Decentralizing Your Digital Identity With Unstoppable Domains
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From privacy concerns to limitless potential, AI is rapidly impacting our evolving society. In this new season of the Brave Technologist podcast, we're demystifying artificial intelligence, challenging the status quo, and empowering everyday people to embrace the digital revolution. I'm your host, Luke Malks, VP of Business Operations at Brave Software, makers of the privacy-respecting Brave browser and search engine, now powering AI with the Brave Search API. ♪

You're listening to a new episode of The Brave Technologist, and this one features Sandy Carter, who is a globally recognized expert and innovator in AI and blockchain. She's currently serving as COO of Unstoppable Domains, a leading digital identity platform revolutionizing how users manage and own their online identities.

Sandy is the author of the bestselling book, AI First, Human Always, and recognized as a Microsoft S&M top 10 AI entrepreneur and in Adweek's AI Power 100. In this episode, we discuss on-chain and digitized identities, what they allow you to store in your digital wallet, and what this unlocks for users. Real-world examples of how the current system is broken, including the ability to access your own medical records and how this impacts personal healthcare.

and the launch of the new .brave domains and why this is such an exciting announcement for our community. And now for this week's webisode of The Brave Technologist. Sandy, welcome to The Brave Technologist. How are you doing today?

I am doing super, Luke, and I'm so excited to be on this session today with Brave. Yeah, me too. I mean, I'm really looking forward to this conversation a lot. You know, your background, you've been in AI and Web3 blockchain technology for over a decade. I mean, when you look at the landscape, what excites you the most about these two technologies together?

Oh, wow. There's so many, but I'll give you my top three. So one, we've just been working with a company that does AI agents. And each of the AI agents has its own crypto wallet. Just imagine this, right? So now my AI agent is, let's say, a customer return rep.

And of course, you know, when you do return, sometimes there's judgment call of how much you give back, like maybe someone wore something or something's not in perfect condition. And so now the agents are going to be measured on what they spend out of their wallet, right?

Or I was just with PayPal and I was looking at their AI agents and they're using their AI agents to actually make decisions for me on my purchases. So let's say, Luke, I want to get you a birthday present, but I don't have a lot of time. And so I could tell my AI agent, hey, here's the five things that Luke loves. Brave being number one. This is the amount of money I want to spend. And you know what? I don't even really have time to write a card. So write him a personalized card.

And then it'll do all of that for me. I just think that's really fascinating because it's then, of course, for PayPal, they have Staplecoin. So it's then obviously able to pay for that transaction as well.

With a couple of companies, like we just announced a .twin to be able to not just have the agent with the wallet, but for the wallet to also have its own digital identity. I just think that's freaking cool. Six months ago, Luke, I probably would not even be talking about that, but that's my number one. The second thing I love about AI and blockchain that I think is going to be very interesting is...

Trust is so important. And right now, if you look at the Edelman trust barometer on AI, you know, it's right at the border. It's like 52% trust, 48 don't. So it's right at that border. And I think that blockchain adds a lot of capability around a tamper-proof audit trail or being able to identify if this is the right picture. Is that my quote? Was that my video?

I love that capability. And, you know, the funny story is, you know, the Pope, if you remember the Pope, I guess we got a new Pope as well. Now, the Pope was actually there was a picture going around with him in this puffer jacket and it was common. And people were I think it got like over four million tweets, which is incredible. Yeah. It turned out he came out and said, no, it's not me. Right. It's a deep fake.

Well, with blockchain, you could have identified, hey, this is his picture and not a fake. And the funny story, Luke, is I was doing a NFT LA event and they had a red carpet in Los Angeles, but it was freaking cold. Like LA is not supposed to be cold. So the only thing I had was my puffer jacket. So I put a puffer jacket on with this beautiful evening dress and someone took my picture. Everybody assumed my picture was a deep fake.

It's true. And so, you know, had I had that blockchain identifier, I could have said, no, that really is my picture. I love that. It seems pretty key. I mean, people don't know what's real. And that line is blurring big time between, you know, what's real, what's not, and being able to validate or verify whether something is coming from the source that it says that they're coming from. That's a really good point.

