Fireside Chat: The New Online is On-Chain - TOKEN2049 Dubai 2025

Good morning. Who's still not awake? All right, we're here with our dear friend Kabib, the one and only undefeated UFC champion. Thank you for joining us. And I'll explain very quickly why he's here.

Besides the fact that he's a wonderful father of six children and now he's coaching his brothers and other fighters, he's here because he's got a beautiful community of 42 million people on Instagram and and X and we're going to be powering up that community very shortly. Before I introduce you my good friend Julian, I'll tell you a few things about him. He came to one of my conferences D10 in Tel Aviv 2018 and he won the ICO pitch competition. That company has since morphed into what today is um Ice Open Network. It took many many years, a few bumps in the road and here we are to explain a few things about why we are here with Kabib and uh Rafael I wanted to thank you also for creating a wonderful community of uh 15,000 participants here in Singapore.

I think you had about 25,000. So all of these communities will very shortly be powered up with uh with our token and with our infrastructure. So Julian, hello Mike. A lot of people say don't ask me how I made my first million. Uh how did you bring your first million users onto this platform?

So in uh 2024 we launched our phase one and uh we had uh at that time 47 followers on Twitter and uh in less than uh 24 hours we got to 150,000 followers. Uh it our app went viral. We got the first million users in the first u week. We got to 30 million users in uh seven months and uh 9 million users face verified KYC unique users and the rest is history. All right.

So he calls me up in August of 2023 and says I got to show you this crazy technology that we built and how we have all these millions of users all over the world playing with it. The the token had zero value. Nobody cared about this technology besides these few millions of people. Then six months later, he calls me up and says, "We just got listed on OKX. They didn't ask us for any fees."

How many people have paid to have your token listed on any exchanges? A few. All right. So, how did you get all these exchanges? 43 by now, including Coolcoin, who's hosting us here today, and uh uh OKX, which is the bigger room down the hall.

How did you get them to uh ask you to allow them to list your token without asking you for fees? So, it's a kind of funny story. Uh we announced that we were going to do a unis swap listing. Uh in the same day, we've been approached by OKX, uh Kcoin, all the major exchanges including Bybit as well. Uh all of them offered us free listing, no other funds using our own market makings and so on.

So basically from my perspective we paid using our users right we had a large community we even crashed OKX servers when we did the distribution so it was amazing okay so what is the actual technology that you build you have how many people on the team what is it like managing both the CEO and you have a CTO but you're kind of the co-CTO because you're a coder and a and a techie so what does it take to build the technology and what is the technology so I have 20 years of tech background. I've been developed a lot of uh unique and uh interesting stuff. Um now we have a large community already. Uh we've already started to launch uh other partners with using our technology. From the 30 million we initially had now it's over 40 million users.

Uh and uh yeah 40 million users. Yeah. All KYC phase verification all over the world. Yeah. All owning the token.

Yeah. All watching us. Yeah. And watching the rest of the world watching them. Yeah.

Okay. All right. But what's the D app builder? So um basically we saw gap within the web 3 industry. A lot of uh smart guys are bringing protocols, infrastructure layers, layer ones and so on.

But they lack the user friendly experience, right? In order to on board the next billion users, you need to make web three, web three look as easy as web two, right? So it should be as easy as creating an email. So basically what we did, we start we developed an infrastructure specifically for this. But we've also developed a unique decentralized application framework which is crossplatform.

That means any app build with our framework works on Windows, Mac, Linux as native apps, iOS, Android, mobile and tablet as well as web browsers. Now on top of this, we've added a strong templating engine with on top of it a no code the app builder. basically is the first platform where anybody will be able to launch decentralized social apps, community apps, uh chat private focused on privacy, uh MPC, self-custodial wallets, e-commerce and many others without any coding experience. Basically, the system will build your branded app. You just go ahead and upload it on your app store, play store and so on.

And all this because you moved your family here from Romania three years ago with your two-year-old daughter at the time and you focused. Yeah. So three years ago I moved to Dubai because in Romania I had too many friends. I didn't have that time to focus. In the past three years I've been working since 7 in the morning till 12 p.

m. And uh basically the product is ready now. We are in closed beta testing soon. is going to be public. We have very good feedback.

