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William Entriken

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Wm Entriken Design

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William Entriken, Wm Entriken Design

William Entriken

Proprietor Wm Entriken Design

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>> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's special presentation of Crypto Trailblazers. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here in the Palo Alto Studios. We've got a great guest of lineups here, leaders coming in, investors, entrepreneurs, designers, everyone who's weighing in on the future of the infrastructure and also the future of crypto. Whether it's commerce, finance or impact, it's all happening here on theCUBE. We have Will Entriken here. He is the proprietor of William Entriken Design. Will, thanks for coming in all the way from Philly to Palo Alto remote. Appreciate you taking-

William Entriken

>> That's right....

>> the time.

William Entriken

>> Hi, John. Great to meet you.

>> So obviously, you're doing a ton of work around NFTs, the role of NFTs. Obviously, store of value is a big topic of obviously crypto and blockchain. NFTs are clearly an asset class of itself. There's some technology under the covers. It's a double bottom line. It's a store of value and there's also some technology involved. So first, what's your view of the current market on the NFTs right now? You've got Ethereum. We just had a conversation earlier about Bitcoin protocols, layer one storage. Set the table for us. What's going on in the NFT market?

William Entriken

>> Yes, so NFT Market and NFTs, so I got involved with NFTs at the beginning, like picking the letter NFT, like is that even something that people are going to want to say over and over? And then connecting it to artwork is how it's really known today. That's really been the biggest market mover. That's been a lot of excitement during the pandemic. And even the South Park episode really was just, I guess, the peak, but just attaching blockchain to all this creativity we have out there and people buying this stuff. And when there's a lot of buying, that's a market, right?

>> Right.

William Entriken

>> And we got to the point where people were buying this stuff and they don't even like the artwork. So we know how that turned out as a market, as an asset that you would invest in. But actually, NFT was a technology, and this technology does more than just artwork. We didn't design it for just artwork. And as the tech, as the NFT of itself, it's actually doing pretty well. So just recently, the Food and Drug Administration in the U.S. just authorized using blockchain to track cattle, so track age and source verification. And that's actually important for exporting, so you need to know what is it you're selling and where it came from and how old it is to prevent fraud. And they're allowing this on blockchain, which is a great use case for that. Not a lot of money. You can invest in these cattle, but it just is a common use case.

>> Yeah, we've been through the cycle. You mentioned the hype cycle. Some things happened. There's been some bear markets, some nuclear winters they call it. But now we're starting to see a regulatory environment and also the maturization of it. Like you're starting to see people getting the reps in, new people are coming in, the technology is maturing. Is there something that you see in the technology or on the market as people are in it longer? It's just natural evolution, the iterations are happening. What are some of the cool things that have settled in from a market standpoint, but also technology? What's exciting?

William Entriken

>> Well, they line up, and I like the seasons. We got to have a season like autumn, I've never heard. I've never heard crypto autumn, but maybe we're in crypto spring right now between the winter and the summer, I don't know. But like you said, there's some rhymes. So the havening comes. We've got the Bitcoin season, but there are things that rhyme. So NFTs were pictures, and then we've got these meme coins, which are pictures, but they're fungible. You can quote, "invest," or you can ape into them, as we say. So people just get crazy with these. And that rhymes with NFTs. Sorry, can you still see me? 'Cause I can't see you.

>> Yeah. Yep, we can see you. Gotcha.

William Entriken

>> Oh, cool. Sorry. So people are getting crazy about this. So is it really the pictures or the celebrity endorsements? I don't know. I don't really know what that is. But what's coming next is we're going to have more types of things that are connected in more asset classes. And also a very important part about this is, as you said, the maturization, the regulation that's keeping up. Well, a lot of the regulation has just specifically excluded NFT. So we're just talking about that right now. MiCA, the European regulation specifically excludes NFTs. And I'm a little bit afraid that they're going to just drive a truck through that and take things that are clearly what they're trying to regulate and then just call it an NFT and get it through. I'll be sad if that happens. Likewise, in the U.S., there's a lot of things that are just completely exempt. The NFT stuff is completely exempt from a lot of the regulations, but that is really the shrinking market, the market in terms of dollars in dollars out. I don't see that as the next future for crypto. There's a lot of things that crypto has got coming, and I don't think trading pictures is going to be the growth market.

