Brad Kam – Unstoppable Domains Transcript

Brad Kam – Unstoppable Domains Transcript

Brad Kam - Unstoppable Domains

Note: This transcript was automatically generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and therefore typos may be present.

Rob McNealy
Hey folks today Rob McNealy here. And I am talking to the co founder of unstoppable domains, Brad cams. Brad, welcome to the show. How are you today?

Brad Kam – Unstoppable Domains
Great. Thanks for having me.

Rob McNealy
Well, I appreciate you coming on. I’ve been a big fan of what you’ve been doing now for. I don’t know, I heard about you guys probably about a couple months back. And I actually got to talk to you offline, because I actually think I want to buy one of your domains. But you’re going to educate me and the audience today about what your domains are doing. And what I’m, before we not kind of get into all that. Let’s talk about you a little bit. Give me a little bit of history about you. What’s your background?

Brad Kam – Unstoppable Domains
Yes, I’m from Atlanta. I’ve been starting companies since college days, started out in the real estate world and actually after the last economic crash started buying up homes during this period where they dropped by like 80 90% in Atlanta, so it was pretty, pretty wild, pretty wild, pretty wild situation, but eventually kind of realized I needed to, I needed to get into the software game needed to get to San Francisco needed to get into startups. That’s really where the big change was happening. So I moved to San Francisco in 2012. And I moved into this house called 20 mission, which has been referred to as a house that Bitcoin built in various publications. Because it was a Bitcoin hacker house where the second Bitcoin exchange in the US launched in our basement of Vitalik came and gave a talk before Ethereum launched in the courtyard, pretty much everybody there was doing something Bitcoin related. So I kind of moved to San Francisco and at the same time, just kind of completely dove into crypto related things and kind of haven’t looked back since then. But in general, been doing startups.

Rob McNealy
Very cool. So tell me what is Unstoppable Domains all about?

Brad Kam – Unstoppable Domains
So it’s about free speech tech, it’s about creating a censorship resistant internet and we’ll We do is we build domain names on blockchains. So we have a domain registry similar to like a.com. Except for it’s part of a smart contract on a blockchain. So we’ve got crypto Ethereum. And the way it works is is every domain is stored by you in your cryptocurrency wallet, a traditional domain would be stored by like GoDaddy or your registrar or something like that. And because you have this mandatory custodian, they can move the domain around, they can take it away. So a blockchain domain is is one that you can that you control, it’s a self custody. ERC 721. And you use the domains. For websites for censorship resistant websites, you store your website content on IPFS or another decentralized storage network. And you can also use them for payments. And this is kind of weird. This is different than a traditional domain. The same domain can work for both websites and payments. So I’ve got Brad crypto, you could type that into a browser and see my website or you could type that into a cryptocurrency wallet, and you can send me Bitcoin or Ethereum or whatever you can send any currency essentially to one domain. Okay,

Rob McNealy
so how does that work is how does it work? So how do you make money? How do I get a domain?

Brad Kam – Unstoppable Domains
Yeah, so the way it works is is you can go to unstoppable domains calm, it’s gonna look similar. It’s kind of like our version of a GoDaddy, you can type in domains into the search bar, you can check out you can pay with credit card or crypto. After you do that you can manage your domain meaning that you add your crypto addresses so you can receive money to it and launch a website, a website on decentralized storage. So we’ve got a bunch of little tools in there kind of like a decentralized Wix where it’s really easy with a few clicks to go and build your website and launch.

Rob McNealy
So is this a one time payment one and done thing or is this like a subscription model like an annual model like a lot of much of the other registrar’s that are out there?

Brad Kam – Unstoppable Domains
Yeah. This is a one time fee. And the reason why is because it should just be something that you control and feel like you can control forever. If you have a subscription, you have these risks where the registry could just jack up the price on you. And there was a really kind of crazy thing that’s been going on in the traditional domain world around.org, where they’re selling the what was previously a nonprofit to a for profit company and talking about jacking the prices by three x. And all of these essentially, most nonprofits in the world are using.org. And now they’re all kind of at risk, where they’re under the you know, they’re under the under the thumb of this, of this registry that can just change prices whenever. So a once simple, easier, safer for the user.

