Thank you very much for having me on.
And for that question, as you mentioned,
I run de banked.
We are small business finance and FinTech trade media.
We also run the United States', uh,
largest small business finance conferences.
We do several of them per year.
And so I'm pretty entrenched in the small business finance
community, and that's what I've been doing for a long time.
What's unique about that particular industry
and community is that they're used to dealing
with assets when they're,
when they're analyzing small business owners for a loan,
they evaluate different aspects
of collateral they might have,
they might ask about real estate,
they might ask about equipment.
They might ask about
how much revenue they're generating each month
or each year to try to determine if they're able
to offer them any type of capital.
And that collateral is generally the security.
But the problem is they never ask about anything digital.
And that's because something like a domain name,
while most people respect as a digital asset,
has never really had any type of mechanism to be able to
transfer it from one party to another in an automated
secure fashion.
So it's not really something that's ever been considered.
You may see things like domain names, uh,
appear in UCC statements where it's a blanket lien
where they say, Hey, we secure a loan against all assets,
and the domain name is listed,
but it's, it's never singled out.
And generally speaking, when we talk about the value
of domain names or even using domain names as collateral,
most people assume we're talking about the
value of the domain name.
Inherently the, the value of a domain name in that
of itself completely detached from a business.
The idea that domain names could be a multi-billion dollar
market is not a new idea.
And so I don't wanna sound like someone
who just discovered domain names and,
and thought, oh my goodness, these could be worth a lot.
You know, these could be worth money as collateral
for a loan while the rest of the domainers in the world say,
yeah, yeah, yeah, we've tried that.
It's never really picked up any steam.
And the reason for that is because domain investors
or domainers are typically looking at the inherent value
of a domain detached from the business.
And so what I I see is something entirely different.
I see a domain name as part of an actual business,
something that can be used as collateral for a loan
to a business owner, because what is the domain name?
At the end of the day, it's really the digital storefront
for a business.
And that possesses enormous value for any business.
It would be hard for anyone
to lose their domain name if their website is a major part
of how they generate sales or, or traffic or attention.
And similarly, similarly, people seem to forget
that domain names are connected to email addresses.
So your email address
and every employee's email address of a company is connected
to that domain name.
So there's a lot of value to a business.
And having that domain name beyond just the inherent value
of what a domain name is worth, people think, oh, it has
to be a really good word.
It has to be a memorable name.
Well, what if it's just a domain name that generates tens
of thousands, hundreds of thousands
or millions of dollars in revenue per year
because it has the website and
because it has email addresses connected to it?
Well, now all of a sudden we have an asset
that a business really can't part with.
It really needs to have its domain name and,
and continued access to it.
And so all of a sudden it could be used as collateral
for a loan because the lender has something
to hold over the borrower's head saying, you really need
to pay because the domain name is at stake.
You can't lose your website address,
you can't lose your email address.
Everyone has an email. Every, every employee probably has
that email address connected to some service
that they just can't part with.
And so this conversation would
otherwise not really ever be had.
And that's because the mechanism to transfer domain names
has never really been there.
That is until recently when companies like yourselves when
Nafi has begun to tokenize domain names.
And let's just quantify what that means
because there's a lot of, a lot of news happening at once.
Most people on this particular space recognize that recently
GoDaddy did some type of integration
with the Ethereum name service,
but that had nothing to do with tokenization.
That's just about providing a name to your wallet address.
What name five is doing in particular is tokenizing the
domain, or as some domainers, make sure
to tell me their tokenizing control of the domain,
which fine, okay, sure.
Tokenizing control and access to the domain.
Either way, it's almost the same effect.
And because that possibility now exists,
we can now enter into the conversation of, well, if it's,
if it's easy to transfer control of a domain to escrow
and easy to transfer domain from, from escrow to a lender,
well now all of a sudden we can have that conversation
of using a domain name as collateral
for a small business loan.
Something that has never really been talked about before.
And as you mentioned earlier,
my background is in small business finance,
FinTech, and also in crypto.
