Transcript

(00:00) [Music] all right and we are live now uh uh excited and kind of privileged to be here um once again i’m johan i’m the founder of kinetic uh i’m a handshake investor i’m a name-based investor uh i’m i think i’ve become like uh like a handshake kind of fanatic it’s a little bit worrying sometimes but i’m excited to be here um i’ve got an incredible panel people here with me i’ve got michael seiger i’ve got tracy fong we’ve got paul uh variditicate and they’re all

(00:40) experienced investors in many things from domains to private equity to vc and crypto vc uh we’re all in the space we’ve all been looking at it and we’re all excited about handshake i think um we’re gonna be talking about investing in the handshake ecosystem a lot of different aspects of it there’s a lot of things to kind of be excited about but um i think we’re all going to be pretty critical hopefully about it too so just to get started when we just welcome everybody and if you don’t mind why

(01:07) don’t we go around the room and if you don’t mind say um your your kind of firm um what you’re doing in the space uh outside of the handshake ecosystem uh and uh maybe just a couple notes on how you got into handshake and we’ll start with tracy great well really nice to meet everyone uh thank you so much for the time here my name is tracy fong i’m a partner at a firm called alborn it’s an alternative investment advisory firm that advises about 300 institutional lps limited partners in the traditional sense

(01:39) uh to invest in it’s interesting as ahead of venture capital i see the intersection of late stage hedge long short equity hedge funds uh versus that of venture capital so that allows for some really interesting insights and i also had the crypto coverage mostly as it pertains to venture um and to some extent as it relates to trading um and so uh i’ve been involved in handshake or have been invested in handshakes since late last year a little later than most of you but uh stephen mackey a big proponent of

(02:13) handshake and early developer has been encouraging me probably for the last two years and i finally got on board and i’m so bought in amazing amazing well welcome uh michael please thanks for having me i’m michael seiger i’m based out in seattle i am the founder and lead instructor at dnacademy.

(02:34) com so the d and the n stands for domain names dnacademy.com where we help investors figure out how to invest in domain names as an asset class traditional domain names is what i’ve been focusing on so com.net.org and then the 1500 new top-level domains that have been launched over the past seven years we’re the corporate training provider for godaddy for cedo in europe for uniregistry and we’ve trained thousands of people around the world to help them figure out how to value domain names as an asset buy them low sell them high

(03:10) and manage their investing portfolio so we we handle everything from a to z i have been a um a long time naysayer of handshake i have to admit you’re not the last one to get into handshake tracy um it was handshake jesus that actually gifted me my name about i don’t know a month ago maybe and i’ve spent way too much time thinking about handshake domains i think i’ve got 20 tabs open right now with domain i’m looking at it’s exciting and the more i think about the way domain names traditional domain

(03:47) names have evolved with the new top-level domains and the way that um bitcoin has evolved over the past 10 years uh of which i’m a believer in the more i can see the vision of handshakes so uh it’s great to be here and thanks for having me thanks thanks and i just got to say like handshake jesus really i mean he he really has been incredible just spreading the gospel so we appreciate that uh and we’ve got chango um chango a long time uh supporter and kind of a booster and evangels for the space please

(04:18) yeah i just saw a handshake as this uh potential for me to get in as an early adopter because back in the 90s you know i i was a child and so i missed out on the internet pioneer opportunity and so now handshake is that second opportunity and i think lots of us see that and yeah we’re here to talk about that excellent excellent and then last but not least my good friend paul from pantera go for it hey guys i’m paul bratatakit i’m a partner at pantera capital um and yeah i feel like of all the domain buying that i’ve been doing i

(04:52) probably should have consulted michael before doing all of that if i spend way more money than i needed to but uh you know uh with anterior capital we’ve been invested in investing into cryptocurrencies and blockchain companies since 2013. dna of the firm was from dan moorhead who used to be a tiger management um cfo headed with macro trading i’m more of a vc guy so i’ve been a venture capital for the last 10 years we focused on mobile mobile infrastructure mobile apps and started investing into blockchain

(05:20) companies and protocols since 2014. and you know the third part not our firm is joy crew from augur and all we do is just exclusively investing into currencies and companies uh the way that i got you know really excited about cryptocurrencies was really just enabling the emerging markets to get access to financial services and then of course now we have the decentralization of the internet which includes handshake i’ve known joseph poon and andrew lee for a while joseph from his work with ethereum and then

