destructive. But at the same time, it’s more about integrations. So, your registry in this world, unlike DNS, browsers just read DNS servers, browsers can get access to every registry, they don’t need to really make any decisions. Whereas here what’s happening is browsers and wallets are deciding which registries are legitimate. So, that’s a role that they are now playing in this world and they’re only going to integrate with the ones that are perceived as legitimate because they have business risks. Now that we’re in 20 plus wallets, Opera browser and more coming, it just won’t make sense for applications to support a colliding system, which is not to anyone’s benefit.

[30:22] Corey Petty: It’s assuming that the principles are in check and align appropriately. It behoves infrastructure and tooling to integrate with things that are used, right? Because like ultimately, we’re doing things so that we’re lowering the barrier of entry, making it more useful, and providing the end user a much easier time to do things than previously. So, like I said, assuming the fundamentals are in place, there’s no reason why someone would want to try and do that outside of trying to sabotage the system Because they think it’s doing something it shouldn’t do and so, I guess that’s your main risk. There is people perceiving unstoppability as bad, like they want control. I think there’s always kind of an open narrative of whether or not permissionlessness or like a lack of control is good.

[31:23] Brad Kam: And I think that this is really just because we haven’t gone to the next step yet in terms of thinking about how permissionless systems actually play out in the market. The whole thing that we’re focused on is the idea that at the protocol level, you can’t have censorship, it has to be permissionless and the reason why is because otherwise the entire system can get corrupted. It’s the same reason why Bitcoin needs to work this way and Ethereum needs to work this way. Because if you have your gatekeeper, that gatekeeper over time is going to limit what people can do. So, you have to have the protocol layer like this. But that does not mean that every application has to allow every crazy anarchic website application whatever to essentially like collapse the social order, it doesn’t mean that terrible, horrible, illegal, all kinds of things are going to be flooded all over our apps, because apps are reading the blockchain, right? Apps can say, we don’t want to read this record, this record is unethical. But the difference is, is that so long as you do that at the second layer instead of the first layer, it means that there’s not one answer. There’s not a way like there is with the current DNS where you can just silence someone completely. If I believe that what I’m saying should be out there and other browsers agree with me even if it’s only through 2%, 3%, 5%, then that information is going to get out there, or people are going to read the blockchain themselves directly from their devices or whatever. Like putting it at the at the first layer ensures that information that needs to get out can get out. But it doesn’t prevent us from still filtering out most of the bad stuff that we actually object to and don’t want to propagate itself. So, having this permissionlessness is actually going to lead us to a place where we’re going to have a better internet, a better regulated internet than what we have right now where Facebook and YouTube, essentially in their own walled gardens or whatever, just decide what’s okay and what’s not, and don’t tell us how or why or what they’re doing. Applications could share that, there could be like a warning list of domains associated with bad behavior and that could sit on the blockchain.

[33:48] Corey Petty: It’s kind of like the crypto scan DB does with a lot of the wallet extensions, they share. Basically, if you type in a certain address or domain, it says, hey, this has been flagged for malicious content. I think you’re right, I say this, I follow the same ideology or narrative that you just mentioned. That is the right to opt out. The more constraints you put into the foundational layer of a system, the less you can build on top of it. So, if you build something that works, that doesn’t have constraints at the very bottom, you can build whatever you want on top of it with the option to opt out if that thing ever turns into something you don’t like. Whereas if you do the opposite, it doesn’t work that way.

[34:40] Brad Kam: Exactly and this is the superpower of putting this information in the blockchain is that it is a gigantic public database in the sky that anybody can access and as a result, you have this protection like it’s extremely accessible, but at the same time, you as an application can just ignore a record. So, it’s so easy for you as an application to say like, I want this information I’m going to go get it and I’m going to show it or I don’t want to share this information so I’m gonna hide it or throw a warning or whatever I’m gonna do.

[38:49] Corey Petty: And back to the show. We definitely agree on that, we can talk till the cows go home about it all day long. Let’s talk about some of the difficulties you face. What’s hard about doing this? And what’s a barrier that you see upcoming in the future of continuing the expansion of Unstoppable domains and services like them?

[39:19] Brad Kam: I think the biggest challenge is the integrations. I think the registry technology is a relatively small part. I mean, it was hard. We definitely spent a lot of time on it. But that’s not the hardest part. The hardest part has been the integrations and the tools. So, the integrations is, to some extent, a BD problem, you know, presenting a case to partners figuring out how to get them excited to embrace new technology. I think on the integration side, that means wallets. That means browsers, that means search engines, it’s a lot of stuff that needs to support in order for us to get to a functioning internet, similar to what we have in the traditional world. Then the other thing I would say besides integrations is just all the tools. So, in the traditional world, web building tools and application development tools, those are all pretty good. We’ve been doing this stuff for 25 years now, whatever it is, there’s all this great stuff around WordPress, there’s all these deploy tools that exist, there’s so much stuff.