>> What's going to be the consequences of that oversight and the regulation, or not oversight, the miss of regulation? Is that a good thing or bad thing, or will the value shift? What happens after that? What do you see?

William Entriken

>> Yeah, so I'm a hacker. I'm a builder, so I'm going to put the hacker hat on now.

>> Okay. Of course.

William Entriken

>> That is a regulation hole, and people are going to drive a truck right through it. So somebody's going to have a huge business opportunity to do things that would not be feasible under a lot of other type of rules, and they're just going to do it as an NFT until they shut that down with an opinion. That's going to be really easy. And I don't want to even focus on that. I don't get involved in these type of enterprising projects. But the other opportunities that are coming up are way bigger than this. Aside from this hype cycle we had on this one specific asset class, these tokens have gone a long way, and they're about to run out of steam too. We've got all these projects, we call them layer ones, layer twos. These are just very commoditized systems for moving tokens back and forth. There's only so much steam that that can have, and crypto is an amazing thing, and that is not even the next use case.

>> What's the dynamic of the on-chain dynamic? Because that's the conversation that's happening a lot. The pointer to a database, store of value is the value of crypto, right? So if you're pointing to a database or a cloud, you don't pay the bill, something happens-

William Entriken

>> Okay....

>> this comes into it like, what is it?

William Entriken

>> Yeah, so you're talking about permanence.

>> Yeah.

William Entriken

>> So I'll just give you a use case. And again, this is not a market thing. This is not something you're going to trade. But luxury watches, handbags, these are something you're going to own for a long time and you want to confirm that they're authentic. That system is currently run on paper for a lot of brands, but we're also doing it on crypto, and that's going to last permanently. That makes a lot of sense. Store of value, I don't really think store of value is a permanent decentralized thing. How many people put money in and really keep it there for 50 years? In the U.S., we do that a lot just because of tax reasons of how retirement accounts work. But that is not the main use case of crypto is just buying Bitcoin and holding it for 50 years. I feel like there's got to be more than that. And even the thing that we're buying now is just stablecoins, which is a deflationary asset. So really, are we just buying USDC to just sit there? No, we want to pay our rent. We want to do commerce. So it's not really about, when we say store of value. I'm talking short term. You're talking short term. This is not generational wealth.

>> You bring up the commerce side of it, which is what that comment was like, a concept of narrow banking comes up. When are we going to see basically banking so I can get some liquidity? And that's been a big conversation this week in the market. Okay. I buy the store of value. I know it's not like your real estate, you can't build on or whatever, you want to hold it. Yeah, there's some holding strategies. Yeah, there's durability. It won't burn down. But making it work, putting it into the market is a huge factor. What's your take on that? How do you see that happening? Any movement there? Any signs of positive momentum in technology companies, products, ideas?

William Entriken

>> Yeah, so you brought in the one thing was the durability, the immutability, we call it as nerds, and the transactions are going to be publicly viewable forever. I saw your other view with Mike Cagney, great interview, and he brought up another part about middlemen. We buy something, there's a lot of middlemen, and blockchain is actually very good at adding middlemen. So this is a feature, not a bug. In that other interview, we were talking about removing middlemen. I'm going to use Visa. I have a bank, there's a Visa, there's a clearing. The merchant has a bank, and then it's got to wait five days or a month and there's chargebacks. These are features. People want chargebacks. People want to have anti-fraud. They want to have anti-money laundering. They want to buy something on a popular website or an unpopular website and be not afraid of doing commerce. These are features. So I don't think that's going to be going away. But actually, the other feature of blockchain is the composability. If you want to start a bank and connect to Visa, good luck. That's not something you're going to do. If you want to create a defi protocol, something that connects money-wise to some other existing project in blockchain, you can launch that tomorrow and just with a couple of people in your garage. And it's a lot easier, and actually, you can avoid some regulation because you're not really touching the money, you're just moving it or something or giving access. And you can do very big things with a lot less licenses that you would need to compete with Visa.