(05:51) andrew from his work at purse and so you know for me just a huge fan of just you know decentralized infrastructure and um we invested into the pre-sale i invested personally too and i’m a huge user of uh things like name base so both um playing around with domains and also trying to figure out how to grow the community awesome great well let’s dive in um i think the first thing i want to start just really broad and you know just conscious of you know the everybody in the audience who’s listening uh thinking about how to invest or how

(06:24) you know how to kind of get access to different things and different ways to appraise um tracy let’s start with you and we’ll go around what is your handshake thesis um sure uh i i think that the investable opportunity has so much room to grow um so i think about it more from an institutional investor’s perspective and why an institutional investor might want handshake in their venture capital portfolio or crypto asset portfolio and so in the context of just to kind of level set some of the investment uh

(06:55) sizing and opportunity set in the context of you know one and a half trillion dollars of ethan bitcoin 100 billion dollars of layer one 50 billion dollars of d5 100 billion dollars and these numbers are all moving of course with 100 million dollars of on-chain synthetic tokens 25 billion dollars in web 3 but you know as chongo said earlier in the discussion it’s really what’s you know um like in the late 90s web 3.

(07:21) 0 is really an opportunity to fuel the way the new internet will be built and so i think that’s going to be really exciting i think that this will be you know uh part of sort of the protocol layer that will accrue some of the most value and i’d be really curious to discuss more of that today furthermore um as i talked to some bc investors and they’re still a little i think it takes some time for some of these vc investors paul here notwithstanding to really get an understanding of how web 3.0 handshake and the

(07:53) opportunity set might unfold as i kind of walk through too you know i’d say i uh surveyed about 20 uh institutional venture capital funds that have a disproportionate majority in crypto and they’re still pretty active in d5 and some of the other you know um primary opportunity sets and haven’t really gotten as comfortable exploring web 3 yet it’s sort of an opportunity that’s going to come to fold as they realize that there is both an enterprise and a consumer opportunity and i can expand on

(08:26) that later but that’s where the crux of how i think about it from our institutional lp’s perspectives that’s great thanks but how do you think about it from individual oh i see okay great yes um uh i uh it’s kind of similar thing that’s sort of the hat that i have um uh well uh in addition to that i’ve also sort of tried to relinquish some of my institutional thinking and you know traditional let’s call it keynesian economics thinking through to now more of an austrian economics framing

(09:00) and i think like i my journey was i first had to unlearn everything i learned from a very you know specific um approach to macroeconomics so uh when i went to berkeley undergrad janet yellen talked there and she’s a total keynesian paul’s nodding his head and then um i actually you know i went to you know the very traditional finance route worked at goldman sachs city group lehman brothers and um and went to harvard business school all of them are all kings and economics part of this establishment financial infrastructure

(09:34) for me i had to kind of unlearn all those things get a lot more comfortable with crypto and then finally understand piece together growing up in the 90s and actually having worked in startups since the late 90s having to piece that together and having that ah-ha moment to say wow this is all going to crystallize in such a beautiful and elegant way on on this basis where the coming together of some of the most rapid development of software known to man on an open source basis uh coming together with a wide swath

(10:07) opportunity set and open playground for people that are willing and motivated to play to build and to utilize these top-level domains in so many different ways through to um you know the enterprise the consumer and then some of the really interesting things which we can ultimately talk about like uh you know wrapped nfts etc so hopefully that’s a little more comprehensive in terms of my personal journey yes that’s great thank you chango how about you how do you what what is your kind of i mean obviously you’re you’re so involved

(10:36) in the community so it might be hard for you to kind of you know dissect the different aspects of it but just from an investor’s standpoint obviously you know i know that you’re you buy handshake and i don’t know if you buy domains like how do you look at um handshake from an investors yeah the way i view this is more from an intuitive angle because you know this i have the same feeling as i did about bitcoin in 2014 it was like okay well this this tech is great is doing something really innovative and it’s not something we’ve

(11:07) ever seen before and it’s addressing a problem um with a naturally viable solution and then i sort of have that same conviction with about handshake right now and so yeah it did take bitcoin about ten years um before the my the market really realized this and for it to get priced in um i i suspect that it might follow us very similar trajectory for a handshake and so that’s that’s kind of i i just kind of feel it it’s not anything i could explain you know enough you just have it in your bones it’s in your marrow

