Lens Protocol, Web3's Social Platform | Stani Kulechov

Transcript

this episode is brought to you by bitmex the og crypto exchange that is back and better than ever you'll hear more about bitmex later in the show end of the day we're web 3 builders and if you if you think about it and uh web3 is an economy so there's decent class finance there's also um the the greater economy that now in part with nfts web 3 social is just another aspect [Music] all right everyone uh we have a fun episode of empire lined up today we have stanley kulichov uh the ceo and co-founder of ave um and a lot lot more than that um

stani and the ave team have been building something called lens protocol behind the scenes for quite a while now um really really interesting take on decentralized social media it's a protocol it's a web 3 social protocol it's really really exciting we're going to be talking all about that before we get into that stanley man you were just kicked off twitter for saying that you are taking over as the ceo ceo of twitter what happened here what happened give us the behind the scenes story yeah i mean obviously there's been a bit of kind of like a context that um elon musk pretty much bought twitter um and and what that means that twitter is becoming from a public traded company into a private company if if the deal goes true

and one of the kind of like things that uh elon elon musk was um mindful of is is the freedom of speech and i was pretty much kind of like exercising my freedom of speech by stating that um because of these events i'm gonna be the interim ceo of twitter um and and obviously it's it was a joke but it got a lot of traction um for for quite a while and and and then uh i followed up of laying down a 90-day roadmap for twitter uh essentially including rolling out uh the edit button and shipping it out uh within a week and and also uh integrating with ethereum uh ens

uh as well and and uh integrating with the uh uh lens protocol as well so essentially after a few hours uh i i got banned from twitter so how's that experience to get banned so did anyone in twitter reach out to you did they explain why this happened did you ever initiate in a discussion with anyone in the team uh to explain that it was a joke did they apologize like what happened yeah i mean uh there's basically they send this kind of like a um basic email saying that your account is being suspended uh and and you can um uh here's like basically you can argue that uh if if you're if you're if you don't

feel that the suspension was uh uh basically uh correct for you and that's what's what would happen but also kind of like i was talking to a lot of uh people that that are uh working on twitter or past employees i mean at all we have uh past twitter uh employees as well i mean alpha or data team is from twitter and and kind of like we try to create a little bit of like a network effect and get get the band out because the the biggest issue for me was that um you know like twitter was for me and still is um a social media platform that i use where i'm public facing where i have my audience and that's where i basically

can communicate and keep people up to date what's what's happening like in my orbit you know i share news about ave about our culture or about the lens protocol and and that was kind of like a uh exciting situation in in in the sense that when you actually get suspended and you don't have any more this access and you realize that you know the power and the control is on someone else's hands and you know you can lose your followers like that uh in in your communication channel with your audience uh that's really makes you think and especially because we are we are building uh the lens protocol these

inter social graph so kind of like there was there's been always like a backbone idea of uh like we're providing the ability to users to own their profiles and relationships and the communication channel with their audience but when it actually happens to you right there you realize like holy how actually uh much power this platform had have and how less of transparency there is because they're essentially black boxes uh algorithms running in a way that we don't have any clue like how the decision came from yeah and so like obviously um part of your you laid out kind of a plan elon is taking over twitter he is bringing including in there cz from

binance he's putting in 500 million like i i tweeted myself hey like if if you're elon like why not consider like taking money from a dao and and like having a web 3 strategy we talk a lot about web 2 companies and they are obviously increasingly interested in web 3 they're you have consumer retail brands issuing nfts is it possible for twitter to to kind of pivot to web3 you obviously have lens which is on its own trying to probably replicate a lot of what twitter is doing but maybe walk us through like how does twitter look like in the next five years can it actually credibly move to web 3 and somehow decentralize that's i think that's the most important

question because uh the the the way i see it is that the the the big the big tech companies and companies in general uh web 2 companies they've been built in a way where kind of like the users are uh pretty much creating the data so you're constantly giving information to all these platforms like twitter facebook instagram uh what you like and what you don't like uh and based on that um they have this massive amount of data which they're using to find out what actually you could be interested in in in buying or consuming in terms of our attention so you are selling your attention all the time to these uh

platforms and um what is kind of like happening here is that the user is actually the product uh within the platform because you are you're providing details you're consuming um products and services through advertisements and you are actually not the one who is getting the end value uh and the value goes from all these interactions back to the platform they get more and more bigger ip that they hold they control the data and and essentially uh profit goes to the shareholders and and the algorithms and the platform will have to be optimized within this uh kind of like a mindset

and and i don't think the mindset is is like uh faulty by default there's you know companies uh you know capitalism is a way where uh we can actually incentivize uh behavior and make efficient products efficient services but the issue here is that it doesn't go to the user and the user should be the epicenter of the value feedback loop and getting getting the the end benefit from that and changing this model to something where you know you are the user you create a on-chain profile and then you have your following relationship with other users and you have this broadcasting channel so

um so let's say that if a one application restricts you from from uh showing content you go to another one so you basically have the the control so what it does actually it changes the the mindset and the way the companies have been built uh in a way where uh now they don't have control over the data it's the user meaning that they need to optimize everything what they're doing in a way where they're competing of creating the best user experience they're competing for creating better algorithms with not just what they do internally but with all the other applications out there because you're relying on open uh protocol and that takes a bit of time and i don't