So it's kind of like two worlds over time have
finally converged.
That wasn't possible before.
It's the tokenization of domains
that is now making this industry possible.
Thanks, John. That's like great points.
Uh, you mentioned that, um, domain names are websites
and which in your words, storefront for a business
and domain names are emails.
So if you lose your domain, you could lose your emails,
your, your business contacts, right?
And that's why when lenders hold them, you can't lose them.
That's a very like, uh, reliable assets to kind
of take lateral on.
Um, you specifically mentioned that it's you,
you are a very humble person.
You said like, you're not trying to sound like it's you
who discover, oh, this is a huge thing.
The this, this concept has been people were talking about
maybe like the visionary person has been, people are talk,
have been thinking about this for a while,
and then you are mount those visional person.
I agree. Are you being very humble?
I like to press on the points where I think not many
of the people, even with the amount
of visionary persons have think about or thought
or talk about the facts that what's lacking there.
And then you pointed out the the capability of, uh,
automatic transfer of like tokenizing access to
or control to domains is actually
lacking to make it possible.
And then you are speaking from a
financial background, right?
It not, it's not like you just come up
and say, okay, here's what I think instead.
You have this expertise in financial by financial background
to actually make that point.
Can you tell us a little bit more,
because I think, I think there's like great audience here.
Everyone has their background. You bring a very specific
as a perspective.
Can you talk to, uh, press a little bit more on why
is the automatic transfer capability, why is
that particular tokenization tokenizing control,
the lacking part and in,
in making it a available collateral assets?
Okay, so let's just talk about what normally happens in,
in the small business loan world
currently outside of a bank.
Let's, let's all agree that
business bank loans are a little old fashioned,
and there's actually a gigantic industry outside
of business bank loans.
One that's generating probably about $20 billion a year in
unsecured small business loans through companies
that some would call non-bank or alternative lenders,
but have nothing to do with crypto at all.
So there's already a huge market,
$20 billion a year at least
in small business loans happening outside of banks.
And a lot of this is done, it's done two ways.
One, it's done somewhat manually.
There's a middleman, a broker who's working
with a small business owner over the phone who's asking
diagnostic questions.
Do you have equipment? Do you have real estate?
Do you have collateral? Do you have revenue?
And they're making a checklist of assets they have
that they might be able to lend against.
And if they don't have any assets they do in like an
unsecured loan or some type of unsecured financing option,
they offer all the products that they have available.
If there were other products
that they could offer, they would offer them.
Their job is to get the business owner the best deal
possible and or the most money possible.
The other way to do it,
which is has become more common since 2014, is more
of an automated online checkout.
There's a large company called OnDeck, publicly traded under
the E Nova brand.
You can look them up on deck as part of Enova that does
that, does an automated online checkout
for a business loan business owner goes onto to the website,
fills out a bunch of fields,
they connect their bank account, uh, via plaid
or something like, like that,
and they're able to get approved for a loan in seconds
and potentially even funded the same day.
Now there are, there are plenty of business owners
who either don't get the amount that they're looking for
or don't find the appropriate product that they want.
Maybe they, they wanted more money, maybe they didn't want
to use their real estate as collateral.
Maybe the amount they were looking for was quite small,
but they didn't qualify for something unsecured.
So having another tool like a domain name would be
immensely valuable.
And one thing I have learned just in doing this over time is
that business owners, they will jump through hoops
to get funding for their business.
Their business is important.
They have employees to pay,
they have customers to take care of.
If you tell them something is a little bit complicated, many
of them will do it if there's no other alternative.
Now I have a firsthand experience in doing,
doing this a long time ago.
In order to get funding for your business
and you couldn't get it from a bank, you would actually have
to tell the business owner to reprogram their
credit card machine.
You'd have to actually connect them
to a technician over the phone who would tell 'em how
to reprogram their credit card machine
and reprogram it to a new credit card processor
and then have them process transaction to
that processor for two days.
And then after that happens,
then you could fund them the money.