You know, that truth, that trust, especially for the business we're in, we're partners and the foundation of that partnership is trust. And so I do believe that blockchain just gives such trust.

to AI. There was an article that came out of the Ethereum University and Vitalik, you know, blessed it, which made it really cool. But there was a Venn diagram and it showed AI and blockchain and in the center, you know, were these things that AI was missing and things that blockchain could help with. So I think that AI and its popularity is actually going to push the blockchain agenda forward a lot more because of some of those missing pieces.

I think that makes a lot of sense. Can you explain like what Unstoppable domains are? How does that kind of reimagine what identity should look like? Yeah, so we describe Unstoppable as a digital identity platform. So imagine, you know, today I just flew up to Seattle. I had to use my identity to get into the airport security. And so this is actually a digital version of your identity. Today it can have things in it like,

Did I get a particular certification? Am I certified in AI agents, for example? And that can become a soul bound token that's stored inside of your unstoppable domain as a proof of identification. So this is going to blow your mind, Luke. It blew mine. On LinkedIn, you can put anything on LinkedIn, right? There's really nothing that does a trust verification.

So I can say I graduated from any university or I have 50 different certifications that I don't have. There's nothing that protects me from not doing that. And in fact, LinkedIn says 30% of people put a college on their LinkedIn profile that they never went to.

30%. We even see people that are claimed to be working for the company that aren't even working for the company. I mean, that's kind of how bad this is. It's crazy. So this is what I love about our digital identity. Everything inside of the identity and the identity is represented as a domain is trusted and verified. Some things are soul bound, right? Like you graduated from a university, you got a certification, right?

your company wouldn't be soul bound, right? Because you might work for Unstoppable or Bray for a year and then you might move on. So that obviously can't be soul bound. There are ways to do that trusted identification. And that's what I love about it. So today we have things like we have certifications, we have education, but eventually we want to get to things like maybe healthcare, maybe some of your information about where you were born. I have a friend who

She was actually born in Argentina. The hospital burned down. Her mom just passed away. She doesn't have her birth certificate. And she's like, how do I get it? If I had one of those digital identities, Sandy, I could have digitized it and placed it in the identity. Or I live right now in Arizona and we just digitized your driver's license. Well, where do you put that?

Well, now I put it inside of my digital identity. So that's really, you know, Unstoppable has a domain. It lives on chain. So it's all about on-chain identity.

And then inside of that, you can store really interesting information. The prime use case is payment in crypto. That's where we started. Replacing a wallet address with something that's like Luke.crypto, for example. And then you could transact with Luke.crypto. In fact, I just bought a blouse in Las Vegas with crypto in a store, in a physical store. I was chatting with a lady and she said they have so many people coming in from the Middle East.

And from Asia that now they accept crypto right there. So I tried it. I paid for it with Sandy.X and bought a boss. I told my husband it was just an experiment for work. Yeah.

I love it. I think it's a great point, though. I did some foundation work a lifetime ago, and it was in Western Africa. And it was a country that had millions of people in it. Things people take for granted in the West where, oh, there is a paper trail. Some of these people don't have birth certificates. If you're born in certain parts of the world, they're just not. And if you want to start to...

be connected in this global economy with people. These types of technologies are going to help those people that don't necessarily have a paper trail kind of build one through these things, I would imagine. That's what it sounds like. That is absolutely correct. And the more and more of these that become digital assets, so like in Arizona, your driver's license is now in West Virginia, they've started digitizing your car title. Mm-hmm.

In some states, they've started digitizing your birth certificate. And so as there become more real world assets that represent you, now you can have a place to store them and then you can choose what you show and what you don't show. So I may want to show off that I have like a pudgy penguin, but.

in my digital identity, but I might not want to show my birth certificate, right? I definitely don't want to show my birth certificate. So anyway, those are the type of things that you can do. That crypto transaction, I don't want to play that off. That's where we started. That's where Unstoppable was founded on that. Just the ability to take your crypto wallet, give it a human centric name, and then be able to use that for transactions. We do between 10 and 30 million of

those transactions resolving Sandy.crypto to a real wallet address investment. We do about 10 to 30 million of those every week. And so it's significant. It's a huge use case for us. One of those difficult things for getting adoption of the technology is that, you know, people can't remember those addresses. Yeah.

