(0:09) Matias: What is up, Matt? How are you?
(0:11) Matt: Doing well man, happy to be here.
(0:13) Matias: This is a great podcast because I worked at Unstoppable, Matt's the man. So I have some insight there, as well. We’re going to dive into UD, where the company’s at today, where they're going, current state of the crypto market, tons of exciting stuff. So I think to kick it off Matt. Intro, what is Unstoppable Domains?
(0:32) Matt: Yeah, so Unstoppable Domains is building a user-own digital identity for every person on the planet. We call these NFT domains and they are really the infrastructure that allows people to own their reputation and data between apps. We believe that owning your data will drive equity, privacy, and empowerment for billions of people. And you know, the internet is broken. You know, anyone who goes out to the internet knows there's huge problems on it. We think of a couple of those problems, such as working on user privacy and then working on curation can be solved by allowing people to bring their reputation and data with them between apps. Right now, you only see a small slice of a person when you're interacting online. You really need to bring the whole person into that user experience. And that's what we're working on at Unstoppable.
(1:17) Matias: Amazing, so something interesting: So when I was at Unstoppable, I knew one of the core value props for the product was really simplifying the payment experience with connecting a bunch of addresses. You go into a wallet, you type in your doc crypto domain, and the money is sent to that domain, really improving the experience. I think a lot of new people have issues when you're typing in this really long address, it's extremely confusing. But now from what I've seen online, there's more of a push into domains as identity. And you've touched on this a bunch. So I guess, can you talk a little bit about that transition and, and where you see domains in the world of web3 identity?
(1:52) Matt: Yeah, so usually when you’re opening up new products and new markets and new consumer behaviors, you really gotta find something that people can latch onto to kinda understand, you know, how that's going to change the world that they interact with. And so for us, like when, even at the very early stages of this company, we said to ourselves, you know, using NFT domains could evolve to be a much more significant part of your digital life, but let's start with something that's very practical. So you're right. Like, NFT domains are great for mapping payments. You can hook up your Bitcoin, a theory of light coin address, that way you don't have to copy paste these 40-character addresses to send crypto back and forth. And the beginning thesis of the company was actually that simple. It was: if we're going to have all 8 billion people on the planet sending crypto to each other, they're not going to copy and paste hex addresses in order to send a payment. It's just too hard and you have 50 of them or whatever. You can just send money to Matias.NFT or what have you, instead of having to copy paste that address. If you think about it though, as a computer programmer and as someone who likes to think about technology, what you're really doing is mapping a set of information that you want other people to be able to easily look up back to and easy to remember identifier. Every single computer network on the planet has a naming system at some point. And DNS is the famous one for looking up websites and DNS, really, you know, when you have google.com or you type in Matias’ blog.com or whatever, then it's just looking up the server that's storing the data that shows the website for that user when you type that into your browser. So it's simplifying being able to find where that website lives so that people can come and view it more easily. Same thing here with cryptocurrency simplifying, looking up this information for crypto addresses. But the cool thing is if you put these naming systems on a public blockchain, it's extensible, so you can add a bunch of other stuff onto it. And that’s why people talk about NFT domains as being web3 identities. They can see that movement from, you know, you have this open system, which allows you to map anything you want, starting with cryptocurrency addresses, to enable others to look that up. And wow, that's a really great place to build on top of over time. So that's why we think it's going to be identity. The things that we're seeing people do with it right now is hooking up their social profiles. People are dropping their NFT domains on Twitter for instance or connecting KYC information. We actually have a product for that as well, so that you can privately share that with applications. And this is just all about having a bunch of data that you take around with you on the internet that you can then share if you want to make it easier for other people to find out information about you.
(4:34) Matias: That's a really interesting point. So in general, in the future, the way you see it working is you'll have your domain. And that's this identity that travels with you from application to application. So when you sign into Uniswap, for example, to do a trade, you're using that same identity when you sign into a decentralized version of social media, but you just decide when you sign in what you wanna share with that application. And then when you sign out, you take that all back with you. Is that the general concept?
