Web3 social networking: Orb, Phaver and share-to-earn

Transcript

g m g m welcome to web3 Academy a place for entrepreneurs businesses and creators to explore and learn how to use web3 to transform business models and build thriving communities I'm Jaybird and this is Kyle reedhead and we're here to keep you on the Forefront of technology so you don't fall behind Kai what's up my man give us the tldr on today's episode yeah we had Nilesh and Jonathan on the podcast who are builders in building apps on top of lens protocol Jay will give a bit of a background of each of them in a second but we talked about why web through social media is needed the

features that blockchains unlock in the social media world that you just can't do with web 2 we talked a bit about the business models of social media in web 3. last time we had uh Brad on from lens protocol they didn't even know what the the business model was of lens so we are getting to the bottom of that today and finally the experience of building and uh and growing in the lens ecosystem uh super exciting episode and I learned a lot so I don't know it was great for me what about you Jay yeah I learned a ton too and and that comes from really two two great Builders but two people who have they're serial entrepreneurs their experience and you're going to hear about their experience in the episode Jonathan over a decade of web 2

advertising sales worked at Google and then worked for an ad Tech tech company that serviced Facebook and grew to one of the largest ad tech companies in the last currently the CEO of orb before that two times co-founder co-found co-founder of blink which was a dating app and then co-founder of dwell food which was a subscription-based home food delivery app so tons of experience coming from our guests today but before we get into the show we just need to take a moment to hear a word from our sponsor future of social media is here and that future lives in web 3 on top of lens protocol web 2 social platforms are broken and right for disruption you see

the epicenter of social media is the creators and yet they are the most neglected web 2 platforms like Facebook Tick Tock and Instagram are all essentially Robin creators of their worth creators are a new type of entrepreneur forming new types of businesses yet with web 2 platforms creators don't own their content to their profiles and that's their product in business instead they are tied to the platforms they choose to create on well just like how crypto is freeing us from Banks web3 is freeing us from these centralized platforms on lens protocol creators own their content own their profile and even their social graph and followers in the form of nfts this allows you to move freely from one social application to another with your content profile and followers moving

along with you lens protocol enables self-soverty for your social graph and interoperability across the internet at web3 Academy we believe this is the future of Social and that's why we partner with lens to ensure that the path of social media is heading in the right direction visit lens.xyz to learn more today the last Jonathan welcome to the show great to have you thanks so much thank you so much we are so excited to dive into orb and favor and so much but before we get there and lens and every I mean just a really exciting show we got planned for today but before we get there I gave a brief intro for bozie already but I want to give you guys a chance to tell your

stories Jonathan let's start with you just give us an idea of your background sort of pre-web three and then take us up to you sort of when you first Dove down the rabbit hole and how that happened and uh maybe up to not necessarily today but when you started building in web 3. yep makes sense so yeah kind of my background uh after business school I graduated from Aldo here in Finland and then moved to Dublin to work for Google for a couple of years in their large customer sales team back with kind of Google Plus was uh All the Rage at least according to google employees who were the only users uh we tried hard but it was an interesting experiment kind of seeing um a social network even with a huge backing kind of being built up and also

failing quite quickly um obviously also YouTube was kind of a big part of our portfolio so kind of got to work with social products there besides just AdWords but then I'm not a corporate guy so I wanted to do something in a smaller company where there's actual impact so I joined um smartly I O which is this uh that point three person company building Facebook advertising Tech and we actually agree with that to be the global market leader in Facebook and Instagram ads so like billions of AD budgets going through it uh annually uh I was based in New York for the latter three years of the five there so you got to work with all the biggest Facebook advertisers uh Spotify Airbnb eBay um and all the likes and kind of really

seeing how the sausage is made on that front which was kind of the segue then to deciding that we need to build something uh that allows people to actually connect with each other uh in a way that they're not being uh like spied upon and monetized uh directly um like there's moments when you really feel uncomfortable about it when Facebook tells you that they can actually tell Best Buy whether you went to their store or not because they track your GPS on your phone and then I'm the one trying to sell that to everyone okay there has to be a better way to um make this work and start kind of uh tingling around in various ways that was already almost three years ago so we initially built a bit more of a web 2 version trying to help creators monetize

through like recommending genuine products turns out they're all too used to recommending everything they can just to get by didn't really work out but then realized actually web 3 is a much bigger opportunity so started kind of focusing on that side of things name favor originally comes from kind of sharing all of your favorite things which is still a big part of what we're building so kind of helping people also pick their favorite posts every day and try to do that way kind of promote uh the high quality content very interesting okay I I want to follow ask some follow-up questions but first I want to give Nilesh a chance to tell his story so no same question uh give us a little bit of your background and then

what first got you into crypto web 3 what first got you into the space yeah so I have completed my graduation in 2016 uh back in India and after that I have joined one job over there and I started as a mobile application developer so as today um from like right now I'm developing mobile application from last six years uh I did couple of jobs over there but yeah after my first job uh just one and a half years I left my job and uh it's added my own startup so it was subscription-based could take a startup we did like uh like for one one and a half year

after that things did not work out and we shut down there to start up then I did couple of jobs uh in India where uh like uh in one startup I was the first employee and uh like we set up a whole Tech Team and developed product from the scratch so uh kind of uh my interest uh for developing products started from uh my only startup versus startup then I saw I decided to come in the US so like one year before uh uh I just came into us and did my one more startup which was uh IRL rating application it did not work out uh so like six months

ago uh uh we started open but I have been exploring oral blockchain technology from last three years and really fascinated about uh how uh blockchain itself worked and always wanted to work uh into the same field but always into was into only the web too and like one year before I really started to uh into go into the blockchain development it started smart content development and all those things and like six to seven months ago we started orb and yeah that's it it's so interesting how both of you have started multiple businesses and and both

of you have had wins and failures and and we often learn the most from our failures which sort of to me is a a little bit of a signal and here you both are building web three right so clearly there's something that's directing both of you in that direction uh I want to jump into that but before I do I just want to give each of you a chance to give the elevator pitch for favor and for orb so you both mentioned the projects you're working on currently that you're building uh let's just get the elevator pitch for each without going like too deep we'll get into the deep parts of each but nilash I'll start with you