You mess up on the key or whatever, and then, you know, you're sending money to somewhere else that you don't intend to. And so, but people do remember email addresses and things like that. And this seems a lot more like in that vein of being able to have something readable and rememberable for having an address, like, or having a way to send somebody funds. And people are kind of familiar with Venmo and these types of things too, where, I don't know, it's more usable. Absolutely. Just like, you know, in the olden days of the internet, right, where you had to type in your IP address.

Oh, yeah. And now you type in, you know, brave.com and off you go. Right. And everybody can remember that versus all your numbers. And I love it because Brave Wallet also resolves unstoppable domains. So if you're using like the Brave Wallet, instead of using the address, you can just use Luke.crypto or hopefully soon maybe something even more customizable that you could use in that wallet as well. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, totally. Sounds great. And it sounds like they do help reduce a lot of that kind of complexity for everyday users. Are there some practical benefits to kind of this decentralized method of having an identity that people haven't realized yet or that you think are kind of underreported or lesser known to the public? Well, there are some today. I would say one that I find is really important.

an awesome benefit is the ability to use your name, sandy.crypto, to communicate with other people. It's almost like a Slack-like channel. I can communicate to anybody who has another domain. I can communicate to anybody who has, let's say, we just announced

A DJ, and this is for like DJs is a huge DJ community. I can now talk to all the people that are DJs in an encrypted fashion. So no one else can see what I'm saying and provide.

you know, input or get to know my tribe better. We use this, we drink our own champagne, Luke. We use this for our whales. So, you know, our biggest customers, we have a special channel that we use and we communicate via those names. And I'll ask them, hey, this is something that's coming up on our roadmap. What do you think? I just did that this morning, you know, two of the things are like, yeah, one of them, they're like, no, don't do it. Well, it just gives such great feedback.

You know, no one can break into it and see what I'm thinking about doing on my roadmap. And a lot of people don't know that that's possible today using your domain as almost like a chat feature. Right. So that you can communicate with different people. Very helpful to marketing because you can segment your audience more.

and get real instant feedback. It's super valuable. And that's one of those things that the crypto space has been really good at. It's kind of building communities around different assets or different types of collections and things like that too. So it seems like it would make a lot of sense. Okay, I've got all my... I could see that easily with an artist who's got, I don't know, like all the Taylor Swift fans or whatever holding their album and all chatting away or whatever. It's

Swifties, I'm a Swifty, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, right now too, it's interesting because for a while, a lot of these concepts were kind of abstract where, oh, hypothetically, what happens if you get shut out of a platform or something like that? But I think nowadays-

That's happening a lot more across the whole spectrum of different interests and topics and things like that, where you're seeing creators, even in a false positive way, getting locked out of being able to communicate with their fans or user or audience or whatever. And so it makes a lot of sense. As long as the blockchain is still alive and making blocks, these things will still work, regardless of whether in a hypothetical situation, YouTube went under or something like that. You still have this online, right?

Absolutely. And I think it's so powerful. One of the future use cases, I want to point out, it's not here today. Yeah, yeah. This met with a group of 100 startups in New York City, and they're in the healthcare space. And this one really hit home to me, because what they're doing is they're looking at storing your healthcare information on chain, again, protected, so people can't see it. But then you'd have access to all of your information. Okay.

A couple of years ago, I actually was in Brazil. I was on a platform. I fell 16 feet and I broke everything on my left side. I needed to be rushed to the hospital. Yeah. And they wanted to do surgery, but they had none of my medical records.

So Luke, I did not know this. I started calling to get my medical records because they needed them. Many people would not give me my medical record. They said, you have to send it to a hospital. Wow. And then it took forever. And some of the records were lost.

Fax down. Fax. Oh, my gosh. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so instead of being able to have surgery within the first eight hours of having the accident, it took 72 hours. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. It was not a fun experience. Let me say that. Brazilian people were great. They took great care of me. But these health care companies are like, Sandy, why should you have had to go through that?

