Sandy Khaund on Blockchain: Enhancing Fan Experience and Engagement

Old Men New Money, please subscribe on YouTube, Spotify and iTunes. Thank you. Alrighty. I'm Phil Arman. I'm Douglas forthwick. And this is Old Men New Money. Please subscribe iTunes, I heart Spotify. We're on all the major platforms. Old Men New Money subscribe. So you get the latest updates and all the interviews today. I am super excited to our guest, Sandy Khaund. Right. I get that right. We've known each other almost 10 years now. I met him back when I was at the mobile majority slash then they went to gimbal and now they go by and fill you on. And we were working with him at in stadium.

I remember vividly, we had a call back then and you were alluding maybe, Hey, you're going to move on, do something next. And it was really exciting. The Avenue that you were going, but for our audience, could you introduce yourself and tell us about the journey that took you to where you are today? Sure. Uh, and thank you for having me on the podcast, really excited about this. So my background, I'm an engineer by trade that's done business stuff as well. It took a little bit of a detour down the NBA path.

I've worked at a number of big companies, Intel, Microsoft, Lockheed Martin, now Warner media, but then Turner broadcasting also worked at a number of smaller companies, including in stadium where Phil, you and I met where I was the CTO, they were ultimately also acquired by gimbal. I was also the COO of a social networking company called pixel. That was acquired by start all, but most recent and most relevant. And to your point, Phil, in 2015, right around that same time that I left in stadium, I started a blockchain ticketing company called upgraded.

And you'll hear a lot about blockchain ticketing, especially if you know anything about blockchains ticketing is a perfect use case. I'm proud to say that 10 years ago, I was thinking the same thing back in 2015. The blockchain was a very different world back then. So you could argue we were a little early and maybe we'll go into a little bit about why it was early then and why I still think there's a future of it now.

But for me, going into blockchain ticketing in 2015, the last 10 years of my career almost entirely has been around blockchain, whether it's ticketing, which I took with upgraded, we spent about three years before we were acquired by ticket master and live nation. I spent two years along with ticket master and live nation, both working on blockchain as well as a few other initiatives, but ultimately during the pandemic, uh, wasn't a great time for the ticketing industry. So I left in mid to late 2020. I actually, I always liked to joke. I actually swore off the blockchain for a little while.

I'd become, yeah, I was like, tell people, everybody called me Mr. blockchain and the blockchain guy ticket master. My fantasy football team was called the blockchainers. It's like enough is enough. I can do some other stuff. 2021 happened. NFTs decentralized finance, crypto spring. And I always call it my Godfather moment. Just when I was out, they pull me back in. So I came back in and I created what I then called NFT plus, which I thought there was a lot of really interesting things with NFTs, but they weren't really capturing all of what the blockchain was capable of doing. It's since been renamed to credenza.

That's what I've been working on on the last three years as really a much broader remit on what the blockchain can mean to the sports industry and beyond, right. Where my original foray was ticketing, right. And then of course the NFTs were a lot about digital collectibles and that's great, but no one ever started a sports league and said, let's make baseball cards, right? You think about ticketing, sponsorship, concession, merchandise, content rights, betting. There's just all these other things that make up 90 plus percent of this hundreds of billions of dollars that flows through sports globally.

And the ability for blockchain to apply across all those different pieces. It's just, it's an, it's, it feels like an infinite opportunity, right? And that's where we've been focused with credenza for the last three years. So let's start before we get dive into credenza, you went into the ticketing space with upgraded, what made you decide to dive into the ticketing space with that's a very competitive space because there's very large companies. What was it that you said? There's a problem. I can solve it and there's a need and I'm going to do it right now. Yeah. And it was actually why it was around the same time that I met you.

So it was about 10 years ago when you were at mobile majority and I was at in stadium that I saw it and I like to tell the story about how we were talking to a customer in stadium when we were showing some of the things that we were working on and his response was like, Oh yeah, what are you doing for ticketing? And we hadn't done anything for ticketing. So we're like, yeah, we haven't gotten a ticketing yet. But what do you think about this? And his response was, yeah, that's fine. When are you getting a ticketing? And when a customer asks twice, you forget anything you're talking about. And you focus on what the customer wants to talk about.

And when we asked, what do you think's wrong with ticketing? He had, he made some really interesting points that kind of stuck with me after the meeting, he said, look, and then keep in mind, this is 2015. So ticketing has come along the way in the last 10 years, but the state of the art at the time was a PDF ticket. And when you sent out a PDF ticket, you didn't know that the person used the ticket or that they give it to their spouse or did they give it to a friend? Or did they sell it on StubHub or did they put it on Craigslist and sell it 10 times or the first person gets in the next night, nine people are out of luck.

There was no traceability on that ticket. Or for that matter, how did, how did Phil go to the game? We sold the ticket to Sandy. Well, yeah, Sandy knows feller. Sandy gave it to his wife who gave it to Phil's wife who gave it to Phil, right? Trying to track the chain of custody, a ticket and how things moved around. There seemed like there was a lot of opportunity there. So suddenly it started popping up that it was a combination of a problem. The problem being the rights holders had no idea what happened to that ticket after they gave it away.

It was a CRM problem, which is why a lot of them stated that they didn't even know 20% of the people in the building on a given evening, as well as understanding some of the relationship and how a ticket flows really became a very fascinating question. So that's what inspired the launch of the product or the launch of the idea. And what I like to say is that when I originally came up with it, I, and I still write a lot of code. So I'd written like a really crude prototype. I use the technology called colored coins, which is extending the Bitcoin blockchain to be able to basically take and create tokens on the Bitcoin blockchain.

And then a couple of things happened in May, March of 2016, probably the most important month of my career. Uh, one was I went to South by Southwest with my prototype. I had a lot of friends that was going to unveil it in private sort of meetings. And I got the same consistent feedback. Number one, everybody was like, yes, ticket master needs to be brought down. The ticketing world needs to be brought down. Uh, but the second question was why, how does this work with ticket master? Can you work alongside them? Because until you guys point, that's a daunting thing to take on a big, strong company like that has many entrenched relationships.

I'm like, yeah, that's a good question. And then the third question was why wouldn't ticket master do this themselves? And my thought was that's the easier to question, uh, to handle because ultimately big companies don't do new technologies very well, very easily. It's very difficult. It's, if you're familiar with Clayton Christensen and the innovators dilemma, it is the ultimate innovators dilemma. You're so focused on your existing customers. You can't even see the disruptive change. And I definitely saw this disruptive change with what we're doing with blockchain.

The second thing that happened at that time is that it was right after Ethereum hit the homestead release. And when I discovered Ethereum, that just changed my life because the concept of a smart contract and all the different things that you can do with a smart contract, suddenly the ticket wasn't a barcode that was meant to be hidden and meant to be tracked. It was now every ticket was an application. It had dimension. It had vectors that had a lot of flexibility and how you defined it. And that opened the door to, Hey, wait a minute.