yeah sure so we are building all Orbeez uh decentralized social media first thing the second thing is uh our goal is to make over by the go to platform to uh in future search any kind of web free working professionals or web3 opportunities so uh this is what we are trying to build perfect like the LinkedIn of web3 is that the best way to describe it uh no so so whenever uh like iph like it this is the question like it's a uh you know LinkedIn for web3 so uh but but basically uh the core idea is same but uh or I can

teach it like it 10x LinkedIn because uh we are trying to build much powerful uh what LinkedIn today is and as we are building on the blockchain so inherently uh we are leveraging all the blockchain Technologies uh definitely I can deep dive in uh like further but yeah we will dive into that for sure yeah Jonathan go ahead uh give us the elevator pitch on favor yeah so kind of favor is the first mobile app published on lens we were live about 30 minutes after Sunny announced the main at launch back in May uh because we had been kind of building the apple bit already before and then we met with some of the lens team in slash

last year this big Tech Conference in Finland and realized that they're actually building something that really matches what we need so kind of um building that interoperable back end I think it's a huge part of web3 social where you can actually take your data with you otherwise if it's an nft that only works in one place it's not an actual nft there's kind of no value to it so that's obvious the core part of lens and then what we're building on top of that is a token economy where we're dying uh trying to kind of build that more ethical way of monetizing so the brands can actually be part of it by buying tokens to promote their messages but we won't be telling them where you shop last night or what your credit card information like Facebook does but rather we're focusing on the topics that

you're posting into so if you're a sneaker fan you're following a sneaker topic Nike wants to do a sneaker drop filters promote content in the sneaker topic and they don't have to know anything more about you and at the same time it seems they're using tokens for that promotion they will actually reward the creators who have been receiving tokens for the high quality content that's at least the goal so token will be launched probably q1 but that would be the big thing we're able to really kind of um share the benefits with the people who are creating the value yeah it appears to me like your your product is almost starting a new category this concept of share to earn can you tell us a little bit about share to earn and what that

what that means yeah uh recently we've been thinking is that actually a good term or not because the place you're a lot of trouble uh where essentially like there's a bit too much of a bunsenomics uh mechanism to a lot of where really kind of you're only making money if somebody else loses but we believe that the big difference is social is that it's not a zero-sum game so I make an amazing video other people enjoy it and they stake the post on favor because they like it and kind of that helps other people discover it uh without having to go through a lot of content that there's kind of value being created both by me selecting that as one of the favorites as well as the production of um the thing so it's not

that somebody loses it somebody creates value and somebody receives kind of token value back so it's actually I think um a massive opportunity to create tokens in that sense also of course kickstarting the whole platform uh like the experience sucks if you're one of the first 500 people in a social media but if you're one of the first 500 people in the token project that's going to be probably a lot of money for you at one point yeah if everything goes well so they kind of balance each other out pretty nicely first of all I don't think you're ever going to get a terminology right in web 3 everything gets torn apart the word nft for some reason which is just like a protocol standard just gets crushed people hate nfts and it doesn't make any sense why so good luck on that

um but I'm interested to hear uh let's sort of zoom out a bit just tell me uh especially we'll let you start uh Jonathan because you were in the web 2 world especially in the social media web 2 world why do we need web3 social media you know like what's the problem in the web 2 world uh in your opinion anyway or what you've seen and so like talk about the problem of web 2 but also what does web3 actually solve for us because I mean on lens we have so many different apps there's over 100 apps being built on there all the different types of social platforms which is all great um but really it's like what's the point in it all what does web through really do for us what does it unlock or enable if you can kind of walk us through your

opinion on that Jonathan to start and then we'll follow up with no lash yeah I think obviously there's a lot of cases where people try to shop web 3 everywhere but I think in Social there's actually genuine uh solutions that can be had one of them is Christina from uh lens actually put it really well we were in a panel a couple of weeks ago and what she was saying is that just think of Facebook's Revenue being 90 billion and they have a 1 billion Creator fund 1589 billion of the value that the Instagram creators are creating because nobody comes there for Instagram they come there from the content and that's kind of why we need a more ethical way of monetizing your content so people don't have to start their own only fans or promote toothpaste um in a

separate contract in order to make a living out of the professional work they're creating and the other part uh kind of the most tangible reminder of that you don't really own any of your social life online is I got a call from my grandmother about a year ago and she was super upset because she had accidentally changed her age to 12 on Facebook uh trying to get younger I guess and what happened she was out of Facebook she was kicked out of Instagram 10 years of grandchildren's photos 10 years of friendships messages these conversations just all wiped out because she made one wrong click and she didn't actually ever own any of that so you don't really have to be an activist you don't have to say anything controversial to be at risk of

losing really your online social life and then when you kind of uh like you mentioned everybody hates nfts nowadays but when you trip away all the hype the nft in the end is a way for you to certify ownership of an online asset and what's the most valuable online asset for most people it's not going to be a monkey picture it's gonna be actually their social life so it's all the friends you've made online all the discussions you've had and if that could be an nft then NFD start actually making sense for the masses yeah two two great points there um I mean think like you know uh kind of balancing out the the revenue model right or Distributing it amongst the

creators who are the most important on social media it's why we go there uh and then to remove risk right that's basically what you're saying here I mean your your grandmother I think you said what lost her uh Facebook I also lost mine I was running a whole business on Facebook and one day I woke up and it was just gone uh I still don't even know why to this day and it was five years ago uh there's no one I can talk to so uh I don't know that people realize how much risk is there I think the the third thing is you know just the Privacy side of things that people tend to complain about but that risk is so big and people who are not even content creators like your grandma it's a big deal like if you lose all of your contacts like I travel

a lot and so I speak with my family and my friends through Instagram mainly um and if I was to lose that like I would lose a lot of personal conversations and personal connections and that is very valuable outside of a business or something like that so I'm glad you brought that one up now let's listen to you um continue on if there's anything else you want to add or anything you're you're seeing as well yeah definitely so uh the most basic uh Point uh Jonathan already covered uh like obviously uh owning the data and so we have the ownership and we do not lose to anyone the other things I want to cover is like uh the uh the underlying technology of web 3 social media itself or blockchain