(5:02) Matt: That is the general concept and we at Unstoppable are trying to build all the rails for that to work. And, you know, there's considerations around. Being able to contact users like opening up some sort of communication channel, there's considerations around privacy for the data, there's considerations around guarantees to make sure that people don't leak your data. Making sure that if Uniswap does check your KYC information, for instance, that they don't accidentally leak that out on the internet or get to keep a copy of themselves. Like they only get to look at it once and then they have to destroy it. And, and so all that infrastructure needs somebody to care about making that easy for users. So one way to think about it is Unstoppable Domains is out here building the open rails for consumers to plug their digital identities with their NFT domains that they own in their wallet and we're going to have the user’s back. So what we're going to be pushing is all the, like, what apps can do, what data they can request, what data users want to share and helping them understand how they're sharing that data so that they can have that privacy. And then, also, that agency decides what they want to share or not share online. And hopefully you'll also get paid for it. So that's a - I don't mean to miss that part - but just imagine if you have a NFT domain and you're using it as your web identity, and you do a lot of trading on Uniswap with it. And then you're like, you know what, I'm going to try out this new DeFi protocol and, I'm going to try out this competitor, I'm going to go on and sign on SushiSwap. And when you do that, if you want to, you could say “Hey, I am a really big user right and here you can go check my history to see if that's true.” And when they check their history, like, oh, wow, you are a big user. Here's a discount or here's some tokens, right, to participate. ‘Cause we want you to be a member of our community, cause we know that you have a lot to bring to the table based on your DeFi trading experience. And that for the web3 use case, it's super, it's going to be super focused on crypto datas very early, but we really believe every person on the planet is going to want to have the same functionality and everyone in web3 right now, you guys are pioneers for changing the way that data is moving around the internet and hopefully changing that in the positive for people. ‘Cause right now, online companies have all your data and they have all your power and you get nothing. And this is the way to kind of make some headway on correcting that wrong.
(7:35) Matias: Amazing, and then in the Uniswap KYC example, ‘cause I do feel like to a certain extent, most of these decentralized trading exchanges and decentralized lending of changes, there's going to have to be, not that I necessarily agree with it, but there's going to end up being some sort of KYC component that's attached to it. Would there be a way where, let's say, you just meet the quota. Where there's just a checkbox that you meet the five points that are needed to trade on this exchange, but your actual first name and last name are not given to the lending protocol?
(8:10) Matt: Yeah, absolutely. And I can actually - we've had discussions with some very big companies who are looking at building that type of computation as a service. So, you know, just imagine that you're a very large cloud provider, right? Not going to name anybody here and that you are interested in offering services to blockchain companies. One of the services that's at the top of their list right now from the conversations that I have is being able to create computational clean rooms, right? And, so for people in crypto you'll know these as zero knowledge VMs. So ZK, VMs, and what this will enable people to do? So let's just make this super easy: you go to Uniswap, Uniswap wants to be compliant with New York. I'm choosing New York for a reason, because they have all the crazy freaking rules, right? They just wanna make it too expensive to do business in New York. I think it's like, they're like, we have too much business here. We don't want anymore. So let's just make a bunch of rules. Anyway, so you live in New York and you wanna follow all the rules, you know, you're a hedge fund and you have to, or you're just a person who you just watch to follow all the rules in New York, ‘cause that's what you're supposed to do. New York has their list of rules, of things that they need that they need to get done. But when you go to Uniswap, you need to be able to provide Uniswap with all the information so that they can show that they have followed the rules. but you don't want Uniswap to have a copy of your data because they could get hacked, right? Or they could resell it and re-selling it's what most people do. So there's two - there's a couple ways to protect that. The first way is if you exchange your data to Uniswap using NFT domain as the lookup for changing that data, there's going to be a user agreement off the rip with Uniswap that says they will not resell. So they'll be legally obligated to not do it, but we know encrypted that that's not good enough because just ‘cause someone is legally obligated to do something doesn't mean they won't do it anyway or maybe the data get leaks. So what we'd really like to do is for you to send your data to a third party that can do these; they can take your data, and then the third party can also take the computer program for Uniswap that checks the data. So Uniswap will write a computer program. It will check, like, do you live in New York, you know, are you eligible to trade? Do you have any disqualifiers, whatever. So Uniswap sends the computer program up to the third party. You send your data up to the third party. And then the computer program is run on the data and then Uniswap gets a receipt that says the data has been run. And then they store that receipt and that receipt doesn't have any of your personal information. And they can use that receipt to then show to whoever the regulator is and the regulator knows that that receipt proves that this was actually done correctly based on the code. And then what happens inside of this clean room where the data is computed? In a perfect world - and this is what we'll build to over time -, when you send your data, it's encrypted, and when Uniswap sends the program to verify the data, it's put in there with the encrypted data. And then the data is only decrypted inside of this secure environment. Read once, receipt is output deleted as part of that process. So, not even the company who's running the data is able to look at it. So that's like the long term goal we're trying to get to with web3, really enabling people to own their data, to dictate all the ways that that data can be read and used and to have complete privacy over that data while still enabling other people to, feel very strong guarantees and verifications around at - doing what you said, what you were supposed to. And that's what's great about all this technology.