Rob McNealy
So do you so the I guess the question I would have, and I’m just trying to understand because I’m actually kind of interested in this project for Tosca, actually. And so if you go away, Does it still work?

Brad Kam – Unstoppable Domains
Yeah. Yeah, you’re relying on a theorem and you’re relying On the ipfs protocol, which is a decentralized storage network, although Pretty soon, you’ll be able to rely on many different decentralized storage networks. So I would say that’s a little bit less of a risk, because you can always just put your website on multiple networks. For aetherium, though you are relying on on a theory and still being there and stable, so doesn’t doesn’t rely on unstoppable domains. Once you have the domain, it’s yours doesn’t really matter what happens to us you already control it.

Rob McNealy
So essentially, when you say it’s on a theory, does that mean that that’s where the DNS is located? So I’m hitting, that’s where the I type in POS network and then all or whatever it would be on your protocol. I’m hitting the Ethereum network and that’s just a permanent DNS record through a theorem.

Brad Kam – Unstoppable Domains
Yeah, so if any of your any of your your community has ever used like my ether wallet, for example, which is a theorem wallet, so there, they have my ether wallet, crypto, and so you can type it into it. browser and you go there and when the browser when you type in my ether wallet crypto the browser goes and reads the Ethereum blockchain, finds the my ether wallet crypto domain, and then goes and looks for the hash where the content is located at the ipfs. Hash, and then it shows you the shows you the website.

Rob McNealy
So you said you can put it on multiple networks. How does that work?

Brad Kam – Unstoppable Domains
Well, I said that I don’t want to maybe over complicate something, I said that purely to say that you don’t need to bet on any one storage network. Right now we’re using ipfs, because that’s the one that’s the most mature and has, you know, great tools and a lot of developers already using it. And so what the way that works is I upload ipfs and then people anywhere can store and share my website to the network. So instead of having my website stored on Amazon Web Services, where if they decide they don’t like what I’m doing, they can just flip me off. I can just turn me off. Instead, I have dozens or hundreds or maybe even thousands of different people all storing a copy of my website and unlikely they’re all just going to decide to turn me off all at once.

Rob McNealy
Exactly. So for this way, do you notice any kind of lag time or speed difference between DNS on a traditional registrar or a DNS on unstoppable

Brad Kam – Unstoppable Domains
so the theory of look apart is quite good, quite easy, quite fast. The IP Fs the how fast website content loads is based on to things it’s based on how many people you’ve got, that are storing and sharing your website. And you it’s also based on how like close they are geographically to you. So what this leads to is, if your website’s popular, then it’s also performance. It also works well, which is kind of like in a weird way. It’s kind of like the opposite of a lot of traditional web systems where you like get DDoS like you get too much traffic. And things go down. Whereas here, if you have a whole bunch of demand, you’re probably also going to have a whole bunch of supply of websites of copies of your website being stored around. So I guess that’s the long answer. The short answer is right now because it’s early. It doesn’t work that well. But the moment something gets popular, it’ll work quite well. So it has this kind of like opposite of the regular internet approach. As it scales as it scales, it gets better.

Rob McNealy
Is there a way to then to use unstoppable for the DNS, and then just pointed to a normal web server host somewhere?

Brad Kam – Unstoppable Domains
Sure, you could do that I think you would lose, lose a little bit of the advantage, though, because what we’re really the purpose of all this is to have a censorship resistant internet is to have essentially self custody of both your domain and your website so that neither of those can be points of failure where you have to rely on other companies like you control that stuff. And no one can really stop you from publishing A browser might say, like, Hey, this is a really, you know, you know, this is illegal, what you’re doing, and we don’t want to show this record. So there’s always like that level of place where somebody could try to, you know, block you from being seen. But that’s different than somebody just being able to take you down. Like right now, registrar can just say, we don’t like what you’re doing, we’re going to, we’re going to, we’re going to take the domain away, you know, right now, Amazon Web Services can just switch you off. And, you know, of course, you know, in the US, I don’t think this is, you know, as big of a problem, although there are certainly issues here as well, but around the world, there’s, you know, all kinds of issues with these tools. So,

Rob McNealy
so do you think that going forward, especially with crypto, do you expect that there’s gonna be actual censorship of different types of cryptocurrencies now, and I’m not trying to argue with you, I’m trying to play devil’s advocate a little bit because, you know, I’m involved with a crypto project as well. And the one thing you hear about everything from all these kryptos essentially censorship resistance censorship resistance, the most important thing, blah, blah, blah. The question is, you don’t really hear about too many kryptos actually being censored. Yet, do you expect that that will change in the future?