itself so kind of uh credibility is the one thing where if you go to any social media uh it's hard to uh it's hard to believe that who is a spam profile or like if I go to Twitter or LinkedIn anywhere I can put any anything for example I work at Google there is a no verification or no credibility in that right so that's the one thing and the the another thing is in web free uh if uh there is a pseudo identity which is growing up and people start I started using this Shadow identity that means that they do not want to reveal anything about them name gender or anything in geography details so uh in future it

it's gonna become more hard uh to how to believe anyone on the internet random person because now the the problem was already there uh spam and uh you know fake identities now it's on pseudo identity let's believe it so the three uh brings really good uh take with it uh where we can uh have the all kind of credential so there are so many things are coming uh in the website so it's like proof of community and the things we are building at orb is like uh proof of credentials so people can link their different kind of credential here and it's with some mechanism we verify it at the back end and directly so uh

verification bit uh what I mean by with the credential is like their history for example where they worked uh where where they got the education and what skill they have so if uh you want you are visiting anyone's profile and you know that uh the their history uh you know portfolio all are verified then it's uh you know already become uh now you can trust them exactly and if you want to do business or want to deal with anything uh it's a kind of already credibility is created and uh you are not afraid to deal with with any person yeah I think it's so interesting how and

Jonathan and kaibo talked about this is we we only think right now about web3 in terms I mean shouldn't we say we only think four of us think about it but a lot of people think about it only in speculation and making money and so then they think oh well that's the only purpose of an nft uh and but there's so much more application here and whether it be an nft or um a did or you know some form of verified Identity or verified credentials you know there's different layers that are being built out to create this to solve the identity problem but there is there is so much application to to web3 beyond the

speculation that is talked about so much and what I find so interesting is when we talk about social media and as you mentioned Jonathan really like our social graph is like the most valuable thing to to most people online there is that is that is personal no property right and so when we put that personal property back in the hands of the owners it's not that all of a sudden they're going to go sell it or that it's going to have like some monetary value like you know my connection with my cousin or a post that I made with my cousin doesn't have value to somebody else I can't go sell that unless maybe my cousin's famous but he's not so so but it has a lot of value to me right and

knowing that that is safe and protected and is mine you know it's like we I think this is just the way that Humanity works we we build these incredible Technologies and so we built the internet and it allowed so many things to happen but because it wasn't immutable and because it wasn't secure in the way the blockchain was we also allowed incredible spammers and scammers to come in and take advantage of the situation and it's left us in a place where you know I I just I think about I recently traveled and I think about the way in which I had to prove my vaccination like it was it was the most web 2 Jelly way ever like I could have photoshopped this PDF like it was not

real at all but that is our current form of verified credentials right so yeah it's uh it's great to hear that much that you're going to help solve that problem it's got a great point also on like one of the reasons why there's so many scammers in web 3 right now is that we are operating on web 2 platforms so there's somebody with the fake monkey picture in telegram telling you you need to track you're somebody who's fake influencer with 10 000 fake followers and Twitter trying to push you to go to a pump and dump scheme and that's all because we're trying to do web 3 on a web 2 platform just like pretty much all of the like D5

folks who failed there were people who were doing defy in a Trad fire way so they were hedge funds taking risks based on their personal appetite instead of the actual protocols like Ava that kind of survived the crash because everything works in a smart contract so similarly if we actually build kind of the chain-based uh credibility into our social apps like Faber now released nft connection so you can connect your board ape and actually show that you have an ape instead of just putting a random JPEG and that also allows kind of for example the ape holders to connect with each other in a natural away so we have a gated topic for only a Porters nobody else is able to post there because we have on chain verification for whether you have a real ape or not those kind of

just unlock so many new things for that credibility of users and also the interoperability so we don't have to call Yuga and ask can we actually help use board apps here they drop Rubble we just have to check the smart contract and we know okay this guy has saved in the wallet so it just unlocks so many possibilities for that credentializing as well and I think orb is doing something really cool there too absolutely I'm curious if so we just rattled off a bunch of features that I guess the blockchain enables right in terms of verifying in terms of Distributing uh you know the value in terms of ownership and kind of removing the risk is there any other features we haven't touched upon yet that maybe Jay and I haven't thought about or that we

haven't said yet um unless I know you said you're kind of the LinkedIn but 10x better I think you said or 100x I'm not sure what number you chose um are there other features that were missing that you think would be worth sharing or does this kind of cover it so far yeah so uh right now if we bring the verified credential there are so many things which automatically brings so uh just one example if I take example of orb and here right now how traditional industry work is and how uh the whole uh hiring industry or job industry work is like if uh you switch the job right uh the if you are working at company a right now and you go to the company B

now after doing everything uh the company B verifies uh your uh I mean we did do the background verification right uh and uh the overall right now the background variation uh Industries uh too large so um it's like more than uh you know multi-billion industry right now and it's also there is a so many problems in the background irrigation for example the last company you have worked right now uh they are not operating and so many other things and here is like you don't even have to do it uh so you'd uh you add company if you are holding it some kind of uh

credential over there and go to Company B uh and you're definitely work there there is a no need for background Evolution and anything so this kind of uh things in real life it solves so it's not like only just talking how uh those credentials or those you know blocks and techno underlying technology how uh uh you know we uh does technology solving the problem in the real life [Music] um it makes things more efficient I guess because you can just automatically verify and automatically credentialize and things like that so I'm curious you're both building a technology right you're both building a business around that um I'm sure you thought long and hard about where you wanted to build this or

maybe it was lens uh being launched that said oh actually this is my idea I want to build but I'm going to assume you guys have been thinking about social media for a long time and had this as an idea before that but you guys both chose to build on lens uh which is on polygon and so that's the blockchain you're building on lens is kind of the the social graph of the ecosystem that you're sort of tapping into and building on top of what made you guys um choose that route in that sort of tech stack and did you consider any others um or you know what was that process like uh we'll let Jonathan if you want to take this to start yeah so I think as I briefly mentioned as well like we were on the lookout for sort of an interoperable protocol