(11:41) awesome paul how about you what’s your name from yeah from from a fun perspective i mean it really started off with the team you know um andrew having built purse having some you know pretty good traction there uh you know that operational experience jj being very very impressed with his sort of technical acumen and then joseph on the community side really just you know knowing a lot about sort of you know protocol design things like that and so i really just started off with the team but i think the idea makes a

(12:15) lot of sense too you know really uh a lot of what we’re investing into is is providing you know censorship resistance and sort of people to be able to sort of control their own data um you know being able to sort of you know resist against um you know centralized authority and i think you know being able to sort of decentralize that layer and then be able to then sort of tie all that back to the blockchain and potentially go into things like identity uh you know becomes really really interesting i mean we start off with

(12:45) domains which are already a sort of a large market and then going to things like identity then it becomes you know really really interesting in integrating finance into that is just amazing so for us i mean it just touched a lot of different layers of the protocol and web3 stack and so team you know we like the idea we like the strategy um you know it kind of reminded you of bitcoin back in the early days too which is which is kind of neat and then from a personal perspective i mean you know when people ask me what

(13:15) do i what do i do um you know obviously participating and getting exposure to the protocol makes a lot of sense obviously there’s protocol design where if handshake takes off and people are are sort of uh building things and and participating in in these auctions then your tokens will accrue value but then again i mean you know similar to how we invest into venture capital equity and also in uh into the tokens themselves i think there can be um a lot of value especially in these domains and so being an early investor in these and

(13:52) trying to have you know your strategy on what type of domains just like back and then this is where michael’s doing this is more michael’s domain but you know i think just being able to have some exposure there and being able to uh potentially get some quicker wins um through you know the evolution of these secondary markets could be a way to make some more immediate money while you’re sort of hoping that the community and everything else kind of takes off on the protocol side of things and that’s

(14:18) probably more understandable for a lot of web 2.0 guys than you know some of the newer generation of crypto investors thanks for that and michael how about you i mean what’s your thesis for handshake i mean obviously it’s kind of one that’s more newly formed but you know what what is it what was the the kind of thing that kind of clicked for you yeah so you know i’m a big proponent of names on the web i love a great domain name i own a domain name from that was registered in 1986 and com it’s the 29th oldest one i love

(14:51) names it doesn’t you know i’m agnostic to the tld i don’t really care as long as it’s a good name but what i really dislike about the way that the game has been played over the past 10 years is that it’s an insider’s game so if you have half a million dollars you can launch your own tld and then you can reserve the best domain names and keep them from other people and continue to make more money and and so it’s just sort of turned me and a lot of other investors off to the whole top level domain

(15:21) discussion um and so a lot of us have gone to just.com and then as we look at the people who are changing the world you know that we’ve heard the saying software is will will eat everything um the developers and the founders of today of the past five years have chosen cctlds they’ve country code top-level domains they’ve chosen dot io dot co dot gg we see venture capitalists going to dot vc these are countries you know credit code top-level domains around the world because they don’t necessarily want

(15:56) these new tlds some of which are going to new tlds i don’t want to paint the picture wrong but they’re choosing their own fate and they’re building on that and so because this entire community is is built with by developers they’re building you know i see them building it for what they want to see in the future the fact that i can go register a top-level domain and if it has value i can then choose to run it as my own domain or i can choose to put it on chain and sell second level domains on it and

(16:27) turn it into an annuity which very few people have had before and so if you had the vision a year ago and you got great domain names you’re set up for something that could happen over the next few years and if you didn’t you still probably have enough money to buy a great domain name that has the opportunity to sell many hundreds of thousands or hundreds of thousands of second level domains um and so i find it fascinating i would classify myself as cautiously optimistic i’m not going all in it’s maybe you know half a

(17:00) percent of my investments in domain names that i’m playing around with handshake maybe a hedge you know i do believe in it because i believe in the developers in this community from what i’ve seen from who i’ve interacted with um and so you know i’m that’s my general take on the handshake ecosystem and domain names and so i think some domain names if you go through the list of what’s going to auction what’s close you know what’s um closing over the next 24 hours i say 99 of them are just