Now we can do, and what we liked, I would, I like to now looking back the terms that we started using with it were rules and entitlements and rules were what can happen with that ticket? Hey, that's a ticket to a Michigan Ohio state game. That was for a Michigan student that shouldn't end up in the hands of an Ohio state alum, or that's a ticket to a Pearl jam concert for a 10 club member. That should not go to the general public. How do you restrict where tickets can go? Or that's a comp ticket. We better not see that on a secondary market.

And we knew we could do these sorts of restrictions if we built the extended functionality on top of a ticket where it wasn't just a dumb barcode. And then all of a sudden, what if the ticket could get you more than the ticket? What if it could get you secondary or tertiary access, right? You get the VIP lounge, you get this field access and to be dynamic with those sorts of things. So that was the innovation we were trying to do with ticketing. Ultimately, Ticketmaster brought us in. We did do many tickets.

I don't know what the ultimate number was using the blockchain, but we never actually got to extend it to where my vision had wanted it to be. And there's a number of reasons for that. And that's neither on Ticketmaster as well as on me. Certainly wasn't helped by the pandemic, which kind of shut everything down. But I still believe there's a future for blockchain ticketing. I just think it'll probably be different than the premise I had in 2015 when I started upgraded. Do you think that Ticketmaster bought you as a catch and kill or are they actually technology today? That's interesting terminology for that.

I a lot of people have asked me that question. I don't know if I'm the right person to answer it. I do think that they were curious about the technology. I think they like me. I think they like the way we approach the ticketing and with the technology. And the most important thing I think we did, why they liked us enough to basically say we want to make an investment in Sandy and the team is that we took a very client centric approach to blockchain ticketing. I think when a lot of people talk about blockchain ticketing, it's like we're doing it for the fans and don't get me wrong. I'm a fan. I spent a lot of money.

I got Dave Grohl back here and I still love going to Foo Fighters concerts. And I used to go watch Chris Cornell when he was alive. Like I love going to concerts, but ultimately at the end of the day, it is Mr. Grohl and Mr. Cornell that would call the shots. Or it was the New York Yankees, the New England Patriots that would call the shots. And it was their responsibility to do right by the fan. So when we designed our technology, we designed our technology to be flexible enough so that each of these rights holders could come up with a strategy for what to do.

I think they knew that if blockchain was going to be the next generation of ticketing, that our approach was the right approach to put these things and happen that makes the client happy and ultimately let the client determine what's going to make the fan happy. I don't know if they necessarily got us and said, OK, we're going to put you over in a corner. We were deployed by I stayed very busy for two years doing a lot of stuff with the blockchain. The other thing to keep in mind with Ticketmaster, not that I want to dwell on too much, but it's an amazing company, right, for all the flack that it takes.

It is amazing how well they do with the volume that they have. But they are older systems. And when you have an older system that is tried and true for a number of years, but then you have a technology whose white paper wasn't even 10 years old at the time that I was acquired. Like that's an old dog, new trick sort of thing, right? It wasn't easy. And our first year was spent basically integrating with this legacy technology, this technology that had done billions and billions of tick billions served and basically saying, OK, we want to infuse this new technology.

And if you also think of where blockchain was in 2018 when we were acquired and oh, my God, in 2015, when we started upgraded and today, it's come a long way. Right. You have to remember Moore's law is an amazing thing. And Moore's law is happening in blockchain right now. Right. And this is just an aside, but I think this is an important thing that sets the context for a lot of things I think we're going to talk about today. But in December of 2019, I was at a conference at a blockchain conference and I said, take a master does 450 million tickets a year. And I want to put every one of those tickets on the blockchain.

But the truth is, is that we couldn't. We couldn't because the latency was too slow, couldn't handle enough throughput. It just it would choke on 50000 people outside Lambeau Field wearing cheese on their head, slightly drunk from the tailgating. And they want to come in. They can't wait minutes for a transaction to close. Right. Transaction costs, then the gas. That's exactly right. Yeah. Forgot all about that. There's the whole price of the ticket. Exactly. So you're already squeezed on margins. And now suddenly you're going to add a surcharge that doesn't really have a meaningful at the time, a huge meaningful consumer benefit.

But my comment at the time was also there are people a lot smarter than me working on this project right now. And there are new algorithms and there are new consensus mechanisms and all this other stuff that's coming. And that's what's going to change the same way that a microprocessor from 1990 and an Nvidia AI chip right now don't even seem like they're the same species. But there's just an expected evolution. And if you think of what's happened with the blockchain like underpinnings right now, all these amazing new chain, new consensus algorithms. We had even switched from within Ticketmaster.

We had gone from Ethereum and eventually we were on Quorum and we went from transaction seconds per transaction to transactions per second. And now you have these amazing new L1 blockchains. Like we're big fans of the guys that missed in labs and SWE, right? It's amazing how quickly they do the consensus. And those are the guys from Facebook, the Lieber project that came over, started this new blockchain. They're doing speeds that I only dreamed of back in 2018.

And that when we were running a private chain, but now on a public chain, the throughput, the latency, the cost, the fact that it's less than a penny for transaction, suddenly you can start putting everything on it. And that's the biggest difference between where we were in 2018 and when I left in 2020 and now fast forward five years and the blockchain is a viable technology getting what I remember was called quite a bit. Visa like speeds, right? Can you the reconciliation of a transaction on Visa had a certain latency and it's actually not that bad.

And we've all grown accustomed to the fact that you swipe, you wait a couple of seconds and it's OK, approved $200. Blockchains getting to that point with a decentralized store, with basically understanding that speed, security and decentralization navigating those things that these new algorithms are allowing for where we're getting to something that we have a long term view of this stuff. And it's just really exciting. I've got one last question for ticketing. One of the biggest problems, I think, is Taylor Swift sells a ticket for $200. Ultimately, maybe it sells for $3,000. She doesn't get anything.

The difference between where she sold it to the general public and where it sold to the end user. And did you solve for that so that a percentage of whatever the upgrade, the up price was from where the artist sold it would go back to the artist automatically? I think I think when tickets are resold in a sanctioned market, some of the money does go back to the artist. I think it's a little bit of a fallacy that in no situation do any of the artists see any sort of any sort of money coming back to them now. But bringing it back to block and this is the important part.

Is when we had built, when we constructed the smart contracts that we did and we had resale in mind because we knew resale was a huge opportunity for exactly what you were describing. This idea of, you know, the $300 or the $200 ticket that goes for $3,000. And by the way, there's two challenges with that that we're going that I want to talk about because it's a very important concern. One is that how does the money come back to the artist to make sure that in a transaction, particularly a crypto crypto transaction, which is the ideal, right, have a stable coin to basically have the transaction happen.

There's two wins that can happen in that area. Number one, the concept that a smart contract can act as escrow. Right. Because the example I used to use back when I did blockchain ticketing, as I said, that one of them, one of the experiences that inspired me to do this besides that meeting with the one customer was I'm a huge Guns N' Roses fan. They decided to go back on tour. They were at I guess then it was AT&T Park now, Oracle Park. And I got excited because I went on Craigslist and I saw the tickets were face value. $150 apiece for that night. And I'm like, oh, my God, this is great. I'm still a starving entrepreneur at the time.

