Entering the era of Web3 Social

Transcript

how's it going second day you need to see yeah it's been interesting times and uh it's amazing to see everyone here um gathering the spot of the the market conditions so i'm super super happy that uh we're here so amazing um yeah so my name is tonic uh sonic glitchov and i'm the ceo and founder of ave so we are a team that builds uh web3 technology mainly on ethereum and and bunch of other chains out there and essentially of a team is known for innovating in the space of decent class finance but

um going a bit back a year ago um when d fly had its kind of like a very most peak moment and we saw a lot of innovation uh one of the interesting talks uh last year was where vitalik's stated that will be interesting to see more non-financial applications as well built on the web3 ecosystem on ethereum and kind of at the same time we were manifesting with the uh our team that you know if uh if jack from twitter is looking to build a financial platform on top of ethereum uh sorry on top of bitcoin maybe we'll build a social media protocol on top of the

ethereum ecosystem and at that idea essentially one year ago we we started already working towards building web3 social so this wasn't a a bear market idea but something that we have been working quite uh substantially um and today's topic is kind of like going over what we have built in terms of the the protocol itself and and they also the lens where and how far we have gone within that last few months so um what we're looking to actually solve when we look at the social media space um obviously there's a lot of different things and and challenges we have uh within the current web 2 social

media landscape um essentially we're currently relying upon a few bigger companies to possess all the data that we have we as users are uh creating that data we're interacting with many of the platforms that are um consisting of our networks um and we're giving data to these platforms to understand what we might like and what is our interest graphs um with this kind of like idea uh it basically sets us the users into this idea of uh the users being the product so we're actually giving more and more information to uh centralized um social media platforms to what we actually like and what we could actually buy as well

so that's the kind of like a product aspect there of the users and obviously uh all that data that we actually um give and and networks that we are building uh we're building with we went into those uh platforms so we can't actually take uh that data from one platform and create a digital exit uh and go to another platform which which we might find more interesting and this becomes a quite a bit of an issue in terms of like the portability um and this is just check two of the issues that we wanted to uh grasp upon with with our team and trying to uh solve um but also there is a um another angle what comes from the

creators so the creators actually don't have a ability to control their distribution but there's aspects that for example you might get censored d-platform and this is something that happened within our community as well recently for example bankless was censored from the um from youtube based on certain algorithm that was actually uh removing uh crypto uh channels and and and content out of the uh youtube uh platform and i was recently banned from twitter as well for uh saying that i'm going to be the new interim ceo of twitter and obviously got back into the platform again as a interim ceo of twitter so

that went well but there's a the deep platformation is is definitely like a smaller issue but it's part of a bigger uh challenge for the user and creators so at that particular moment i lost my whole access to my public community and that when that happens to you actually you you realize how much kind of like a power these bigger platforms are having and also one of the issues that we have is that there's quite lack of monetization tools that you can use within the bigger platforms and most of the monetization is actually based on how those networks can monetize themselves and make most out of their users and curators so we're all curators

we're content creators but we curate a lot of content so whenever you create a spotify playlist uh whatever you retweet something you create a list list of who to follow you're actually curating content and that is a creator asset class that is um at the moment quite undervalued and we're thinking like how to solve this um issue of bringing the the creation aspect uh more forward and becoming more rewarding as well for us with the lens protocol the idea wasn't just to build a protocol that will be smart smart project based social media

social graph but actually bring the power back to the users so we wanted to change the dynamics actually behind of how we are interacting with social media today and and the the dynamics there so instead of actually having that ownership uh within those platforms we wanted to bring that content ownership the relationship ownership and the community ownership back to the users and going back to time a bit and we have all seen different um slides of of how the web evolved from one to two to three and and what kind of aspect he provided but just to give some uh perspective for uh for the audience and there's there's

definitely always newcomers in hcc as well um is that essentially in web one ecosystem we created this kind of like an interesting way of providing knowledge and content across globally just with the internet connection so we self-hosted a lot of servers and content and and broadcasted that uh in a read mode and essentially went to web 2 where we transferred into a ecosystem where um you could actually interact with that content and you don't have to self-host to to to actually uh share what you have and and your thoughts uh over the internet and what's what was amazing with internet in general and social media that it really connected the peers but let them uh interact with each other