Why couldn't you have all that information in your digital identity protected so no one else can see it? And then if you ever need to, you can share it all. Like you can just say, hey, here's all my healthcare data. That's a use case. Again, it's coming in the future that I really see a lot of power with. And they told me that 60% of the misdiagnosis that happened today, let's say you go to a doctor and

they diagnose you with something is actually due to the doctor not having full visibility to all of your information. That's such a true, yeah, that's such a true thing. Like, I mean, I deal with this family members recently in and out of hospitals for different things. And people just assume that, oh, they got the full chart. The amount of information they don't have, it's mind blowing. And you think, oh, well, it's through the same systems or whatever. And a lot of it's not.

I think it makes a lot of sense what you're saying. Yeah. And in fact, I just read an article yesterday that an AI agent was assisting a hospital, a doctor.

And the AI agent made a diagnosis of this rare disease that this person had. This person happened to be an AI developer. So they started asking questions and it turned out that the agent didn't have all the information. And so he was sharing this with the doctor and the doctor was like, oh, well, that changes things. Oh, well, that changes things. Oh, if it's this and this, well, that changes things. Right.

So it turns out he didn't have this rare disease. It was something else because he didn't have all the data. Yeah.

I was chatting with this gentleman. He wrote a whole article about it, too. But it was fascinating because he said, I assumed that they had everything about me, just like you said, right? I go to this hospital. It's all in the same group or whatever they call it. I assume they had all the data. And then when I started asking them, they didn't. And so I got this funky, bizarre disease diagnosis, which actually wasn't accurate.

So that's kind of one of the things, hashtag tech for good, that I'm looking forward to one day having inside your digital identity is not just your education and your driver's license and your birth, all valuable things, but having data like that could potentially save your life someday. Yeah.

A lot of that ties in really well with that first example that you gave at the beginning of the interview where you have agents that have different keys and access to different things. One of those things where if you know people that get in the hospital a lot, everybody says you got to be your own advocate. But if you're in the hospital, you're just trying to get better.

You don't have the energy. Like if you had agents that could help you with these things, like, oh, here's the one that's going to get the records. Don't forget to ask them this, that kind of thing where these things could be like super helpful. And it sounds like what you are doing is like helping to kind of enable, you know, that potentially in the future. It's really, really exciting.

It's super exciting. I always tell people I have like this super cool job, you know, it's kind of neat, I think. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Well, and it sounds like crypto domains are kind of like an essential building block. We do have a partnership already, but there is kind of a thing that we're bringing out together too from the domain side. I don't know, maybe you want to give a little bit of color around that.

Yeah. I would love to be able to announce this. So we are going to announce a top-level domain, which means a naming service around .brave. I wish we had, like, a class. Maybe we could add a class to everything. Woo!

Yeah, I think this is so exciting. Well, first of all, I mean, you guys have 80 plus million users and brave, you know, going back to that trust element. You guys are so trusted today. The way that you manage things and the way that you look at things, you try to always do things in a not just ethical way, but a safety way, looking at privacy.

And so I think that this is such a powerful announcement because now it enables your users to be that tribe for themselves, but also to have all the capabilities of being able to set up their own decentralized website through your browser, being able to use your .com.

Sandy.Brave, Luke.Brave, which I like much cooler than Sandy.X or some of the others. To do your crypto transactions, to do your chats, and hopefully one day to store all this amazing data in there as well. That's one of those things I really love about this too, is that like, you know, I've been a Brave like basically since the beginning and

We've had a lot of demand from people around like, hey, I want to be able to have like an app Brave alias or have be able to kind of associate like the affinity is like super strong with our user base and what we're doing. But we always can't have ran into this problem of like we want to have like maximum deniability. Like we don't want to have the company storing data. And what the really cool thing about the Brave domains is that for any users that wants it, they can go register it and have that affinity, right? Like with the brand.

And then also be able to kind of use a lot of this Web3 functionality. Like so much of that piece too is missing from what I've seen. Like everybody had like hopes for, okay, what's this Web3 thing mean? But like from a browser, we can connect it all together, which is super exciting. You get this ability to send messages

you know, to transact with the crypto domain. I mean, are there processes now where it kind of ties it to, you know, a lot of the DNS, like a lot of the dot-com types of usage for these domains too? Is there a process for that? Because I remember like back in the day, it was pretty isolated. Yeah. So this is one of the things that we've been looking at, which is tokenizing the DNS domains and all token. I mean, I'm sure your users know, or your listeners know, but tokenizing is just placing an asset on chain.