So cost was a really tight deal here even to see excellent slash. But then I thought, what if these tickets aren't real? And or what if I send if I PayPal this guy $300 and then he never sends the tickets? And so I'm like, I want it to be like send me the tickets first. But you know what he's going to say. No, I'm going to give you these tickets. You're going to run off. You're not going to pay me. So the idea of having digital escrow, that's one of the things a smart contract is great for.

And in getting that smart and getting that digital escrow, the idea of routing the money so that $3,000 comes in and X percent goes to Taylor Swift or the management staff, the promoter Y goes to the seller Z goes to the person to the contract itself. Love that opportunity. I still think there's value there. I think a lot of the sanctioned resale resale places like Ticketmaster do enable that already within a closed system. While I like it to be more open, I do think that there are avenues for artists to go where it doesn't necessarily have to be blockchain.

So that's why I put I take a little bit of the air out of that opportunity because why I think it's great. I also think that the incumbent solution does have some some consideration for the artist. But the other part that I want I want to bring up, and we don't get to bring this up very often, but it's actually a pretty important piece, is the idea that when you talk about that $300, the $200 ticket and the $3,000 ticket, the truth is that Taylor Swift would be very happy if just the $200 ticket sold and you never had to go to a resale market for the $3,000. The problem is that you have bots and you have so bots are problem.

Number one, Ticketmaster is an amazing data science team that literally does forensics and all these bots in this huge cat and mouse game that's there trying to guess and putting you online and doing capture and all this other stuff. And so the few people that try to figure out how to make that work. But there is a second part that's really interesting and where I think blockchain can play a role that no one ever talks about and it lends itself a little bit to Credenza.

And that's the idea that are you a 20 year old Swiftie who has tortured repeat tortured poets on repeat on your Spotify and loves it so much or are you a 50 something male who usually listens to Audioslave and the Foo Fighters and Soundgarden but understands the arbitrage of a $200 ticket that goes for $3,000. And I'm just going to snap up that ticket for $200. I'm going to throw it on a resale market. And just for being a little bit patient online, I'm going to make thousands of dollars.

This is what Ticketmaster tries to do with verified fan, making sure not only that you're human, but trying to understand indications to show that you are a bigger fan. Think about what the blockchain can provide in this scenario, right? What if you can bring your fandom of Taylor Swift or of the New York Yankees ahead of issuing World Series tickets or whatever it might be out there to bear so that it's hey, we're going to build a queue and the queue is going to recognize the ones that deserve to be because they want to buy the ticket for $200, right? Because that's what Taylor Swift knows she's going to sell out the audience.

All she wants is $50,000 of the biggest fans in the greater New England area, the greater Los Angeles area, to be able to show up and hopefully not to have to pay $3,000 for the rights. And so what you're talking about here is digital identity. That's exactly right. Yes. Yes. And with identity and the attributes, we like to talk about it as assets, attributes and actions. And I always think about this with the blockchain. Everybody, we all know assets, right? The name of this podcast calls out those assets. It's new money, right?

But the beauty of blockchain is that it can also deal with attributes and actions and attributes define who I am, right? I am a Cornell University alum. I am a member of AAA. I have an American Express card. Those aren't things that can be traded away. Those are things that Cornell University or American Express or AAA confer to me and identify and basically validate. Yes, this is who I am. And traditional wallets that we used to carry around back in the olden days, and I do now with a milk phone, but there's a card that is my AAA membership, that is my Kaiser permanente health card or whatever. How do we digitize those things?

Not only so we can digitize them, but they actually impact every subsequent transaction that happens. And so when you have identity and identity less about Sandy Khaund, does anybody really care about Sandy Khaund? No, they care about where I went to school because that might be relevant or they care that I'm a enormous Baltimore else fan because that might be relevant. That level of identity, that association of metadata around who you are that can impact the transaction. That's what I like to call blockchain 3.0.

I think that's the next wave where the first couple of waves are around assets and this ability to create assets as value for money and that ability to exchange assets for assets, which is what NFTs became when you would use ETH to buy an NFT. I think this third version is to say, how do we color that transaction with sufficient metadata, which isn't about Sandy Khaund or where I'm from or my age, but more I am an Orioles fan. I've been so for 45 years. And my lifelong dream is to go take batting practice at Camden Yards. That's how much of a nut I am. Consider me a crazed fan as opposed to a casual fan who might check a box for the next day.

When you talk about a digital identity wallet, let's say, that has where you went to school, maybe where you worked, all these different certificates, essentially digital certificates that are sent to you. And then the nice thing is you can choose whether to show that to every organization you're dealing with. It's like when you go to the checkout line, when you rent a car and they say, are you members of AARP? OK, and I'm also I'm a Yale graduate. OK, great. And you get all of these different things you throw out there, you get discount.

And the reality is I've got to carry around 10 different cards in my wallet today to show that, whereas I could just do it on my phone. My phone and say, OK, scan, here's the identity. But before I show them that, I just tick off all the different things that I have essentially the digital NFTs for. So I can then show them that and they can scan it and say, OK, here's all the different savings you're going to get because of your members of all these different organizations. Absolutely. In fact, I'll go one step further. And one of the things I always say about Credenza, my dream long term, what's the big audacious goal that I have long term?

And this will never happen. But I do think it will happen at some point, broadly speaking, is that right now the three of us all have Social Security numbers, right? We are tax paying citizens. We have to put that stuff on. And if we want to apply for a loan, if we want to apply for a credit card or mortgage or anything like that, we have this nine digit number. But I'll tell you what, I'm not going to say mine on the air right now. Neither are either of you because the public key that identify the identifies who you are is also the private key. Right.

This idea of a public a public key infrastructure, this idea that you can have a public key and a paired private key so that the public key is like an address and you can put it any time. Go ahead, look me up. Let's see the digital equivalent of Google made. Right. Do that. But no one can authorize anything on my behalf unless they have this signed ID and the concept of a zero knowledge proof. Tell me you are who you are without telling me without giving away that thing that proves who you are. Yeah, that level of digital identity right now, we're already doing it in a very insecure sort of way. Right.

My one of my colleagues feel so awkward about giving a social security number that she will send four digits in text, three digits in Slack and two digits in email or whatever it is. Breaking it up. We almost have to have a decipherable code to be able to do it. Nor we always talk about the last four digits. Well, that's what the social security number anyway, it is dead. I've had I think three different people file taxes on my behalf. So obviously I have a pin number now every year when I file taxes. And I think that probably happens to a lot of people. Yeah.