So they will, they will do things
that are a little bit complicated,
but of course they would like to do things that are easy.
And that's where the whole tokenization aspect comes in
because there's now a process that's automated,
but you know, could have a few things
that are a little bit difficult, that could be smoothed,
that could be smoothed over.
For one, it's not hard
to transfer a domain name from one registrar to another.
I've transferred several as you know, from
registrar web two registrars to name five.
This is something I did that wasn't hard.
You unlock the domain,
you get your transfer authorization code, it transfers over
to name five, it's done.
You guys tokenize it, it's automatic. That part is not hard.
It wouldn't be hard for a small business owner
and it definitely wouldn't be hard if they had a broker
guiding them over the phone.
Even a broker who had no knowledge
of crypto could tell somebody how
to log into their registrar
and get a transfer authorization code.
That part is not hard. The hard part is what you guys do.
It's the tokenization, which is great
because nobody in the small business finance world really
knows, needs to know how to do any of that part.
You take care of the hard part.
Now, once it's tokenized, your domain is an NFT, right?
So what did I do
the first time I tokenized the domain on your platform?
I said, it's an NFT, it's recognized universally
across Ethereum.
So I went on to an NFT lending platform
and I pledged it as collateral for a loan.
And of course it worked.
I was also the borrower to that loan, as many people know.
But I was trying to prove proof of concept.
I used a tokenized domain name as collateral for a loan.
And what I did, even though it sounds daunting,
wasn't really that hard
because the hard part, as I mentioned
before, is what nafie did.
You did the tokenization stuff.
The business owners don't need to know how to, how to do any
of this fancy stuff.
They only need to know how to perhaps transfer a domain.
Um, that's it.
And a broker could guide them on how to do that.
The tokenization is what makes this whole transfer process
possible, which was otherwise not possible before.
And there's already an entire market that,
that would be willing to sell this particular product.
And a, I'm sure an audience, small business owners
who would gladly use their domain names as collateral.
And I think domain names are sufficient as security
as collateral because it'd be hard to lose your domain name.
I know I, I said it before and you repeated it,
but I run d banks.com.
It's a website I've run since 2010.
If I were to use that as collateral, I have to pay. Why?
Because it would be devastating to my business to lose it.
All of our revenue is generated online.
I can't lose the domain. Some might say, well, perhaps
you could just set up a new domain and what's the big deal?
Well, I lose all my search engine optimization.
I lose my key enter traffic,
but more importantly, I lose access
to all my email addresses.
And our email addresses are connect, are connected
to all our services, including our bank accounts.
I have to pay that loan. This is sufficient collateral.
And I know this firsthand
because think about what type
of collateral is used elsewhere.
If you borrow money against a car,
you really don't wanna lose your car if you take your
car to work, right?
You don't wanna get your car repossessed.
If you finance a machine
and you use the machine to run your business,
you really can't afford to lose the machine.
It makes the machine go.
So the domain name is sufficient collateral, I'm sure of it.
And now we have tokenization as the, the mechanism
that can make this market.
Wow, that's profound understanding of this.
I think it touched, uh, let me recap this.
What you mentioned is that, uh,
back then it wasn't available.
And then, uh, you have firsthand experience
and also of course you're providing loans
to other people from the other side.
Uh, from you, you have sit at both side of the, of the table
and you know that business owners,
they need money when they need money to pay, uh,
like pay their vendor, pay their employees.
They can go beyond like regular hardship to kind of find way
to if, if like, uh, lending were not available
to them in in bank, they can actually,
they can go very far trying to kind of find the,
find the funding for, for their business just to sustain
and, and can continue to compete.
Um, and then back then there wasn't available.
That's, uh, like domain names are not a available for them
as a secured assets.
Um, that's great points, very profound.
And then we happened to name find
and I, I also give kudos to other people
who was also doing it, tokenize it, make it easier
for platforms like Teller, NF tfi, um, they to kind
of run this loan for, for people.
And then you were the first one.