because we truly believe that kind of we could create our own nfts in the background but they're not really worth anything because then you can block your access to favor we've given you a key but we just changed the locks so it's worth nothing anymore so the only way for that social profile to be worth something is if it's interoperable that's where lens is the first one we found that actually did it from like a user perspective uh a lot of the previous ones where like hey here said the diesel chain you can build anything on it but they're all kind of Walled Gardens and we shouldn't build web uh three you know we build web 2 where it's wall guard and that don't talk to each other so I think that's where kind of lens is really the only Natural Choice to start with uh to do that kind of um

like shared social graph um polygon obvious is a choice of theirs so uh not much that we can consider on that front so far it's been going well so uh at least better than Solana so have to be happy with the stability right now uh so I'm gonna be worse for sure um and um in any case kind of it's uh early days and then uh we're looking at some others as well like we're in talks with cyber connect Etc like how can you actually integrate more of your web free presence into your favorite profiles the long-term vision is to kind of be a Nexus between all of your web free identities that we don't want to get back to the same point where we have to go check your LinkedIn feed your Twitter feed your Instagram feed your Facebook feed and 20 others because they're all

World Gardens but if everything is permission lesson interoperable you just need one feed uh where you can check kind of all of the stuff and then it might be job related coming from one place it might be fun coming from another place but if it's permissionless we can actually kind of integrate them all into a one feed so is are you saying that there's a way that favor could be like on built on top of multiple blockchains or multiple like social graphs like if there's another lens protocol built on I don't know you know a layer two like arbitrum or something you could also build on top of that and somehow that would be interoperable between lens and whatever the other one is yeah I think kind of like if you like I'm not a developer so I don't over complicate things but uh

like not everything has to be unchanged so we don't have to think that much about bridging and all that but really kind of your favorite profile right now is a web 2 profile it leaves on Google cloud and it's kind of um got all the perks off uh being an easy web 2 profile but then what makes it web free is you can connect it to your lens profile you can connect it to your board apps you can connect it to your cyber connect web free or some other setups and then kind of all of those becoming interoperable um so when I make a post I could in the future elect that this is going on a diesel platform plus on lens plus somewhere else if somebody follows me they can actually follow me on three uh like blockchains at the same time and I think the interoperability it can

all be kind of from user perspective kind of uh unified into one place go one more question Jonathan just before we move over to the Lash you mentioned that you are already building favor it sounded like before you knew about lens I'm just curious did you also think about building your own interoperable standards at any point or has there been discussions around that um at that point we're thinking like we'll just start with a token ecosystem and kind of sort of the reward part first and then kind of leave this sort of uh like option for connecting to a protocol once somebody figures it out and then skip developing and we realize that okay they're actually doing exactly

what we need to be part of this and kind of provide that first like genuine ownership part of the building blocks you must have been so stoked when you first yeah it was a random interaction we went to get some obvious swag from uh their booth in um the like event in Finland and then went to Broadway in the evening and then realized like okay these guys are pretty cool and they're building something cool apparently also for web free social so let's see what it becomes and then one day in the year it kind of released like okay so this is actually exactly what we're looking for into I also got on to lens via their swag at a conference so uh marketing tip

right here for anyone uh make some good swag because Ave and lens have the best way and attend hackathons and conferences and get the swag be there early because it's taken at the moment everybody's spewing up for it in the morning then he's taking like first day halfway through Pro tip get your lens or your Ave swag before you get your coffee at conferences that's it yeah the last interested to hear if you have anything to add in terms of just why you chose lens uh did you consider anything else uh and what helped you kind of guide that decision yeah so initially we uh we held like uh idea or all idea of what we have to build but uh I was exploring

many things and did not find anything so we started even though uh when learns uh lens did not launch we even decided you know our own uh so we thought like let's build you know start with web uh web 2 so kind of build something our own and so we started building our backend and we built have built some some of the functional functionalities over there then uh one day I was searching and exploring the Twitter and heard about lens launch so I I could let let's check it out what's there and then uh I went to website and went to the whole uh developer documents how things are

working and uh I was about to go go to bed at the tight and um yeah then and then just just open the website and it's like for next six hours I'm just exploring what how is how things are working and um it was uh really amazing to see like whatever we were trying to build is like they uh I mean the social graphs and things was already there I mean the underlying underlying architecture was already there so uh I thought that uh what we are trying to build uh it lands fit completely you know in that so let's let's uh build on top of this so

we don't have to you know build our own things and then don't have to move from web to web 2 to Web 2.0 and three like that so we decided to build on top of that we scrap our all whatever we have built till now and it's give us speed as well because like uh every architecture was uh already there so we already have to build you know the interface first and then top of that some uh our smart contract and all the things so at that point it become Natural Choice to uh you know build on lens um one of the things that's very interesting I think another big feature not necessarily that blockchain unlocks although somewhat but it's more just the

open uh open source concept of this is the composability right so both of you were like well we started building this app um and you don't need to build a blockchain polygons got that covered you don't need to build the social graph lens has that covered and then just today I Was preparing for our news roll-up we have at the end of the week and there's three announcements today on Twitter um from stani and lens has integrated in with um push I think it's called push protocol so now they have notifications um which notify the users if they get a comment or a mirror whatever um so that's another feature you don't have to build you can just integrate in there was the just integrated with ens so now they can like um anything that ens plugs into it'll

show your lens handle your lens photo Etc uh and then the other one is I think lensport which is a Marketplace for the nft specifically in the lens ecosystem so these are three different features I guess technically that neither of you have to build because there's just others already doing it can you just sort of speak to that and what that experience has been like of just this kind of composability because that to me is super interesting and also super valuable yeah Jonathan we'll let you start uh sure yeah so kind of so so far we've um been a bit kind of um like peak in choosing from the functionality disciplines mostly because like we're trying to build everything kind of ux burst so that's why we built a native web 2 at first and then we're kind of

block by block integrating web 3 stack there so we actually were the first ones to have the dispatcher in uh plays kind of from the get-go which means you didn't have to sign all of your transactions because um I'm again for the fourth time this year locked out of my metamask on mobile because it for like refuses to reroute me from any mobile app to metamask and things are mobile are just terrible when it comes to kind of quality ux and then it's kind of out of your hand so if metamask is being um stuck then you can't really fix it yourself so we're trying to do it in a way where you can actually even go on a desktop um and connect once with your Ledger and then your mobile app works independently but that's kind of why we haven't implemented all of the features like