And so it's a vulnerability as long as it exists and as long as a lot of people key on it. So you're right. There's ways for you to operate without it so you don't have to give it. But if it slips out there and I've talked to a lot of people who've been the victim of identity theft and I use like a life lock right now. So if anybody tries to even do anything with my accounts, at least I get a little bit of an alert and I appreciate that. But it'd be nice if we didn't have to deal with it in the first place. Would be great if we didn't have to deal with it.

Yeah, it is a pain in the neck because when that happens and when someone opens a credit card with your social security number and then you see it pop up. Hey, thanks for opening a card. Thanks for the credit. That's right. And I don't know how many times this happened to me. It's probably happened to a lot of people listening to this, but a digital identity I think would fix that. Yes, 100 percent. And that's and I think and by and one of the other things you brought up Douglas, it's really important is that the idea of being I like to talk about the translucency of data and there's two aspects translucency of data.

The idea that says that you are my let's talk about health care just as an example. Right. You are my primary care physician. You should be able to see everything about my medical history. Right. My my HIV test, my covid test, my whatever, all this other stuff. Blood type, you're my chiropractor. You just need to know that I'm healthy and I got a clean bill of health. Right. The idea of smart contracts to adjudicate because all the requests can be signed requests. I'm going to talk a little bit in engineering speak and I'll ask for forgiveness ahead of time.

But what ends up happening is that every time there is a request to a smart contract, the person that's making the request, there can be anonymous requests or there can be signed requests. The signed request can basically, hey, tell me more about Bill and the smart contract to be like, who's asking? Oh, it's it's his chiropractor. OK, Bill's in perfect health. It's his dentist. Oh, Phil is type O negative blood type because you never know might be an important thing for blood thing. It's his physician. Oh, here you go. Phil did this and did that. And here's some of his other medical records.

The idea that you can create this sort of translucency because at the level of the smart contract, you can determine these who's asking to get different information. This has practical applications in health care, in finance, in sports. Right. Is it if it's a rights holder, if it's the Florida Panthers, right? Florida Panthers, I believe used to be on ticket master and now is on SeatGeek. When it was ticket master could ask for information. Maybe they get more information in SeatGeek as a resale market would get less. And then when that relationship changes, OK, now SeatGeek is awarded certain information that ticket master isn't.

So even on a retail business to business level, there's a lot of really innovative things you can do with the block chain. And going back to why Credenza was created, I always felt like as much as I was, you know, entertained by NFTs and I'm a huge believer in cryptocurrency, it's scratching the surface on the programmability of the platform and the flexibility of the platform. The true beauty of cryptocurrency is its programmable money. It's not just money, right? We can do a lot of things we do with crypto generic like passing of data. I could Venmo you tomorrow or cash app or whatever the kids are using.

There's an intermediary getting in there. I don't like that part. It's not really anonymous. I don't like that part, but it still gets the point across. But when you start doing interesting things around programmability, this is why decentralized finance is to me like one of the true vanguards of what happens with the block chain, because they're being very creative in the way that they're structuring how the money moves around in that situation. And for me, and I was at MakerDAO, I was on the board of MakerDAO for a couple of years. That was the thing that blew me away. I love saying this.

I was asked to be I was they talked to me about being on the board of MakerDAO in 2019. And I read the white paper and I'm like, oh, my God, this is a scam on top of a scam. This is like crypto and its derivatives. And oh, my God, then a year later it happened again. They reached out to me again. Somebody else had reached out to me and I read the white paper again. And I realized this is the most amazing, brilliant thing. I think I've read in my entire life, right? This is as an entrepreneur and block chain.

I'm humbled by how brilliant this is because it's thoughtful about the programmability, about money, about collateralized lending, about the governance of this sort of thing. It's absolutely off the charts. Amazing. Now, our listeners have no idea what a DAO is. First of all, can you spell it and then let's start with the fact that DAO is an acronym. So Decentralized Autonomous Organization, DAO. And there's a number of ways of implementing a DAO, why you'd implement it, what it can do. But at a high level, one of the most important things is that when you think about it, just just start with the acronym, right?

Decentralized Autonomous Organization, right? Organization is just a group of people or group of entities that come together so we can be pretty lightweight on that. The Decentralized Autonomous, I feel like they key off each other a little bit. It's really important in a traditional organization, any organization that's out there. There is governance that's often individuals that basically run it, right? There are rules that are set, but ultimately, not to be all AI board centric about it, but it's like there's humans that kind of run it to determine.

Our United States government had humans that were running it five months ago and humans that are running it now and look how, even though it's the same structure, look what difference it makes when a different person's running it. With the Decentralized Autonomous Organization, what happens is there are a number of people that join this organization digitally. Their inclusion in the organization, in a lot of cases, can be because they put money into it, they invest in it. I think there was another DAO that was around trying to buy, was it the copy of the Constitution? It was like Constitution DAO. MakerDAO is another example of this.

But you're almost like a shareholder within this organization, for lack of a better term. You buy your way into a typically finite amount of access into an organization, and a couple of things happen, right? So now, suddenly, a voting structure can determine certain things, right? So things can be put forth, and the DAO can make collective decisions based on what the overall sort of situation is. It's almost like the most democratic way of doing things. In fact, when I was at MakerDAO, it was the Maker Foundation. We weren't telling people what they could do. It was the code that basically was adjudicating and managing all these things.

We were just trying to promote the ecosystem of people being in this and making sure the right things were happening there. But ultimately, at the end of the day, the Articles of Federation that bring these things together, the Articles of Incorporation, are all encoded within a smart contract. The smart contract determines certain things based on the collective wisdom of the people inside of the DAO. A DAO, I'm not one who's saying that it should be blockchain for voting, but for a lot of people questioning the integrity of elections and everything, and that's another hour-long podcast, we can do it another time.

Because I've been thinking something in my head, I want to interrupt you. With Doge, obviously, coming into the US government right now, it would make sense for everyone that's in the United States, everyone around the world, essentially gets an app that they can download onto their phone. And if you have a social security number, the social security department sends you essentially an NFT that would be picked up by that app. If you have a passport, the passport office would send an NFT of that into your phone to pick up that app.

Now, if you don't have that passport ID or nationalization ID on your phone, then the social security number won't work, right? So now we get rid of folks that are not using the social security numbers. But then your college could send you an NFT that would go into this app. So essentially, this app, that's a national app, could hold all of these different credentials, and you'd be able to show that and essentially create a QR code based off of your credentials to be shown folks when you choose which one to use. And I think that would be very efficient, get rid of a lot of waste, get rid of a lot of fraud. And it could be on the agenda.

I'll tell you something. First of all, thank you for the commercial for Credenza. That's a little bit of what we do. So that's a great lead in there. But I think one of the things when you, there's a couple of terms that you use that I would push back just a little bit from someone who spent the last 10 years and block in on like the technical side that I think is critical. I think, I don't think it necessarily needs to be an NFT per se. Like there's a lot of structures and data structures that you can use because I think NFTs tend to be a little bit dumb.

