Stani Kulechov I Web3 Social and Decentralized Media | Aave I Pragma Tokyo 2023

foreign [Music] for our next interview I want to bring on somebody that you all know from a different part of what we're going to discuss today which is uh stani who is the founder of Ave you may all know Ave as a defy app that you've all used in the past few years from the early eat lend days to what Ave is now we've seen a massive Evolution on how this ecosystem has been shaped but what we're going to talk about today is how do we think about the future of consumer applications in what three and that is specifically talking about web 3 social networks and decentralized media it's a very hot topic because there's a lot of things that we're seeing in the web 2 world that we want to change to improve or we're seeing not being done right to the opportunity that we get to actually think about ownership governance in a better sense of community and belonging into into our web 3 ecosystem and that's where Lens comes in we're going to talk about how the protocol works why we decided to or he decided to do it and how he's thinking about all those things as a company in a protocol so without further Ado please welcome stani on stage [Applause] so stani how's Japan so far very good very good um I have to break my diet which is uh not a good diet but uh it's going to get only better from here well that's wonderful to hear so we're not here to discuss defy today and my first question to you is tell me about what happened where you wanted to change up all of your time and attention and focus to working on a social network what what was that moment and why lens well at some point when um the oven protocol became more decentralized I found more time not necessarily so um it's quite interesting because we've I've been building these interest protocols for the past few years now and I always had an idea that what we're building here in web3 and what got me into the space is that we we're in some ways building a lot of accessibility so we're using um decentralization the blockchain the smart contracts to to build more accessibility uh for people um and with even back in eight land days and in and during Ave the uh division has been about democratizing Finance so bringing uh Financial opportunities um to everyone across across the globe uh with the same uh with the same equal opportunity and the same transparency um and the work hasn't been done still so um quite a lot of my time goes into Ave um enormous amount of time um and and also part of my time goes now to uh lens as well um and with lens the fascinating part is that it's a different kind of problem to solve it's about axes but also um more about the ownership of your Social presence so we've uh with people we tend to transact um you know we have uh now a good transaction layer in finance in in web 3 still needs a lot of work to to be scaled adopted in normal payments for example that we can use stable coins um across wherever it Global has its hackathon next time for example um but also we we do different kind of transactions like we we also uh connect in real life we connect in um over online constantly and we create a lot of value we create a lot of value online but um we don't have a clear way to actually preserve that value um and and also attribute that to to the content we create for example so social for me is an interesting way to um solve that problem so how we can actually change a bit of Dynamics where um we put the content that we create in a more valuable position um and also create um Network effects where um if you are part of the content supply chain that I like to call where you create the content how you can actually get that value to yourself and everything else that has inspired you to create uh something online and also how do you preserve those connections that you make online so it's a different kind of a problem to solve but I think um at oven in the other companies and what I try to guide my team is that we have to focus on problems that are big and you know we're in some ways in a front line of building web 3 meaning that we have to also find bigger problems and challenges to solve and that's where kind of like a we found that lens and and social networking is where we could actually create more impact as well well thank you so much for for uh for that whole background I think that helps really set the stage for the rest of the conversation one thing that I noticed here was that the thing that didn't come up which usually comes up when we hear about somebody else talking about this problem is that part of majority of the motivations for somebody to start something as a decentralized network is the risk of being de-platformed is that because you didn't emphasize it or because you don't think that's as important compared to all the other pieces of value and identity and and capturing the essence of a social interaction I couldn't stop staring your go sucks you know we have we actually have matching socks I was not planned yeah that's that's a go go suck so um yeah so um I think the D platforming isn't really that big of an issue so we kind of like make make an issue out of it because you know decentralization solves solves a lot of that um some of these parts so for example when you have a permissionless access or decentralized protocol these protocols don't look into your backgrounds when you are interacting but I don't really see that the the platforming as a kind of like a big challenge to solve um it's something that is solvable in an open network so as an open network you can create an environment where um anyone can actually participate and it's up to the the um some sort of like a middleware or algorithms to find what is a high signal um and it's what is valuable to surface uh to the rest of the users so in the day platform thing might be an issue to some extent because we're you we aren't using that many platforms online everything has been very concentrated um and I think that's a good thing about web 2 as well like we tend to think of that web2 social is a kind of like a big bad thing but what web to your social did it actually democratized the the way to um you know connect with people online um and also share uh information so web2 social isn't a bad thing uh in general so it really created a democratization as well what I think is is more valuable is