What we are looking to do together is we will bring .brave in front of ICANN. ICANN is the governing body for all DNS. That application process will start in April of 2026.

And we will have .brave if accepted and approved as both a DNS domain and a blockchain domain, but will be intricately tied together. And so that means then with your .brave, you could have your doing your crypto exchange with your .brave, doing your chats with your .brave, storing all your data as your identity with your .brave, and also having a decentralized website or a searchable, tagable website that's governed by DNS.

I think it's super powerful. And Luke, one of the reasons I love it is that I see now this digital identity being the first asset, which is 100% on-chain. Because we're now tokenizing .coms and we're tokenizing .ais. And now we'll have Brave that's not just on-chain, but also DNS. And so this whole space, I believe, will be the first asset 100% on-chain, 100%.

And I think it's one of those awesome things, too, where we were touching on this a little bit earlier, too, like a lot of these barriers to adoption when you're kind of going from, OK, I've got to like almost like eat the whole watermelon in one bite kind of approaches that, you know, getting in on these Web3 tools is like not easy.

I mean, I've been in this space almost for 10 years now, and it's still, it's not as easy as it should be. But the thing I really like about this is that it gives us a way to meet people where they are. If you're a web developer and you want to get in on the web.bravedomain, then all of a sudden, because you have that, all of these other things that the crypto domain enables you to do just become unlocked. And if you're in the browser and we have all the support for those features already, it's almost like,

I got these ports on the side of my TV. I never had to use them, but now they're there and I can use them for things, right? It's really, I think it's going to be one of those things where it's almost like a Trojan horse in a way to like getting a lot of the usability for these things and a lot of the proof points. Because if we can build decentralized things with Brave and we can use these elements to kind of tie them all together, it's going to show kind of how strong that concept is like to a broader audience that haven't really, they're not going to get exposed to it any other way, really. I mean, that's kind of the,

Interesting thing about this from my point of view, and we're super excited about it. I think this is like something that was a long time in the making and the progress you all have made on getting that path to ICANN in a place where we could actually do this. It's like huge. How long has Unstoppable been in business for?

We've been in business since 2018, and we started just with the simple use case of doing that crypto wallet transaction. And then since then, we've been building up. And one of the reasons we decided to do this, Luke, is everybody wants to bring Web2 users to Web3.

And, you know, everybody's waiting. OK, Web 2 guys, come over, come over. And they just haven't come for lots of different reasons. So we decided to bring Web 3 to them. And that's been working out really well. So we got our ICANN accreditation. We still put everything on chain. If you buy a dot com from us, it's tokenized.

So you can use sandy.com to buy something just like you can use sandy.brave to buy something, which I think is really cool. And then obviously going the opposite way, right? When .brave, if approved by ICANN, becomes a DNS domain, now it has all that power too. So what I always look for is I always say when I'm partnering, I always want to look for a win-win. Because if you ever have a win, kind of win, it just doesn't work out, right? But I

think this aligns so well with Brave's mission, you know, to put users first with privacy, with speed, with control. I think these domains are going to come like a trusted anchor in that privacy-focused web. And I can even imagine like

identity.brave and wallet.brave, in addition to all the names, I just find this Web3 native identity and utility is going to be super powerful, especially with the trust that you've built with all of your users. Yeah, I mean, and that's kind of a piece like people think about user agency, right?

There's so many things that we can do from the browser. What these services like you all are providing really kind of empower users to have more agency too over like where they take their data, like how they choose to put it up and what they choose to do with it. So I think it's a huge part. We're super excited about this. Everybody should get out there and get those domains too and help us to get on that path. Yeah.

I mean, it's not only your browser, but Brave is just freaking cool, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You want to be brave. Exactly, exactly. And I mean, it's one of those things too, where it is, it's been kind of a movement where in the beginning, people kind of, it was more of a thought and a mission. And now you're like, you can't argue with like 85 million people kind of moving to something, whether it's for the wins you get from the privacy or these other things or because we offer them.