And there's an opportunity to basically encrypt or encode certain information associated with that, the passport, let's still call it a token, but that is associated with that token that can be embedded within that is only released when someone actually provides that code or anything like that. So that QR code can be a lot more powerful. But ultimately, at the end of the day, the app that you described, it's less about the app and more about the blockchain itself and the data that is stored on this blockchain, the standardized universally accessible blockchain. And then suddenly, it's not about one app.

It's about any app that taps into that identity. Whether it's showing a QR code, whether it's logging in instead of logging in with your Google credentials, you log in with your US credentials and whatever it is you have to do to basically authenticate yourself. But now suddenly, you have the ability to share, yes, this is my passport information. This is the social security number or whatever the error apparent is to that number. There is an identity piece. Now, the balance of it and the reason why I have some sympathy for the government when it deals with things like social security numbers is that there is still a digital divide.

People have phones, but not everybody has a phone. And people understand phones, but not everybody understands the phone even at our level. So I try to avoid not talking in deep engineering terms, but there's people a lot below anybody listening on this call. People, especially above the age of 70 or 80, that can't even figure out how to get like email to work or Safari inside an iPhone to work. Where making them understand the stuff, there's still going to be a little bit of the digital divide. I do think with every year, we get closer and closer to that.

But I would say just as easily having some sort of physical evidence and NFC chip that can be connected to phone doesn't have to be or it can be more like an Apple pay sort of thing, right? It's something that's in the wallet. It's something that's recognizable. That is definitely a possibility. You could, it could be implanted. Call me out on that all the way there. I don't know if people will go for that.

By the way, one of the things that my experience, I've worked at Microsoft, I've worked at Ticketmaster, I've worked at places that have had relatively ubiquitous technologies that have insane market share in terms of the number of people that use it. And it's amazing what happens when you have to deal with that wide an audience and what people will get upset about or what people will push back on, right? So I know one of the things that I worked with during my time at Ticketmaster for a while was trying to figure out biometrics. Wouldn't it be cool if instead of showing a QR code, you could just walk in and your face is your ticket, right?

Like one of my colleagues used to like to describe it as selfie ticketing, right? And your face is just embedded in. Now we're not looking for a barcode. It's Douglas and Phil walk up and it's like Douglas, you're through Phil. No, we don't know who you are. Go the Amazon shopping. Yeah. In fact, Amazon uses the palm. And we actually, I, we talked to them at some point when I was there and I actually saw some of the early prototypes of that. It was awesome. I think I can say that now it's five years later.

But, but a lot of people got very nervous about even a Ticketmaster holding a visual, a face, and there were a lot of groups that started up and I still remember. And this is six years ago, right? It was 2019. And they jumped into sports entertainment. Remember clear? Yeah. Clear did it. In fact, clear did it with LAFC. I remember it was a big thing and we were involved and tied into that. The problem was particularly music. I think there was a big, bigger fear. There was actually a group, a public interest group that came out and said, and it's just, it's laughable now that I'm not in it, but it was disheartening when you were in it.

Where it was like Ticketmasters capturing this information because they're going to share it with the government because they're going to share it with the DEA and they're going to share it with ICE. And I'm like, why would we knock on our customers? Because when the CIA comes knocking and tell you we want the data, it's hard for you to say no. Exactly. And so as long as that's there and I know there's, and that's above my pay grade or that's in the legal, I'm just the tech guy that thought it would be cool to get in with my face. And it's a company we work with that's still around. I love those guys. Blank identity.

They're down in Austin, Texas. And it was just amazing because you wouldn't even slow your gate. If you've seen a vault for security now, you don't have to just walk, right? Don't have to walk through a metal detector. Just walk. If you've got a weapon on you, we're going to find it. This was like the ticket equivalent of that. It's like, all right, Phil and Douglas, they both got tickets. Let them through. I want to do a proper and full segue into Credenza. And one of the reasons why I'm so excited about it is because back when we did meet, I was hitting the circuit, like the ALSD conference and seat.

And I was talking about how to leverage first party data before, during and after an event in order to drive more revenue. Right. And so it really got everyone's attention. However, but then once you get past that first level, and we were doing it more from an advertising standpoint, but because I came from sports, I was like, there is this next layer that you were tackling because what we would get into is, okay, these affinity markets are so big and these people have discretionary income. So they're super valuable. But how do we do this in a manner that enhances the fan experience, right?

They've got all this data, but it's in a data warehouse. It's unstructured data. They have all these disparate systems that need to talk to each other and enter Credenza. That's where I really see this is because there's really three different segments that are impacted this. The team, the fan, and the fan experience. And then the brand sponsor side, right? How does everybody win and how does it work in a smooth fan experience? Because fans, because it's an affinity environment, they will put up with a little bit more, but they will tell you all about it. And if it fails after that, then they will be screaming.

Tell us exactly what Credenza is. And let's dive into some of the use cases because actually full circle, I remember listening to Matt Gardner at ALSD with the Blues. And that's when I looked what Sandy did here. So Credenza. Thank you. I love it. And again, I think you did a great job setting it up because you're talking about a lot of things we care about. And I think to even go into it, it's worth saying, what's the state of the art in 2025 or 2024? Like we're 2025, but, and you think about how it is right now. There's a way that this is happening right now. That's a little almost, I think the best work to use is creepy, right?

So you will be on an app and you'll be on Instagram and you look at something. And suddenly now this other app knows where you are because Facebook or meta is doing the pixel stuff and they're doing the under the cover stuff and they're figuring all this stuff. And you're like, I didn't want that information. I didn't want it tied to me. So now you know, it's Sandy Khaund. So there's already a personal information stuff and going back to whether it's, you know, in Douglas, we're talking about the CIA knocking on your door.

Maybe they're not knocking on the door by the sponsor thing, but it's still, I don't necessarily like that my name is being associated with this and it's being shared with these advertisers. So there was already a little bit of a problem with that. So it was happening below board. It was happening where I wasn't getting anonymized or pseudonymized or anything like that. And I didn't necessarily see what the benefit was because it was typically only just like I got the ads that I got, which isn't horrible always accepted. It was done in a little bit of a better way.

I always like to use the example of Amazon Prime is my favorite example because we're all above board with Amazon. We're logged in on all the different sites, but I have an echo that's literally with an ear shot right there. So if I ask, you know how to do something, she's going to do it. Yeah. Or I walked to Whole Foods and I actually just did this morning. I took my dog for a walk and grabbed some like something from the whole foods. And that kind of comes back into my overall data record. And if I were to go back to Amazon.com right now, they'd be like, in fact, my orders will show my Amazon or my Whole Foods order, right?

How do we create this cohesive environment where all these different touch points in a meaningful way can relate so that I get an overall better experience? The blockchain and the way Credenza tries to do it, it starts with the idea of I'm not Sandy at Credenza 3.com, right? I am hex 123 ABC. I'm a pseudonymized blockchain identity. Going back to the same thing we were talking about with social security numbers or anything like that on the blockchain. There are no strings that are important in identity. It's not that you need to be anonymized. We need to have a pseudonym for you.