>> Yeah. Will, you've definitely got the multiple hats on. You've got the hacker, you've got the builder developer, but you also got the market pragmatic view. So let's talk about that because this has come up in a few conversations where I just had an interview with the CEO of Kraken, one of the largest exchanges. I talked to the folks at Coinbase, and these consumer exchanges and these platforms, they think like users, buying users, but they also have their platforms. So you're basically getting into that last piece was about, hey, it could be layer one, two, or three, or you can actually have multiple service layers. So you're talking about a platform. You're talking about like basically technology apps. Okay, I have all the immutability, that's infrastructure. It's classic layered approach. I want chargebacks, great. Someone can offer that as a service-

William Entriken

>> Yes....

>> but it has to build into the system, right? So talk about that piece because I think a lot of people get hung up on the dogma of layer one on the chain. "We've got layer two, not layer three. Ethereum does this. Solana does that." So there's a lot of like conversations where people are, I won't say misrepresenting, they're just slicing the salami as we say. So whatever your view is, so it's not a one piece of the stack solution.

William Entriken

>> No. Love it. That's a great question. And I'm even going to go back to layer zero using cash because we can't forget about the tradfi or the existing companies 'cause they can innovate if they wake up and learn how to, they can actually do any of this. All the applications we're talking about on blockchain are entirely possible with banks today. There's nothing that we're doing that can't be done with a bank, and I know that's going to explode some heads out there. They just haven't done it. The fact that we can connect and compose applications on blockchain is just because the nerds that gave us blockchain made it composable.

>> Yeah, it's not a-

William Entriken

>> Your bank didn't.

>> Again, this is evolution, right? It's like the caveman, they're walking a wreck at some point. At some point, the market will have to move to where the market is. Again, it's just those transitions, old way, new way, where are we? So okay, let's take that path. What happens next? Where are we?

William Entriken

>> Here's where we are. We're doing commerce. We're in the U.S. So you're using your credit card to buy coffee and you're still paying the extra 3% that you would have got with the cash discount. Why? 'Cause it's physically harder to get the cash out when you buy coffee. It's just physically harder. And nobody uses debit cards in the U.S. because you don't get a 3% discount. Europe doesn't have these problems. China doesn't even have money the way that we have money. It's just totally different. So this is a uniquely U.S. problem. But some of these other features, I work in a business and I send you money, you don't even know that the money's sent. There's three days. Like, what is this?

>> Yeah, Venmo works great. I love Venmo.

William Entriken

>> Venmo's decent, but you don't use it for payrolls. And there's limits and there's the $300 thing. So some people are using Bitcoin for this, but it's not easy enough yet. When I'm able to pay my employees and immediately get a receipt that they can take to the bank and borrow against, that's the future. We don't have it in blockchain and we don't have it in the real world.

>>

William Entriken

>> Guess what? The Western Union could do this today. If I had an extra so many billion, I would buy Western Union today just for all the licenses they have. And I would deploy all these features on the existing rails because all you need to do is just give a receipt when you send money. Make it digitally verifiable. And guess what? Programmable money and composability, you can do that on a Chase account. You can do this on Western Union. All you got to do is just do this little magical digital signatures thing that all these nerds know about. And you have composability with an API.

>> That's the classic conversation because what you're pointing out is the obvious. So like, hey, why don't they do it? But here's the problem. They don't do it because they're old stuck in the mud, and so someone just says, "Hey, if they're not going to do it, I'm just going to eat their lunch." So I think this is the entrepreneurial side of it. So you're pointing out lots of white spaces, lots of opportunities. How does that get there? What's your advice to people out there who are building saying, "Hey, you know what? If I can't buy Western Union, how do I just replicate them?"

William Entriken

>> Yeah, so it is the licenses: the money broker licenses, the money transmitter licenses that needs to be done in each state in the U.S., and there's also national licenses and money laundering. So the way that the banks have succeeded until today is you cross-pollinate between the banks and the government to make everything legal. Okay? Well now we need to cross-pollinate between the banks and the crypto because we actually need to build these products. Some of the crypto products, they don't even work. You can't even open them. Your money disappears. You click on the wrong thing, your money's gone. These are rookie mistakes that at a minimum we need to do at least as good as the banks are doing. How many times do you open the news, oh, everybody lost their money, there was a typo? That's still happening today, and these projects are just an embarrassment to the establishment.

>> Yeah. Sole custody-

William Entriken

>> So if we can get this level-...