(11:44) Matias: Amazing, super exciting stuff. One of the things I wanted to pick your brain on, for those who don't know, Matt is a huge crypto OG. He's been in the space for a very long time from the Ethereum ICO days. Obviously we've had a complete change in the market. I think there's a few points I wanna touch on. One, I definitely wanna get your thoughts on Luna and UST and everything that happened there. But I also wanna get your thoughts on, you know, the current state of the market, you know, where you see us going and how you think this cycle compares to the previous cycles that you've been a part of.
(12:15) Matt: Yeah. Okay. Well, so this happens a lot in crypto, right? So this is another one of those cycles. You know, I was there in the end of 2012 and 2013 cycle, the 2017 ICO bubble pop with the scare right after the COVID happened and all these different places, where crypto has had these huge run ups and these huge markdowns. So where do I think this one compares to the other ones? Hmm. There's there's two counter trends. There's two trends and they're working counter each other. On one side, crypto has never had this much acceptance before as a mainstream place to park some cash. So that's actually holding up the market. If you look right now, the market got hit super hard with the blow up of Luna, which we’ll talk about a little bit more later, but we're actually maintaining levels at about 50% off the highs, maybe 55%, you can go look. And considering how much bad news is coming out, that's actually pretty impressive cause you have stocks on the NASDAQ that are down more than that. So I think that that's attributable to the fact that crypto has grown a lot and people are seeing this as like “Oh, this is a long term asset class.” So you have some people in the space now who don't care what happens in the market. They're like Warren Buffet, they're just going to stay in, no matter what. On the other side of that, we had a very typical run up in 2021 and there was just massive, massive over speculation. Usually in that part of the cycle, you start seeing things where everyone is in it to just flip it, make some quick money. And then also the fraud goes up. And so we've seen more of that starting to be exposed. And so that's late cycle events that you see. And when this has been sucked out before, you've seen 90% drawdowns in crypto, you know, not 50%. So, that's the case for arguing that things are going to get worse. So I think, you know, definitely in a bear market, I would - it's hard to say that this one is going to be significantly different than the other ones that we've experienced in the past. So I would expect it to be about the same if that's the case, you know, you're expecting somewhere around 70 to 80% drawdowns, we've only seen 55. So we probably have a little bit more to go. And in terms of timing, usually it's anywhere from one to three years on these recoveries. So just take it down the middle, say 24 months, you know, and obviously starting in Q1, so you probably have a good two years here to flush it out. And that's where I think we are. So this moment is it, you know, every single time it rhymes, but it looks very similar. So that's where, that's where I think we are right now with the crypto market. I do think it's also the most exciting time though, for another set of reasons.
(14:54) Matias: Do you want to touch on what those reasons are?
(14:56) Matt: Well, so if I was going to place this, it feels post 2001.
(15:00) Matias: Okay.
(15:02) Matt: if you look at what happened after 2001, the actual biggest businesses were built. And the difference was that you had enough infrastructure in 2002, 3, 4, 5, 6 to see where you needed to go, right? Whereas before in 1995, when you were building technology, you didn't have enough of the stuff in place yet to really be sure which way the internet was going to go. So you didn't have enough of the foundational things laid out so that you could do long term planning and the big businesses that made it after 2001, you know, it's the Twitters, it's the Amazons, it's the Googles, et cetera. I mean, these impact people's everyday life now. And I think that that's where we are right now. So, as opposed to like 2017, that felt much more like, you know, a little bit earlier in space. I think we are far enough along now in this space where you can start to plan on five plus year time horizons, and you need to be able to plan on five plus your time horizons in order to build really big, impactful new businesses and products. So that's the exciting part, I think the opportunity for building something really big exists here because you know, the crypto market it’s on a little bit sturdier footing. Still early, but far enough along where you can place those types of big, long term bets.