paid collects and things like that yet but it's definitely been kind of making things so much easier also from like a user growth perspective so obviously a lot of people want to get all in swipe list so we've been able to help them and then we kind of pick the best users and give them white lists and also kind of get a lot of content from Leinster and from orb and uh blendstube Etc that also flows in real time into our um kind of interface so not only is it giving you the tick it's also giving you the network effect of a social platform and even if you're starting like there are 70 000 I guess profiles and lens right now so when you integrate with lens your app has 70 000 profiles the first day

and that's a pretty good starting point instead of going there and figuring out your loan then you just have to kind of expand your own footprint there and find your own niche but it's really kind of providing a lot of things that uh like typically let's say a building on a chain alone wouldn't amazing unless you want to add to that yeah and so just uh taking one more example right now here uh so for example the next thing is in in the social media is one to one chat and the good thing is like now uh we don't have to edit individually the lens team is uh kind of already working on uh on this so uh so right now we just have to focus on what we are trying to solve the problem

and underlying architecture we can just uh use it so that's pretty good thing and does does lens involve you as a builder in the architecture that they are building are they coming to you and saying hey what can we build for you guys or maybe on the opposite end are they educating you on hey we just built this maybe you should go and consider using it so uh the really good thing is like they have created groups on telegram so all the builders Jonathan me and other all the builders are already there and whatever things they are trying to build uh they you know and just uh being there uh like

uh this is what we are trying to build and uh also uh they're often take the opinions like you know what's the problem you are having and also so it's kind of you know discussion and brainstorming all together so that's really good isn't it wild like imagine being in a and I guess it wouldn't have been telegram it would have been I don't even know what it would have been they uh whatever the original text chat group was like back when I said I think he was building like Facebook you know it's so it's such a different way of building I mean composable is really the word uh that we didn't really see before you know all of

a sudden I always think about how much fun it is to like go into a Dao and you know I know different separate business model but like it's so fun now you don't have to interview you could just like pop into somebody's Discord and see exactly how they're running things and you could show up to one of their weekly meetings and you're like in their company it's wild this this is a total this open source way of building that we haven't really seen in decades it's uh it's very different Jonathan any anything to add about what it's like building uh with lens and do they involve you in their their architecture yeah we've been of course kind of uh like we've had our own chat also um with them from the early days uh onwards and kind of um working a lot of especially kind of like sincerlinster

that's kind of uh like the main main app that they've been developing for since it's very easy to kind of integrate new features in a browser version so you can kind of test everything on a day's notice send Yogi's super responsive the guy I'm dead the linster development so it's scary sometimes you see that okay in 12 hours we'll have this live and we're like okay so how do we get this but um at the same time like we have to as I mentioned since we're building kind of ux first and mobile experience first um we need to kind of pick and choose a bit on the feature side but the team is being super helpful so we've been talking a lot with Josh who said one of the Superstar developers on their side and he's really helping us out kind of figuring out how do we get that kind of

uh like signatureless experience to the entire uh lens flow and kind of by getting to the point where you feel like you're using Twitter but um like it's actually working on Jane in the back end side but you don't like whenever you realize you're working on chain something went wrong so that should never be kind of the case every time you have to sign something it's actually a negative sure I love I love your focus on ux it's so yeah right it's amazing uh I'm curious on the so continuing on with sort of working in in the lens ecosystem one of the interesting things in web3 is the way that we've been like funding projects I mean ethereum has just been a darling at this right they

just continue to give back and sort of build the the next iteration of applications that that are built on top of ethereum and keep sort of like reinvesting into the network because this brings Network effects um Jonathan as you touched on and lens has kind of done this so they thankfully were built by stani and the crew that came from Ave and so they already have a successful business they're well funded and so they could launch this lens ecosystem and and be a big part of funding that and then also having the the dev support to sort of like uh educate and and support those um these these different applications so I'm just curious and you don't have to go into details if if some of us are allowed to share but does it do you guys get grants or like how does that all

work in terms of if you want to go and build on lens what sort of support are you getting monetary wise or financially um and what's that been like uh Jonathan feel free to start here yeah so for us kind of we were lucky enough to already be uh Venture funded when we started working on lens so we decided to kind of uh like let the folks who really need the grants to get them on a hindsight we probably should have taken some of that money yeah it makes life very easier yeah it's been a lot of fun doing fundraising this market for the last six months or so and just realizing that actually the ticket sizes keep shrinking and shrinking uh but uh kind of yeah we sort of decided against it and maybe shouldn't

have but it's great that there is a grand system and I think with that sort of Open Source mentality and the whole composability of things it means that you can have like one industrious person who can really build an entire app uh based on a kind of um a grant so that can kind of be a great way of sort of prototyping and getting there then obviously if you find that fit then it's gonna take a lot more money than a grant to kind of make it into a mainstream reality but nobody yet knows what's going to be the best part of web free social so just funding a lot of experimentation is going to be a great way to do it um unless anything to add there yeah so like the lens uh we got the lens Grant uh I mean we still have to get in the

wallet but uh we got approved uh in the first they have like different batches in the first which we were kind of late so we were not there and now after three to four months they have second batch and we uh we got into it and uh this really uh good uh basically for individual developers and who are trying to experiment things and build things so getting Grant and you know going uh going and building so it it helps a lot so from the day one you don't have to worry about the to getting fonts uh you know uh from the uh VCS and everything initially you can start from something and if you see

something then then you can decide and go to uh getting funding and everything so Grant really helps in the web 3 overall absolutely uh you kind of already answered this Jonathan but I gotta ask because I was just wondering so you guys are building on top of lens and when I think of social media I think of all these applications that built on top of Twitter back in their early days and then Twitter shut off their apis and completely screwed over all these businesses now web3 obviously is trying to prevent that um but I couldn't help but think going into this episode I was like well I mean they all kind of are building on lens they kind of are relying on lens um I mean for example right now lens doesn't open up to anyone right they're kind of whitelist only which I know you