(17:32) not very good they’re not investable assets um but you know once every 10 screens there’s a great domain name that’s either been going to be a phenomenal brand for a company instead of com or to uh what makes a growth great domain from your perspective obviously you’re the you’re the kind of the expert on this but i want to start uh i want to come back to you for uh on one thing which is um you’ve got half a percent of your entire portfolio in this space uh what’s it gonna take to get you to

(18:00) five or ten percent what are you waiting for what i’m looking on a dollar basis um you know i’m not a not total number of domain name count because i have a very small investment portfolio that’s worth uh you know i in my opinion um uh it’s worth a high value so from uh from an investment perspective it all comes down to usage right i think that i i actually missed the um the uh the showcase that you did last night because i had to go to dinner but you know when real companies are using handshake

(18:33) and i commend the conference for forcing people to go to handshake and i input the ip addresses at hdn hdns.io that was shared yesterday and so now my chrome and my safari and my firefox resolve and all handshake domains immediately like that’s fantastic but we need to get companies using it as their primary source and then we need to get into browsers you know that’s if if handshake domains get into browsers game over i think because then the next generation of internet users will just type in a top-level domain and go there

(19:14) yeah i i completely agree and definitely that’s kind of what we’re all uh kind of pushing for okay so let’s kind of ping it back over to to you tracy what are you looking what are you looking for in the ecosystem as signs of kind of maturity um you know and signs that uh you know the kind of the technology and then the overall infrastructure is going on the right track which makes it you know perhaps more or ready for prime time handshake is always kind of seems like it’s always been it’s still

(19:39) niche it’s still lagging behind it still has that kind of fresh feeling as like an undiscovered uh you know little gem in the forest uh mushroom in the forest but what’s it going to take for it to kind of grab um from technical perspective i um have a somewhat limited uh purview um as i’m more on the financial perspective but from from comparing some of the other projects i’ve looked at at a very high level um much more developer engagement broadly speaking maybe more distributed across the various

(20:13) areas that paul articulated for example and geographically i think having some geographic distribution can enhance some of the you know attraction of other developers um and that the sort of uh related network effect and as a consequence from there i would um i was talking to taishan about some of this more active and um i guess more consumer and enterprise use case sort of integrations um that would allow um some can you be specific about that i mean are there enterprise use case integrations that you’d like to see and i think some

(20:47) people are saying that you’re you’re audio oh got it um i’ll try to speak up um i’m in a um an interesting sort of unnamed location so um so um i’ll try to speak up um but at a high level um some of the integrations could be something along the lines of uh along the lines of what michael said you know in terms of a browser opportunity maybe a browser extension so one of the biggest exits uh last year was a four billion dollar exit of honey to paypal maybe the year before that it was a simple browser extension so

(21:26) could you port um integrations onto the various browser extensions that exist today um i know paypal is pretty active in terms of you know integrating crypto i think it’d be a stretch to ask them to extend it on to their browser extension today because of the way that they operate but something along those lines um what i call what i said about honey was it was one of the greatest hacks in history uh because it was a simple browser extension leveraging some really simple you know rebate like coupon-like groupon-like ideas and i think there’s

(21:54) some sort of hack along those lines that can be observed by way of um uh you know connections i i know one of the lead growth hackers that are know through contact some of the lead hack growth hackers that had worked on the um the honey browser extension so that might be an interesting opportunity and some others and that’s you know what little i’ve been following on the technology side i think at a high level um downstream from that what investors that are less technical would want to observe is then therefore more enterprise adoption

(22:27) like i said more consumer adoption and the one other thing that i um we’re probably good maybe going to get there later in terms of our conversation but i think the other thing that would be interesting is just a little more engagement from the institutional investors that have uh have invested in handshake like founders fund and draper because they have unstoppable right so you know there’s sort of a question mark around that and andreessen horowitz in particular because they have a standalone crypto fund that’s so prominent in nature

(22:58) and their you know web 3 folks or you know their web 1.0 folks so uh so those are some of the things that i’d like great great um let’s talk about actually the specifically investing and the different types of investable opportunities in the handshake ecosystem obviously we’ll kind of come over come back to uh mike in terms of uh domains but paul what do you think are the the actual investable opportunities i mean infrastructure companies uh domains handshake like what what makes most sense from either a