(16:22) Matias: Amazing. And I wanted to touch on a point that you mentioned earlier, so you're talking about acceptance in the crypto space has never been so high. Two things, well, one, how much do you credit that to the growth of NFTs, which, you know, NFTs were not at this level in, in previous cycles. And then, on the other point, how do you see the NFT market handling this bear market? Because tell me if you disagree, but I, I generally think this is the first full cycle for NFTs, where they really have like this immense run up and then we're kind of trying to see where things go next. And there's also a different liquidity component compared to just tokens, right? So what are your general thoughts on that?
(17:03) Matt: I think you're correct. And this will definitely be the first cycle for NFTs. I think this is going to be a more brutal cycle for NFTs than it's going to be for crypto broadly. And that's because it's the first time we had it, right? So this is going to be more like ICO type pop for NFTs. And that means you're going to see 95% or 99% drawdowns on these, alternative NFT projects, right? So like, you know, your blue chips will probably be, they'll probably have 80% drawdowns, right. But your more speculative NFT projects, you're going to see 95% to, you know, plus drawdowns on those companies and those valuations for those projects. So I think that that's coming for NFTs. To their credit though, I think NFTs helped convince another huge chunk of the population that, guess what, there's undeniable utility for crypto and blockchain and that part of that long term investment thesis, so what NFTs did, and I also think stablecoins are doing this for - NFTs really helped the creative and the artists’ class say “Oh guess what, I can use crypto, like this is here to stay, it is fundamentally changing how I can monetize the people that I’m trying to reach”, right, for artists and creators, so they’re on board 100%, they don't care what happens in the market. Like artists don't care what's happening in the crypto market at all for what their project is that they're trying to create something. They're going to create it regardless. And this is just going to be a new distribution channel for them and they're fully convinced. So that's huge artists and entertainers and all that are on board forever. I think stablecoin did a similar thing for regulators. Now, they get a lot more regulation to go through, but stablecoins are breaking through in banking. I mean, you see tether, you know, settle with New York state or whatever, and you see them now having more than half the reserves are treasuries or something. Go look that up. Confirm it. But they're like, they're moving more and more legit. So stablecoins are now becoming a part of the banking system. I think that's another huge cohort of people where there are now bankers, who say this is going to save us and our customers tons of money. So one hundred percent we're going to be doing that. That's another huge cohort that got, and the stablecoin market went from 1 billion to a hundred billion plus. So NFTs and stablecoin are the two things that have really just undeniable utility. People who are experts in those fields feel that there's undeniable utility. And those are the long term people who just don't care. It's like, you know, the Warren Buffets of each of those spaces, they don't care what anybody else says. Cause they're like, well, I'm going to use it, so I don't care, you know. I have no, I have no opinion on, on whether you use it or not. I'm here, I'm here to stay. And this is on top of the crypto OGs, who've been here forever for the, you know, the digital thesis behind Bitcoin. And, and I think that these are, you know, additional theses that have now evolved, and are going to really put on the bottom of the market here.
(20:03)Matias: Yeah. And another point to that I think is really interesting is, on the NFT side, the whole PFP craze, where I think there's an element where people were really buying into a community. And then again, I think that has longer staying power, where if you're entirely immersed in this community, you're not as concerned with prices because there's an extra utility that you're getting out of owning that NFT, which is being part of that community. And I think that’s an element of it.
(20:30) Matt: Well, and I think that's an emerging element and I would actually put that in the, Dows the category of things. And I, I do not think that those crypto micro communities or whatever have had their day in the sun yet. I think that's still to come, even though people are very excited about them.There's still some work to be done there on the tooling to make that better. And the concept of building digital communities with more context in, like, more context and financial incentives and, and everything that comes around building a community, like really making it like a real world community in that sense; I think is only getting started. So I think there's a lot more to drill there. We’ll probably see some more of that over the next three years. And right now is when people are going to be building.