>> comes up a lot too. I lost my keys. What's your take on sole custody? Because I think that becomes very important versus having a centralized piece. What are some good use cases and people can implement that you see?

William Entriken

>> You got to do sole custody, but also we have to as a community, you're in it, I'm in it, the community, we need to find a way to fund these things because right now they've got these self-custody projects. Who's paying for them? It's self-custody, so they're not getting a percentage of your money, so it's the best effort case. We need top-of-the-line stuff here that's actually going to work. And we just... a huge amount of money just lost because the pop-up came. They clicked OK, and they didn't know what they were clicking and they forgot to put that in the app. So-

>> Bad design....

William Entriken

>> let's make better apps. Bad design.

>> Will, we really appreciate you coming in from Philly. Final minute left, what are you working on? What's cool? What do you have your eyes on? Obviously, you got your finger on the pulse. You've got a great optimism. I think you're blowing minds out there for sure, but that's just opportunity you're seeing. So what are you working on now? What are you excited about?

William Entriken

>> Here's what I'm excited about. I'm excited about the next asset class. And I'll tell it to you, the thing that got NFTs exciting was we took artwork that was outside the blockchain and connected it. Boom, everything exploded. Let's take more valuable stuff outside of blockchain and connect it like businesses. So here's the perfect storm. I'll just give it to you real fast. In the United States, we're deregulating how we invest in private companies, hopefully. We've heard about the crypto czar, the AI czar maybe giving us an accredited investor test. Okay? And accredited investors can invest. You don't have to be a millionaire anymore to buy private companies. How are you going to buy that? With the rails of crypto. So buy and sell, I think that that's going to be way more valuable than the pictures of the past. But the connection is what makes it valuable. Connecting these things to real businesses, it's exciting.

>> Will Entriken here on the Crypto Trailblazers. You're trailblazing. Keep going. Love what you're working on, love the ideas. Continue to innovate, get building, keep hacking, and have fun. Thanks for coming on.

William Entriken

>> Thank you.

>> All right. We are here for the Crypto Trailblazers, theCUBE Trailblazers as well. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here in our Palo Alto Studios. We'll be right back.

William Entriken, Wm Entriken Design

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>> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's special presentation of Crypto Trailblazers. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here in the Palo Alto Studios. We've got a great guest of lineups here, leaders coming in, investors, entrepreneurs, designers, everyone who's weighing in on the future of the infrastructure and also the future of crypto. Whether it's commerce, finance or impact, it's all happening here on theCUBE. We have Will Entriken here. He is the proprietor of William Entriken Design. Will, thanks for coming in all the way from Philly to Palo Alto remote. Appreciate you taking-

William Entriken

>> That's right....

>> the time.

William Entriken

>> Hi, John. Great to meet you.

>> So obviously, you're doing a ton of work around NFTs, the role of NFTs. Obviously, store of value is a big topic of obviously crypto and blockchain. NFTs are clearly an asset class of itself. There's some technology under the covers. It's a double bottom line. It's a store of value and there's also some technology involved. So first, what's your view of the current market on the NFTs right now? You've got Ethereum. We just had a conversation earlier about Bitcoin protocols, layer one storage. Set the table for us. What's going on in the NFT market?

William Entriken

>> Yes, so NFT Market and NFTs, so I got involved with NFTs at the beginning, like picking the letter NFT, like is that even something that people are going to want to say over and over? And then connecting it to artwork is how it's really known today. That's really been the biggest market mover. That's been a lot of excitement during the pandemic. And even the South Park episode really was just, I guess, the peak, but just attaching blockchain to all this creativity we have out there and people buying this stuff. And when there's a lot of buying, that's a market, right?

>> Right.

William Entriken

>> And we got to the point where people were buying this stuff and they don't even like the artwork. So we know how that turned out as a market, as an asset that you would invest in. But actually, NFT was a technology, and this technology does more than just artwork. We didn't design it for just artwork. And as the tech, as the NFT of itself, it's actually doing pretty well. So just recently, the Food and Drug Administration in the U.S. just authorized using blockchain to track cattle, so track age and source verification. And that's actually important for exporting, so you need to know what is it you're selling and where it came from and how old it is to prevent fraud. And they're allowing this on blockchain, which is a great use case for that. Not a lot of money. You can invest in these cattle, but it just is a common use case.