(23:27) fund and or both a personal and a personal perspective how do you decide like how to allocate towards each of these yeah i guess i guess i’ll quickly touch on uh tracy’s last point in case um that’s helpful and then i can just talk about how i’m seeing the ecosystem and it’s still very very early i mean i guess that’s the great thing about um you know having a more decentralized round was that you’re able to get all those brand names in there but i guess the flip side of that is um if things aren’t super hot then

(23:58) there’s no one that really has enough skin in the game to really want to kind of push forward and so that’s kind of the thing i don’t think everybody knows i don’t think everybody remembers like what what actually happened why this yeah so it was a very small round compared to other rounds that were happening during that time so probably let’s just say single digit millions and there was so much demand for this project we probably could have done a like a polka dot style round probably up to 100 million dollars would

(24:28) have went into this thing and so let’s just say of that round um you know no one really had more than or it was like maybe like uh yeah five seven but seven million dollars but no one really had more than like a few percentage points of of the um of the round so because of that i mean there was no typical like lead investor and therefore when everybody has a small chunk of um sort of a network then you just aren’t as incentivized as if you had 10 or 15 of of a company so it’s really just um trying to balance uh you know how a

(25:07) company is doing and whether you should spend time on that company versus you know a company that you have more skin in the game but maybe isn’t isn’t doing as well or he’s doing even better see again do you think that’s held the ecosystem back in terms of its development not having like you know really committed investors because i mean back when when we were starting the kind of the d-web foundation i actually did some of the rounds and i talked to some of the early investors and they’re like

(25:33) oh we still have this uh because they’d only put maybe fifty thousand dollars a hundred thousand dollars and it just yeah they couldn’t afford to allocate the time you could follow up on it of course why don’t you buy more handshake it’s not even that far from the the entry like the entry price was 10 cents it was like three years ago buy more and they’re like yeah but because it’s so small we can’t get the approval to buy more so it’s like it’s really a person’s land and it’s i’m kind of i’m kind of

(25:58) shocked yeah so i think i think um more than just the number that people put into the round but it’s also the percentage of their fun and so what you could do is you can get more i think right now there’s an opportunity potentially you know again i don’t know who would be this sort of ir person but like to get uh smaller funds that could put in money that would represent a larger chunk of their fund versus let’s just say pantera’s four billion dollars right now we invested three hundred thousand

(26:31) handshake it’s a very small percentage of our fund and so you know getting smaller guys or angel investors that can have a little bit more skin in the game in terms of percentage of their worth in and then be able to sort of go out there and and i think things like this are super helpful where you are just creating content creating awareness i think in general we need to just have more more entrepreneurs and and more competition um you know it kind of feeds into some of the things that i would be looking for i mean just

(27:04) personally myself i mean you know if if the way to get involved with handshake is to buy handshake then number one like how do you buy a handshake right and you know the ideal scenario would be to have handshake and maybe it’s one of those things like live pier has a hundred thousand dollar grant for people to help with listings or something like that right so i think it obviously if you can get it on a centralized exchange that’d be great but if not um you know name base or other other ways where you don’t have to think

(27:35) about you know being so technical and it’s just really easy to just get access to handshake that’s the most important thing so maybe integrations with other existing you know wallet providers that already have a bunch of traction with other different tokens and things like that so i think that’s the first step is you know how do you increase the on-ramp to handshake and maybe there are sort of dedicated services for that like you know river financial today raised 10 million dollars and it just focuses on bitcoin

(28:03) maybe there’s just like pure on react for handshake and then from there you can kind of like uh you know like almost like a you know like a mobile app that like a app store for basically getting handshake and then being able to just do different things with it you know these secondary markets things like that so in general like i think that needs to be solved and then from there i think you start you know thinking about like how do you get other developers on board so you know me and jihan are both invested

(28:31) into a company called alchemy and they’re kind of doing that for ethereum right yeah so you know if you look at polka dot right now i mean really what what is helping that take off is they’ve solved the on-ramp problem because all the large exchanges have have given access to polka dot but from there it’s really you know how do you sort of uh you know how do you how do you sort of transfer like you know existing companies onto onto polka dot and that’s kind of what people are building with the trustless

(29:00) bridge and then of course there’s different toolings that people are building to you know make it a lot easier for people to develop new applications on top of polka dot you need the same thing to do with handshake and then from there i think you know i think the enterprise thing is interesting it just may kind of come a little bit later on just like how enterprises are normally just just the way that they are but i mean i think it’s just solving the on-ramp you know making it much easier to speculate so maybe even just