We need to have a pseudonymized identity because we do want to accumulate this information about you. But the problem is that an email address is not only a, is not only personally identifiable information, but it also leads to all the information that comes in. Then that's where you start getting into that creepy factor. Where we try to be the anti creep to a certain degree. How do you, I'm sorry. Pseudonymized identity. It used to be that your wallet address was essentially pseudonymous identity, but now I can mark wallet addresses so that I know that this wallet belongs to this person.

And so I can see when sailors buying Bitcoin, or I can see when Binance is selling something because it's all on chain. So pseudonymous, our cell phone numbers used to be synonymous. Social security numbers used to be synonymous. But then there's a data breach and everyone gets it, or you associate something with news or an event and you can figure out what it. So pseudonymous doesn't stay, stay. Yeah, that's true. Well, and by the way, like when Michael Saylor buys Bitcoin, when Sandy Khaund buys Bitcoin, those are two very different things based on the size of our positions.

Like when Warren Buffett buys does a stock buy for Berkshire Hathaway. And when I do a buy. So the question is that in a sea of information, ultimately, where does that pseudonymous? What is that pseudonymous? I'm going to get that question wrong or that phrase wrong, but where does it apply? Where does it not apply? If you're basically writing information against that identity for that experience, a specific place, there's two ways we can do the pseudonymous. One is we can do it by rights holder to rights holder. One, we can do it across rights holders.

Ultimately, at the end of the day, your information needs to be tracked in a way that whenever you log into another place, and that transition goes from Sandy Khaund three to hex 123 ABC. Again, even the system doesn't care about that. The system's basically, I'm just looking for information about person. Can you give me his unique idea so I can go and get that information? And the only way you're going to get to that public key as a system, as opposed to a creepy sort of underlying thing that Facebook is doing, is to do that log in is to do that sort of handshake where somebody authenticates themselves and presents their identity, right?

Going back to the idea of everything that you were describing earlier around, what if we had this app and the identity that goes with the app? The idea is that you wouldn't actually be able to present that unless you had the app with the QR code that had the zero knowledge proof associated with it, right? So at some point, it's going to be a little bit of a trade off of how much you're out there and how much you're not out there. But ultimately, that Sandy Khaund three is a much easier public key to be able to go out and figure out who I am than hex 123 ABC.

And when it starts with that, and when you're using that, and people feel a little bit more comfortable about that. And when I have to prove to you that I'm the person so that someone goes and looks it up, that changes the way the nature of the data that's out there. And then when you start accumulating the data, and when you start creating this moat around the data, the thing that I described before around the idea of adjudicating who's the requester of the data to get what kind of information back, suddenly it becomes like what I've started calling all party data. That's not my phrase, somebody else used it.

And I have to shamelessly lift from that. But the idea that data can be syndicated across all the people that are associated with it. Phil, this goes back to what you're talking about, which is to say, Hey, this is my favorite one. I was just at a Starbucks, right? And I just got I got my coffee and got my impossible sandwich. I just got Delta miles for that, right? There was a handshake that was made between Delta and Starbucks where my Starbucks purchases go towards Delta miles. We have the ability with the blockchain to create an open, flexible system around these sorts of programs are put in place.

And whether it's loyalty programs, whether it's meaningful data sharing, whether it's just knowing on another site that this is a New England Patriots season ticket holder, a Cleveland Browns season ticket holder. And we're a sponsor of that team. We give special deals to people who have an affiliation with that other rights holder. The fact that this data is accessible based on some of the provisions that are set around that data, that changes the way marketing can happen. But it only happens when the person opts in on both sides because that's a nation of identity. Why start in sports and entertainment, right?

Because I think as we're talking about this, we know there's so many different applications for this. Why start in sports and entertainment because you are there. Yeah, sport. There's a couple of reasons. Number one, there's no more fragmented world than sports and entertainment, right? I, I like to talk about the fact that I'm a fan of the Baltimore Hills, but their ticketing is on tickets.com. Their merchandise is fanatics and they've been in store fanatics store. Their point of sale systems are shift four. I think they may use Aramark or Delmar nurse. I forget who they use for catering. They're on mass and network.

And I am a different identity in each one of those cases, even though this is all part of my 365 day obsession with baseball, trying to create a canonicalization of that identity across all these different touch points where I feel like I have a relationship with this one overall rights holder, but all these other intermediate mediaries are coming into play. Sports can benefit from this. Most couple of that with two other things. One sports fans are the most forgiving fans of the world. If it gives them more access or better experience. It's, it's the reason why we love sports. It's where we are loyal to a fault. Right.

And then the idea that there's just, I'm sorry, but there's a lot of money being left on the table right now. There's a lot of optimization that can occur. And if you think about it, I live in California. I can't go to that many games at Camden yards, right? But I am still a huge fan. I watch 150 plus games a year on MLB TV, right? Not counting playoffs and hopefully they go deep in playoffs this year. How do you monetize me better? The EPL, I keep saying the EPL is one of my holy grails because they're such a huge following. So many of my friends are big EPL friends fans here in the States. I live on the West coast.

That means sometimes waking up at six o'clock in the morning and going to the pub and drinking beer, right? I didn't think that was socially acceptable, but now it's a way of life for a lot of people. How do you monetize those people more effectively than just the pub that served them that beer at six in the morning? Huge opportunities for digital fandom and linking that digital fandom to physical fandom, right? The fact that you have this, we like to say cross domain, cross device, cross world, right? Cross domain fits a lot with what you were describing with sponsors and partners and things like that.

Cross device, your fandoms on your phone, your fandoms on your laptop, your fandoms on your Oculus Rift glasses, but cross worlds, physical, digital, and virtual, your sports fandom is across all of those things. The ability to create that consistent identity when you're physically at the arena, when you're digitally or checking out the website or when you're virtually in some game, that's some 3D game, and you're the same person and each that consistency creates this better experience because we know who you are. We can pull off what Amazon pulls off with my Whole Foods experience, my Amazon experience, my Amazon video experience.

So how is that going? And I know you're doing stuff with the blues. And I think you and I both know once you get in sports, if you start working with one team, all the other teams like to do what the other teams are doing. They want that next shiny thing that solves the next problem that they experience. So can you share a little bit about A, what are you doing with the blues? And B, how have those conversations gone throughout the different teams, throughout the different leagues? Is there certain either sports leagues or teams that are more accepting of it, welcoming of it?

Or are people like, hey, we know that's a problem, but we're just not ready to tackle that yet? Yeah, that's a great question. With the blues, it's been great. So Matt Gardner has been our chief partner there. And he's been absolutely fantastic. He leads innovation. And a lot of teams don't necessarily have people who lead innovation the way he does. So we're incredibly fortunate with that. And I think what we've done is we've taken a crawl, walk, run approach. So the first thing we did is that they already had this terrific community called Blunatics. It was 100, 150,000 huge blues fans that come in. And they get news there.