think it's it's an issue like i think the more issues like how do you push this idea through the whole organization that's the hardest part i think i'm gonna push back a little bit on that because conceptually i love the idea i totally agree with you when you get banned it feels very real and it feels like the world is it can be pretty precarious like now i'm wondering well i'm gonna be careful what i tweet bankless youtube channel just got shut down temporarily and i think it was a mistake and the ceo of of of youtube was public about it and said we made a mistake um but what we forget is okay when we're using web 2 applications a lot of these social networks are free no one i never pay for for twitter i never pay for facebook and you know they're kind of subsidizing

a whole host of infrastructure on the back end um and there comes a cost to that i think people should be aware when whenever like nothing there's no such thing as a free lunch like when we study economics and i think that's very true in social networks they monetize your activity and through advertising and a bunch of other ways and monetizing that data what is what is the business model for something like lens like and question number one and the the second question is in this world where your users are trying to like optimize their experience like is that like does that degrade the user experience because we all talk about decentralization we all talk about the promise of creating these applications but at the end of the day we also complain god the ux sucks and so most

users are not going to make that compromise like if twitter is pretty slick interface yeah i mean that's that's an interesting question i mean essentially uh when you have something like a uh decentralized social graph uh essentially you change a bit the um whole kind of like a landscape of how do you approach of of uh of of not just kind of like the monetization but how different products uh services are built and regarding the monetization i think like uh currently i definitely agree on the fact that if you're getting something for free you are the product so like you are paying for actually buying things and and this platform finding things that

uh triggers your attention to to to to buy uh twitter hasn't been very good at actually uh monetization uh to the extent for example what google is doing uh given they have a lot of uh information as well and data but i think like for me what's uh fascinating is that when you actually own uh on your content you own this uh the relationship with your your audience it basically means that your followers aren't anymore in the twitter's database and essentially it means that now actually anyone any part of the world can actually come and create a better algorithm or or

better user experience and and a new way of interacting with the content because i love twitter uh as as the ux uh but with the same audience you might have a different way of interacting and it's very very hard today to to compete with big tech in terms of creating better user experiences and and actually by creating new social media application because the first and the most important thing that you have to do is you have to create this big uh network effect so no one is coming to your uh no one wants to go to a party where no one is going so if it's like empty so if you go to an application there is no one there

it's very uh hard especially you base and i think clubhouse was a good example i mean me santiago yeah me we hang quite a lot uh in the clubhouse during during the coffee then and explain how um decentralized finest works too for context we would do marathons of like i think the longest standing one was 12 hours um stani also met his you know significant other on clubhouse is that is that the same one that stanley took a took a nap midfield he fell asleep at one point and left me hanging but you know somehow his battery didn't drain uh but anyways but stanley let me ask you that's just an extension of what of that answer that you were just giving in like web 2 social or really just social in general is categorized by massive massive

network effects right if you own if you you aren't a big so a successful social uh social media platform if you don't have hundreds of millions and in some cases billions of users right will that look the same in crypto right will the will the ones who win social networks and crypto be the ones who own all the users or is the business model set up differently so that that's not actually the case i think we'll see variations because now the way it works is that it's pretty much like a numbers game in terms of like how big the network fx is how much data you can combine and and based on that uh you can be more accurate what you sell to the users and and and the end users so this is the approach when we

think about that the user is the product in inventory social and i think here's a bit different for example when you're not anymore basically a number in uh or a name in twitter's database and and actually that's on a decentralized social graph what what actually happens is that it lowers the threshold of any developer any part of the world come and actually build a new way to interact uh with the social graph with the content uh or creating a better algorithms so for example in my opinion uh twitter user experience is is is quite quite nice i like the design but for me it kind of sucks that i basically have just

one algorithm that i can use i would like to select for example change the algorithm that maybe finds new content that i'm interested in or or more followers and recommendations that actually uh might be interesting for me for some particular reason and i could go away from my kind of like you know the saying when we we feel like the with twitter is a echo chamber when you know you you see all uh pretty much like more and more crypto twitter and yours every single tweet that you get in the feed is gm jam jam jam and and you know like i for example might want to have an algorithm that is just like more expensive a bit uh than normally and this is a thing like when

you actually uh have a public infrastructure that anyone can consume and build algorithms build user experiences you start to see developers uh coming up with creativity uh and trying new things and this is something that happened in decentralized finance because you know normally you know you have a working banking system you can send money from your friend from your bank account to your friends you know maybe it gets blocked you send some paperwork it gets unblocked and everyone is happy but no one is innovating actually because you know uh i need this interest finance what we actually did we created an open ecosystem and told every developer that you know go and build something and create something new and this is why we have you know this

massive interesting uh diversified financial infrastructure and i think uh to to the question actually i think when you open up uh the platform the user experiences uh and algorithms maybe the most successful uh social media kind of like application build on top of lens isn't the one where you you you can genera you can basically get the most of the the followers but maybe uh it's it can actually kind of like emphasize who are the most important followers for you and and how to interact with them uh in in a more interesting way so it's not anymore a numbers game