[40:25] Corey Petty: The problem now is not availability of tooling. It’s choosing whichever fucking tooling you want to use for a given job, because there’s so many options.

[40:34] Brad Kam: So many options and it’s not all stitched together in this way that makes sense. It’s not a developer user journey like it would be with the traditional internet where you have this problem and then this and then someone will be able to point you to a place where you can go and find tools to address that problem. Right now, it doesn’t work that way, things aren’t stitched together yet. We don’t have the GoDaddy like experience where I buy a domain, I can easily launch a website, or whatever the developer equivalent is of that, we don’t have those experiences yet. That just requires a whole bunch of new stuff being built, a whole bunch of stuff being applied to this world that already exists, and stitching it all together. So, I would put the two categories of things that are the biggest challenges is our integration partners, convincing the applications and tools making it easy, because I think from the demand side, like people are pretty excited about this idea of a decentralized web. I think that we’re able to get a lot of, I would say most of the crypto world but even a lot of people outside who have either faced censorship and you talk to most people around the world. They have faced some sort of internet level censorship domain level, web hosting level, whatever. So, it’s very easy to get people excited about trying this stuff. The problem is like once I’ve had this conversation 100 times with somebody who is not really crypto native and then they say, okay, well how can I do it? And then we start explaining how to do it and they’re like.

[42:07] Corey Petty: Alright, well come back to me a couple years.

[42:13] Brad Kam: Yeah and honestly, I can say this very candidly, I don’t think that this stuff is quite ready for the outside world yet. I think it really is still in the crypto community phase and the crypto community is diving in headfirst. They’re starting to build stuff, we’re starting to see a lot of DApps launch stuff on the decentralized web but until we see that mature, until we really see the crypto community in it and using it, that’s when we should expect that it’s going to then go out into the next concentric circle of you know, dissidents or whomever else that really, absolutely need this stuff. But it’s gonna start with the crypto people I think.

[42:52] Corey Petty: I agree with that. That’s a reasonable outlook. I mean, if we’re not using it ourselves and happy with its use case, and like make it really easy for us, then it’s much, much harder for the people outside of our domain expertise to latch on to it the way we do. Speaking of that, like if because integrations are so important to you, you need people to use it. You need the tooling to be more fluid. You need that user base to be available and whatever kind of applications that are out there. Because that naming system is so integral to the user experience in all assets. Right? What have you created to help facilitate applications integrating Unstoppable domains into their application?

[43:47] Brad Kam: Well, it’s been a combo of things. So, one thing is just developer documentation for how to do it that’s on our website. We’re getting the word out. We created a grant program, where we’re actually helping to subsidize the development work for key applications to support this. We have a team of folks that are going out there and talking to applications. But the last thing, and I think the thing that’s probably the most important is user demand. So, we have users who have been buying domains over the past year, and there’s been a little over 220,000 domain registrations so far. And they want places to use their websites. They’re launching websites, they want to be able to see them places, they’re sending money using their domains. They want wallets to do it. So, like they have been asking for it and I think it’s really the user demand that’s been the thing that’s been driving it the most. So, we’ve focused on that so I would say all of those pillars are important. But actually, users saying, hey, I want this is really the thing that’s the most powerful.

[44:58] Corey Petty: Yeah, I can definitely see that. How easy is it to integrate? Walk me through the process of integrating Unstoppable domains into, say, a wallet or web3 browser?

[45:11] Brad Kam: Yeah. So, I mean, if you’re a wallet, all you’re doing is you are parsing this information. So, if I see a domain name, and I identify that my user is in the Bitcoin send field, I need to make a request to the blockchain and say, is there a BTC address associated with this domain name? So, I’m making a call to the blockchain and say, is there a BTC address associated with this domain name? So, I’m making a call to the Ethereum blockchain. So, it’s pretty simple. Applications have written their own code to do this. We also have a library, which is even simpler, you can just plug that in a few different ways.

[46:03] Corey Petty: JavaScript and a web3 browser is basically the same thing. It’s someone inputs a domain, it takes it, it parses the domain and says, alright, where do I go to find out what this resolves to? And so, adding in whatever the appropriate lookups are for the .crypto and then making that request is all that’s needed for a web3 browser I’d imagine, is that about it?

[46:33] Brad Kam: That’s about it. It’s really quite simple. I mean, if you were to go and look up on the blockchain, all you really see is Brad.crypto BTC equals this LTC equals this IPFS hash equals this, I mean, it’s actually quite simple.

