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Unstoppable Women Leaders In Both Web3 And AI With Sandy Carter
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Unstoppable Women Leaders In Both Web3 And AI With Sandy Carter

NFT 301 | Women Leaders

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If you can see it, you can be it. If you’re a woman and you want to make a name for yourself in either Web3 or AI or both, there is no reason why you shouldn’t do it! In this episode, we are joined by Sandy Carter of Unstoppable Domains, to tell us exactly how they help nurture unstoppable women leaders in both Web3 and AI. Join us as we delve into a world of limitless possibilities, where barriers are shattered, and glass ceilings no longer exist. Get ready to be inspired and informed as Sandy shares her insights and experiences on fostering leadership, innovation, and boundless potential among women in these transformative fields. Discover how Unstoppable Domains is championing the cause of unstoppable women, and learn how you too can be part of this extraordinary journey towards a future where your aspirations have no bounds. It’s time to rewrite the narrative, and Sandy is here to show us the way. Join in!

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Unstoppable Women Leaders In Both Web3 And AI With Sandy Carter

Hello, everybody. This is Sandy Carter. I’m from Unstoppable Domains, championing Web3 domains that redefine data ownership. I am on the Edge of NFT which champions the knowledge that you need to take action on for all things Web3, enjoy.

NFT curious readers, stay tuned for this episode to learn about this year’s unstoppable women leaders in both Web3 and AI, including 50 young female pioneers.

Also, Unstoppable Domains has turned up the innovation dial with an adrenaline-pumping gaming adventure with some unexpected partners.

Finally, we break down the French government’s progressive stance on NFT games, not fitting the same statutes as gambling.

It’s official. You can dive into the captivating world of artificial intelligence with the Edge of AI Podcast. Join us as we explore the frontiers of AI and its impact on our lives. Subscribe now on your favorite platform and follow us on Twitter @EdgeOf_AI and LinkedIn for exciting updates and insights. You can also visit our new website at EdgeOfAI.xyz.

This episode features a repeat guest who we’re excited to bring back, Sandy Carter, who holds the dual titles of Chief Operating Officer and Head of Business Development at Unstoppable Domains. Guided by a mission to bestow user-owned identity, she shapes growth and business strategy, and pioneers partnerships in the realms of Web3 and the metaverse.

Her tech lineage includes pivotal roles at AWS focusing on emerging tech like AI and blockchain leadership at IBM and founding a Silicon Valley startup. Unstoppable Domains isn’t just a domain provider. It’s a revolutionary force with a noble goal to bestow every individual on the planet with a user-owned digital identity. They’re championing Web3 domains that redefine data ownership. These aren’t just domains, they’re domains with superpowers. Sandy, it’s great to have you back.

It’s so great to be back here with you guys. It’s always so much fun and value. Thanks for having me.

You’ve also been a repeat speaker at Outer Edge. We appreciate everything you’re doing in this space, not only for Unstoppable Domains but also around broadening the space. We’ve talked about before the importance of inclusivity in Web3 and emerging tech in general. You’ve been a real pioneer there. You’ve got Unstoppable Women. We connected in Singapore about your event. You had a cool ceremony there while we were all together at TOKEN2049. I’d love to jump into that a little bit more before we get into what’s going on at Unstoppable Domains, if that’s okay with you.

I’d love to talk about this. I founded Unstoppable Women and I did that because I noticed there aren’t as many women and diverse players as there should be in our space. I started talking to people about it and they were like, “Why don’t you do something about it?” I said, “What can I do?” I started this group focused on companies coming together to change the education landscape.

If you can see it, you can be it. Click To Tweet

There were so many groups out there already like BFF, Black Women Blockchain, and Boss Beauties that were focused on the individual but I didn’t see any group that was holding companies accountable for bringing education and more women into the space. I founded the group to focus on those companies who could help us make a difference. I was telling my CEO, “I wanted at least 20 companies to maybe 40 to join us and we’re now up to 220 companies who have joined us.”