but maybe it's like how rich the social graph is in terms of value stony instead of monetizing with ads and so let's let's say let's say there's a decentralized twitter there's a web3 twitter instead of monetizing with ads if i'm kind of extrapolating out like five to ten years we'll have a world where there are these mini social graphs on twitter right let's say everyone who likes crypto is in this part of twitter and everyone who likes music is in this part instead of monetizing the people who like music with ads for an upcoming concert instead on this decentralized twitter you would actually monetize by having going out to applications and saying look you can build on top of this protocol uh if you want to build like a music application come build on this protocol and you can you already have

your users almost baked in right so now the the problem of like trying to find users for this application is kind of fixed by the protocol am i in in the same way that in d5 if you want to build something the users are already there you just need to build an incentive for them to to come use your thing am i am i on the right track here or is do you see a different future essentially it's it's pretty much that every single application that is built on top of lens protocol is growth hacking users to every single other application on the same protocol the same social graph which is kind of interesting because let's say if you have 10 different applications

you know they bring users they they enlarge the graph and of course on the front ends they can decide what they curate from which application the users come and they can they can curate the experience and curate what the end user sees and and and how the experience uh feels like but that's the thing like you you you where in distance as fine as you have this kind of like a pool of liquidity in in lens protocol you have a pool of uh users essentially who are contributing and following and expressing interest and i think regarding the modernization uh our what lens protocol does very well it solves the the the social graph

aspect so you create a profile and then you have different followings based on what we want to follow and having that on change so essentially to give a bit of brief uh when you create a profile that's tokenized as an ft meaning that uh you can send it to your cold storage or later if that profile is your brand you can sell it and then you can follow other profiles so when i follow for example santiago and i'm the first follower i mean santiago's first following ft now santiago might have 100 000 followers uh or maybe 200 000 followers uh in lens protocol so all those follower uh followers are token id so there's rarity

built in but what's fascinating is that the follow nfds are actually dynamic nfds so they will always reflect the latest content what you publish in the lens protocol so let's say that if santiago publishes a picture of a cat all those followed as these will reflect the picture of a cat so for example if i go to my let's say wallet or open c and look at the follow nft i see the picture of the cat and then if santiago decides to post new content it will reflect uh let's say a picture of a dog it will reflect the picture of a dog and so it's a dynamic uh distribution kind of like a broadcasting channel on chain but

fascinating is that we decided we want we didn't want to actually uh solve much of the monetization part because we wanted to build one infrastructure we there's a couple of things we built in terms of monetization is that if you really like the picture of a gatlin the the picture of a dog and let's say the dog has a funny cap uh you can actually then mint a immutable nfd out of that the same way as you would mean that nfd uh in in different kinds of nft jobs or in in foundation when you buy digital art so essentially you can do drops directly to your uh followers and and then another one uh is that you can uh amplify the content so

uh i like the picture of the dog but i amplify and i have let's say a thousand users in my follower base i can mirror that uh content and if um you know you collect it i get part of the collection fee that santiago as a creator sets so it's it's basically monetizing kind of like that read with button but these are just built-in monetizations uh and i think like more interesting stuff uh will also be built by developers because the protocol itself is very modulized so you can build a new follow logic you can build a new reference which is the comment logic or the collect logic and one example we

we already have community contributions so one of them was uh interesting uh follow logic where you pay to follow uh someone but then uh that creator essentially will share with you the collection fees so it's kind of like a creator uh fundraising at the same time so it's just like mind-blowing how far you can go with this it's kind of crazy what you're actually describing right now which is not just a social platform but it's uh it's social tokens built into it right because there's this concept what what always happens with like my friends and me and i'm assuming a lot of other friend groups out there is you follow someone pretty early right like let's say i follow a musician on soundcloud or an artist a dj i really really like on soundcloud and then they blow up or an instagram account a funny

meme account when it has 3 000 followers and then it gets to 300 000 followers and all my friends are following it you always want to say i was i was early to that account yeah i followed that account early right or like if i followed santiago and he had a thousand followers and now he's a big big name i'm like oh my god i've been i've been following that journey and what you're actually giving folks here is the ability to have upside in a creator that you're supporting from from day one yeah what is the problem that you guys are trying to solve is it that everyone lives in this bubble is it the business model of something like twitter is broken what is the actual what is the problem that you guys are solving here for us kind of like i mean the way we approach is that the

social media space it has different kinds of areas where you could actually make a lot of impacts so that might be for example content moderation composibility might be for example monetization aspect so there's like a lot of areas that you can actually solve and our approach was that we know that the the space is very wide there's multiple problems to solve we basically want to solve the the graph part so essentially uh how you can actually own of course your profile but also in a way where uh you're not locked into one particular platform so anyone who builds a new application you can just

pretty much sign with your wallet uh log in and and you have your followers because you have your uh lens profile there so like how to make that work so that's kind of like one of the key components there is things that we added uh there like the the parts of the uh monetization uh but essentially we we wanted to uh figure out like how you can have a composable uh social graph that actually benefits and allows more innovation into the space it's very tricky for example like we earlier talked about talked about the clubhouse example is that the reason clubhouse became popular because there was so much actually