I forgot to mention, and you could buy it with that too. I forgot. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Great point. Because we just came into your program as well, your rewards program. You can purchase your .brave with that. And there are rewards out there too. So, I mean, the whole thing, you can use it with your wallet. You'll be able to use it with your browser. You can buy it with that. I mean, it's just kind of, you've got the whole ecosystem pulling together.

Exactly. No, it is. It just adds that whole like holistic approach for users and kind of bringing it all to them. It's awesome. Looking out kind of to the future, is there one bold but realistic prediction for how digital identity will evolve over the next five years that comes to mind?

Well, I mean, for me, the biggest one, which is bold, but realistic, is that digital identity for your agent. I think in the future, Luke, each of us is going to have a set of agents. We're going to have our own personal assistant agent. We'll have our buy my birthday present agent. We'll have our agent that will maybe go out and do market research for us. And each of those agents tied to wallets is going to get confusing without

a digital identity. So one of the things I like to talk about is, you know, we've got the DNS is almost digital identity for companies. Your blockchain domains like that we produce are really digital identity for people. And who knew that this new area with what they project is going to be 60 billion AI agents out there will also have their identity.

So I could imagine like maybe you have a brave agent. Maybe my AI assistant is not brave because my AI assistant is going to go to my website and grab my calendar and look at what I'm doing and maybe book meetings for me. So for me, I think that is very futuristic, very realistic.

Real though, because it's already starting to happen in a few places, mostly around enterprise, but still starting to happen today. And I think that that is going to be

a fantastic world. There are some downsides too, but I think having these agents with digital identity is going to be very powerful. This could be helping to address an important issue around like, okay, I can give certain agents certain control over or access to certain parts of my life, but you still want to be able to validate that it's really connected to you in a certain way, like through a signature or whatever you need to do through there. So I think it makes a lot of sense

There's going to be probably, you know, negative ZAM positives with all these things, but having that kind of transparency and the cryptography behind it that you get from a crypto domain would be like an added value, I would imagine. And for me, I never expected it to move this fast.

Already having, like I said, we've already got a dot twin specifically for these enterprise agents, right? So like my banking teller twin or my retail customer support twin or something like that. I just think that is mind blowing. And again, so wild that six months ago, I never would have thought about it.

Yeah, yeah. It's becoming real, right? Definitely moving fast. And it's kind of, you know, this agentic movement, it's just like really, really picking up speed too. And we're totally grateful to you that you all are getting active on that front on the agentic side too. I think, you know, crypto and AI like should be innovating together, right? And that's a real, real opportunity on converging those two things. And, you know, Sandy, I'm super grateful like that you gave us so much of your time today.

Is there anything we didn't cover that you want to let people know about while we've got you on? You know, the one thing that I always like to leave people with is that we've talked a lot about technology, Luke, but I think in the end, it really is about people.

And so I never want the innovators out there, the builders out there to think that, oh, it's not about me. The technology enables us to create what's possible. Also, you know, responsible, private, et cetera, as well, but human centric. And I don't want people to lose heart in that. I saw a post this morning where it was actually a college student who said,

okay, well, shoot, if AI is going to do all this, like I don't have a role anymore. And I wrote her back and I said, no, that's not true. Like there's so many things that you're going to be able to do with AI. It's going to make your life better. And so I always want to ensure that people know that

Technology doesn't shape our future. It's people who shape our future, right? And that to me is really important. Great note to end on too, I think. Sandy, thank you so much for coming on today. If people want to follow you or go check out Unstoppable, where do they go? Unstoppabledomains.com or we're really active on X or Twitter, but we're Unstoppable Web on X or Twitter. Yeah.

And you can find me out there too. I'm everywhere. Sandy underscore Carter. As you know, look, I track you down on. Hey, it's good. It's good. Telegram, whatever. It's appreciative. You've probably got five agents kind of chasing us all around. I love it. I love it. All right. Well, Sandy, thank you so much for joining us today. Love to have you back to you to kind of check back in on how things are going in the future. Yeah. Have a good one. And we'll talk soon. Okay, great. Thanks, Luke. Thanks.

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