um and and that was like actually um game changer as well so like web 2 uh and web 2 social itself um it has been uh progress um and web 3 is more about now ownership so that's the word we keep hearing all the time when it comes to the context of social media and social graphs one of the things that we came to us for length in mind is that it's not only ownership of let's say the networks that we create together as a community um creating public goods but actually being able to own your social presence and your social media profile and your connections that you have and that is

something that can't be taken away from you and you are constantly growing it um for yourself and this brings a new kind of a dynamic where you have the portability so let's say that you create a social media profile which is part of your identity you don't need to leave that profile behind of you when you want to actually change the user experience and move to another application you're constantly growing your own network and that ownership is is the key component what has been uh standing behind the the protocol there's a couple of things what we have been um thinking of of uh

impact aspects so we wanna wanted to make an impact for uh developers and first and foremost by lowering the barrier to create new applications so the same way for example in web 3 and and let's say in decent plus finance you know the space is open to everyone you know the code bases are open source uh you can directly contribute to the the code basis as a developer you can also fork those code bases improve them and redeploy or you can just take inspiration but you have all this accessibility as a builder and our goal here was actually build and bring the same experience into web3 where you don't need to necessarily focus on building that big platform effect that

every social media application has built over the years but essentially creating an environment where you can actually focus on building those new experiences new ways of interacting with the content and you can be anyone anyone any part of the world building either a new social media algorithm that discovers the content that you might like more or essentially a super exciting way of you can actually uh interact with existing uh content and this also removes the pressure of like focusing on building that network and and focusing on uh user acquisition um and second thing is is the the creators uh itself so when you actually

bring that power to the users and and bring the power of actually to the creators to um manage their own um social media presence they have more choice so instead of being locked in one particular platform you actually have now the opportunity to vote with your feet and go into those applications and interact with them which you feel the most maybe exciting or maybe that particular experience or network algorithms are servicing uh your values better and and this brings more flexibility um the protocol itself um there might be some who are very familiar of what we

are building uh at least the ava team but um what we have built is essentially a protocol um that is on chain so it's market check based protocol where you can actually create a social media profile and this profile is an nft and you can publish content with nfts with the with the profile and fts and you can create relationships by following other profiles so whenever you follow another profile that means they follow nft and those follow nfds are always reflecting the latest content that the person you're following the profile you're following is uh publishing so for example if i um if i publish a picture

of a dog today um and i publish tomorrow a picture of a cat those follow nfts will reflect uh the latest content in uh whatever it's rendered for example openc or or or in your wallet and and it creates kind of like this um censorship resistant uh communication style channel between you and your audience and one thing we added is that despite the fact that we have dynamic nfts we created this another uh concept of being able to collect the content so um every post in the lens protocol is actually collectible in the sense that you can collect it as an immutable nft

and the creators of those contents can actually set different kinds of prerequisites and for example monetization strategies where uh you can actually set set collection fees as if you will um be sharing nfds uh in in general uh one of the things we wanted to solve is the amplification of content so we added a feature called mirroring and mirroring essentially means that you amplify the content of some other creator to your own audience and by mirroring you can also set mirror fees as a creator so you can share the monetization so there's a couple of things that we build already in terms of

monetizations directly into the protocol but essentially it's just a protocol so it's very agnostic how you can use it you can select different kinds of modules so what's different between lens protocol architecture and let's say the avi protocol architecture is that the lens protocol is very modularized now some of you that were in the previous talk uh just a moment ago you have seen kind of like the trend going into specializing and building different parts of ecosystem and uh modulizing the components so they are reusable the same way as you would reuse for example code today and with this protocol you essentially can choose what kind of modules you have but also how you store data so it's very

agnostic and flexible in that way so you can store data on chain but also the protocol can reflect they actually resolve the content into off-chain for example ipfs into rv or even self-hosting if you wanna have a kind of like a peer network with your friends that you want to take down later uh you can use um all legacy systems like the cloud uh or even store small parts of bits of data on chain uh as well so our goal was to essentially bring something for developers where they can have the base layer to to innovate um and i think one of the valuable um

things we noticed that the the value that we wanted to create is that you actually have the direct connectivity with your audience so one when you own your social media profile and your audience relationship actually the dynamics changed in a way where you have now the direct access to your audience and it's up to the applications to actually reflect uh the experience and and the algorithm builders to reflect how that content can be found and how valuable it can be to cross the whole social graph but a lot of the modernization tools that we built in uh which is the mirroring and the ability to collect the the uh content as nfts