By the way, that's the one one reason we really call you VIP
customer, uh, or Genius Web Webify, God, uh, uh, Sean, uh,
is because you are the first one that actually educated us,
not just the possibility of doing,
you can actually do it today, uh,
with platforms like Teller.
I'm meeting with them, uh, later today
and trying to see if we can do even more.
Our goal is to kind of make the whole ecosystem work
for name five customers.
Um, I wanna kind of mention that, uh, you, uh,
inspire me to think about a point back then.
Domain names in your, in your words is actually kind
of like it's identity, it's a business identity.
It's the store storefront is actually how people,
um, come to you, right?
And, and how people discover you.
Like when you lose it, you lose all your, uh, search engine.
You, you lose all your search engine optimization,
you lose links towards you, you lose your emails that you,
you will be able to use in bank accounts
and maybe your clients are using that to contact you.
So you lose all of them. You can't lose them.
Uh, on the other hand, just like the, the the car metaphor,
maybe it's important for you to keep the car,
but if the car, if the bank sell the car, um,
the car would not be worthy of that much of amount
of amounts.
It seems to me this is one of the first time that
a thing is more important
to you than the bank could sold it for.
It's like business goodwill. What's your view on that?
Is that going to create a different, uh,
a discrepancy in the kind of money
that people were expecting when taking out
the long using block?
Uh, domains versus the bank are willing to,
because if it, at the end of the day, if you go out
of business, the the, the bank would not be able to sell,
usually not be able to sell the, the, the domain for
that as as much.
Do you see? Do you think there's gonna be a discrepancies in
expectation of how much money they can
take out of from the loan?
What's really interesting about your question is that
web 2D NS investors think exactly like a bank.
They think about the inherent resale value of the domain.
It's a one dimensional valuation.
They think if it's a a good clean name, well,
what could I sell it for?
They don't think about what could I use it for?
How can I monetize it?
They just think about the resale value
just like a bank would.
The, the bank says, oh, I don't wanna foreclose on the house
because then I have to sell the house.
If I, if I repo the car now I gotta resell the car.
They're not thinking about like, oh, I'm gonna repo the car
and drive the car around and take my kids to school in it.
Or I'm gonna start it in an,
I turn it into an ice cream truck and monetize it.
But that's what a lender in my opinion would be thinking
about because in, in the world that I come from,
the very first question I'm, I would get is, okay,
say it's sufficient collateral in your mind,
but at the end of the day,
you're still gonna have borrowers that don't pay.
You're gonna have lenders who are stuck
with domain names as collateral.
And now you're back to the, well, what do you do now?
What is the value of these domain names?
Was it really all worth it?
And that's where part two comes in.
It's about being able to monetize those domain names,
not just thinking about the resale value.
I would be thinking about what can I do
to make money with the domain?
Does the domain name have good search engine optimization?
Can I re-skin that domain name, point it to my own server
and monetize it?
Maybe it's, it's something as simple as, you know,
Google AdSense where you just have, uh,
pay per click ads on there and stuff.
Or maybe you set up some type of e-commerce site.
What if it's an e-commerce business that's operating?
Can you re-skin it in such a way
that you could monetize the traffic that it brings in
and actually generate revenue from e-commerce sales?
Now, I'm anticipating that this type of, uh, asset
as collateral wouldn't give you the right
to operate under the company's brand name.
So you'd have to re-skin it entirely
and you couldn't pretend
that you were the previous business.
You're not technically inheriting their website per se,
you're only inheriting the domain name, but that's okay.
You can evaluate what their niche is
and then determine if I'm stuck with this domain,
how do I monetize it?
So if I was a lender, I would be thinking about an entire
other aspect of when I end up with a domain name,
how am I making money with it?
Is it as easy as becoming an an Amazon reseller
where I'm just making commissions?
Is it as easy as assets? Um, is it as easy as drop shipping?
Uh, is it as easy as making commissions for referrals?
Like when you look for a contractor online
to do work on your home, oftentimes you'll find that a lot
of the sites you click on are just, they're just, um,
referral farms, right?