[46:53] Corey Petty: Any web3 browser currently can buy and manage their domains. Using your standard portal correct? As long as you’re a web3 enabled browser, you can still buy, trade, sell, manage, edit your current domains.

[47:08] Brad Kam: Exactly.

[47:11] Corey Petty: That makes sense. That seems like it’s a relatively easy ask, why do you feel people are reluctant to do so? Because they don’t know any better? Because there’s not there’s no user demand, specifically within their application. What?

[47:25] Brad Kam: I haven’t seen a lot of friction around it. So, you know, when, when we’re usually when, when folks, you know, are become aware of this, they’re pretty excited about it. So, we don’t see a lot of friction. I mean, I think that there’s always like, we roadmap this amount of features, and so we might need to do it after this thing happens. But we don’t really come across any fundamental reasons why not. I mean, pretty much every wallet you talk to knows that this idea of copy and pasting these long addresses is just a really awkward user experience and they face this problem because they’re onboarding new users. So, the wallet is very often the first place that somebody goes when they start playing around with crypto, and they immediately are hit with this problem. So, if you were to go ask a wallet, what are your support requests like? Very frequently. It’s, what are these crazy numbers and letters? Like, what does this address mean? It’s very basic stuff like that and in the future, I don’t think people are going to see that stuff. I think people are going to get a domain name. It’s going to auto assign addresses to them, and they’re not even going to have that concept. I don’t think that there was a phase where the consumer internet really took off and I told you, hey, check out my cool website at you know, 23.47.25.85, there was no point in time where people were using IP addresses to share viral websites. It’s kind of like you can’t really take this next step until you have naming.

[49:02] Corey Petty: So, I have a bit of pushback there. Personally, but it’s more of a discussion than a hard argument and that is like the social nuances and ways in which we conduct ourselves with regards to the internet. The social mores we have around it are specifically because of that, because we’ve never told the user to care and always have them offload the responsibility to something else. Crypto is definitely a potential to turn that on its head and to say, you have the power and optionality to be responsible for your own value. And the security associated with keeping it yourself. The more we obfuscate that, the more we stay along those social mores of offloading responsibility, and security, for convenience. So, you don’t get any real changes if the user doesn’t have to think any differently or treat the system separately. So, in my opinion, if we are to do what we’re trying to do, and a lot of the cases of the applications and people who are in the space like you, have to have some type of change in the interaction and intuition of how to operate with decentralized applications, and the associated assets that you’re dealing with. So, that’s a spectrum. That’s not that like you said earlier, it’s not a dichotomy. It’s not one or the other.

[50:46] Brad Kam: Yeah, I totally agree with that, I would just say that the domain name is also that. So, the domain name has this same characteristic that the cryptocurrency itself has, which is that it’s self-custody, that it’s a self-sovereign asset. So, you’re fixating the user on a self-sovereign asset with a name that’s easier to remember and pronounce and refer to, as opposed to the public address. So, you’re obfuscating one self-sovereign asset for another. Or what you’re really doing is you’re rolling the self-sovereign assets together, in some ways. I think that’s really more just a UI thing. But it doesn’t actually change the fundamental responsibility of the user, which is, I control my stuff.

[51:45] Corey Petty: For instance, I’d make a bunch of registrations on my name and the things that are important to me, and I lose the associated private keys, those registrations and then I no longer have access to them, they’re gone, their computer crashed, and I didn’t back them up appropriately. You can’t do anything about that. How do you then educate the user to appropriately back these things up, because that’s going to be an eventual part of a system like this is just basically stuff that’s lost, that can never be found again. Like it could be really good domains that people want to use, especially if the system gets really popular. It’s like, oh, no, that domain is dead. It no longer has control because the guy lost his private keys when it first started.

[52:36] Brad Kam: There will be zombie domains. It is inevitable. I think the nice thing is that there’s virtually limitless number of domains if you think about it from a combinations perspective. So yes, you might lose some really great premium domains out there that can no longer be used. But it’s not as if a system could suffer from so many losses that it wouldn’t have functional domains. In terms of the education, I think we’re in the same boat, as you know, essentially every crypto asset. So, there’s going to be multisig schemes for important domain name assets, there’s going to be backup tools. There’s even going to be institutional level custodians for temporary storage and things like that. There’s going to be basically everything that you would see with a cryptocurrency here. It’s just that people will remember if Bitcoin.crypto gets lost and it becomes a zombie domain, people will remember that much more than one random BTC where the same thing happened to it. So, it’s going to be like more noticeable here, I think. But the dynamics are still the same and there’s a flip side of that, which is an idea that we’ve actually thought was kind of interesting, which is that it’s actually possible to put up a website that no one can take down, not even you by throwing away your keys. So, there’s a flipside to this, where you can actually create a website that literally is impossible to take down by anyone.