(21:10) Matias: One hundred percent. That's actually a huge part of what we're focusing, with AssetDash. NFTs are definitely our top feature with what users are connecting and building out more tooling to help people better connect with their project leads and whatnot directly in the app. Personally, I'm extremely bullish on that sector because as we go more digital, you're going to start seeing communities pop up for different things. And then your NFT is basically your digital membership, right. And I'm very bullish on that concept overall. Now I definitely wanna move over to the Luna thing. We haven't had a chance to talk about this yet, so.
(21:45) Matt: Everyone, everyone wants to. So like, you know, the two hot topics at crypto are like, what do you think about Elon Musk being a crazy person, right? And then the other hot topic is what do you think about Luna? So, Luna, listen. I have always had a problem with projects calling themselves stablecoins and then I have an additional problem if you try to call yourself like a euro stablecoin or a dollar stablecoin. I mean, first of all, I think. You should be a dollar if you're calling yourself a dollar, right? And, and I think that, you know, the U.S. government has invested, you know, a hundred years in building the brand for the U.S. dollar, right? And the euro has invested 30 years in building a brand for the euro and the same thing with the yen, right? And all these countries have invested a lot of money in building the brand behind their assets. And it's so confusing for consumers that, consumers think if it's a dollar, it's a dollar, right? And so if you, you know, if someone else came up on the - started selling Coca-Cola, right? And, and it wasn't like, they literally just made some soda and then put a Coca-Cola label on it and they said like, you know, Coca-Cola, like “blockchain Coca-Cola” or whatever. Like, Coca-Cola would still be angry at them. They'd be pissed, right? ‘Cause it doesn't matter if you call it “blockchain Coca-Cola”, it's like, you're still calling Coca-Cola. So I think that, I would just say for projects out there, if you do not have a dollar in the bank for your dollar stablecoin project, I don't think you should call yourself a dollar. One of the projects out there that I'll give a shout out to is RAI from Reflexer Labs. And they tried to make a stablecoin and it's like 3.14 cents or something. So it's like pi, right. So they tried to make it so it's, it is not actually a dollar and they never claimed to be a dollar. And I think that that was much more honest for people who were interested in trying out some of these algorithmic stablecoins. And, you know, it's tough though, because I know that people wanna peg everything to the dollar, ‘cause that's what most things are priced in and it's easy for consumers. At the same time though, I think you're hiding a lot of the complexity and these things are complex financial products. So, my take on the Luna situation is that they were essentially running an unregulated money market account, where they took on extreme leverage and sometimes were acting almost as like a bank, you know, with like 10x leverage on their assets for issuing those supposedly dollar-length stablecoins. And they blew up, right? And they blew up because, you know, a hedge fund attacked them and put them out of business. And there's a reason why these money market funds are regulated in the U. S., you know, they have to be backed one to one and they have to have certain asset ratios and all sorts of stuff. And it's ‘cause you can have a speculative attack on your funds, you know, if they're - if you have them in assets that may, at some point in time not be priced, because there's a run on the market and that's exactly what happened to Luna. It was a smart thing to try, I think people should continue to try building different versions of these projects. But I think they need to be careful on how they advertise and market them, they need to be careful about the scale at which they try to execute them in, and they need to be much more honest about disclosures around the reserves and everything like that. So, the fact that it was so opaque, I think it’s super bad. The fact that they tried to market themselves as a dollar to consumers, which was not. It's just not true. I think that they were abusing that a little bit, is also bad. And I'm very sad for all the people who lost a lot of money on that. And it seems there's a lot of irresponsible parties and that, but for everyone who lost money I feel you and we’re still to see what's going to happen with that.
(25:38) Matias: Yep. Totally. And do you, do you think this changes the dynamic of the alternative layer-one narrative, that has like really picked up steam. Like, do you think there ends up being more of a reliance now on Ethereum because Ethereum's basically weather, you don't think it changed that at all?