that um how can we go 10 steps 10 steps further um and and create a completely open platform an open network where anyone can actually come and you know make a pull request into the infrastructure into the algorithms we create user front-ends and I think it's just also the way we think about uh products in Nava in general so you know imagine if you like if you think about most of the products in the world you really can't go and make a pull request so you can't go and make a pull request to your iPhone or your Android phone and expect something good to happen after if your idea is good and you fix a problem right um but what if in the future you can actually build this way protocols products and and algorithms and it's possible when you build things in a more open way built publicly and you know it's everyone has access to contribute that's a really interesting point so kind of the couple things that you just talked about are ownership kind of governance here there's a sense of identity or actually just a proof of identity do you see that as different Primitives that enable an application or are those the applications that end up with content and content itself is the end use case I I really don't have a good answer of of what's like particular use like end use case for lens because um what we did with lens protocol um to explain a bit um more is that we we look into how social networking and how human behavior social human behavior works and we took different kinds of um um artifacts of that so so for example how people connect share content create content and create it a bit more web created uh way of doing that we also added some more web3 native um kind of like artifact as well which is ability to collect the content as well so collect is a form of appreciate appreciation uh it might be a form of expressing support it can be also a form of consuming digital content as well and there is multiple pieces that actually are valuable from social networking perspective and content creation that by itself is is kind of like a valuable for um the the future of social media I personally think one of the most valuable things is um it is the content itself and how the content gets created so if you think about it today like we're quite alone in terms of like how we create content online you know and how we share you know we create tweets uh you know or any kind of content online usually it's done by one um author um but in the future you might have a Content supply chain where you might have multiple people contributing to the idea um creating that content being participating in the actual production um you might be using an application that provides you good tooling for creating content and then algorithms that actually also surface that content in across multiple applications and that content gets collected so what we might see in the future is that we reinforce the idea of um you know um I I like to probably use a term like ultrasound content because it really shows that you know you can create together something very valuable but also highlights that everything that you create uh together uh you can also share the um uh the value out of it um and monetization for example it's similar to kind of D5 you have a notion of composability built in and you get your remix and and still have everything propagate is that is that a better way of kind of thinking about it yeah okay and also towards that idea um because the content shouldn't stop into the lens protocol itself so what it means is that you should be able to use lens as a distribution channel of everything you create so you might be using um a nft platform to create nfts a platform you might like or smart contracts you should be able to use lens as well so you should plug in everything that exists in web3 into this content chain that's an interesting so could you get give us a more direct example of what that means for what what a version of this would look like I could imagine that you know you might be using um you might be using a music nft platform to meet your nfts um but and as a media protocol but then you notice that maybe all the the audience that you have is actually on um lens and and that there's where the distribution is um and and maybe algorithms that can Surface your content to to people that are um excited about what you're creating as a as a user and in some ways it means that um there's a place to pull everything together so there's a bit of like a gravity effect if you think about it because um if you have this place where you can connect the peers um and you have this like a public town squares um you can actually pull all those Primitives in webtray together um and and Empower so if if there's a place where a lot of music nfts are created you can connect them with the lens protocol to a specific like audience as well so or you know it might be about git coin grants so you you will be able to directly create give grants true lens for example or um like Market the grant to an audience so it's the social graph that gets to remain constant and you get to in a way propagate messages to this graph yeah yeah I think so and and the fascinating part is that everything is um an open playbook so you today anyone can go and make a pull request into the protocol um into any of the um algorithms into the user interfaces um if you have something valuable it really means that you have a really open way to to contribute as well into like how this public town secures will will look like in in the future as well from how you've architected this how do you think about people wanting different things or people just contradicting priorities with each other or just disagreeing with some changes how does the the network decide what is considered true or consistent for everybody versus a sub community yeah I mean there's um thinking about the the lens protocol itself there's there's kind of like a misconception that it's a known chain protocol because there is a big part of the protocol that is on chain um that brings certain type of guarantees so things that the users really need is a guarantee that you own the profile so um you have the ownership of of what's yours but also the audience that you you create and and the the follower graph so you have that ownership as well um those are simple guarantees that the we're using blockchain to provide but actually