And they post there's registered win contests. There's polls. There's pick them, things like that. So what we've been doing is that we actually went into their system. And we extended out their existing login to create blockchain rails. And so every user that has a Blunatics passport, which is an extension of your Blunatics account, now has a suite address, a public address that's associated with it. And every time you do a certain set of actions that's on that site, excuse me, now also on the retail site and on the in venue site and on the ticketing site, we're actually starting to pick up data and write data against that record.

And what we have the ability to do with the blues-- and we had a very cool example of this recently-- is that now we can start constructing unique offers that are a little bit more personalized. So someone who just comes to the site shouldn't get the same experience as a season ticket holder who's also been a Blunatics member for the last three years and just went to last night's game.

When you start building this lattice of an identity of a customer because we started to congeal all these different data points and you construct it-- we used a term that I hated before and I use a lot now, but hyper-personalized experience that says you don't need the $30 coupon or you don't need the New Jersey because you just bought one. You, unfortunately, we traded that player. We traded Vladimir Tarasenko a couple of years ago. You probably are in need of a jersey. We're having a jersey sale. We're going to try to entice you a little bit more.

We actually had a cool-- it was a cross-domains experience a couple weeks ago where they had a contest for the best blues jersey of all time. And what we were able to do was target specific people who had voted in previous rounds to encourage them to vote more. And if they voted in both of them, we would recognize that we would deliver a special coupon to them and we would do it through the app.

So what we were able to do is take the experience that you had on the community, the experience you have in the app, the experience that you have in the e-commerce retail outlet, as well as us as the glue that puts these things together, that almost creates a sequence of events that gets the right offer to the right person at the right time.

That's been a little bit of our mantra with them and with most of the people that we talk about is then, how do you make sure that-- again, going back to me for a second-- the Orioles fan that's the crazed Orioles fans for 45 years, and the person who's learning baseball who just came with me because my wife, who can care that much about baseball, we shouldn't be treated the same. And that's one of the things that we're really starting to do with the Blues and the success of that program. We were able to push a lot of merchandise, we were able to get a lot of click-throughs, we were able to get a lot of engagement.

And engagement that subsequently turned into revenue has really been fun because it's allowed us to start brainstorming on a couple other things around, how do we get external people involved? How do we get sponsors involved? Because that's really where the rubber hits the road. Because sponsorship technically is infinite if you can create enough compelling opportunities. And that's what we're trying to do. So the second part of your question-- Oh, sorry.

And that brings something top of mind is I remember having a conversation with the now 2025 Super Bowl champions, the Eagles, is where a lot of organizations, one of their primaries is get butts in seats, right? They want to fill up the stadium. The Eagles have the good fortune to wear, they're sold out all the time, right? So it's how can you get the most engaged, enthusiastic, crazed, fan that's going to spend the most money so that they could maximize revenues, but also give them timely upgrades, timely experience to your point. So it sounds like that would be a perfect opportunity for people where, hey, they're selling out every night.

Where do they get these incremental revenue sources from by getting more money from the people that are already there? That's right. How do you deliver more value? And how do you get compensated for that value? So the idea is-- You said it much more eloquently. Mine was very revenue driven. It's easy to raise the price of tickets, but in the time fans are going to get upset. It's, hey, you love the team enough that you've been a 20-year season ticket holder. Let us get you a little bit closer to your favorite player. How do we do those sorts of things? So totally agree with that.

I think to your second question, I think there's a dovetail to that. Because I think on the one hand, we started this company. 2022 was our first year. And it was on the heels of the boom of the NFT, but it was right around the time. The FT-- all the debacles, which kind of hit a crescendo with the FTX debacle and the Sam Bankman free perp walk. It was a tough year. And I think a lot of people had the hangover of NFTs. Even Top Shot really came down today. It's a nice sustainable level right now, but it's not what it was in February and March of 2021.

So I think there was a huge promise that was made back then, because people saw the trajectory like this. When they should have recognized that was a little bit of a Pokemon Go moment for sports to a certain degree. And so I think some of the people felt a little burned in that first year. They were very locked into an NFC centric model. And what we were basically peddling was something very different, right? And so what we had to do is reeducate.

And a lot of what I've been doing in the past year, when I talk about blockchain 3.0 and the reason why I make it such an important part of what I talked about is because I think it's reeducating and re-platforming people and the way they look at blockchain, right? Yes, it is crypto. Yes, it is NFTs. But when you start it with identity and you extend that identity, not only to crypto and NFTs, but to those assets, attributes, and actions that I was describing earlier, you make it a much more holistic platform. That's what makes this more sustainable. That's what makes it have more value in a traditional sense.

And going back to these teams that are trying to figure out, okay, we're the Eagles. We just won the Super Bowl. It's going to be even easier to sell season tickets next year. Oh my God. Okay, how do we make sure we're able to make more? How do we do certain things in the, they play nine home games, 10 if you throw in the exhibition game or the preseason game. There's 355 other days a year where no one's going to the state, where no one's going to a stadium in Philadelphia. But people care about football 365 days a year, right? We're already, I'm a Tennessee Titans fan. We're on the clock right now. I'm looking at football every day.

I'm looking at cam warden sure. Sanders college football hasn't been played in a month. It'd be like two or a thousand Cowboys do a significant amount of tours. The whole experience. Exactly. Exactly. And that's a cathedral of a stadium. How do you do those sorts of things? Or Buffalo and Nashville both have new stadiums coming in. What are they going to look like? LA, they built an amazing village around SoFi Stadium, right? It's more than just football and they've even got two NFL teams there, but you have concerts. How does that work? So all these things coming together, there's a lot of monetization opportunities.

And the thing that gets me excited is that there's also a lot of new ownership groups that are coming in that are very savvy about this. That was going to be my next question. I'm happy you brought that up, especially with Douglas being on launching the first SEC registered digital security in the world. Is how do we, or how do you see this working out? And is there an application or opportunity for credenza to play in this world of now private equity is very much on the mind of sports. It's the hottest topic, especially with the NFL opening up investment opportunities, which has never been done before on the private equity side.

Where do you see this? Is there opportunity to go in some fan ownership opportunities? Can you talk a little bit about that? Could that be used like some of the data points that you have? Say, look, this person has identified he's been a VIP experience. He's spending a hundred plus thousand dollars a year with us. Maybe he'd like to take it to the next level and have a small fractional ownership of a team. I definitely believe that's where things are going to go. I do this idea of fan ownership. And if you think about it in Europe, it's almost the opposite, right? They lead with fan ownership, right? It's a club.

It's not done the way it's done here where it's the oligarchy or whatever you want to call it, but very wealthy people. And it's almost a status symbol of ownership. I think the idea of driving it more as a business, I think the idea of having more fan participation makes a lot of sense. I will say from a credenza perspective, that's probably less in our wheelhouse than sales. It's a great company down in LA called House that's doing this sort of stuff where it is about how do you create more ownership and democratizing ownership and having more people have a stake, which can ultimately lift the overall valuation of a company.