network effect but behind that there was sort of crawled hacking the invitation system a lot of pcs were pushing the product like i i think like in the beginning there's more vcs than anything else in in in the uh speaker rooms and essentially like uh if you find a new way to interact with content you will have to go to the same process you will have to growth hack your social media products and that's very hard so essentially like if you just figure something small out and it's very exciting suddenly boom you have this big network uh at your hands and it's just like it democratizes uh the access to build social media but also democratizes the end user in

the way like how and what kind of tools uh they have maybe you are not happy with one particular application's uh moderation policy you can go to the next one uh and they actually compete uh in the in the sense like which of these applications are respecting uh your values most so you can make value-based decisions how what is the business model of someone building an app on top right because when you look at what social media companies have today they have incredible moats right so uh twitter is really the only big social platform maybe linked into where i have like a following so i'm gonna end up spending a lot more time there and i'm probably not gonna leave twitter because i've put so much time into it what what is the moat

if you're building an app on top of the lens protocol to keep the user um in the same way that if you look at finance right like bank of america has an incredible moat uh i signed up for bank of america when i was like 18 and i'm still haven't left it even though it's a really shitty platform but you look at d5 it's like unit swap and ave uh they really have to fight for the user because the mo the ability to leave is so easy in d5 so like what does that look like when it's translated into it into the social world there's two different things of course like there's there's the uh of course there's the community aspect but what i what i think is is also important is that uh what lens protocol for example does it really

takes one piece of the uh kind of like uh the layers of the social media and and makes that uh that public good decentralizes it and makes users kind of like owners of their own graphs and essentially all the other layers are still there and they do exist so essentially with instead of like being a only a number in social media platforms database you have basically your data on that level is stored on chain and what's uh different here is that the only thing that that that is disappearing is the locking mode but looking as a mode um you know it's not always

workable in in the sense you know there's been in history social media platforms where uh users are building their network in one particular place but slowly if that platform doesn't innovate you know there's something interesting happening you start to accumulate somewhere else your uh followings which is sad because many people put a lot of effort actually building those uh networks i mean we all remember myspace uh today the the application barely works so just just an example like uh uh cases but then those layers uh that are on top basically the the applications there might be new ways to interact with the content [Music]

on that level you have a lot of algorithms so you can compete on on that level as well so for example if there's two similar looking applications even same way of interacting content but the other algorithm just is somehow more um driven towards your values or finds content that you are more interested in you might spend time i mean tick tock is a good example where uh the algorithm rewards something that becomes very uh funny or interesting and it just like uh distributes the the the content in in a very wide uh network so there's there's gonna be more and more options uh to the users and and based on your algorithms and and your

experiences you can actually create a lot of uh monetization on on top of that we interrupt your programming with a special announcement empire has a new sponsor santi and i are very excited to welcome bipmix that is right bitmex is back the exchange we all know and love is back and better than ever we're gonna be dropping a couple updates on bitmex over the next couple of months this first one is a big one coming soon bitmex is rolling out their spot exchange and they're giving away 500 000 in bitcoin to new users that's right listening to empire has got the alpha santia and i got you 500 000 in bitcoin going to new users for the ogs i

don't think i need to tell you why you need to use bitmex it's a love of the game kind of thing you respect crypto you use bitmex for those newer to the industry bitmex has a long and great history of innovation since their launch in 2014 they created perps and a whole lot more now they're back they're better than ever they're making waves so what do you need to do go sign up for the bit mac spot exchange for a chance to win some of the five hundred thousand dollars in bitcoin that bitmex is giving away b-i-t-m-e-x b-i-t-m-e-x dot com that's bit max.com go make it happen now let's get back to the show the type of data that exists on chain you know is is transactional in nature

uh you might be signing certain things but it's transaction okay you might be communicating you might be signing messages but for the most part it's like you bought an nft you swapped a particular token you may have voted or a part of a particular dow and so you kind of i think there's enough data there to start kind of the flywheel of curation but there are other more discrete data points that just are probably going to not exist on chain because it's not very efficient or you have an oracle problem and we can talk about what those are but do you do you think that that is going to eventually be a limitation on the kind of relationships that you can create because inherently the data

will not exist on chain at least not in the foreseeable future i think what will happen is that uh i mean essential on-chain data is very uh interesting because you could have for example a scenario where you know me santiago we we voted into we voted on other governance so let's say if someone posts something about governance you know that might appear in the feeds which is like based on the on-chain data but what we will see also is that many of these applications will start building layers on top of the on-chain infrastructure so for example they might have features or functions where

you might create data and they use this data combined with the on-chain data to basically find you more interesting things to to to read about or interact with and then uh even more uh cooler thing will be than when we have actually a cross application data layers so let's say we have something some sort of a data layer that actually you can integrate integrate with your lens application and all those applications maybe they collect the same data point and they can retrieve data from the same data points and essentially they they you have a way to actually get more data and share it with with the other