(29:26) like uh a easy way to just kind of you know just exchange and change your name secondary markets like there’s there needs to be more and more marketplaces of that and then of course i think then you focus on you develop you know developer tooling and onboarding and then i think after that is just really just educating people on all the different types of use cases and then getting out to different developer communities to help build it and i think one of the things that could be helpful in addition to these conferences is is a grant program

(29:55) i don’t know i you guys are probably there’s probably already a grand program but like having people very very active to issuing grants i think would just be huge yeah i think these are there’s a really great point and i think hopefully we’ll recap a lot of those and take a lot of those away um chango what do you think about you know kind of some of the points that paul is raising in terms of you know how to kind of grow value in the ecosystem and kind of make it more accessible and palatable and and for for

(30:19) the community and investors yeah and in order to solve the on-ramp problem it really is three major exchanges and then you know once you hit those dominoes the rest will fall and you know those three major on-ramps are yeah coinbase number one because they uh take up all of the legal overhead of doing due diligence making sure something’s not in security and then once um coinbase gives it a go then it’s you know cracking all of the us-based exchanges gemini follows suit and then the rest of the world also follow suit and there you are

(30:50) do you think sorry why are we not listed on coinbase do you think well okay if i if i want to use the adam example for example um you know cosmos is was was launched march of uh 20 2018 it took coinbase maybe about a year of due diligence um before you know to make sure that it was not a security or it that it fell within the sec’s guidance framework and that um yeah and then once they gave it a green light then it was launched and it took about one and a half years and so we’re coming up against that mark

(31:24) for um for handshake and what it really is is you know each of us in this community are really passionate about it and all of us have some sort of influence and maybe a connection to coinbase and it’s just a matter of talking to them and you know giving them access to whatever whatever knowledge we have about the potential of this thing and especially since you know in relation to like every other coin like especially proof of state coins this one is is arguably it’s way more decentralized right it mimics bitcoins

(31:54) yeah it mimics the bitcoins not the model model and so it this this is easily it should easily pass their smell test yeah i i agree with that i mean i think it’s it’s a no-brainer in terms of being decentralized i i do think that you know these coinbases and at least all the u.s exchanges are fairly regulated so there is a process and so you need a bit of hand holding to get onto those ones now maybe financing those other guys maybe not as much so you know that’s just kind of how it is with with someone like coinbase

(32:24) and so i don’t know who is sort of responsible for that but i think there needs to be maybe an integration team for exchanges to kind of help facilitate that and why don’t i mean especially with what’s going on with d5 why isn’t uh again i’m not super technical maybe this is tough but there’s obviously a lot of decentralized cross-chain exchanges out there but why isn’t there any sort of like liquidity built up on maybe decentralized exchanges to kind of go out there and and you know get some access that way yes

(32:48) yeah staking things like that so one team that we actually are working very closely with who wasn’t able to make um this conference to be a speaker is kyoko and they’re actually at the forefront of bringing this defy narrative onto handshake which is the handshake you know hns tokens as a payment token it doesn’t have any um security risks that would come with being a staking token as a proof of stake and so it’s totally fine you could just um peg it on to ethereum for example or another blockchain such as flair and

(33:18) then you could just lock it up on send it into like a lock up address and then you could you know subsequently mint a synthetic token on the other blockchain and then enter into this d5 economy which is happening it’s totally happy like this year bet on it yeah we had a pretty exciting um talk yesterday from flair uh hugo philly and the founder of flare.

(33:40) xyz uh who’s going to be doing an integration uh and i i i believe there’s going to be an announcement uh maybe in a couple weeks or so about their their support of the ecosystem um and they’re gonna basically help to tokenize uh domains um and that might even kind of lead to tokenizing the second level domains which i think is pretty interesting um let’s take it back to you michael i mean we said we’d come back around uh we’re in the final stretch now uh about what makes a great domain name

(34:06) um and investing how should people in the audience be thinking about looking at domains valuing them how do you do it well the first way i do it is i understand that in the domain asset class there are six types of domains there’s generic dictionary words exact match words which have search volume and cpc there are brandable you know sort of made up words like google there’s acronyms numerix and alphanumerics but if we take away the the acronyms numerics and alphanumerics and just focus on the three you know getting a great brand that