>> Yeah, we've been through the cycle. You mentioned the hype cycle. Some things happened. There's been some bear markets, some nuclear winters they call it. But now we're starting to see a regulatory environment and also the maturization of it. Like you're starting to see people getting the reps in, new people are coming in, the technology is maturing. Is there something that you see in the technology or on the market as people are in it longer? It's just natural evolution, the iterations are happening. What are some of the cool things that have settled in from a market standpoint, but also technology? What's exciting?

William Entriken

>> Well, they line up, and I like the seasons. We got to have a season like autumn, I've never heard. I've never heard crypto autumn, but maybe we're in crypto spring right now between the winter and the summer, I don't know. But like you said, there's some rhymes. So the havening comes. We've got the Bitcoin season, but there are things that rhyme. So NFTs were pictures, and then we've got these meme coins, which are pictures, but they're fungible. You can quote, "invest," or you can ape into them, as we say. So people just get crazy with these. And that rhymes with NFTs. Sorry, can you still see me? 'Cause I can't see you.

>> Yeah. Yep, we can see you. Gotcha.

William Entriken

>> Oh, cool. Sorry. So people are getting crazy about this. So is it really the pictures or the celebrity endorsements? I don't know. I don't really know what that is. But what's coming next is we're going to have more types of things that are connected in more asset classes. And also a very important part about this is, as you said, the maturization, the regulation that's keeping up. Well, a lot of the regulation has just specifically excluded NFT. So we're just talking about that right now. MiCA, the European regulation specifically excludes NFTs. And I'm a little bit afraid that they're going to just drive a truck through that and take things that are clearly what they're trying to regulate and then just call it an NFT and get it through. I'll be sad if that happens. Likewise, in the U.S., there's a lot of things that are just completely exempt. The NFT stuff is completely exempt from a lot of the regulations, but that is really the shrinking market, the market in terms of dollars in dollars out. I don't see that as the next future for crypto. There's a lot of things that crypto has got coming, and I don't think trading pictures is going to be the growth market.

>> What's going to be the consequences of that oversight and the regulation, or not oversight, the miss of regulation? Is that a good thing or bad thing, or will the value shift? What happens after that? What do you see?

William Entriken

>> Yeah, so I'm a hacker. I'm a builder, so I'm going to put the hacker hat on now.

>> Okay. Of course.

William Entriken

>> That is a regulation hole, and people are going to drive a truck right through it. So somebody's going to have a huge business opportunity to do things that would not be feasible under a lot of other type of rules, and they're just going to do it as an NFT until they shut that down with an opinion. That's going to be really easy. And I don't want to even focus on that. I don't get involved in these type of enterprising projects. But the other opportunities that are coming up are way bigger than this. Aside from this hype cycle we had on this one specific asset class, these tokens have gone a long way, and they're about to run out of steam too. We've got all these projects, we call them layer ones, layer twos. These are just very commoditized systems for moving tokens back and forth. There's only so much steam that that can have, and crypto is an amazing thing, and that is not even the next use case.

>> What's the dynamic of the on-chain dynamic? Because that's the conversation that's happening a lot. The pointer to a database, store of value is the value of crypto, right? So if you're pointing to a database or a cloud, you don't pay the bill, something happens-

William Entriken

>> Okay....

>> this comes into it like, what is it?

William Entriken

>> Yeah, so you're talking about permanence.

>> Yeah.

William Entriken

>> So I'll just give you a use case. And again, this is not a market thing. This is not something you're going to trade. But luxury watches, handbags, these are something you're going to own for a long time and you want to confirm that they're authentic. That system is currently run on paper for a lot of brands, but we're also doing it on crypto, and that's going to last permanently. That makes a lot of sense. Store of value, I don't really think store of value is a permanent decentralized thing. How many people put money in and really keep it there for 50 years? In the U.S., we do that a lot just because of tax reasons of how retirement accounts work. But that is not the main use case of crypto is just buying Bitcoin and holding it for 50 years. I feel like there's got to be more than that. And even the thing that we're buying now is just stablecoins, which is a deflationary asset. So really, are we just buying USDC to just sit there? No, we want to pay our rent. We want to do commerce. So it's not really about, when we say store of value. I'm talking short term. You're talking short term. This is not generational wealth.