where the content is reflected into um or where it's located is is up to the the the client's um integrators and eventually users um and I I think we're in a kind of like a interesting position where things are so early that a lot of the community is relying to the actual team but in the background we're working together with many of the clients integrators uh and community members as well in terms of what kind of changes the protocol could have um but you in most cases you see a lot of a lot of the ideas coming directly with a pull requests into the repository which is um quite amazing yeah yeah and but down the line um at some point yeah and going back to the the um uh discussion about the um lenses actually a set of on-chain Primitives and also um off chain um Primitives for social so the clients can actually decide which one of the uh things they want to use for their own use case um and I don't think we really need you don't really need to use everything that lens has to build a interesting social experience what are some of chain Primitives like what are these apis or features here of chain Primitives for example is that where you store the data itself the content data so any client can specify what that destination becomes yeah exactly so you can specify the destination uh in the future you can also uh create a transaction that is a data availability transaction so it doesn't need to be necessarily on chain so you can't really cherry pick what what do you want to do and it depends on your use case our primary goal is to just uh create a very unopinionated protocol that is flexible to various of of use cases now that is super fascinating So speaking of an unopenated protocol when you were looking into creating this what did you find other attempts were lacking whether it's in in web3 or just open source projects or other attempts to make decentralized networks why why decide to do this yourself instead of either improving something that's out there or using something that's out there what we've built with with lenses um very unique in the sense that there's been previous attempts on on bringing social to more like a website native audience um statement is a good example of of that a bunch of other projects and I think there's different things that actually has been working but I think something that we're doing very differently is that we um we're very thoughtful about um even the the actual design decisions and um how how lens could be integrated so just given an example is that even though um you can do transactions on chain you don't really sign those transactions and you don't really pay gas of those transactions so all the blockchain logic is really abstracted away from the users and all the content is reflected pretty much right away so there's a lot of like design choices as well so it's the first time ever our team has been thinking through the lenses of not only how to build a good protocol but also how we ensure that people actually will use this and it doesn't feel clunky uh as an experience so that's a one example the other example is that we've been curating a web3 audience we know that uh what we're building now should be useful for all of us um and and we all we are all the kind of like a primary citizens uh of the lens protocol um you know whether it's you're interested in in Social or D5 or governance um and down the line the idea is that we can expand to more um new audiences as we can scale with the with the technology itself so um when you go to lens you know you're talking to a web tree audience and what we have done in the beginning is that we've we've actually um I mean the protocol is still on beta right so it has 116 000 profiles and we try to get new profile profiles uh in a slower Pace but what we have done in the previously we've um a low listed based on Webster data you know who participates in Dallas decent just Finance um collect nfts create nfts in our Webster's citizens um and if we can make make it work between us first um and we keep continuing improving the experience um we're able to onboard more people as well down the line and I think that's the path we're going towards so we've been very focused on who lens is for now um and what we think it's a web 3 social layer um or it may be more even social layer for web3 and down the line if we can actually um if it's useful for us for different use cases it can be useful for the more bigger audience I mean that will be a fascinating time to kind of have this actually be Mass adopted I want to switch from the essentials networks to decentralized Media so you talked about a a few different types of media contents that are now enabled with The Primitives that are built into lens could you give us an example of what new opportunities it creates whether it's on the monetization or the way people are using it from current user base right now what's new that they couldn't do before or couldn't do efficiently before in web 2. something interesting about um lens what's what's kind of like unique unique behavior is that people might mint different kinds of nfts and content and and basically create nfts elsewhere than in lens but they come to lens for that uh distribution um and as they get used to to the platform um they they basically start to use it for other use cases so um the web3 is a Connecting Point so people come and talk about web3 but because everyone has an identity and that means that you have multiple identities so you might be talking also about music and other things in in terms of the um comparison itself between uh what's happening on lens and elsewhere and especially like in in the tree sort of but through social is that um you really have this kind of like an open stream of sharing um everything that they create and and the value that you can capture so um the monetization plays a interesting role it's not the primary thing about lens itself so I think the the primary idea is that content becomes valuable because um you have a stake in it um you have you're visited into a um a a a network where you have an audience and you truly own it and you know you value that more and you your users value your uh creativity but down the line um being able to create content and monetize it directly has been something uh quite valuable uh so far um and and surprisingly there's a lot of content that is monetized through lens