It's a huge SEO game where you click on it
and you're being referred somewhere else
and they're generating revenue from that.
Perhaps you could participate in a, in a, a, uh, similar way
that you could refer
that traffic somewhere else and monetize it.
That is how I, as a lender, if I were to do this myself,
that is what I would be doing.
And that's really the secret to the whole thing.
That's where this idea
that this could be a billion dollar market departs from
what traditional domainers think,
who are only thinking about resale values of domains.
My background in small business lending requires me
to think differently When I get this particular collateral.
How am I monetizing that collateral?
Let's pretend I couldn't even sell it.
Let's pretend there was no resale value of the domain.
Do I know enough about domains?
Do I know enough about the web that I could monetize it
and not only get, uh, not only get paid back
what my initial investment was?
Could I ha turn it into an, an ongoing revenue stream?
Could I actually long-term profit off of this?
Could I turn this into its own business?
These are things that would, that would go into
my own analysis.
And if you're purely a domain name investor,
all this stuff sounds really daunting,
and it sounds like a lot of work
because who wants to think about all
that other stuff when you really just have a good domain
name that you just wanna sell, who's gonna sit there
and think about niches and referral commissions
and, uh, monetizing domains and turning into a business?
Well, guess what?
You know who likes to think about that stuff?
Wall Street does. They think about billion dollar markets.
And so they're willing to think beyond just,
how do I resell a domain for a quick profit?
They think about the long game.
And so they would be looking at domain names
as collateral in terms of how can they actually,
if they're stuck with these domains,
how can they turn them into a revenue generating asset,
something that could build an empire
for them if a default inevitably and regrettably occurs.
That's very, very inspiring.
You just reminded me that domains is not just for resale,
uh, value, but also, uh, the capability of monetizing it.
Because your perspective coming from, uh, a lender
or a loan, uh, businessman for, uh, for small
and medium businesses, right?
That's right. I mean, there, there are plenty of people
who have levels of expertise where if they end up
with the asset that they lent against that they know how
to monetize the asset.
So if this were to be a billion dollar market,
the lender who's facilitating that market has
to be an expert, has to be well equipped
to monetize the collateral beyond resale,
because that is the key to this whole thing.
That's very inspiring because I,
I think when you present the question and,
and the problem of how to monetize them, we happen
to realize that we are in good position like NFI
and whoever vendors
or part ecosystem partners we can work
with are actually in a good position
to actually help customers of name five
or name fires to monetize their domains
with a lot of automation.
For one, we, unlike other registrars,
we have your a a a way to pay you from day one, right?
We know if you log in with your, your wallet address,
you have a bank account that we can send money to.
So if there's a good way we can help you monetize,
let's say there's a button, you turn it on, it, it's parked,
not just parked, but it also start earning revenues from
like traffic or referral business, uh,
both a referral associate income, then we can give that, uh,
uh, that money to you just by paying to,
to the account you have.
And that's, that could be one thing interesting, doable for
NFI and all tokenizing platforms.
Is that a good directions, uh,
to think about from your perspective?
Our with with I gar, God,
I mean, I'm, I'm a little selfish in pursuing this
particular avenue because it's really a blending
of two areas that I am somewhat knowledgeable in.
So if it's a, it's a direction you want to pursue further,
it will obviously continue to pique my, uh,
interest and excitement.
Um, ultimately, I'm sure there,
there are many more use cases obviously,
but I'm just blending two things that I know well,
and I think there's an opportunity just there.
And I'm sure, by the way, I don't want
to make it seem like I am downplaying
domain name investors in that of itself.
I keep talking about the inherent value of a domain name
not being worth what, what I think it's worth,
but there's still an entire market for that.
And the ability to lend against the domain name, just
because it's a clean name, is also a market opportunity.
And what's great about Web3 is that there are incredible
peer-to-peer lending rails available.
So if you are an average person listening
to this particular conversation, you could, if you wanted,
become a lender against a domain name,
maybe it's a domain name
that you would really like to have yourself.