said some 70 000 like as soon as you plug in you already have that which is amazing but maybe they could have a million by now you know so like maybe it's holding you back maybe they can rug you and I'm not saying they will of course they will not I'm just curious though have you thought about that yeah have you thought about that is that a worry that you have I'm sure a lot of people have it when they build on Facebook or on Twitter um but interested to hear your thoughts about that sort of relationship with lens yeah it's a great point and kind of the web 2 history is kind of uh like a history of backstabbing developers um on pretty much all the fronts um as well as advertisers so yeah Twitter kind of shutting down their apis and killing a lot of businesses or then they clone

your business and put it into their actual suite and then on the other hand like Facebook back in the day told everybody go and advertise so you can buy likes for your Facebook page and then you get that reach because everybody follows your page and then they rugged you completely and told you actually now you have to advertise in order for those people who you just advertise to get on your page to see your posts and that's kind of what happens when you don't own any of that and I think kind of uh like the cool part of um like the smart contract based system is that it's way harder to rug people and kind of uh remove things out of there um and obvious yes it could be much bigger but as I think we discussed before um the episode we will probably see what

happens when you try to keep people in swipe lists there's gonna be uh like tons and tons of spammers scammers squatters said that are swarming in and trying to get their 10 felons profile so they can select an Open Sea so uh it's a tricky balance of trying to do it where now for example doing it with those automated nft collections so if you connect any nft worth more than let's say 0.1 East you're able to get a lens white list that's kind of part of that package deal because we're trying to get those like really high quality people on board in some automated way instead of hand picking them like we've done so far but yeah it's obviously always um like a hypothetical risk with any partner but I think with

interoperability uh like if Lynn starts rugging people uh like uh us and delicious team up and we Fork lens into a new protocol um like we we can I think if that were to happen since it's kind of Open Source Code then it would just mean that all the folks who relied on it let's just uh like clone the contracts and do a better one which is I think a good way to in a way hedge 3 Squares with Twitter because they own all the users you can obviously copy paste Twitter source code but that doesn't give you anything because you don't have any of um the follow-up relationships the content the users um but here it would be kind of um at least to a certain extent easier um so when people connect their wallets

you kind of have that data also on your side so that's one of the reasons why not not saying that lens is doesn't become successful they decide to sunset in two years and then we have a ton of people who don't have uh lens anymore so that's also why kind of your favorite profile exists separately off lens and we actually have about 10 times more users on favor than we do on lens um inside our application uh kind of on a day-to-day basis so there's a lot of people who haven't yet been eligible to get a lens profile but through how we built it they can actually follow Lynn's profiles in favor they can see the lens content on favor they can upvote it and kind of be part of the discovery experience they just can't post on the

protocol yet that'll also bring us a bit of safety in the sense that let's say somebody else takes Overland says the most popular app or lens decides to uh break down or let's say polygon explodes is maybe the most likely scenario that there's always kind of backups in the sense that at least a web 2 backup is still better than no backup right wow very interesting thank you for that just fun fact here talking about the scammers with the whitelists um Webster Academy is actually the most followed account on lens with over 60 000 I think followers pretty much everyone's handle follows us but not even because they're all basically I don't know how many but 99

of them are scammers trying to get a white list we didn't white list them obviously so actually most of them don't even have a lens profile it's just their wallet but we didn't give them the white list but for that exact reason um but very interesting anything you want to add to that yeah sure so like as Jonathan already mentioned that the cool thing is like everything on data repo so you just Fork it uh if things are not working you're just working and you just build your own version of it so it it is really easy so which are which were not possible in the past in in the web too so because all the code base are not open source or not public so you did not know what's going behind it now it's really cool like uh

just you forget and whatever well you want to do just do it devs are amazing just like hey is there a lot of risk here like ah just Fork it it's easy I would never have thought of that but that's super super cool Jonathan you mentioned that uh you have more users on who are not lens holders than you do who are is that because the the sign up and login is different for the non-lens people can they do it without a wallet yes so kind of we I like that we sort of reopen a way uh for like you can use even your uh Facebook login uh to log into your favor if you want to and

create your profile or Google or email uh to kind of keep it very easy to get onboarded and the long-term wishes is actually kind of automatically create wallets for new users when they create their lens profile if they don't have a wallet because we're really kind of in the next billion people here and the next billion people will need somebody to hand hold them again my grandmother if we actually want to get her the ownership of stuff We're not gonna tell her to go metamask first like she's gonna link your password already so uh that's just not a reality where uh mainstream is gonna be onboarded so that's kind of why we get that web 2 onboarding experience and then bit by bit we're on boarding the

high quality creators onto lens and now with more and more automation kind of uh the other interesting project we're working with is called click out of Singapore they do the solar bound tokens based on your web 2 history so we're rolling out this week the first pilot where you actually get a favor uh click SVT for uh your Twitter history so we check whether you have genuine followers whether you have an account that's a bit older than a few days for example as we saw that actually a huge amount of scammers have 20 Twitter accounts 20 discords 20 favor accounts and they all have like 10 bought followers so it's really hard to figure out who are real but with this sort of setup we can actually at least a bit more carefully validate who has a

genuine history web 2 and then help onboard them so let's say you have 10 000 genuine followers on Twitter we should go out to Red Carpet let's get you hand hold uh lint onboarding and make sure you actually have service level that you should have on Twitter but you don't so you're just waiting to be rugged on Twitter essentially but then if you're one of those high quality creators like we should be serving you better and there's automated ways to authenticate that so until Twitter again shuts down the apis that's where we're not building ourselves we rather rely on Partners who are maybe less likely to be rugged guess Twitter you say it's a matter of time before Twitter uh removes our 50k followers where they realize we're trying to kind of steal them from them it's interesting to hear you talk about

because the one thing we we haven't really dove into is how are we going to get to a billion users uh and obviously there's there's a long way to go we're very we're very far away from there right now but we're getting there quickly and it's interesting to hear you mention your focus on creators and I guess there is this you know which chicken and egg right if you're the first user in a social media it's kind of lame there's not really anything to do you can't really connect with anybody but if you're also the first one there and there's no creators and you're not much of a Creator yourself then that's also sort of so it brings up a question for me are you and are you both focused