Brad Kam – Unstoppable Domains
Well, I think the very nature of it is censorship resistant, like so for example, like Bitcoin and aetherium, do not require permission in order to get an account from anyone, they’re able to be sent anywhere to anyone. So they’ve already proven their censorship resistant use case in the market very early on. And this was very controversial. One of the early use cases of Bitcoin was sending money to WikiLeaks when they got shut off. And regardless of how you feel about them, the fact that there was no way for anyone to stop that was, in a sense of first the first time that somebody was ever able to publicly fundraise for a lot of money completely against the will of the United States and various other countries. And they had no way to stop because of its censorship resistance. So it’s really about like, how do the tools work? And I think you can do the same thing that you can do for currency with domain names. Right now. domain names On the sort of fundamental level, they get taken away, they can get taken away. And if you change the power structure, then you kind of change the entire ecosystem. So that’s that’s the idea is like cryptocurrency is like a safe, open source permissionless space to build tools on top of where everybody can, everybody can join in, everybody can be a part of it. And that’s part of the reason why I, it’s important on the fundamental layer. It’s not like every single person is getting censored, they’re not. But we all benefit from the open source, the open source tech because of this, like social, social, you know, social cooperation thing. We’re all working on the same stuff. We’re all building stuff that’s more and more interoperable. There’s innovation all over the world, like so. It’s not just about the people getting censored, although they matter. And I think in the on the website side, it’s a pretty big deal. Like there’s, you know, a law in Turkey that says that a read that a hosting service is not allowed to happen. Have the word gay on any website content automatically pre banned naked as well. You see a lot of this in particular, there’s been some pretty weird cases with startups using l y dot L y. And when the Islamic in Libya came, took over, they started taking down some websites, including porn websites and things like that. Your basic internet infrastructure should not have those kinds of random points of failure, where people can its problem is people, like people that you shouldn’t have anyone in charge of what’s okay to say. Applications can still create an experience where they, you know, remove the harshest or the most offensive voices if they choose, but it’s still a better internet for everybody. If I can then go choose a different browser. If I don’t like what they do, and I think that makes a lot of sense.

Rob McNealy
Do you feel that Going forward, as demand starts increasing that, that the speed to deliver these on, you know, unsensible website, do you think that’s going to improve over time? And you said, there’s gonna be more options? What options are there going to be for? You know, besides IPFS?

Brad Kam – Unstoppable Domains
Yeah, well, so there’s there are, you know, several in the works that are, you know, advancing very quickly. ipfs is a couple of years ahead. But there’s there’s several that are advancing very quickly. And I think the idea is, is that you’re going to want to have your content on maybe three to five, just a sort of like an extra, an extra safety layer. But in regards to kind of the speed and performance, it’s really about how many people are storing and sharing that website. And so that’s about, in part how popular the website is. And so I think right now, the only problem is, is is not so much the way the tools work, it’s that there aren’t enough popular websites yet. And those are coming And I think the tools are just getting Easy enough where people are starting non technical people are starting to build stuff all over the place. And that’s been kind of one of the new steps. That’s happened really just in 2020. I would say, even before now it wasn’t. And now we’ve got this thing with browsers. So Opera browser, which 80 million users on their Android app can now just type in a dark crypto domain, just like they would a.com. And that just happened today. That was kind of the big, big, decentralized web news for us today. So I think it’s really just that there aren’t enough. There aren’t enough websites yet. But the stuff the stuff actually works, you would just need a lot of people storing it in order to get really, really good censorship resistance and really good uptime.

Rob McNealy
So what do you see about protecting websites from denial of service attacks? does this affect that in any way or help with that at all?