And so if you end up stuck with it
and the borrower defaults, it's not such a bad thing.
Or maybe you have a very particular, um, uh,
level of expertise in a certain field where if you got stuck
with a domain name, you did a peer-to-peer loan,
maybe a couple thousand bucks, maybe a couple hundred bucks,
and you got stuck with it, you could say, Hey,
I could, I could monetize this.
This is, this is something I know about.
It could be anything in the world.
The world is sort, sort of your oyster.
Once anyone is able to participate in this market,
it doesn't have to be a wall streete dominated market.
You could just have a couple dot coms that you could use
to borrow against, or you could have a couple thousand bucks
that you could start using to lend against dot coms.
Anyone can participate in this market
and it's something that I think
will continue to grow over time.
Yeah, Sean, by no means we we're not like trying
to do the same business with you.
Uh, what we said is this is direction that we can kind
of, uh, support.
So for example, if in your case you are already doing this,
then we can send customers your way.
Like we can say, okay, if you want to know how
to monetize it, or if you want to have a button
that turn it on and then you get monetized, we can send you
to Sean service
and then like, maybe you'll share revenue with Sean,
you will share a piece to us some, something like that.
But like the, the fact that this capability, this is,
this possibility exists is what we really feel interesting,
like inspired by you
and name five is definitely not there to do everything.
Like we didn't intend to start a NFT market be, uh, so long
as there are good NFT markets out there, um, I, we,
we have been pointing people to kind of open see
and other NFT markets,
and I would certainly not in the business of doing lending
as well, like, uh, tellers there, NFT, Pfizer,
other platforms are there.
We're trying to kind of be the ecosystem players.
We send people to every ecosystem, um,
that we can inter integrate with.
That's kind of our philosophy from day one.
Right now I am not personally lending against
any domain names, but I certainly
have an interest in doing it.
And so perhaps down the road,
and I don't know how long, maybe it was sooner rather than
later, there might be a certain niche where if
a certain type of domain name owner,
maybe they're a business owner is looking for a loan,
there could be a referral to me and maybe me
and maybe a group of people would all love to participate
and doing exactly what I've been describing.
Everything that I'm talking about is not theoretical.
I have, I have firsthand experience with all, all
of the things I'm talking about.
And I just mentioned peer-to-peer lending
before that concept isn't new either.
Peer-to-peer lending was really started in, what, 2009
or so, but two companies known as Lending Club and Prosper.
They pioneered the peer-to-peer lending space.
This is before crypto. And guess what?
I used both platforms. I made loans to individuals.
Uh, at that time anonymous, you didn't get to know
who they were, but these were crowdfunded loans
where you would get a return.
And by the way, they were unsecured.
There was no collateral at all.
And I made, I guess you could say,
I think the number is more than a hundred thousand dollars,
uh, worth of these loans, um, in tiny increments of $25.
So these were crowdfunded loans
where you could put in $25 per loan.
And obviously both programs were very successful.
Lending Club went on to become a bank.
Anyone can look up Lending Club
and see that they're, they're a huge bank now.
Prosper is still around.
So the whole peer-to-peer lending model definitely,
definitely has merit to it.
And I would be more than happy to participate in it
because I did it before with both of those platforms.
And so, yeah, down the road I'd be happy
to potentially pioneer, um, lending against domain names
that are in a niche that I feel comfortable with
and probably speak to what I said
before where there is a, a monetization aspect to
what I could do with the domain names.
Thanks, Sean. Go ahead, sunny.
Thank you. Thank you, John, for your inspirational speech.
And I, I, I think
for nfi it's providing the blockchain expertise
and on your side you are really, uh, merging Tri fi and,
and the blockchain space together, you know how much, uh,
the extent of which, um, blockchain can bring to transform
domains from like a seller reseller market to a,
a completely new paradigm.
Um, and, and that's, that's very impressive.
And, and now we have a few, like 10 minutes for,
for our audience to ask questions.
So if you have any questions, please raise your hand
and, um, we can,
Sean can answer your questions, uh, individually.