We’ve now trained 55,000 different women on the metaverse, digital identity, and Web3. We’ve done that in English, Spanish, and French, which we’re excited about. One of my favorite quotes is, “If you can see it, you can be it.” For the third year in a row, we’ve published the Unstoppable Women of Web3 and AI. We added AI and we wanted to make sure that we honored them. The reason is that we wanted people to see all these incredible women and all this incredible stuff that they were doing for this space in the industry.

NFT 301 | Women Leaders

Women Leaders: We wanted people to see all these incredible women and all this incredible stuff that they were doing for this space in the industry.

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As you’ve done this tally of who’s leading the charge in Web3 and now, AI, how has that landscape shifted over the last few years? I hope that as an industry we’re getting better at positioning women in positions of leadership and authority in this space. I’m curious about that and if there are any recipients from this year’s class that are new to this space or new to the spotlight that you wanted to highlight.

The interesting thing and changes that we’ve seen is in the number of people applying over the last three times that we’ve done the award. At first, we wanted 100 and we pushed. We got 100. The next year, we had 1,000 for 100 slots. We’ve also had 4,000 people for 100 slots, which is phenomenal. We also wanted more companies to help sponsor us.

We had Blockchain.com which hosted our event in Singapore. We had Flipkart join us in helping us do some of the judging. That was cool because they are the Amazon of Asia and they’re starting to play in Web3. I thought that was cool that not only do we have some of the typical players in Web3 joining in, but we also had some new entrants joining in as well and that made me happy.

The other thing that we noticed or that we tried hard to blend was the next generation. We’ve only done one list of our Top 25 Girls in Web3 and AI and we just did our second list. It was incredible. We had 55 different young girls. Josh, I would tell you that this was my favorite part. One of the young girls who won was so excited and she wanted to share with me her blockchain class for how to code a smart contract. She was six years old.

Do you remember what you were doing at six? I was not teaching a smart contracts class, I can tell you that right now. I love these young girls who have these big ambitions. From having an NFT collection to coding and smart contracts to looking at starting their business of young girl blockchain coders. It’s wild to me how many different women and girls are doing so many incredible things.

It’s wild how many different women are doing so many incredible things in Web3. Click To Tweet

I love that you highlighted the future leaders of tomorrow in terms of this award process. That’s great. At Outer Edge, we had over 100 students and future leaders come and learn about blockchain and they had so many ideas for what they could do with this skillset. It was unbelievable. As we think about, “How do we make these pipes easier for people to go down and how do we make Web3 more accessible to the masses?” It’s going to be the young leaders of tomorrow that figure this out.

In fact, they get it. I was talking to them about the value of digital assets and they’re like, “You don’t have to tell me that. I know that. I’m on Roblox. I’m developing here.” When I go and present something to, let’s say, a corporate executive, I spend half of my time explaining what is Web3, why is a digital asset valuable, and what’s going to happen in the future. However, with this next generation, they get it. They understand it.

I was attending a birthday party. One of my daughter’s friends had a birthday party. All that she asked for was Robux. It’s the Roblox dollars that you can use to build stuff. I was like, “I have to do a little focus group here at the birthday party.” I was asking her and she was like, “Ms. Carter, digital assets are so much more valuable. They don’t take up space. I can do this.” She was doing my pitch to me. It was so funny to see that kids at this young age get it so that the next generation is going to catapult us forward in this whole space. Do you have kids?

Not yet, but I do have cousins and they are all about it. Anywhere from Roblox to even thinking about all the other massive games out there that you can buy assets in and be able to do like different dances and everything else involved. Even when I talk to them about Web3, they immediately start to understand what’s going on. However, one thing that everyone can understand right now is domains, going on the website or owning some website.

One of the things that Unstoppable Domains has done is helped to redefine the landscape of blockchain tech and digital freedom through the power of domains. To shift gears, I want to just tap in real quickly into the genesis of Unstoppable Domains and also, what are the functionalities that people can connect with. There’s been so much traction to Unstoppable lately.

Unstoppable Domains was founded in 2018 and it was founded with the simple premise that when we started the internet, people were typing in an IP address. You typed in 123.45 something and then all of a sudden, you could type in Amazon.com. You didn’t have to type in these numbers. The founders saw the same opportunity here where people were typing in 21 alphanumeric letters and numbers to address their wallets. They’re like, “We should replace that with the domain.”