From my perspective, there are ways of being super fan, which don't necessarily go into ownership. And there's a lot that goes into ownership that again, Douglas could probably teach me a lesson about. My Wharton MBA has its limits. There's only so many things I understand when it comes to some of the regulations that exist in that case. But I would even say that if you think about the concept of a PSL or personal seat license doesn't imply ownership in the team. And yet at the same time, it's a binding agreement for someone that comes in. It is a cash cow in a lot of ways for these teams to create the idea.

And this is, I don't know if the, I forget if the Eagles have one. I think most NFL teams have them, but it's like we're just when they built the new field, that's do you want to get access to the tickets and have the opportunity to buy tickets for the world champion Super Bowl or Super Bowl champion, Philadelphia Eagles. Because guess what? If you don't, somebody else does. And to be clear for our listeners, a license, when we're talking about a license, it's the license to just have the opportunity to buy. That's right. Not even including your tickets. It's basically buying your space in line. That's right.

And it seems crazy until you realize how, and this goes back to your question Phil about like why sports. There's such a passion that you said it right. Like just people paying thousands of dollars just to be able to have the right to pay more money to the team shows you how passionate these fans are, how much they care, how much they want to do things. But there's also a remit on the team to say, hey, you know what, thank you for doing that. And we're going to make sure it's worth your while. Don't skip out on the PSL and buy the tickets off of ticket master resale or vivid seats or something like that.

Stick with us because membership has its privileges. And I do think the idea, and I've always been a believer, that having a PSL giving you additional membership, because now the attribute of being a PSL holder that you can flash anywhere inside the stadium. And it's, oh wow, Mr. Larmon, very nice to see you again, right? That personalized experience. And I know I was talking to Ethan Joyce, who's this great writer from SPJ. And we had this conversation that we were riffing about the TV show "The Bear." And if you've ever seen "The Bear" has the episode where Richie goes and he's made her do whatever, concierge for one of the restaurants.

And they say, hey, the night you're coming in, we're looking at your socials. We're looking at all the other stuff. There's a unique experience to you. And there's the scene where the young woman he overhears at the table wants the deep dish pizza. And they create this crazy deep dish pizza. Like, how do sports create what hospitality and what these fine dining restaurants do? You have the ability to do these sorts of things when you collect the information, when you do these things, when you recognize a VIP as a VIP.

There's no more VIP a person than someone who has paid tens of thousands of dollars in some cases to stand online just to have third-level tickets to sit there at a cold snowy day in Cleveland to watch the Browns or evening in Cleveland to watch the Browns play the Steelers in what was one of the craziest games I'd ever seen. And they were all out there. You have to tap into that. You have to show them regard. And in return, they will give you more money. - So let's talk about, so these are maybe knowledge-based upgrades or for rewarding fans for their loyalty and their commerce within the organization.

But what about just straight revenue plays and paying like micropayments? Are you seeing that there's an opportunity for crypto payments or is it still just US fiat? - Yeah, when we talk specifically about Credenza and the way we structure the solution architecture, if you will, one of the things we talk about, we always say it starts with identity and it starts with this bridge between what people know in their way of authenticating and creating an account and that pseudonymized identity or that basically that hex address that in this case will define who you are without a traceability back to necessarily that individual.

That's a first piece. Then it goes to the data management of it. How do we start collecting the data? And again, not necessarily even for loyalty, although loyalty can certainly be a part of it, but just building a richer real-time data experience. It's almost like a CRM system or a CDP system on steroids. We like to say it's CDP3. It's customer data platform three. And how does that information get syndicated out to the other places? There's also the opportunity to basically create rules around this stuff that says, hey, every time a season ticket holder comes to his fifth game and buys a jersey, let's do something nice for him.

Let's surprise and delight. Because ultimately at the end of the day, much like hospitality, surprise and delight is the name of the game. So it's not even, hey, we're going to give you a discount. We're just going to do something for you because we think that's going to make you more likely to renew your season ticket. It's building a customer strategy around it. The reason I say all that is that when we have a slide that we talk about this, those are the first four things. And then the fifth thing I would say is stored value and transactional DRM.

And stored value is for those of us on this podcast, cryptocurrency, but cryptocurrency used with a term that doesn't scare people. Ultimately at the end of the day, it is the holding of value, right? A gap card is a version of stored value. But so is the idea of holding 10 Ether, 10 Maker tokens or whatever it might be. That's just holding value that ultimately is exchangeable for other things. And I still believe in the digital rights management system where old men, right? Old men remember back in 2002 or 2005 when you had iTunes and I worked at Microsoft.

I had windows media audio and you were either beholden to the Apple DRM system, you were beholden to the Microsoft DRM system and there wasn't a universal one. So if I own Coldplay over here, it didn't mean I necessarily owned it over here. Ultimately, we have to get to a point where there's a standardized ubiquitous system of rights that's out there so that we can cut across these places. No better one than blockchain.

Phil, when you talk about micropayments in this, yes, because the beauty of it is not only is it micropayments, but recognizing that transaction occurred and maybe allowing that transaction to ripple effect to another transaction. Hey, that's the fifth video that you bought for 50 cents or a dollar. We all know credit cards hate 50 cent transactions. Blockchain's perfectly fine with it in this new day and age where transaction can cost as little as a penny, but you start accumulating because now you're starting to see purchase habits that you're starting to accumulate. Those are actions just as much as their tokens.

Well, we have definitely been in the same rooms, right? Because when you go to a sports conference, we always hear surprise and delight. That's right. Rise and delight within that environment, the word of mouth value from that that people will then go and talk to their friends and family and say, you're not gonna believe what just happened. And again, how do you make people feel special that can buy anything and everything, especially when you're talking about, get up to the mega suites and things like that. The thoughtfulness, the things that they're just not used to experiencing where, oh my gosh, access. You did XYZ all of a sudden.

Guess what? You got to say hello to your favorite player. And you want to give it to the people who care about it, right? I will get ads for cheap seats for $9 and I'm like, they're not paying attention because every time I go, I don't sit anywhere other than the first level. It's kind of reached that age in my life where I don't do 400 level seats unless someone gave me the ticket. So that's where my friends are sitting or something like that. Target me for me. I'm unique. I have my special relationship with you. Don't treat me the same way you treat the guy next to me, right? That's an important distinction. And that's what's possible.

I tell you what, Sandy, this has been a fantastic interview. I very much appreciate it. You've hit on all sorts of aspects of sports entertainment from experience to loyalty to just shock and awe of doing awesome things but also people's identity and protecting it. So I think there is a way and you obviously cracked the code to be able to share data with different organizations that impact the user experience but also give them the power on what and who they share it with. So again, fantastic interview. We really appreciate it. With that said, our listeners, make sure you subscribe. Follow us on all the major socials or on YouTube.

We're on Instagram, all of them. Spotify, iHeart, hit us up. This is a fantastic interview. With that, I'm Phil Luhrmann. I'm Douglas Borthwick. And you've been listening to Old Men, New Money. Thank you very much.