on do you think about that like how are we going to get to a billion users and do you think about what the strategies are to get there does lens talk to you about what they're doing and is there sort of like if there's if all 100 builders on lens all work together is that something that happens I know lens has a conference talk to us about how you guys are approaching that how do we get to a billion users yeah I think there's obviously a lot of steps in between now and then uh and I think the user experience is really it's been the biggest blocker right now so I spent one day like three hours trying to buy something on open C just because I didn't realize that the difference between Matic and raftmatic is that it's

a different color uh currency symbol and then when you've got to figure that one out and you realize you can't use your native magic you have to get some rapmatic in order to be uh buying that nft on a centralized platform uh that's one of the most popular web free platforms right now so uh that's what we need to solve first where you at least feel like you're on a Twitter or Instagram on the front end and it's not super complicated but I think overall it's um gonna be kind of uh like bit by bit onboarding people towards more and more of that web free mentality so if we start by asking your wallet address or uh even worse your seed phrase that's the first onboarding step as we've seen some of the earlier

projects do in web 3 then most people will turn there because they have no idea what you're talking about and if they do they're definitely gonna not give you their seed phrase so it's a very small part of ready but gullible people that you're going to be onboarding um so just kind of making you feel natural and we actually found like when it comes to the creators and sort of the audience we phone kind of third niche in between those the curators where we saw that that was actually the kind of good starting point so we have about uh like 60k users around 12K daily actives right now in favor and those 12K daily activities are actually creating more than a hundred thousand posts every week um just on the favor app side of things

uh because a lot of them are curating kind of um the coolest news articles YouTube videos tweets other content from other platforms and that's been kind of a good way to start getting kind of interesting content um on the platform and curating it into different topics now that we have that kind of uh active amount of users we're able to vote on content and kind of help service the best one now it's a good time to start onboarding the more mainstream creators we're in talks with one 10 million follower YouTuber from Turkey for example about onboarding on lens in favor and a lot of like turkey has been a very big market for us with kols and creators because they have like 10 million crypto wallets in the country

so it's already kind of a very natural market to onboard a lot of uh also mainstream creators interesting but kind of that was an interesting part to start with so otherwise you just have people waiting for Content or even people waiting for an audience and it's really hard to get both of them at the same time so I think the other big question on on our mind and unless if you have any doubt on that I can let you jump in here so we got the interoperability standards we're building on top of that that's that's lens then we've got the users which as you mentioned where you guys are figuring out how to attract them when the customers come you guys still

need to make money there needs to be a business model here let's talk about that for a second what's what's the business model for orb in favor do you even know you know maybe you don't know yet maybe you're still trying to figure it out I know that when we first talked to lens comments this earlier in the episode they still weren't sure what their business model was uh but curious if you guys are willing to give us a little peek behind the closed doors of how you guys are thinking about the business model and the less you can go I guess Jonathan you can start my AdWords work disconnected I'm trying to connect them okay yeah good diversion uh so yeah on the paper side as I kind of touched

up on the advertising model previously so that's going to be I think what one of the core parts of it so I think um like somebody has to pay that's just the reality um if you want to kind of make a successful business and it's either uh purely about Brands uh paying a very invasive monetization model like Facebook where they uh track your GPS and Google reads your gmails Facebook reads your WhatsApp conversations in order to data mine you to profile better ads that's the only way for you to talk to your friends online right now so it shouldn't be the only way but there's always the people who prefer to have a free option and there's people who prefer to be paid for their content and

they rather be paid more than less so we think bringing the brand into that conversation through the token advertising model can be a good solution but at the same time because the token model allows you to kind of do all kinds of sort of payments we can also have the people who want to subscribe to premium content like on patreon or on sub stack kind of pay some tokens to subscribe to a certain stack of premium content there's the native lens collect features where you can collect people's posters nfts and also let's say you don't want to see any advertising you can just like to have the advertising free version for X tokens a month or minting custom nfts or reactions so instead of just a sticker that everybody

has you can have a limited edition nft reaction for your post or Creator can kind of give those to their favorite fans or most passionate fans so there's a lot of things that kind of have been working in web 2 either in gaming or freemium apps or social apps thank God if you build a well-functioning token model you can actually bring all of those into it a lot of it could of course also work without the tokens but the cool part of token is that it's going to reward the early adopters so if you were actually one of the first people on Facebook you have the bragging rights and maybe a very short username but if you're one of the first people in aweb 3 social then your tokens that you made early on are actually hopefully going to

be worth something so there's a big difference also if you build it through the tokens and then we're of force hoping to take like a nice little cut from everything so then we can get our Lambo someday that's what it's all about right oh you don't want to be the only ones with the lambo so we're taking everybody with us that's the plan everybody you get a Lambo you get a Lambo and you're not you're not gonna take me like as you said there the key you're hoping to take a little cut not a 100 kind of Facebook currently takes yeah yeah we're happy with that one billion even instead of the 89 billion kids rewarded me that

Nilesh what about you what are you thinking of there yeah so at Creator side uh there is a uh already uh modules like on the top of the lens where is the collective is already Jonathan mentioned that UI creators can collect and they can get paid off uh of their content at all site what we are focusing is like uh we would be uh I mean planning to monetize from from the organization side so as we are bringing both together end users and the we are also building the infrastructure for all the all the web 3 companies and all the organizations so there uh we are trying to uh figure out some model where kind of for posting

some opportunities uh and finding some Talent so for from there we can uh make a money and uh uh this is the one point and the other point it's like and right now there is no solution if you want to do Market your business to uh uh if you are playing in the web free industry and you are you want to reach out to other web 3 companies who are into it and you want to sell some of your services there is a known structure there so it the orb would be kind of biggest uh infrastructure where all the company where three companies are there and uh we we can monetize on top of that if you want to and you want to do sales with