(34:36) somebody might want um is what everybody should be looking at first right i i sold um tulip.com a couple years ago to the company tulip.io that was it’s a retailer technology provider they were upgrading they wanted to get there.com so i worked with them to to make that happen you know there are a lot of companies named tulip they there’s no one company that owns that mark and i would uh warn people not to buy trademarks that are only owned by one company think iphone uh think coca-cola you know those types

(35:10) of marks but for for a word a generic word like tulip or rose or something like that in um in the top level domain is fantastic because a company might want to choose to go to the decentralized web sometime in the future and and that would be a great option for them search volume and cpc for exact match domain names is great so if you can find a a high search volume that has active advertisers that’s the sort of the sweet spot for commerce right everybody wants to buy something online they’re buying services

(35:43) or what have you so if you can get something like software.com or cars or music or wallets and that allows people to take advantage of you know hundreds or thousands hundreds of thousands of second level domains on that one high search volume phrase that’s great and then brandables are always fun right um i uh sold carpool the word but with a k and so you know i think that when all the great domains are taken some great brandable words that are made up that are easy to remember with one or two you know slight modifications

(36:16) will be an opportunity as well in the future so lots of opportunity and that’s what’s really exciting about this space it’s still the first inning awesome i think we’re coming up on time here but i want to kind of do one last one last kind of go around we’ll start again with you uh michael um what what final thoughts do you have and also let’s finish it off with like what’s your what’s the favorite domain that you own for you’ve got so many so you can choose either traditional or handshake but i would

(36:43) encourage you to choose anything but it’s bigger to me well you know my favorite handshake is sagar just my last name i own cigar.com i have the cygger handshake you know that way anybody uh in my family going forward you know my my parents moved to the united states and and changed their name to sagar when they moved here from a european name and so that’s our family name and then i’ll be able to launch mike.

(37:09) cyger or you know mykidsnames.com or what have you so i i recommend that people look at their first names especially when they’re thinking about well how do i even play around with how do i move my money into handshake what’s the first type of domain name how do i figure out the system think about your own uh name your own last name if it’s uh not uh not if it’s if it’s unique you have an opportunity to get it still for very little or your first and last name and just figure out how the system works and how

(37:36) names are stored in name base and um and then think about what you might want to invest in from there but we still need to see some commerce and then we need to see domain selling at fair market retail right now i think we’re in a bit of a bubble where people are spending a lot of money on domain names that really don’t have a lot of commercial appeal so it’s we’re sort of in the in the ego space right now where people really want something but it may not it may not be justified for commercial reasons

(38:07) awesome thanks for that tracy how about you uh what is what what kind of final thoughts do you have about handshake and kind of going forward invest inside and then also what’s your favorite uh domain if any sure absolutely um i’m looking forward to um some of those um on-ramps or extensions to things that are um i guess more um actively engaged in the community in the crypto community today so to the extent you know uh we could go the wrapped nft routes and snfts are sort of on fire um or um or secondarily um you know

(38:41) projects like flair and those types of integrations i think sort of think about how in d5 how curve and metamask has changed the landscape for d5 pretty meaningfully and many others right so um something along those lines maybe flare and a couple of other projects could be that inflection for handshake and um yep i own uh three handshake names um they’re i guess ego maybe michael would um indicate that on my own tracy fong i own trey fo which is my nickname and i own double rainbow uh right when the emojis came

(39:13) out so single emojis weren’t uh accessible to me and my price point but the double ones were in double rainbow is a good one in my opinion maybe michael would think differently that’s great that’s great awesome uh chango oh yeah so um i have some final thoughts and this is a message directly to developers it’s a if you if you are a developer and you think that the ethereum ecosystem is credible for you know being this mutual innovation hub for a bunch of different um developer founders in the future

(39:47) to build all these different use cases on top of it then this is um you know think of translating that into the handshake context right you know if this is a really good um base layer for identity and domain where ethereum has um the erc token standards and then you know from that you know who would have thought like nobody in the ethereum ecosystem in 2016 would have thought okay you know this nft thing is going to become like a huge use case but they were thinking okay like you know what about decentralized gaming

(40:18) and game um what else what else like anything else right they just built this neutral platform with useful tools that other future developers who were even more creative um built a cool thing out of and then maybe eventually becoming unicorn you know nobody in 2016 said okay there’s going to be uniform and that’s going the killer app with ethereum so yeah so um you know if you adopt this mindset then you know building mutual tools that are going to be reusable and that are open source um for people to use in the future