applications which is on top of the on-chain infrastructure because i don't think it necessarily needs to be that you have to have everything on chain you can build layers like shared layers or application specific layers and those might help to like build that algorithm that they are they're interested in and so in that case just people get an idea we talk a lot about signing in with ethereum and so instead of creating a username password i might be able to sign into twitter with metamask um or whatever but like web3 portal and then tied to a particular wallet and then you're saying you could scrape that and and pull in that data feed

and then to further personalize and and scrape kind of content that exists in web2 not on chain to then further kind of another dimension of curation like would that be possible if you're signing it to the wall street journal the financial times or facebook like pretty much anything in web 2 that might have at some point a an ability to log in with a wallet like with a web through portal yeah you can do that uh i mean essentially if you ask the user permission you can you can get data from let's say twitter um

you can get data from instagram i i'm personally i'm not the most like i i think there will be a lot of combinations uh with with like on chain off chain data i'm most interested in the web 3 footprint because there's sort of skin in the game there like for example when you participate in governance you uh have an ens uh you know you you have records there uh you you you do various on-chain activity um that creates like an interesting profile and the more the the web3 landscape uh expands from let's say from d5 and and go and dials and governance uh nfds into three social uh web3 e-commerce whatever uh

essentially like it's just like it's new areas of data points and usually you have uh skinny in the game it's just like very fascinating data point just a simple thing as po-ops you know uh and pops is something where you know it depends really about like what is the event but many have from from you know eight hackathons it might be something else might be uh company internal pop-up but having those po apps they bring a lot of interesting data you know who you could match i could i could see even someone building a dating app uh on top of lens protocol where which basically uh you know for all of us out there single um you need that

am i do i look that desperate that's right that's really why i'm going on the conference circuit really so i just um so i do agree with you uh i think blockchains are data rich and we are at a i think relatively nascent part of the like evolution of web3 where there are limited types of data but over time you know i think it it we'll get there the thing that i've seen where so other like social media is a very very hard kind of space to crack you know as much as we hate facebook and snapchat and like there are

dozens of players that have tried to improve upon their model and have failed because there's this idea of activation energy most people for the most part will really not take that extra step to go and try a different platform you know i remember i was one of the earliest kind of users of facebook because i had gone harvard summer school and i had a harvard edu email and so like you know i was able to get on relatively early and it was like very bare bones but it was this idea of like oh you know i knew certain people there in the platform so that was what kept me there so maybe it starts with like crypto twitter fanatics and then over time it kind of expands um but um but this is kind of goes back to my question which i i was curious of

like are you working with when you've obviously announced lens in some way shape or form you kind of drop certain breadcrumbs what has been kind of the reception like who has reached out who has expressed interest is it purely kind of crypto native protocols and people have you gotten interest from web 2 companies um who's going to i'm just kind of trying to envision who's going to come and build these kind of applications and what is the first kind of application for lens going to look like in the next six months one thing about web3 networks is that i i realized that over the years that they don't need to grow very fast and quickly whereas like web 2 social media platform

if it doesn't grow within a couple of three years you know it goes to the graveyard in web 3 when we look back ens we look at even poab pop is interesting because it's started by one person going to events and giving patricio giving you know the the pop-ups and a few years ago and everyone's wondering like what is going on and it's there's like fun and you know and it's becoming like a network itself and then uh yeah literally doing things that don't scale and to get to like some product market fit right like exactly selling cereal boxes oh sonny can you i'm sorry i know you're not done with that answer but i actually still don't understand this why and i want to make sure i don't end this podcast without fully understanding this

why it feels like all successful platforms whether it's social media platforms or even financial platforms like ave right ave and uniswap and even centralized exchanges like a coinbase or an ftx they all need users to scale and they all need network effects and they need the liquidity of interactions and liquidity of interactions in finance might be uh buy and sell but liquidity of transactions in on twitter might be tweet and like and retweet and things like that so why do crypto based social platforms not need users like the network effects of users i'm still not fully getting that you always need of course network effects of users the the the difference between web 2 and web 3 social is that in lens protocol you create your profile

once uh you know i mean obviously if you have brands and whatever you can get more but basically you create your profile once and you have those followers so like that's that's yours to keep it's the same idea of you know like um you're on your keys you're on your crypto so i see so the user's already i see i i get it yeah the users are there already yeah exactly and and and and that's the thing because like every single like one user in social graph means also like one new user in all of the applications i mean obviously you can curate as an application level more that only like only like users that came through through this application will will pretty much like be shown in this

application you do like you can do a lot of curation but essentially as you will sign up i was you as you will create a profile in lens protocol it will be equivalent of creating a profile in let's say facebook instagram uh twitter and and ticktalk uh at once and if you come from one of those applications uh you reaching the whole uh graph and for me it's um for us the the the kind of like a uh i mean this has been launched a couple of months ago uh the test net and and what's uh cool has been is that we started with a hackathon so obviously the the main idea is that we have smart