Brad Kam – Unstoppable Domains
I yeah. Because essentially what happens is if you get a whole bunch of traffic, it as long as that well, so It doesn’t, it doesn’t automatically prevent malicious actors. But you can do things like say, I will only permission these wallets or wallets with these criteria to visit a website in the first place. So you can create like easy kind of locks on your website if you don’t want to, if you if you’re at risk of those types of things. Ultimately, I would just say that, in general, if you think about, like, what’s really happening if Amazon Web Services, you know, used to store essentially all the website data on their servers, and now all of a sudden, we allow anybody in the world who has extra storage space to offer it up to anybody in the world. We’re going to get a marketplace and it’s going to be a lot more efficient than what we’ve got over here. So I think it’s just that like this model of open source marketplace, you know, peer to peer marketplace for storage space, just I think it just makes the internet better and basically every way over the long term. You know, if we’re talking if we’re saying like, you know how performant is it over the next year, I would say, you know, it’s going to be a little, it’s going to be a little inconsistent, depending on geography, depending on the specific website, some websites are going to work far better than others, because they have more, they have more nodes sharing them. So you’re going to have these kinds of clunky things. So it’s kinda like 1990s level internet. But the point is, is that it works like it does work. We do have a decentralized web, that functions, it’s going to need all the tools and it’s not it’s going to need a lot of love before it, you know, it can really, you know, migrate over the previous, you know, the previous kind of internet infrastructure stuff. But it does work for the censorship resistant use cases. And it does work for daps you know, cryptocurrency applications that, you know, are trying to remove all the points of failure in their applications, but they still have the domain name problem, and they still have the website on Amazon Web Services problem. So it solves, you know, these these two key problems for them. And then we’ve also got the youtubers so the crypto YouTubers have you know been getting their videos taken down. And you just put up those videos on decentralized web and then no one can take them down. Now we’re going to need aggregators to make it easy for, you know, for everybody to find that stuff, YouTube’s great at the discovery part. So obviously we have some work to do. It’s not going to work tomorrow, but you can go ahead and put them there. Especially if YouTube takes him down. Definitely go put them up. And you can do new things like you can charge for them, you charge 25 cents for them. You could have a tip button in case you don’t want to charge but it’d be great if it’s easy when someone likes your video that they can just easily tip you crypto. There’s all kinds of new stuff you can do.

Rob McNealy
So are your unstoppable domains, would you are they compatible with things like NginX and CloudFlare

Brad Kam – Unstoppable Domains
CloudFlare has done a lot of has done a lot of things to integrate with Etherum and IPFS. So CloudFlare is is kind of very far along I would need to look a little closer at what engine x is doing. I just don’t have I don’t, I don’t actually have enough personal knowledge. They’re

Rob McNealy
very cool. So where would you say you are in your roadmap? What’s next for you? You got the opera integration done now, which is a huge thing. Where what’s the next big thing you guys are working on?

Brad Kam – Unstoppable Domains
Yeah. So we’ve got, you know, we’ve got our registries out, we’ve got crypto and dot zil. We’ve got over 200,000 domains registered. So they’ve been started. That process started about a year ago. So there’s domains that have been being being registered unclaimed ever since then. We have been mostly focused on the wallets so there’s like my ether wallet, trust wallet, my crypto coin Oh, me atomic, several others coming soon, where you can send money using the domains. There’s also a Chrome extension. So it’s a unstoppable Chrome extension. So if you prefer to use Chrome you can use it also works in brave and then opera. So that’s the that’s the that’s the native announcement of the first browser. The first major browser to ever support a non DNS domain name. Attention so far as we know because it’s pretty much been all DNS before this it’s not just about blockchain domain you know blockchain Domain Name System they’ve never supported anything that wasn’t you know just part of this this one kind of I can I can control DNS system now it’s all about making the tool is easier to build build websites. So that’s a that’s a big focus there’s templates like I mentioned for decentralized Wix there’s people at Cairo crypto you can easily launch your own decks there’s a bunch more stuff like that that are that are coming tools just to make it easy to build websites.

Rob McNealy
Very cool stuff. Bradley cams. Where can people find out more about your domains unstoppable?

Brad Kam – Unstoppable Domains
Well, you can do UnstoppableDomains.cam. or check us out on Twitter, UnstoppableWeb or Telegram UnstoppableDomains. There’s always a conversation going on in there.

Rob McNealy
Very good. Bradley, thank you so much for coming on the show today. I really enjoyed our conversation.

Brad Kam – Unstoppable Domains
Thanks a bunch.

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