Nader Dabit I Lens Product Demo | Pragma Lisbon 2023

foreign [Music] which is the scalability solution that we introduced to lens a few weeks ago and I want to talk about what it is how it works and then do a quick live demo so the challenge that we have I think in web 3 in general that we consistently see is giving users the full control of their content providing them with all of the characteristics like sovereignty ownership and things like that but we still want to offer the ease of use and the ux that people expect from traditional applications so bringing the really powerful and important things that we love about web3 and blockchain and then still giving them the ux that they have so therefore offering a better product and a like a higher polished and better I would say value proposition for coming into this space because even though we care a lot about blockchains and we care about all the stuff that we're geeking out about here the average user is kind of not as bought into a lot of this stuff so ultimately providing a better ux overall is going to be kind of how we win the masses even though that's kind of like a meme at this point we truly do want to bring in a lot of new users into this space so some of the values that we think out of uh in general blockchains and web3 provide are things like permanence immutability sovereignty censorship resistance and ownership and these cannot be brought to you know into these applications using traditional infrastructure uh therefore you know blockchains and similar Technologies do so currently our system and a lot of applications that are you know quote unquote web3 are essentially on Chang meaning they're using either like an L1 or an L2 and these different technologies have different trade-offs mainly around scalability cost security and time to finality so obviously l1s were you know brought to the market became popular we realized they didn't scale we now start seeing things like l2s and even what you would consider maybe like an L3 and these again have their trade-offs but for something like lens we realize that everything doesn't need to be on chain things that are Financial things that are collectible yes but if I want to post a comment or if I want to post a you know a picture or something like that and I don't really care that if someone can collect it or not it doesn't necessarily need to be on shame so why would we continue using these types of Technologies if there is an option that still offers the permanence immutability and ownership but without the cost and the scalability concerns that we've seen on blockchains and a good kind of uh example of why this is so important is Twitter itself I think around when World Cup was happening was hitting around 50 000 transactions per second the most scalable blockchain that we know of today that actually you know might work in theory is really closer to something like 10 000 transactions per second and these blockchains are shared infrastructure meaning that there are thousands of apps each with tens of thousands of users possibly all sharing a kind of like a compute environment that doesn't scale beyond that so imagine saying oh we're going to build an application that scales to tens of thousands of transactions per second we literally don't have a traditional blockchain that can do that right now so therefore we needed to explore other options and when I say we I'm always talking about the amazing engineering team at Lens who I'm kind of here speaking on behalf of so traditional blockchains are not optimized for data storage so why would we use a traditional blockchain for data storage well we've done that because there really wasn't maybe another option that offered both permanence and immutability we had immutability with things like ipfs but we did not have permanence but there are options that are out there that offer this but the challenge at the time was that they did not offer the finality that was needed for the type of ux that we wanted so for example our weave is technically like not really a blockchain that uses a blockchain like structure that is more like a graph database if you kind of wanted to compare it to a data storage mechanism as opposed to kind of like a distributed Ledger um but are we main purpose isn't to facilitate a decentralized currency or to prevent the double spin problem which is kind of what most blockchains that we know of are really there to provide the main purpose of our weave is to provide data storage so with our weave they don't really care about some of the concerns that you might have with traditional blockchains and the main way that this is done is through their consensus mechanism again it's not the same as what you might think of in a traditional blockchain what they use is something called proof of access and this this consensus mechanism isn't focused around securing transactions or the or keeping up with the network State on every single transaction that happens the main thing that it's focused on has to do more with data recall and data permanence so what was realized as an optimal system would actually use both it would be like a hybrid model that would use traditional blockchains for financial transactions for anything that needed to be collected but we could also possibly use are we for data storage and with newer protocols built on top of our weave like I'm going to talk about just a moment bundler Network you're able to get that very low latency finality that would be not possible directly on on our weave while providing immutability and permanence so if you wanted to distill what momoka is it's kind of that it's a hybrid of using on chain for what needs to be on chain and using everything else going to bundler with rweave and you could say that are we of his own chain but it's not own chain in the in the sense that we often think about it so with momoka we provide significantly in three increased throughput and reduced costs without sacrificing user sovereignty allowing us to realize our vision of scaling lens to the world and the flow looks something like this without going into a lot of technical details we have a lot of the stuff uh available online that I'm going to pull you to some resources the client instead of sending a transaction to the network to the polygon Network which is what we've done in the past we introduced two new pieces of infrastructure one is the momoka submitter and one is the verifier the submitter simulates the transactional polygon and gets the simulated transaction result so it would be like as if you actually transacted on polygon what would that result be you can you can actually just simulate that you don't actually have to store that so you then you take that data and you store it on a less costly Network which is our weave so you take that simulated data it still is technically the data that would have been stored on chain but you're storing it on a less expensive Network we then have the verifier that's running and it's kind of like a listener and it listens for the transactions that are happening on the submitter or I'm sorry on on the the rweave network and it will check to verify the the validity of that and if that transaction is valid then the network apis can pick them up and then surface those to the client-facing applications momoka is gasless and signless we think that one of the most important reasons why lens is being adopted by so many people in so many applications is that it provides the ux that people expect from