smart contract-based protocol and we want actually to see what kind of applications could be built so within the first application uh sorry the hackathon alef grove we had uh 530 uh hackers and over uh 126 submissions uh in a um under two week hackathon which is like uh like outstanding numbers it means that there are people there are developers that are actually interested in the space and and they want to build things and we saw uh within those two two weeks actually uh full front ends being built so lenster dot xyz is a good example and and

there's a bunch of other fascinating uh projects being built so it just showcases like how quickly you can build a social media application when you don't need to think about the back end that much again i want to go back to the idea of monetization and and not just like in the context of lens but just generally because when the user is in control meaning acoustics and i think talked about this really eloquently much better than i will which is like when you have your wallet your wallet is kind of it places so much power on the user and it's it may be difficult this is what jason was trying to say i think earlier which is it's difficult to kind of own the relationship with a customer it kind of puts more pressure on the company to

deliver value and you have all these different people trying to curate and serve and create useful applications i think in web 3 i think the the the entity or the person that benefits the most is the consumer the end user which owns the data can port it over whether you're a game in gaming nfts d5 like your wallet is unlocked so much value but what does that mean for at some point like you have to have some business model for these people that are just rendering the curation and all this stuff like but i'm still having like a bit of trouble like bridging that i'm with you santi i'm i'm i'm with you there okay

where's the revenue yeah i mean like and maybe it's like we don't really know what that monetization model is gonna be well yeah like in in d5 the if the revenue is coming from fees right um yeah yeah where's the right super straight forward it's a swap that's it yeah so where's the where's the i guess there's the question there where's the revenue coming from then stanley i i mean basically for the uh for the creators essentially because like their their content is is is tokenized so that's pretty much like one way of monetizing so you can sell your content so we all have nfts here so we we already pay for nfds um and essentially on a social graph like lens protocol you can

pretty much create uh anything you can create uh art you can create just regular content and actually like it's not you can even drop an album but it's it removes the idea of of kind of like having a medium it creates medium-less uh creators because let's say that uh you as a creator uh let's say billy eilish you drop an album on lance protocol hyperdelic i mean i want it to happen but let's say hypothetically uh and maybe you will have out of uh a few million uh followers maybe uh you have certain percentage that will actually buy that as nft the the album drop but then at the same time uh billy

eilish can you know uh just post content that says uh you know uh make love not war you know and and people will collect that as as a basically piece of content the same way as please in that case do you need to own does billy eilish need to own the lens a is there a lens token here um do you need to kind of stake that lens token to uphold your reputation is there some sort of fee like uh open c style where if you're buying if there's a transaction happening then part of those fees will go to lens yeah exactly so so what happens is that as a creator

when you set those fees so you set essentially the collection fee and because it's mobilized you can set um there's there can be different kinds of collection logic so it can be auction so you can just uh post a content 24 hour auction you know who wins gets it so it's typical foundation uh style or or open c auction then it it might be fixed price uh limited amount of uh copies it might be even uh you know you can collect on a certain time period let's say 24 hours so that's that's basically what you can do and you can set those fees then uh what we created is that the protocol

itself can uh collect fees as well into the uh protocol treasury but that is set to zero so our goal is to be uh after uh having the protocol live and to see that how many users there are and how much there's utilization uh transfer the whole ownership of the protocol uh progressively to the uh community and the community then can decide uh what to do with the fees and and whatnot and and whether something like this happens but that's that's more of like kind of like speculation for us like for our team especially we always try to build something that uh works uh if it works if it creates an impact uh maybe it inspires some other

new protocols to be uh created but that's so so the monetization is just like we created a seed for that so anyone can uh monetize their nfts but there's so many things you can build on top it's it's it's it's quite agnostic yeah and look look at i mean it's totally fair answer to say we don't know yet because i think like sometimes to your point if you just build things that provide value and people are interacting and communicating like i'd rather as an investor place my chips on that and saying if you're tapping into like a fundamental like human need then you can it's easier to figure out the monetization piece after whereas if you're creating like a product that no

one wants like you know no i mean nearly every business starts incredibly niche right if you look at ebay it starts with just collectibles or facebook didn't start as facebook it starts as just a social network for small call it for colleges right so i am curious why does a money market kind of d5 bank all of a sudden wake up one day and say yeah i think we're going to build a social graph here i think end of the day we're web 3 builders and if you think about it and uh web3 is an economy so there's decent class finance there's also um the the greater economy that now in part with nfts

uh web3 social is just another aspect there might be at some point uh web free e-commerce and and so forth so like for us what is important is that to find where we could actually make an impact uh and and how to do that uh in the web street community and i think beyond that what's for me personally very interesting is that once you have a decentralized social graph you can actually turn it into a trust graph and when it's a trust graph you can actually enable interesting things like credit and under collateralist lending and that's kind of like where we could go towards but that's very early so it's something that

takes a bit time and we'll see like how this plays out um i mean even back in the days uh we we had uh pocs of using ens names as a collateral so you kind of use your you could use your profile as a collateral as well but end of the day it's more about creating interaction data and understanding uh what users have and also interesting fact is that if you have a profile that has good monetization what you can actually do is you could use that as a collateral if there is constant revenue stream and that's something that's very fascinating from dfi aspect yeah i certainly believe that um how do you solve for like the civil problem here um like uh a person might have 100 wallets