Um, so while we're waiting for more questions, um,
I'm, I'm curious to know that Jean, you are, um,
very experienced in the tri space
and, uh, since like fi, finance is finance
and the web is the web.
So currently in the, in the naming space, um,
like Web3 naming space, um,
what are the tri fi um, kind kind
of domain knowledge we should learn like in Web3, uh,
from the traditional or the legacy institutions?
I know, um, some of them are using very obsolete systems,
but a lot of, um, tri Fi, um,
like theories are still can be applied today in, in our Web3
space, especially in defi.
And just curious to hear about your, um, insights in this.
Yeah, I mean, it's kind of a broad question.
I think one thing that I often have to think about
and just comes with experience is that I think about, um,
the inevitable ne necessity of compliance and defi.
I think we all like to think that we can invent a world
that operates outside of regulation and control.
And to an extent, we obviously can create a product
that we have full control over,
but we may still be subject to regulations and laws
and so on and so forth.
Um, so any, any product in in Web3
or defi, think about what the regulatory implications
might be for it.
I was on a space yesterday where I was talking about, uh,
DNS domain names, and obviously the big topic right now is
whether or not DNS in Web3, whether
or not this eliminates the need
for decentralized names in Web3, like ETH for example.
And I think the, the obvious answer is no, and that's
because of all the centralized control that is applied
to the DNS space.
We have to understand that when we use these DNS names,
and I'm sure name fi is,
has already thought about it greatly.
When we use these names in Web3, we have to think about
what we're doing with that.
Are we acting in a way that's legal?
Um, or are we kind of going off
and doing stuff that may be in an area of gray?
And if we operate in an area of gray, knowing
that there are risk to your name,
it could be at the registrar level,
it could be at the legal level, you know,
it could be at the ICAN level,
but there could be restrictions
or consequences to your name in particular
where your name could potentially be rescinded.
And so that is why names, like,
that's why decentralized names like ETH
will always have their place.
'cause you get a little bit more, you're still subject
to laws obviously,
but you get a little bit more peace of mind
that you're not gonna wake up tomorrow
and realize that somebody, somebody decided
that they didn't like what you were doing
and you lose access to your name.
So I think that's something
that everyone should be keeping in mind.
I have several decentralized names.
I have a lot of dot e names now I, I've mentioned previously
that I didn't buy them for, for resale.
I bought them for personal use
and I think they have great value.
I like the idea that I can use a eth, it's even related
to my brand and my trademark,
and know that I'm not gonna run a foul of some somebody,
some centralized person who's just gonna
take it from me tomorrow.
And so I can use it all over the blockchain
and I'm not really putting it at risk, so to speak.
I'm still subject to laws, but I'm not gonna lose my name.
And so I think that is, uh, when it comes to
web two and Web3, just think about that area
because even in peer-to-peer lending, a long time ago
it was new and it was funded with an exciting,
you could even compare it to what Defi is thought of today.
But ultimately people found that there was still,
they were still subject, uh, to rules and, and regulations
and so on and so forth.
Um, that's something I personally have learned by being in,
in traditional finance that you can't, you kind
of can't escape the rules.
Um, but there, there are certain features
of decentralization
and that is the ability to retain control of your asset
if somebody doesn't want you to have it.
Great. Thank you Jean. Um,
Because this, Sean, you've, you've been in into the,
the tradify space for a while, especially when it came
to like lending and loans and, and collateral.
And really for me, I, I don't think of anything
as really property
unless I could use it to do whatever I want with it,
like rent it out or try to get a yield on it
or try to use it for collateral.
And I remember trying to get a, a, a loan for a domain
or try to figure out if it,
if it was even possible a couple years ago.
And I think I had to email a couple of people
and they would have to kind of like evaluate if it was the,
the domain value was pristine
or if there was any type of value
or what they would be willing to loan for it.
Um, so wanted to ask you how coming from
that tread fly space, how easy is it, how hard is it to,
to really get a loan from that space?