actually are just very uh base layer and we think that most of the monetization will also be built on top either new protocols that can be related to monetization or on the algorithm or application layer um there's two kind of concepts i i want to bring out uh as well so the applications itself and uh your ability to post content means that you also have distribution so normally you should distribute content through one application but here you have the ability to actually post once and be distributed across the networks and applications that really

value the content of what you're creating but another very fascinating thing that uh christina from our uh team that is leading the the um um growth side of of the lens protocol uh created this kind of like a concept of um uh user-generated content uh as an asset class so today we have um different kinds of asset class asset classes so we all know that they all kind of like idea of bitcoin becoming asset class and crypto and nft is becoming an asset class most of the nfts are very much art bases and they have metadata and i think we can go even step further of thinking that like culturally relevant and valuable impactful content

might become assets as well in the same meaning it or it's already happening but that can be extended into text-based uh content and also content where you interact with the original post and i think couple of interesting examples are memes so we have already um examples where we have different dowels actually going retroactively buying some of these memes from the original creators that were created a decade ago and the same way you actually could mint and buy a name today that might not be valuable in terms of the network effect it had received but might actually increase the network effect over time and this is very fascinating area of um

of the content part that we are uh excited about um so most of the things that is happening on on on lens is actually not built by us but it's built by the community so basically the community is front-running all the developments that uh are happening in the ecosystem which is absolutely amazing and that's the way to build uh decentralized protocols um we have a lot of traction in terms of like how we came up with the uh the the the protocol and and the flexibility for developers to come and innovate on top of the protocol um we see kind of like the whole ecosystem in different layers so

as we saw the previous presentation which was actually quite amazing is that not only we have modules but we also have layers that we are building today the the battery ecosystem and we have the blockchain layer we have a protocol layer where actually the lens protocol is living and various different kinds of modules we might have ns which can be interoperable with the lens protocol proof of humanity proof of attendance and then we have this middle layer so the middle array is interesting where you can actually create different kinds of algorithms and serve them all the way to the experience layer and experience layer is is the one where the users are interacting so you might access the same content from

multiple front-ends or the front-end that you really like but you actually might access a particular type of content from one particular front-end because it's tailored towards that experience in that particular audience and and of course like you have the the audiences depending on what the application itself is and very much a lot of things we have been building in the uh space has been very base layers so there's something we build ourselves kind of like the uh lens friends uh where you can follow different kinds of profiles and you can scroll those profiles and that could be an interesting play playground as well for training different different

machine learning algorithms uh in terms of like food who to follow logics uh in the future so we kind of like want to keep the middle layer as open as possible so everyone can contribute their algorithms be very transparent what they what kind of data they are using uh and let the users to choose what algorithms they want to support and linster is one cool application because it's just a very basic way to access the lens protocol it was built in less than two weeks in a one hackathon we had i left grove together with the global team so it just demonstrates how quickly these applications can the build

we have also lens tube that was recently built um why i like lens tube quite a lot is uh it's very basic and it's also kind of like a demonstration of like the basic things that have been built on on on the lens first but it uses also live peer for the rendering and also it uses rv for data storage uh and lens protocols so it just shows how like content uh social content creation tools and and the infrastructure is is very composable and i could argue there is even more compassibility than than um what i've seen in in decentralized finance another my favorite is tea party so it uses actually cell bound tokens to

reward of different kinds of interactions and your interactions becomes your kind of like a reputation within the application itself so a lot of cool stuff so we have also geolocation based uh network application and also we have orb so it's kind of like a linkedin for uh web3 but essentially we have a lot of new talent coming into the space and it's a place to learn about different technologies that we have and then also apply to open roles and also educate kind of like that audience when they come into the space from the talent side um uh and i i like this particular slide because like this is a miguel one of the

community developers uh who is who works at uh world coin and miguel is actually here so miguel basically builds one application a day so we can basically give a nice so it's quite fascinating because um we kind of like somehow created a network effect where developers like miguel has been very excited about what we built in terms of battery social and how composable and usable the application is and and he decided just to go to a sprint where he took like a week or week and a half building different kinds of tools uh on on the lens um community and i call this like proof of

miguel where you have like community developers that are coming and they're super excited to build and use their free time for that yeah i mentioned about the middle layer so why it's important is that transactioning in blockchain is is usually uh i mean it's it's essentially you pay gas for that so we created this kind of like a api which helps to index data build faster uh these experiences uh and the idea is to over time uh decentralize the infrastructure and help other algorithm developers to actually inject their algorithms into the lens api but what's fascinating about the the api is that there's also a