and yeah i mean civil problems does it matter yeah it matters to some extent at some extent doesn't so what i'm fascinating personally is a concept of social verification so let's say that twitter currently gives blue check marks based on their own assessment right what could be fascinating is that you could create and bootstrap communities that could actually uh do the social verification so let's say decentralized social graph is a big data dump uh you know there can be a lot of good profiles sort of bad profiles uh it's the same as many of these web two databases but what's fascinating is actually who has verified a profile uh

from a community standpoint so let's say that i know santiago uh you know he he comes and visits me in london so you know like and we're friends so so basically i can socially verify that uh this person is verified by me same for you yana and and then uh maybe i meet your friend somewhere let's say permissionless and i can verify that person to you so like and and then you can create verification communities and and also you can even aggregate those verifications so you can buy curation uh you can solve a lot of things but for me um the next step from here where a lot of things will move is when you can actually do uh social verification on facts as well

so let's say if i post something like hey i'm the interim ceo of twitter so maybe people at twitter can actually kind of like verify that you know this is like uh and flag it to somewhere like maybe this isn't correct or you know maybe the you know crypto reader folks will say that this is correct or just funny like there might be a lot of like labeling and data on those verifications so like which could actually fight things like fake news and and so forth so like that's that's the kind of aspect aspect that there's a lot of to do for uh the creation as well but that's something that has to be built on top there's there's a paper at a u pen from 2015 that talked about so uh credit scoring

and credit scoring in a kind of socialized um or decentralized manner here um one of the things that it found is that it actually causes users to engage less and like form closer ties with the smaller communities and that it actually kind of pushes people away from people who might be like quote unquote low credit people does that feel like a problem for you guys to solve or does that feel like a problem for like the apps built on top of lens protocol to solve or you're not even thinking about something like that right now way too early very fascinating research and i would say that's uh you know if someone creates a algorithm that basically uh takes into account that if you follow

someone who has lower credits like kind of like score or whatever um you know and and this is public in the first place you have to be very transparent what data you're using because now the users have the power they own the graph they own the profiles they own the relationship so like you are the epicenter as a user so uh it creates a competition where everyone needs to be more transparent on their algorithms because there will be some provider who will be uh and even open sourcing their algorithm so essentially what it means that someone will come and just create an algorithm and says that you know what we don't do that uh you know and use this and you have

choices as a user but if you're using something where you're logged in in a platform you don't have that freedom so it's all about creating opportunities and freedom for the user is there is there a downside of having uh users all of user social data on a blockchain right because when you look at something like um ether scan i can see every transaction that's going into that on ethereum and it's obviously amazing you've got this incredibly transparent ledger but on the flip side i'm not sure people i want people seeing like what i just liked on instagram and tick tock right and i'm not sure i want my uh stupid tweets from 2007 15 years ago stored forever on a blockchain so is there is there a downside to some of this stuff there is and for example uh this is one of the reasons we also uh

we don't have a like like button on the protocol level you can build on an application level i like button reactions buttons uh some other new cool things you know now you can be like 15 18 years old and just build a new application on top of lens protocol and that might become a big uh big and popular application um so like uh i would say that you can build a lot of things on top into a private database but i'm also fascinating about using something like zero knowledge proofs of actually creating private photos private profiles and adding that functionality but i think like once we achieve that

that kind of like a base layer where you know you have you have this visibility transparency then uh the next thing is to to figure out like what techniques are used because you obviously you can build on a lot of things on databases but then like how you could actually use cryptography uh to uh to make a lot of things private that's that's that's going to be the next step sony could could lens be bigger than ave one day well we'll define the define the parameter by bigger market cap or users or um i think i think users probably no i actually don't think users is the right metric to look at there

because obviously there's going to be a lot more users on a social platform than a financial platform um the parameter might be i don't know revenue cash how much it's making i don't know normal business metrics good interesting metric is that like how many people care about finance in general like how many of you if you take like you know like a uh one particular or how much time people spend on finance like how much time you spend on yeah yeah i would say like a lot of people care about finances but don't think about that every day like you don't go to the bank every day you check your phone at least 50 times a day because you want to interact with people that you care about exactly so like that's like

like if you spend maybe once a week to tweak your yield farms uh you know that's the the the amount you put energy into that and attention but you know if you go to an application uh and spend there two hours a day uh or or in crypto twitter uh 16 hours a day uh what value that has so um maybe a question is do you envision a world where we just move totally off of web 2 platforms or are you complementing what you're seeing in a web 2 context meaning you're still in parallel you're still going to be using twitter and then you're still going to be using lens for different things and they somehow complement each other not

replace or are you replacing i i ideally uh twitter should integrate the lens protocol like that was part of my 90-day plan when i was intrinsic of twitter [Music] why don't you just create a dao and call up elon and say hey listen or cz and to get cz to out of his 500 allocation give us a slug and as a community we'll fund it because i i actually do think like jokes aside like why wouldn't you if you're elon you want to kind of boost the credibility of twitter as much as we think twitter is like the best thing ever most people outside of