'cause like you said, you would go through the assets
and try to figure out if they were,
they were eligible or not.
Um, do you think that it will be do easier for people to try
to assign the value for it now?
Or do you think that the, the pro the, I would say the yes,
the process seems more seamless,
but do you think that there are going to be more people that
are willing to actually do this?
Because it, it seems like we get a, a little pushback from,
from, from some domains that would be like,
oh no, you can't do that.
However, I, I've talked to a couple of domainers
and they'll say, well, yeah, for maybe like a four digit,
you know, that people are willing
to take that as a collateral.
So just, I just wanted your thoughts on the whole situation.
Yeah, it's a great question.
And it's the question that defines exactly
what I'm talking about.
If you talk to a domainer, they're thinking purely
in regards to the inherent value of the domain name.
They can't really see beyond it.
Whereas I'm thinking purely from the aspect
of a small business lender
or a small business loan broker,
I'm thinking about one,
would a business owner take this particular product?
I know that they would, I know
that when they have limited options available,
they're generally open to doing anything that there is.
I'm someone firsthand as both an underwriter
and a broker who has sold, uh, funding amounts as small
as maybe $1,500 to $2,000.
These are very small amounts of money
and the terms are honestly not too good.
But if it's a, if it's a, a situation
that a business owner really can't avoid,
maybe they have a piece of oven that's broken
and they have to fix it,
and there's just no options in the world for them.
This is a real world scenario, you'll find
that business owners are pretty much open to doing whatever
as long as it's safe, secure, um, and somewhat easy.
And so I know that the business owners would take it,
that I'm not worried about.
And then it comes down to, well, you know, would, would the,
would the lenders do something like this?
It would have to be a lender that understands the nature
of the collateral itself
and is able to monetize the collateral.
If you talk to a domainer, they're going to tell you,
like you just said, I think you just said like a,
a four digit or, or something like that.
They're thinking about whether
or not someone else will buy the domain from them.
I'm not thinking about that at all.
I'm thinking about can I take this domain and,
and make money with it?
Can I, we gonna instantly, instantly start monetizing it.
I know that the business owners will take it
and it just takes the right lender
that has the right expertise to do it.
So Sean, my question is,
'cause you, you are dealing with, uh,
small medium business owners.
So how, how, when you explain, um, domain names,
like tokenized domain names to them as
a possible collateral, what's their response like?
Well, you know, I have not yet had this conversation
with small business owners, right?
So I, I am drawing a, a conclusion of
how the conversation would go,
but it's based upon prior experience in pitching products
that were actually much more complicated than this one.
I mentioned earlier that, uh, more than 10 years ago,
you used to have to reprogram businesses,
credit card machine over the phone.
It would take an hour, sometimes it would break,
and then it would take two days of monitoring
to make sure that it, it worked.
And then, then you could send them the money.
Sometimes it actually required sending a technician
to their business, who would tell 'em they had
to close the store while they reprogrammed their POS system.
So I know technologically that business owners, uh,
would jump through these particular hoops.
Obviously I have not had this conversation
with business owners yet myself,
because this is an entirely new, uh, concept
that we're exploring on this particular call.
However, I have relationship relationships with thousands
of brokers around the country who do interface
with the small business owners.
In fact, if you look me up online,
I just hosted something called the broker battle.
And the broker battle was actual brokers demonstrating
what it's like to be on a call with a small business owner
and then being evaluated with judges.
So this is the, this is the industry in which
I am well acquainted with.
They have a special diagnostic checklist
that they go through on every call.
They ask about how much revenue do you,
do you per month at your business?
How long have you been in business for?
What is your credit score? Like, do you have any equipment?
Do you have any real estate?
And then they create basically a, you know, a a general idea
of what the business owner might qualify for.
And they go out and find out if they could get approved
for any of them and they present the options
to the business owner.
The question of the day would be if a business owner had no
options available, but they could take a loan out against
their domain name, would they take it?
I think the answer is 100% yes.
And that is what matters at the end of the day.