Hence, Unstoppable Domains was born to replace the crypto address with something that was a human-readable element. That remains our number one use case. Richard, this should blow you away. Thirty million resolutions every week of your name to your crypto wallet. That’s pretty darn cool, especially during this bear market. We’re still seeing 31 million addresses being resolved to your crypto wallet.

NFT 301 | Women Leaders

Women Leaders: Unstoppable Domains was born to replace the crypto address with something that was a human readable element.

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Now, we’ve added a lot more use cases too. You can leverage it with a decentralized wallet. You can log in. You can have your own profile like a LinkedIn for Web3. You can use it to do your taxes. I was with a game and they were using it for a gamer tag. This game was telling me how their gamers are so attached to that gaming tag. We were talking about what else we could do. You can get badges. The list goes on and on and on. Our vision of the future is that Unstoppable becomes the one-stop shop for your Web3 identity, but also for all domains, including Web2 domains. You can go to one place and own that identity across all domains.

What does that look like? If I have a GoDaddy account and I have a lot of domains over there, I’ll be able to access those domains through unstoppable domains instead. Is that what you’re saying?

Maybe we would be selling dot-com domains, for example, or maybe we would be looking at how you would Web3 enable that Web2 domain. One of the things that every Web3 domainer wants is the ability to take Sandy.x or Sandy.crypto and have it resolved in the Google search bar. These days, you can do it but only with an extension. What if we were able to bridge the Web2 and the Web3 world together so that you could have the benefits of the blockchain and the crypto wallet, but also the benefits of being searchable and taggable in the Web2 world? That’s our vision of the future.

It was an interesting decision and move that you guys had to integrate with Ethereum Name Service. Some people would perceive them as a competitor, but strategically, you chose a different path forward in terms of how to work together. Could you talk about why you made that strategic decision and what it means for users?

One thing is we believe that Web3 is an industry in which all boats rise together. We’re in a tough time right now so we don’t want Web3 fighting against each other. We want to showcase the value of what we are doing on Web3 to the whole world, not this infighting. We decided to start selling on our site, .ETH but not just selling it. We started to a lot of the customers of .ETH and they told us things like, “I can’t pay for it with PayPal or a credit card. I can’t do auto-renewal. If I build my profile, I have to pay a lot of gas.”

We started not only releasing .ETH on our site, we wanted to make it better and better to buy .ETHs too. You now can buy .ETH with a credit card or with PayPal. You can now do auto-renewal. You can now build your profile up and so many more things. This was strategically part of our vision to be that one-stop-shop for digital identities and domains, whether they’re Web2 or Web3 across the board.

In terms of that particular functionality, it’s an integration of other service providers. Theoretically, you would integrate other companies and other domains in the future as well like you were saying, correct?

That is correct. We’ve already announced that .sats will be next. That’s part of the ordinals family. We’re going to be doing .sats and then we have a couple of others as well that we’ll be bringing to the market. As we looked at customer behavior, I came from Amazon, so we’re customer-obsessed. We’re always looking at what a customer wants.

We have ten TLDs or Top Level Domains. When someone comes in and they want Sandy, they typically don’t just buy Sandy.x or Sandy.NFT. They’ll typically do what I call a clean sweep. What our customer said is, “When I come in, I want to also buy .ETH and .sats. I want to buy everything. I don’t care where it comes from, I just want to get a clean sweep of my name. That’s one of the reasons why we wanted to add this functionality as well.

Being able to bundle it all together makes it a lot easier. I like that you’re working with communities that also have very high transaction standpoints as well from .ETH and tapping into the ordinal .sats. For all the NFTs that have ever been made on Ethereum, you’re already seeing a large influx come in from the Satoshi and ordinal standpoint. However, on the subject of partnerships, you have several others that are going on. Two that I want to highlight are The Sandbox and Smobler, which is really cool to see how all that works together. Can you unpack the essence of those partnerships and how all of that came together?

I’ve been tracking down Seb throughout the world because I love The Sandbox. I don’t know if you guys have looked at The Sandbox or the games and everything going on there from Paris Hilton to Gucci to incredible things from the eyes of fashion, you name it. It’s a cool platform. Our users kept saying, “Let’s partner with The Sandbox.” Whenever we partner, we want to create a win-win. It has to be good for us. It has to be good for the partner, and it has to be great for our users. We found that with The Sandbox.