We've also started to do things way ahead of the launch. We've partnered with over 1,000 content creators from Instagram, Tik Tok, YouTube, which have a total audience of over 250 million followers. We are on boarding daily a lot of these type of content creators and we expect to reach close to 500 million followers across their socials when we go live. Why is this important? Well, the moment we're going to launch it online plus which you call it is going to also be our mainet app also as a showcase of what's possible to be built with our technology.

All of these content creators and partners are going to share on all their socials and talk about us, right? And it's very important to specify we never paid the dime to any of these partners. So, it's pure um pure free and uh and they saw the potential in our technology. Now in the past uh months we started to also announce a lot of partnerships with we have so far about 70 crypto projects that we've uh partnered with from which 50 of them are on the waiting list to build their own community social apps with their own MPC self-custodial branded apps with the social component and everything. basically the everything is in place for mass adoption and our goal is to bring the next billion users on chain and make it as easy to build an application a decentralized application as easy as creating a social account.

So, if in 96 you didn't have to call your uh IT person and your company or your university to set up an email account or if you forgot your uh password and if in 2005 67 10 you didn't need to call anyone to build a profile for you on LinkedIn and Facebook and all social media platforms. Now we're we're at the level of not even building your own apps. You don't need any tech uh knowledge. Is that correct? That's correct.

Yeah. This is the future from my perspective and uh you know the power should be put in the hands of the people because at the end of the day from my perspective I've been doing um affiliate marketing since I was a kid at around 15 years old. I've been doing my first million at 70 years old. I was driving tens of millions of uh visitors per day free of charge. No paid marketing only viral stuff.

And that's where I gained a lot of experience. Now giving this power to content creators, to businesses, small businesses, b businesses, communities to launch their own decentralized apps right under their own brand names and monetize them fully without having to rely on a third party like Meta, like Tik Tok and so on. From my perspective, this is the game changer and is going to make the way for the new world. So Ice Network is not a chain. It's a chain as well.

We are a layer one. Just a chain. Not just a chain token. Not just a token. Exactly.

Okay. And it's not just another app and it's not just another ecosystem. Exactly. What is it exactly? Well, it's the the way to the new future, right?

To the way towards the decentralized future, we call it. Okay. And Kabib will be the first one to use it or you let anybody who's rushing to it? No. Kabib, of course.

Yeah, of course. All right. And digital sovereignty, it's a huge huge topic. It's not a feature. It's actually much more than that for for ISO network.

Yeah. Digital sovereignty should not be earned. It's our benefit. We should all have it, right? So, we also have on our own identity we call it where all your data is owned 100% by you.

You can choose what you do with it. how who we share it with and whoever has access to it and so on. You can move your data, you can delete your data. Our protocol is also designed to be Poppy CCPA GDPR compliant. Basically, it allows anybody to also delete their footprints from the decentralized world because otherwise this would not have a big adoption, right?

So, we need to also be regulated, right? And tell us about the deflationary mechanism built in. So we have the most deflationary model that there you can find anywhere on uh on any crypto project. Basically our company doesn't earn any fees from any of the services that we provide. Um we have a deflationary model where ice is going to be burned when somebody upgrades his account let's say for a quantum resistant encryption.

When somebody sees an ad within the app, that ad revenue will be put with the market making buying ice from the market and burning. We also have uh private content that you will be able to access and pay not only with crypto but also with fiat to make things and on boarding much easier. Uh we are adding as well cards, ibands um topin top. Uh so basically we are making a a fully fully platform where you're not going to be able to you're not going to need anything else. So we're not here to fix anything that's broken.

We're here to to create uh here have been built. Yeah. Remember some of the companies that raised a lot of money back in 2018 and 19 claiming to do some pieces of this. Uh they raised a lot of money. Their token went nowhere.

they're on vacation somewhere or in trouble with the law, but you stuck around since 2017. I've seen this guy build two other companies in which he invested about 1.5 million in each over these years and I've seen the ups and downs. Uh but hopefully the third one is the lucky charm. Of course.

Okay. Thank you very much and um let's see what the future brings. For sure. Thank you everybody and uh cheers.