(25:54) Matt: No, it doesn’t change at all. I think that that's just a nice - crypto people are so tribal, so they will pick, like, any argue or whatever to push their position forward and you know, everyone's guilty of it, I'm sure we're guilty of it as well. But no, I don't think there's anything behind it. I think that, like, it was an experiment that was marketed improperly and it blew up and they hurt a lot of people and they should feel really bad about it and certainly showing more humility would be a positive for leadership on that project. And, I think a lot of consumers got hurt. So I also think that weighing in without showing some empathy for those who participated, you're kind of missing the point here. So like, if we want people to love crypto, play with it, get involved with it or whatever, we have to all be upset when someone evaporates, you know, tens of billions of dollars of savings, what people thought were savings when they’re doing it. And like, there is all sorts of things about Luna that should have been like bright flashing red lights, right? So like anyone tells you, you can get a 20% annualized return, you know, compounded or whatever, all with the safety and security of, you know, U.S. dollars or - this is what they were using in this case. But like, if anyone tells you that there's a safe 20%, you know, year over year compounding return, you know, no risk, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That is - it should be - just a big flashing red flag. And, I think people got carried away in 2021. I think Luna is the example of what happens when the tide goes out in the market. And I don't think they will be the last, I will also just say here, I don't think the other stable - there is any other major stablecoin project out there. Who has this problem? USDC is backed. Tether is backed and becoming better and better, higher quality backed over time. Like they've obviously made a choice internally on their leadership team, to move in that direction. And I hope they keep doing that, ‘cause it's a really good example. So I don't think that there's other, like, stablecoin projects lurking in the mix to be popped. I'll actually point to the traditional markets and say that like, I actually think most of the speculation right now is on people's margin loans and their stock trading accounts and that's what we should actually be worried about. And maybe there's some regulation over there, but the regulation is lighter there too. And that's maybe where some of the bears are working in the shadows.
(28:16) Matias: And on the traditional side real quick, where do you do, do you think this is closer to a bottom or do you think we're just kinda like getting started in like this bubble pop and there was a lot of companies that went public at way too high valuations and whatnot.
(28:29) Matt: Yeah. Again, it is hard. We are, I would just, I would say, I think we're right in the middle. So I don't know if we've - I feel like we'll certainly retest the lows where we're at right now. I think that's, that's baked in, but you know, if we go lower from there or if that's a retest and then we, you know, go sideways for 12 months. But I do think we are in for a, you know, 12 to 18 month typical, you know, three to five quarter recession. And I think we already started in Q1. We'll see, like maybe - they'll never know until afterwards, cause we have to go back and look at the data, right, that's just how it works, but that's where I think we're at. I, again, I don't - nothing about this looks out of the ordinary from what we've seen before. I'm expecting things to progress, similarly, at least in the crypto market, and then in the real markets; the only difference here is inflation, which we've actually been, you know - a lot of places in the world have been trying to generate inflation for a while. So there's some supply chain stuff that's happening there. And what I mean by that is like, we're no longer buying oil from Russia, so that's going to cause some supply chain issues. And then China's shut down because of COVID so that there's, there's not enough stuff. There's too many dollars. There's not enough stuff. Interest rates have to go higher. I think, I don't think that's going to change at all. So anyway, I think it's an overall pretty ugly market. I don't think it's atypical. In any way, with the, you know, little asterisks here around if interest rates really get high, you know, we're talking like 8, 9, 10% on mortgages or something, that would be pretty unusual, I guess that's still kind of a tail risk.
(30:00) Matias: Matt, you did send me an inflation warning text like 12, 18 months ago, that you saw was coming.
(30:08) Matt: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it was very obvious to anyone running a business. So, like, typically, you know, like I would say the order of operations is people deep in the financial market see things about six months before people running businesses see things, and people running businesses see things about six months before people who are just going to a job nine to five, see things. So, you know, you have an advantage of being deep in and having to, you know, allocate resources where you're going to have information a little bit sooner. So yeah, it was pretty obvious. And the oil crisis that's happening right now is making it worse. So what could have been maybe like a 12 month recession? It's probably going to be an 18 month one. Because we gotta figure out where we're going to get oil. And I suggest, I highly suggest Texas, right? Or anywhere else in the United States where we know we could get, it would be a good place to start, for, for getting oil and gas. But anyway, we’ll see.
(31:02) Matias: Totally agree, Well, Unstoppable made a lot of strides in, in the last bear market. So I guess general advice for founders who are building in a first bear market. How do you, you know, what were some of the experiences that you learned from the 2018, 2019 cycle, and what are you basically applying today?