We announced a partnership. The actual game itself that we’re doing is with Smobler. Smobler is going to build an Unstoppable hub on top of The Sandbox for Unstoppable and that’ll be a hub where you can go in and buy domains. You can also, as a company, link out to other templates to make it easier for you to build land flows. We also are going to release a game that has swords, shields, and all that stuff too. It’s to gamify what we’re doing in Unstoppable. Again, this came directly from our customers. They’re like, “We want a partnership with The Sandbox.”

Being able to have some of those types of integrations is going back to the plan of how you integrate everything together. Gaming is a big piece of where people are living online, especially around the concept of having a ton of these digital assets that they’re going to be wanting to send in a very easily read address that they can send places.

When you think about your typical game and the gaming assets that come within it, then applying that to blockchain and now having a quick way to be able to use it and potentially transfer it to one another, there are immediate synergies that make a ton of sense. We’re very familiar with The Sandbox. I’ve done some cool stuff with them throughout the years. That partnership also made a ton of sense. That’s going to be a fun thing for your users to go and participate in.

I can’t wait and they can’t wait either. We decided to go ahead and announce the partnership at TOKEN because Seb and I were on a panel together. We decided to do it there. We got a great response and now they’re like, “When is it?” We’re hoping to ship the game in either the fourth quarter or the first quarter. We’ve got two versions of it coming. We’re hoping one will come out in the fourth quarter and one will come out in the first quarter as well.

Speaking of forthcoming new initiatives, in August 2023, you dropped another announcement that you guys are creating a new domain-to-domain messaging platform function, which sounds pretty cool. I’d love to understand more about where that came from in terms of the idea and what type of functionality and opportunity you think brings the world in terms of making an impact.

This is a crucial use case because if you have a domain and you’re going to use it when you want to transact something. Hopefully, though, we’re not buying tons of stuff every day. You want to use it for email and other things. One of the things that we use all the time is messaging. The ability to message anyone at any time based on their domain is a very powerful use case.

This came up when my discussions with Polygon. Polygons is a very strategic partner of ours. We did .polygon together, which is one of the fastest-growing extensions we’ve ever had. Sandeep and Sanket were like, “I want to message all of our .polygon users. Can I message all the .polygon users?” He had to use Discord, which is hard, or Telegram. You have to have multiple channels.

We embedded messaging into your profile and our site. Now, anyone can message anyone else who has Unstoppable Domains, a Coinbase wallet, or a Lens Protocol. You can message anybody. A person like Sandeep can also message all of his partner community. He can message all of the .polygon holders. If you have a badge that’s a sub-community, let’s say it’s all the people who race cars in the metaverse and you have that badge, you can message them. It enables you to segment and target as well.

This is live already, to clarify.

The person-to-person and one-to-many or business-to-user, both of those are live.

What does the user experience look like? If Sandeep wants to send a message to everyone with the .polygon extension, how will that s look on the user side of things?

Again, we have 3.9 million domains so you can message any of those. Anybody who has a Coinbase wallet or anybody who has a Lens Protocol. You can now message so many people in the world and sort through them in segments by your badges.

On the user side, they have to be on their domain page on the web to see those messages, right?

They could also be on the Unstoppable page. They have to be on one or the other. They either have to be on their Unstoppable user domain page or be on the Unstoppable page overall.

Are there any thoughts later in terms of giving people paying via email or their preferred communication method to say, “You have some messages? Check it out.”

Absolutely. Josh, you could be on our product team.

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Let’s do it.

On Twitter, we’re @UnstoppableWeb. It’s not domains because that’s someone else. Our website though is UnstoppableDomains.com if you want to go and check out getting your Web3 digital identity. My Twitter handle is @Sandy_Carter or you can reach me on any social platform. I’m Sandy Carter on LinkedIn or @Sandy_CarterFounder on Instagram. Reach out with any questions or comments or anything. I’d love to hear from you.

Only the best for your readers, right?

Right on. We appreciate that.

It’s my pleasure. Thank you guys.

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