(40:51) that’s going to really lend to the ultimate use case of handshake right and you know if you’re a super creative person who knows what that might be you know and that’s something that the web foundation would be very interested to find right if we’re some kind of this credibly neutral foundation that’s similar um that acts sort of like the ethereum foundation without having any of the core team in it then um yeah that’s something that would really bolster the ecosystem and your favorite domain of the ones

(41:21) that i own yes i was just gifted a bicycle tld a bicycle pinicode god and i’m a bike rider so that was i’m very happy about that amazing amazing all right rounding it out paul yeah i mean i’ve been invested since the beginning super super excited um i think the biggest thing recently is just being able to join the community with with jihad i know that we’ve been co-invested in this community but just to kind of meet more folks uh like us and to be able to sort of band together and i’ve always been

(42:00) talking about handshake to other develop uh other investors so i think you know hopefully we’ll get more and more other investors involved and being able to sort of push uh handshake out and get a bit more decentralized there you know to developers i mean we are continuing to look at uh companies that can provide infrastructure so you know name base has done a great job and you know i think you know maybe we’ll see sort of an open sea for domain names and other things like that and we’re happy to take a look and

(42:30) how that applies to d5 and nfts and other things so we’re open for business and we just want to fund great entrepreneurs with big ideas and hopefully you know some decent balanced teams in terms of domain names whoever got to varata take it before me i really like i’d really like that one so feel free to try to put that on the market but it just it just happened right before i got there anyways outside of that i think i think i guess for those in the crypto space uh the fun one that i acquired for not much at all is

(43:03) um one called paradigm and so i think it’s just kind of funny because you know it’s another crypto crypto fund and you know it they’re also invested in hin uh in name base so if they they want to know where that is you know it’s it’s right here awesome that’s nice and you know i i’ve heard paul that you’re doing very well these days with all that the kind of ryzen bitcoin person you can actually afford quite a high a high price to buy that brand i’m just paying me yeah anyway exactly

(43:31) i don’t so um okay so final thoughts for me and they’re gonna and then we’re gonna end here um i i have to say that you know the thing that i love the most about a handshake is the community um easily easily easily it feels exactly like the early days of bitcoin at least you know the 2014 15 era when i was there um and even the earliest ethereum where everything is just positive everything is possible everyone is you know open and kind of collaborating and you know i really think that this type of conference

(43:58) um is really showing the true stripes uh of you know the community and ultimately that’s what that’s what’s going to drive it forward against all other you know kind of competitors or all other kind of protocols and really i think that um everybody who’s out there in the audience listening it is about the community so please keep promoting keep tweeting keep you know evangelizing you know do uh do what handshake jesus is doing follow his example i mean it’s great how much of an influence we

(44:24) can each have um on the d web foundation we’re working really hard to get listings i personally believe that price is signal and you know there’s nothing you know one of the great things that we can do is try to you know push that price up organically through uh you know higher auctions more burn uh higher activity and then more listings so i’ve been personally been talking to holby i’ve been kind of advocating them so everybody just get out there and put you know push the exchanges if you know people exchanges

(44:54) keep pushing my handshake i tried to start a small hashtag uh which i hope people will follow which is uh hashtag when handshake uh and you know i’ve been trying to send it get people to send a coinbase like we do need to be on coinbase uh it will make it much easier for other exchanges to list uh and overall i mean i’m investing all over the space uh i kind of have been just looking at everything both handshake domains handshake tokens as well handshake companies so i’m all in and part of what i notice is that there’s

(45:24) not that many funds here um and so it’s really important for everybody to be pushing other funds to really look at handshake we have a great decentralized community but we do need more support and finally last but not least my favorite domain i’m going to have two uh i have both.shit and the dot poop emoji so i’ve kind of got the full the full suite uh you got it locked in right so uh eventually i’m gonna i’m gonna release dot uh and i’m gonna release like kind of dot poop emoji uh and i’ve got the the i think it’s the

(45:57) five digit puny code not the not the extended one ones i’ve got the og one uh and of course something that i actually bought uh dot nft so i’m actively looking for kind of business models for nft so mike clearly i need your help with that um we’re gonna stop it there thank you everybody for uh kind of attending an incredible panel and you know see you out there on the streets of handshake take care [Music] you