>> You bring up the commerce side of it, which is what that comment was like, a concept of narrow banking comes up. When are we going to see basically banking so I can get some liquidity? And that's been a big conversation this week in the market. Okay. I buy the store of value. I know it's not like your real estate, you can't build on or whatever, you want to hold it. Yeah, there's some holding strategies. Yeah, there's durability. It won't burn down. But making it work, putting it into the market is a huge factor. What's your take on that? How do you see that happening? Any movement there? Any signs of positive momentum in technology companies, products, ideas?

William Entriken

>> Yeah, so you brought in the one thing was the durability, the immutability, we call it as nerds, and the transactions are going to be publicly viewable forever. I saw your other view with Mike Cagney, great interview, and he brought up another part about middlemen. We buy something, there's a lot of middlemen, and blockchain is actually very good at adding middlemen. So this is a feature, not a bug. In that other interview, we were talking about removing middlemen. I'm going to use Visa. I have a bank, there's a Visa, there's a clearing. The merchant has a bank, and then it's got to wait five days or a month and there's chargebacks. These are features. People want chargebacks. People want to have anti-fraud. They want to have anti-money laundering. They want to buy something on a popular website or an unpopular website and be not afraid of doing commerce. These are features. So I don't think that's going to be going away. But actually, the other feature of blockchain is the composability. If you want to start a bank and connect to Visa, good luck. That's not something you're going to do. If you want to create a defi protocol, something that connects money-wise to some other existing project in blockchain, you can launch that tomorrow and just with a couple of people in your garage. And it's a lot easier, and actually, you can avoid some regulation because you're not really touching the money, you're just moving it or something or giving access. And you can do very big things with a lot less licenses that you would need to compete with Visa.

>> Yeah. Will, you've definitely got the multiple hats on. You've got the hacker, you've got the builder developer, but you also got the market pragmatic view. So let's talk about that because this has come up in a few conversations where I just had an interview with the CEO of Kraken, one of the largest exchanges. I talked to the folks at Coinbase, and these consumer exchanges and these platforms, they think like users, buying users, but they also have their platforms. So you're basically getting into that last piece was about, hey, it could be layer one, two, or three, or you can actually have multiple service layers. So you're talking about a platform. You're talking about like basically technology apps. Okay, I have all the immutability, that's infrastructure. It's classic layered approach. I want chargebacks, great. Someone can offer that as a service-

William Entriken

>> Yes....

>> but it has to build into the system, right? So talk about that piece because I think a lot of people get hung up on the dogma of layer one on the chain. "We've got layer two, not layer three. Ethereum does this. Solana does that." So there's a lot of like conversations where people are, I won't say misrepresenting, they're just slicing the salami as we say. So whatever your view is, so it's not a one piece of the stack solution.

William Entriken

>> No. Love it. That's a great question. And I'm even going to go back to layer zero using cash because we can't forget about the tradfi or the existing companies 'cause they can innovate if they wake up and learn how to, they can actually do any of this. All the applications we're talking about on blockchain are entirely possible with banks today. There's nothing that we're doing that can't be done with a bank, and I know that's going to explode some heads out there. They just haven't done it. The fact that we can connect and compose applications on blockchain is just because the nerds that gave us blockchain made it composable.

>> Yeah, it's not a-

William Entriken

>> Your bank didn't.

>> Again, this is evolution, right? It's like the caveman, they're walking a wreck at some point. At some point, the market will have to move to where the market is. Again, it's just those transitions, old way, new way, where are we? So okay, let's take that path. What happens next? Where are we?

William Entriken

>> Here's where we are. We're doing commerce. We're in the U.S. So you're using your credit card to buy coffee and you're still paying the extra 3% that you would have got with the cash discount. Why? 'Cause it's physically harder to get the cash out when you buy coffee. It's just physically harder. And nobody uses debit cards in the U.S. because you don't get a 3% discount. Europe doesn't have these problems. China doesn't even have money the way that we have money. It's just totally different. So this is a uniquely U.S. problem. But some of these other features, I work in a business and I send you money, you don't even know that the money's sent. There's three days. Like, what is this?