(31:24) Matt: Well, first thing you gotta do is clean up house, right? ‘Cause typically in a bull market, you'll take on a lot of debt, like technical and organizational debt, because you're trying to keep up with demand, right? Like, we just had so many customers calling us in December of last year, it was ridiculous. Like, the customer ticket volume is insane. So you go through and you clean all that up and then that should take you, you know, several months. Then reorganize all your processes. Focus on internal efficiency and get that done. So that’s, that step one: clean up. Step two: you really wanna double down on providing value to your customers and the way that you typically do that in software is through engineering. Look at where you can help, help your customers get more value from your product. So at Unstoppable Domains, obviously we're pushing a lot of new functionality around NFT domains as identity, and we're looking at, you know, ways to improve your UX experience, et cetera, et cetera. So you'll just see a lot of product engineering investment from us. And then strategically you want, once you, once you've, you know, have that solved, the next thing you wanna look at is, strategically, where can you start taking medium and longer term bets? So like, what are the things that you would normally say, oh, let's do that later. Well, now you have a little bit more time because you're going to have less customers, right? You're going to, like, that's what's going to happen. You're going to - so this is a good time for you to focus on those medium to longer term projects, which you know or you believe. Fundamentally build value for the business. And what's great news is it's probably going to be cheaper to do that, right? Because if you, if you're in a bull market and people are just throwing money at you to get the product out the door, there's a huge opportunity cost to investing in the long term. But when you're in a bear market, all of a sudden it flips on its head, right? Because no one's showing up to buy all your products that day. You're like, well, I guess I have plenty of time to go back in the workshop and do that long term value creation that we needed to do. So that's my framework for how you should think about bear markets. You need to be very focused on value creation during this time. And you should operationalize your organization so that you don't have to be, like - you move completely away from responsive to proactive in your interactions with your customers. So bull markets, you know, product is flying off the shelves. You just gotta do whatever you can to put as many bandaids and duct tape on that to keep it moving. Fair markets, that's when you, when you take the time to heal, recover, and put all those things together. I'm not the first person to say this, Brian from Coinbase actually, has some pretty interesting things that he said, and Coinbase is - everyone remembers Coinbase. The number one complaint on Coinbase in 2013 or whatever it was, their website always goes down when there's, you know, when the market's going too fast or something, and it was almost a meme in crypto that like, you could know what the crypto price was by if Coinbase was up or not. If Coinbase was up, crypto prices were fine. If Coinbase was down, like the website crashed, then you knew that the crypto prices were down, ‘cause everyone was trying to sell at the same time and their platform had trouble handling, This is 2013. They're obviously much different than that today. But that just shows that, you know, you build up this technical debt, now's the time to refactor and get that fixed.
(34:25) Matias: Love that, amazing advice. And I guess, to wrap things up here, is there one feature in particular that you can highlight or one product that's currently out that you guys are pushing a new update to, that you're looking forward to, for the rest of this year?
(34:39) Matt: Well, there's a lot. And so, something that's coming pretty soon, so this is maybe a little sneak peek here, is we are going to be enabling you to hook up your email address much more easily to your NFT domain, so that, as you're taking - as you're logging into apps on web3, those apps will have a way to contact you. And right now, it's a big problem on web3, like I've used Uniswap, they have no way to send me an update. Like, and, and this is also a security risk for people, right? ‘Cause Uniswap may say “Hey, we found a bug. You need to use this new set of smart contracts or whatever, or you need to update your LP or whatever it is that you're doing in there. And they just have no way to contact me. And there's a, there's a lot of projects that are working on this. We're going to try to make that easier with NFT domains. I'm hoping to get that out. I mean, I'd like to get it out next week cause I know it works cause we demoed it this week, but it's not going to happen for another month, right? You gotta give the people time to go in and, and work through and make sure that, you know, we got all the bugs worked out, but that's something that's working right now that we're going to have out there soon. I think it's going to be pretty cool in addition to just a host of other updates that we're going to be making, on chain for opening up the smart contracts. So we’ll see.
(35:49) Matias: Cool, super exciting stuff, Matt. Well, thanks a bunch for jumping on here. We'll stay up to date with all the Unstoppable updates and looking forward to doing this again.
(35:58) Matt: Awesome. Thank you, Matias, loved it.