dispatcher which actually pays for the gas for the users and we reached uh 1 million gas less transactions since the launch and this is something we build ourselves but i'm very proud of our engineering team and josh who is here too who has been leading the efforts of the lens api to actually make it easier to to uh build on top of lens by by having that infrastructure as well um [Music] and part of the dispatcher idea is that you can actually delegate a lot of functionality to it so essentially you should be able to uh interact with webtree social without actually signing metamax transactions and that's why the dispatcher is very convenient so you

will be able to use something like lancer in the future or other applications that will be built without actually kind of like feeling that it's built on top of the web stream yeah so something we added into the lens api is that it supports also uh resolving and finding of those lens profile holders their ends addresses proof of humanity pop um and also sybil so it's a way of actually distributing different kinds of algorithms on-chain data across different applications who are using the lens api and we hope actually that other this inspires other developers to to build their own kind of like a middle

layer infrastructure and offer to those applications and and decent places further um uh the middleware and on a protocol layer we have different kinds of direct contributors into the module so the because the protocol is modularized you can actually come and build new modules so one of the modules that has been built by the communities is the token gated and nft gets followed so if you have 75 fwb tokens one crypto coven then you're able to follow for example a particular profile and you can build in different kinds of logics on top of the smart contract infrastructure and make it very interesting and kind of like take and unleash the power of uh the the um the whole web3 uh ecosystem and and some

interesting things is that we have also composibility with d5 for example where the yield is going and stream to the creator uh through the avi protocol under interesting module but one of the things that has been very inspirational for us is actually the loot projects and we kind of saw similar ways of um uh building within the ave sorry of the the lens ecosystem and that has been quite fascinating to see and web 3 footprint is another exciting part of what we are trying to emphasize is that we create a lot of footprint in the web 3 and that's kind of part part of your identity spectrum and that can be used in terms of like finding the

content and what might be valuable for you as as the user and and this is how we're uh kind of like a seeing things evolving and for example when we're listing different kinds of uh um communities uh to claim their handles into the closed beta of the lens protocol uh we're using this web 3 footprint and obviously the developer community has been super excited we we've been participating a lot of in different hackathons and seen fascinating things and we want to also kind of like push uh our efforts in the uh traditional web uh social uh space by adding the um uh the lens uh reference into in the uh

different web pages a lot of involvement will happen in the future especially in the relayer side which where we are improving the dispatch battery functionality and the middle where and also we're thinking about how we solve the scalability with the multi-chain and l2 approach these are something that we're currently brainstorming within the team and we're expecting a lot of growth in the um kind of like a middleware machine learning part as well now that i'm running out of time i think i could quickly show you one or two interesting slides in terms of like so this is the amount of uh we have actually revenue going directly

to the user so uh with because the content is collectibles um there's over two hundred thousand worth of uh uh dollars worth of value going directly to the creators um and if you compare something like what we have achieved in a one and a half month and if you compare it to some other applications uh social media applications out there they don't produce any revenue directly to the users that are basically interacting and and creating content and as a creators so it's been definitely interesting journey and this is when we started to open up a bit the the release and after three days we had five thousand profiles we went after two weeks to ten thousand uh as we started to

create different kinds of use cases how we expand the allo list so this was the pulley nft and you see that there is one particular graph it starts it starts to actually form there so here's different communities we started to allow list and you see the social graph becoming kind of like a hairball after 30 days and this is the the latest uh one what we have had after 58 days 43 000 profiles um half a million follow nft is minted um and and it's still closed data so we're still figuring out different kind of topics like the permissionless venting uh of the profiles and and a bunch of other interesting things

yeah so pretty much you could build any kind of interesting things if you are building something or have something in mind reach us out me personally or our team and obviously i want to thank um our team members that have helped me on the slides uh nikola david christina pedro and antea uh putting data graphics and everything together and i have one interesting slide for you as well if you didn't get oh you guys are fast so that's the ticket for ravi i'm not sure how many of we have in this drop but so we're going to have a very exciting event tomorrow if you haven't been in drama you should

definitely be there and beer until 4am grab our swag if you don't have it yet from our booth and i just want to thank everyone [Applause] you have time questions oh no time for questions but if you have any questions you can find us out there somewhere or close to the booth and thank you everyone bye