[54:13] Corey Petty: Assuming that where it’s hosted can also not be taken down. So, like, it’s pinned somewhere in IPFS, assuming it’s hosted on IPFS, like the resolution can’t be taken down. So, assuming that the backend hosting of IPFS stays true, and it’s pinned somewhere that can also never be taken down too. But like that isn’t actually ….

[54:36] Brad Kam: There’s ways to make that more robust over time too. So IPFS is amazing. They have tons and tons of awesome developers building tools for it. But we’re not opposed to other decentralized storage networks either and a lot of our users have actually asked us, can we launch to multiple storage networks? Can we also remove the risk of the storage network itself? So, I’m on 1000 different nodes inside of IPFS and I’m on 1000 different nodes on two other networks, too. So, we can continue to make this more and more robust on the hosting side over time.

[55:10] Corey Petty: Okay, we’re running out of time. So, I’m kind of trying to figure out the questions I want to ask because that’s going down that rabbit hole, something I wouldn’t mind pursuing. But I noticed when I was looking up Unstoppable domains before this interview, and I searched for a couple of domains associated with my name that they’re under a reserved or like specific type of list that basically says you need proof in order to have this. Where did this list come from? And why is it there?

[55:40] Brad Kam: Yeah, so the idea is that one of the problems that we saw with a blockchain domain registry we’ve introduced this new problem where a domain cannot be taken away and as a result, it means that you need to be much more concerned about people who might just buy and squat on someone’s brand. This is a huge problem in the traditional domain name world and have what’s called a sunrise. That’s meant to address it, where you basically give brand owners right a first refusal on domain names. So, we imitated that process. We used the trademark clearing houses database, along with a handful of other lists from crypto specific things, and others and we blocked off all of these domains as unable to be claimed by anyone other than the brand owners. We’re just giving away for free to all the brand owners and the large companies, we’ve had multiple fortune 1000 companies claim their domains as well so far. The idea is that we didn’t want the namespace. We didn’t want them to miss it. If everything becomes available on day one, they wouldn’t have heard of it yet, because this is a small new thing. Then if all those brands can’t get their domains, they can’t adopt it. Even worse, people will use the registry primarily for phishing attempts, other types of scams. So, we did this defensively. It’s a sunrise period that ends December 31, 2020, at which point domains will be freely available. But the idea is to get those in the hands of brand owners as much as possible and that’s the reason why we’re giving away for free. We really just want to make sure that companies have the option in two years, three years, five years to adopt this technology and if they can’t get their brand names then they can’t do that.

[57:24] Corey Petty: How does one go about proving that they are the brand owner?

[57:32] Brad Kam: By standard methods, proving through social media, corporate email addresses, various other things like that. Proof of trademark.

[57:43] Corey Petty: Okay, great and for the audience out there that would like to get a hold of one and it says that it’s reserved there you go, go through it. Go get one, it’s free. There’s no reason not to, at this point my opinion. I’ll be doing it. That’s about all I have for today. Are there any questions that you would have liked me to ask that I didn’t?

[58:04] Brad Kam: No, this was actually amazing. This was super deep down in the way everything works. This was really fun. I feel like we covered all the key things, the only thing that I might just wrap with is that there in the traditional domain name world. We see content being taken down from hosting services all over the world very frequently. We see it in Turkey, we see it in Russia, we see it in places all over the world. Because hosting services, can be subject very easily to the rules and laws of their land. It means that you as the publisher, really don’t have the right to say whatever you want and we think that is a critical flaw in the current internet, and not the way it should work that anyone should be able to publish and transact online without censorship. Now, what apps do with all of that and whether or not I believe that what you’re publishing is ethical and whether or not I want to see it is my choice or my applications choice, but at the base layer, that shouldn’t happen because we don’t have a secure, safe and free internet if we don’t have that.

[59:19] Corey Petty: Alright, that’s a nice wrap up. For those who would like to learn more Unstoppable domains.com and for the back-end infrastructure stuff you have Unstoppable domains on GitHub to check out all the code that’s available. Anything else that people should reach out to?

[59:43] Brad Kam: Yeah, but also, I would also check us out and Telegram. There’s a conversation going there. There’s also a dev chat and you can also check out doc’s and Unstoppabledomains.com and check out how to do integration and all that stuff.

[59:50] Corey Petty: Awesome. Thanks for coming on the show.

[59:51] Brad Kam: Thanks a bunch.