the companies or want to reach out to somebody and so we have we can have some minimal uh subscription model or uh anything so there are a lot of opportunities to monetize over there so yeah very interesting um we're gonna begin to wrap up here and so Jay has some speed round questions for us he's going to ask some questions uh and we'll give you guys uh some quick answers or you guys will give us some quick answers here before we do though I want to just let you guys take a second to just let people know how they can learn more about orb in favor and where they can go I know not everyone listening has a lens profile handle or has access to your apps um we are going to do some form of giveaway at some point soon it probably

won't be at the drop of this uh podcast as we just need to figure out some things because we don't want another 60 000 followers on lens but we do have some ideas and so um to the audience that's listening um stick around over the coming weeks we will announce something probably on Twitter in our newsletter or again on the podcast and we'll let you know how you can get in on these and you can access them all but for now if they want to just kind of learn or explore maybe there's something they can do even without a lens handle um you know let them know what they can do Jonathan will let you start um yeah sure so uh the favorite app is already available in the App Store and Play Store uh you can download it anywhere in the world um the spelling is p-h-a-v-e-r because

we did if the.com domain was too expensive back in the day and we didn't realize all the cool kids have XYZ domains so if you guys gone with an F but a lot of 80s rap Vibes now in the name uh anyway uh you can download it uh it still requires an invite code if you don't have somebody's username uh you can use uh if you know how to spell my name you can use yonatan or when you don't use code early bird you can get in uh to favor we are also as I mentioned running a various silent whitelist campaigns we whitelisted thousands of users through kind of hand picking the quality profiles but that doesn't really scale anymore so now if you have some of our kind of uh like

first round of nfts if you connect let's say obvious your Apes but also a lot of cheaper ones you can connect one of those into favor to verify that you're a real user and then we can actually get uln's profile or then you can verify your Twitter history soon with that new Soul bound token method so we're experimenting with a couple of new ways there will be other more scalable options soon for lens handles as well but as you mentioned it's super hard when like you give people an option you think like great we'll get some high quality users and then you get 59 000 scammers following you and then 1 000 people who genuinely deserve it and then you have to like hand come through those wallets somehow so no good deed goes unpunished

thanks Nilesh feel free to uh give us a little bit of explanation there as well yeah so right now we are in the private beta uh so the apps are available on app store and play store you can download it but once you download it uh you can sign up for the wait list over there in the app itself and then we are continuously doing uh we are rolling out some invites to users so I would say just go to our website it's orb.ac and download the app sign up for the wait list and also follow us on Twitter because uh Twitter and join our Discord so we do all the announcement on

discords if we are opening uh Nexus for more users and we also hand picking the users from the Twitter so the best way uh interact uh with our tweets and uh so basically we want to know that it's genuine user or not so we are handpicking from there as well it's really ironic that web 3 social companies are saying follow us on Twitter and that's how we're going to make sure that's the world we live in so I get it but it's just really funny because yeah it's we're trying to throw a life raft at the poor people who are now being oppressed by Twitter we're actually speaking of doing a campaign called the SBT sbts where if

you've been Shadow banned on Twitter you get a soul bound token best report for that because those are the true web free Heroes now if you haven't been Shadow bad by Twitter you're not doing it love it well we appreciate the both of you for saving social media for us uh for the many that have been impacted by Facebook and Twitter and whoever else and they're centralized censorship ways that they uh they like to live and Lead uh Jay why don't you walk us through a bit of a quick speed round here yeah let's do it okay so I'm gonna fire off some questions at you guys uh and I'll let you each answer them uh and we'll probably have three or four questions for today let's start with uh you

Jonathan what's an nft or or a fungible token what's in what's a token you'll never sell um I got a pardon me nft for the permissionless conference and that was a really cool one because it just gives you so much access to really great people in the web free so that's also the only one where I haven't gotten rugged so that's a good memory for me the only good NFP memory I want to make it cool because everyone gets rugged and went through all the time Jonathan's had a is that a bad go of it that's for sure no lash what about you itself is energy

nice awesome uh who are you learning the most about web3 from right now whether it be a newsletter or a personality on Twitter or a Creator on lens who you who are you following that you feel is putting out great content and educating on web3 yeah a lot of good people on Twitter it's really hard to kind of uh find it through all the kind of both messages my favorite newsletter right now is called tldr they're really nicely summarizing kind of the web free updates um every day I have like 20 newsletters in my inbox that's the only one I try to read so that's a good tip for trying to kind of get the big news every day and of course favor is a great place to get

everything yeah so for for me there are a lot of people uh but I'm also so how I got into web 3 is like uh from a long time I'm uh listening the podcast of Balaji and uh this is how uh uh I mean the how we're describing the and why we need the web 3 and all the things uh he is producing kind of really good content and uh he also launched one book the network estate right also going through that so that's the biggest but there are many get a pretty pretty heavy book He's a he's a big thinker uh something

something you've purchased recently for under 100 that brings you Joy does not have to be a digital asset or a digital uh product Jonathan you can go first that's a really good question I tend to buy two expensive things um I'm actually right now quite happy uh off this like balance stool that I'm sitting on that's why I've been walking around because I'm sitting in my armchair for the last two years with covet and now I finally decided to get a desk and I got a hundred uh Euro kind of balance tool and it seems to be actually a really good thing for like not breaking my back mmm nice nice it was a good tip

yeah for me it's like uh from long time I've been working from the laptop only uh since I moved from the uh from the India and recently I bought uh the keyboard and mouse and monitor all the setups so that's pretty good Game Changer Game Changer set up yeah okay this has been a fabulous episode thank you so much Jonathan and alesh for joining us and for sharing your vision and also the vision of web3 social which I think we're all super excited about we just need to get the users there and it all starts with the builders can't get any users there if there isn't anything to do so it starts with you guys so thanks for all your work uh we'll be

sure to put in the show notes all the links to find you uh and hopefully our listeners will be joining orb in favor and getting involved in web3 Social soon thank you for listening to web3 Academy we hope this helps you along your web 3 journey and if it does please share this episode And subscribe so you don't miss the next one nothing in this podcast was Financial advice crypto and web 3 can be risky you can literally lose it all in fact if you invest on account of what we say you probably will lose it all so don't do that in all honesty the point of this podcast is to remove the noise of markets in price and focus on utility and implementation anyway so you should not take any of this as Financial advice thank you friends and see you in the next one