something like Twitter um or Instagram or one of these other social networks where you're obviously not needing to pay for your transactions when you make an update into your app you're not waiting for it to finalize you have optimistic updates and it just feels really good so we continue to kind of provide that with momoka and again one of the reasons that this is now possible is using a network called bundler which is a protocol built on top of our week and it basically enhances the scalability of our weave by making everything faster and it has instant uploads and instant retrievability and it's significantly less costly than our previous evm Network I would say main focus so with a bundler we're seeing transaction costs up to a thousand times less expensive typically though more in the range of hundreds so what are the results of this we've launched this a couple of weeks ago this screenshot was taken a few hours ago 64 000 transactions at a cost of twenty six dollars that's less than one transaction on ethereum obviously and about the cost of a handful of transactions on some of the other layer twos this is 64 000 transactions so what I want to do is quickly show you how to run a momoka verifier and before I do that I just want to give a huge shout out to the Lynch engineering team um Josh specifically because like they're just incredible and and unbelievable and I get to come here and talk about this cool technology but they're the ones that are actually building in and doing the hard work so I just wanted to give that shout out so what I want to do is quickly just show you what this might look like so here we have we have a couple of new um GitHub repos that show and then kind of just all this stuff is open source so anyone can run this and I'm going to run a verifier in just a moment so we have the momoka verifier and then we've also built out like a UI that will allow you to explore and see the transactions as they're coming in in real time so we have the verifier and then we have the Explorer you can think of the Explorer as something like a block Explorer and of course my internet's kind of slow but let me see if I can get that fixed I'm on my own mobile network here but um as that's loading you anyone can run a verifier and you don't really need to actually download any software to run a verifier as you're about to see you can just actually use npx and all you need to have is an uh a node and an archivener that you can actually spin up with Alchemy or some other provider in just a few seconds and we're going to test that out just a moment but here is the Explorer my internet's really slow I don't know if someone will hear you guys are starting to load up a little bit but I was hoping to do a demo that might not work if my internet's really slow I'm going to give it a shot anyway but anyway this Explorer just shows the transactions as they're coming through in real time and to test this out I wanted to create a post and then see it coming through in real time and also run a verifier so I'm going here to my command line I already have the verifier running actually it looks like um go ahead and clear that out I don't have anything I know that's very small but let me zoom in a little bit here I don't have any software installed to run this verifier the only thing I am doing is running this CLI command npx at Lens protocol passing in the environment which is the network which is polygon passing in my archive node which is something I spun up a few minutes ago at Alchemy and then passing in the concurrency which means how many transactions can be processed concurrently and what I can now do whoops make this smaller is go ahead and run this and we will start having our own verifier running locally and while that's running I would love to create an image to upload um here using mid-journey but again I think this might be kind of too slow but I have this prompt that I'm going to use real quick Has anyone used mid Journey 5 yeah and mid 95 is like really good so I'm just going to say imagine speaking in front of a large group of hackers in Lisbon futuristic looking cyber Funk anime vibes and I like pink and neon colors so I'm adding that as well so I'm going to let that run for a second and then we're going to go back here and if this doesn't work in the next minute or so I'll probably have to just not do this but um or if someone has a faster Wi-Fi that I can connect to you can let me know oh is there an Ethernet okay cool so I'm going to try this see if this works so just turning off the Wi-Fi shouldn't okay I'm just going to go test to see if this is working yet it looks like it might be loading now um can I take questions after this okay cool one or two questions yeah I am running over on my time honestly but I would love to take a couple of questions so I guess I'm gonna just check on this oh it looks like it's loading Okay cool so I'm just going to take this image and um okay it looks like we're getting somewhere momoka running so now what's going to happen is we're now listening to any new transaction that gets posted to momoka now remember that momoka is only adopted now I mean it's starting to be adopted by a lot of apps but not every single app has picked up momoka so we have orb we have limpster a bunch of the main apps are so if a user is posting to one of those Networks and they are one of those apps and they've decided not to make their publication collectible then it should show up and I'm going to um try to rerun this because I'm thinking that after disconnecting it might have messed something up okay still having some Wi-Fi issues try this one more time but if not I will post this later on lens and then you can go and check it out but um okay while that's doing that I will just take a question or two and then if this doesn't work then unfortunately the demo didn't work there's there's no trust because every transaction that has been simulated on on polygon has all of the metadata stored on our weave which can then be replayed using either your own software or you can run the verifier which kind of automatically kind of has all that set up for you and then um essentially it's it is very it is verifiable but it's not on polygon it's on our weave which again has the same characteristics that I guess you would be concerned about immutability and permanence so I guess I'm not getting the question the only point of centralization that could be considered would be the intersection of bundler network and our weave which is has some delay but are we is is is permanent it's been around for quite a few years now longer than most elton's um so I think that with that um what's that so I don't think I understand the question there because um yeah but no there there shouldn't be no trust in the way that this is architected if um you kind of go through and maybe understand how are we works and how the simulations are happening on on the network any other questions okay if you want to check out and maybe learn more and maybe uh for yourself dive into the actual blog posts that we have released that kind of goes into some of the more technical details we have mirror.xyz slash lens protocol.eth this is a pretty in-depth explanation of momoka that goes a lot further than what I when I went into here and that would also check out the GitHub which is equally as well documented and completely open source for you to dive into the code and answer questions like that on your own without trusting me so that's it thank you [Applause]