crypto twitter think it's like a dead platform and don't use it but like if you spin the nfts and like you spin like you know i think that that is kind of a good way to reinvigorate twitter so uh yeah why don't we just create a downloadable call of pandreas and andreason's putting in what 400 million for this cz is it like 500 million no i'm saying probably easier was through cz i i think it makes a lot of sense because i mean if you put this down uh i'm definitely in because i think there should be also like more native web3 voice on on platform like that big even though we don't know how easy it will to get some of these changes and you know the three aspects and and how the whole twitter organization thinks

about it uh but like it's it's a it's it's it's gonna be um something that drives the space toward rip three and i just don't think like i think both words need to exist you know you have decentralization then you have you know centralization you have services you have companies like there's just like two different layers and they interact with each other that will happen like but seeing twitter going towards with three more um that will be very successful for our mission because you know it's it's good for everyone oh let's talk about that they have blue sky do you remember twitter twit twitter built a group called blue sky as like

jack and i don't even know yeah but the goal is to like to develop as they say in their words a decentralized social network protocol so this might be actually a direct competitor to lens very biased i think they should build lenses but i think you need to have i think i'm more on the camp of you need to have credibility by opening up integrations with web3 protocols as opposed to building in-house like you need the community on your side i see a mesh here where like the same way that you're probably never going to stop using bank of america for certain things even though bank of america is no i will i hopefully will but you're still you know you're still going to have like d5 doesn't totally i think replace finance i think financial institutions start working with d5 and they just act as

front ends and user aggregators to tap into this world and as a settlement layer and in similar manner i just think that like social web two social networks if they're going to be relevant in the next 20 years they're going to probably at some point enable users to integrate their two lives call it you're living in the real world in the metaverse well you need a bridge to like mesh those interactions and and amplify them not replacing it yeah because we're still going to live in the metaverse and we're going to live in the real world where there's inflation and you have to eat um and so i think like if you're twitter right now like you want to be relevant you want to kind of catapult into next leap and i think

that's what's exciting where if i if i if i'm elon i would probably like seriously consider like enabling web3 support and opening up to other to the web 3 community as opposed to trying to build it in house because it reminds me so much of the like ones l1 like corda and all this it's like when jp morgan jp morgan launched uh what was it the fork of ethereum quorum or something it's like whatever this crap is no one is it's like closed certain yeah uh standing i'm just i know we're coming up on time here i did want to ask you one thing um what is the tech stack on your guys's end for this so you guys built on polygon is like some data storage are you guys using like r weave ipfs like what what is your kind of tech stack for this

yeah so uh pretty much all of the infrastructure at some smart contracts and we we deployed on polygon um so what um the the next part is of course like we want to have a bit of like cross chain functionality uh but that's uh that's a different story in terms of the the data storage the the protocol is very much agnostic to data and how you store so you can use ipfs you can use rv uh you can even use s3 you know if you want to uh so essentially uh you can choose where you store so for example if you use one application and they have a setting for you to store in ipfs that's that would be the solution

so if there's future solutions they can be plugged in uh easily got it cool anyone out there that is listening like what um where can they find more about lens where should they go work for lens should they kind of are there grants available i know you are huge sponsors of hackathons like what is the best way for someone out there listening saying okay i want to build on top of lens or something yeah so uh lens.dev uh is a good place for information and seeing uh basically what how the protocol walks what you can build uh we have outstanding documentation and we made it as

simple as possible to to build on top of the lens protocol or integrate it and also we have a grants program so we call it the fertilizer so so the idea is that uh we already had one round of crowns and and we have a next one so it's ongoing basis you can apply for different kinds of grounds whether you are integrating lens into a web to social product or you just want to make your current product social but webtree native or building something very very new um yeah and of course if your end user your believer inventory social owning your profile and your uh relationship with your audience what you can do is you can go to lens.dev and

sign a open letter there uh and you can even uh share that on twitter essentially and and that's a a kind of like a open letter about how we believe that's why uh uh should be open we're all gonna get banned if we do this you're gonna you're gonna end up into a uh jail yes i'm gonna be on the list yeah great uh this is awesome uh any like parting thoughts i mean it's super exciting i mean i think social has been tried in in web 3 before i think these are one of the first kind of things that like steam it and stuff like this but i think the time is right at the intersection of nft is gaming uh and

it stitches all together very nicely we're doing more we're spending more time on chain so makes a whole lot of sense um maybe maybe time before before reporting guys but timeline when can we start like seeing like a really nice front-facing application soon this is this is the politically correct answer so that none of the engineers working on this gives tiny hard time so i appreciate that exactly but yeah thanks for having me here it was amazing uh and and the questions were super super exciting so i i really uh i really am a believer in inventory social and it's going to be interesting to see what kind of things are going to be built but it's a process so i think uh

this interesting something big as social media will take twice as long as uh decentralizing finance you heard it from the man who went through brutal bear markets and is one of the best builders in the space and and the host that's appeared the most on this podcast so standing always a pleasure man um thanks for for building this i think if anyone's going to pull it off it's you and your team so congrats on everything and i think it's much needed in the space so keep at it amazing thank you take care tonight [Music] you