>> Yeah, Venmo works great. I love Venmo.

William Entriken

>> Venmo's decent, but you don't use it for payrolls. And there's limits and there's the $300 thing. So some people are using Bitcoin for this, but it's not easy enough yet. When I'm able to pay my employees and immediately get a receipt that they can take to the bank and borrow against, that's the future. We don't have it in blockchain and we don't have it in the real world.

>>

William Entriken

>> Guess what? The Western Union could do this today. If I had an extra so many billion, I would buy Western Union today just for all the licenses they have. And I would deploy all these features on the existing rails because all you need to do is just give a receipt when you send money. Make it digitally verifiable. And guess what? Programmable money and composability, you can do that on a Chase account. You can do this on Western Union. All you got to do is just do this little magical digital signatures thing that all these nerds know about. And you have composability with an API.

>> That's the classic conversation because what you're pointing out is the obvious. So like, hey, why don't they do it? But here's the problem. They don't do it because they're old stuck in the mud, and so someone just says, "Hey, if they're not going to do it, I'm just going to eat their lunch." So I think this is the entrepreneurial side of it. So you're pointing out lots of white spaces, lots of opportunities. How does that get there? What's your advice to people out there who are building saying, "Hey, you know what? If I can't buy Western Union, how do I just replicate them?"

William Entriken

>> Yeah, so it is the licenses: the money broker licenses, the money transmitter licenses that needs to be done in each state in the U.S., and there's also national licenses and money laundering. So the way that the banks have succeeded until today is you cross-pollinate between the banks and the government to make everything legal. Okay? Well now we need to cross-pollinate between the banks and the crypto because we actually need to build these products. Some of the crypto products, they don't even work. You can't even open them. Your money disappears. You click on the wrong thing, your money's gone. These are rookie mistakes that at a minimum we need to do at least as good as the banks are doing. How many times do you open the news, oh, everybody lost their money, there was a typo? That's still happening today, and these projects are just an embarrassment to the establishment.

>> Yeah. Sole custody-

William Entriken

>> So if we can get this level-...

>> comes up a lot too. I lost my keys. What's your take on sole custody? Because I think that becomes very important versus having a centralized piece. What are some good use cases and people can implement that you see?

William Entriken

>> You got to do sole custody, but also we have to as a community, you're in it, I'm in it, the community, we need to find a way to fund these things because right now they've got these self-custody projects. Who's paying for them? It's self-custody, so they're not getting a percentage of your money, so it's the best effort case. We need top-of-the-line stuff here that's actually going to work. And we just... a huge amount of money just lost because the pop-up came. They clicked OK, and they didn't know what they were clicking and they forgot to put that in the app. So-

>> Bad design....

William Entriken

>> let's make better apps. Bad design.

>> Will, we really appreciate you coming in from Philly. Final minute left, what are you working on? What's cool? What do you have your eyes on? Obviously, you got your finger on the pulse. You've got a great optimism. I think you're blowing minds out there for sure, but that's just opportunity you're seeing. So what are you working on now? What are you excited about?

William Entriken

>> Here's what I'm excited about. I'm excited about the next asset class. And I'll tell it to you, the thing that got NFTs exciting was we took artwork that was outside the blockchain and connected it. Boom, everything exploded. Let's take more valuable stuff outside of blockchain and connect it like businesses. So here's the perfect storm. I'll just give it to you real fast. In the United States, we're deregulating how we invest in private companies, hopefully. We've heard about the crypto czar, the AI czar maybe giving us an accredited investor test. Okay? And accredited investors can invest. You don't have to be a millionaire anymore to buy private companies. How are you going to buy that? With the rails of crypto. So buy and sell, I think that that's going to be way more valuable than the pictures of the past. But the connection is what makes it valuable. Connecting these things to real businesses, it's exciting.

>> Will Entriken here on the Crypto Trailblazers. You're trailblazing. Keep going. Love what you're working on, love the ideas. Continue to innovate, get building, keep hacking, and have fun. Thanks for coming on.

William Entriken

>> Thank you.

>> All right. We are here for the Crypto Trailblazers, theCUBE Trailblazers as well. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here in our Palo Alto Studios. We'll be right back.