with the collects and and I really want to emphasize how interesting the the collect feature is because it just creates an open design space of um formatization but also what a collect is and we rarely think about like how we consume content online because we've used to the idea that internet is free um right so you can go from one place to another and you can freely read there's Wikipedia you know there's a lot of resources that are free and now internet is moving more towards um paywalled version and you see that newspapers are doing online uh this quite quite frequently at this point so um we have we have an opportunity to redefine how we consume and and how we pay for consuming digital Goods um and and digital content and I think that's where the collect uh feature comes and explaining that to creators uh and users that come outside of Pepsi is is the most exciting thing because it's really every time I explain what a collect is uh it gives me opportunity to think of like how we're going to consume digital content in the future um and using collect as a as a kind of like a tool for that that's awesome and also for a lot of the content creators this is something that they already understand because for them this is their livelihood and now they just get to maximize the way the weights are distributed between a web 2 platform and web3 and that should also click immediately for a lot of them is it whether it's from kind of your research to talking to your users do you feel like making every social behavior transaction deters them from using it like the fact that I can tweet something and not care what happens to the content if it becomes popular or not is is it a feature or like a thing something should be neutral to or does it matter that I know that I liked it and I can sign for the fact that this individual has has appreciated or collected or liked something I I do think that the collects are a very high signal of um appreciation of the content or um creativity or or membership or or something else um so it definitely has a value um but but also I I think a social media Network could work pretty well without um without even the monetization part as well I I think the the the the I think for us what's important is to create different kinds of tools um that somehow support some of capitalization of of the value that you create uh mainly like primarily for for the reason that we want everyone to appreciate more content um and and by creating a a network where you're able to um you know value more and your audience can value more what you're doing and and also uh paying for consuming the content that creates a clear indication of um how valuable your creativity also is and helpful and I think that the bigger issue isn't actually um demonetization it's also like the the design space now in web 2 social and in the internet in general is very limited it's very limited to the attention um as a community and you can see that that every single social media application they track daily active users monthly active users uh weekly and and the stickiness and I think it's just like that by itself limits you to create applications where uh you're trying to get the users to you know just open the application and spend time as much as possible um and and basically then you can charge more for ads um and for that attention that they create but I think you can actually build more interesting things besides that um and if there is better monetization Tools in general uh working in the background without anyone needing to worry about that um the the builders and the creators they can actually create applications that are they have a new new experience so maybe you will open the application once a week uh but it's still one of the most valuable apps that could be ever built um on on online because of the fact that you don't need to rely on the same metrics and the same attention uh span but you have actually something uh new and you have a bigger design space for that and I think that's where where we're trying to to push towards that you're not limited also on selling the attention uh but you have this open design space uh for capturing value um and even without monetization the fact that you have this ownership for um for for your audience you can do new things that you can do before or you weren't motivated to do so just unlocking new behaviors is a pretty good sign of a platform um what are some of the things that you worry about as you uh think about making lens more publicly available or as you review more pull requests what's uh what are things that concern you or future things well some yeah something that is very interesting is that um building something as what lens is is very it's also kind of like challenging because um you can't do everything right away you have certain steps and you want to grow um you could want to grow the audience and the community in a way where it's cultivated uh well um and you have the right stakeholders to decide you know how the protocol will function the future um how things like trust and safety is implemented I personally think something very cool if someone is hacking during this hackathon is that you could create some sort of a adapters or like algorithms for choosing trust and safety policy I could imagine that getting giving that right all the way to the users to choose what kind of policies they want to get get subscribed towards uh could be very cool um and and also um other thing is like at some point like if the AI continues to to get trained like when like where where the difference comes between like a real user and a an actual bot that is behaving like pretty much like a normal user and even more like you will have very sophisticated Bots and and what do we do like how do we resolve this challenge like do we treat them as like normal users or is it weird to talk to a AI bot that you know it's actually quite nice nice spot to talk to you so so those are like very like scary and freaky uh things but they're coming very soon so that's why like we invest this weekend this weekend probably yeah I'm pretty sure and that's why we need a lot of smart people to to you know be in the lens community and and help on giving inputs and uh this is the first time ever I've seen like uh the the community being built within the application normally you go into a forum so uh on Ave um and the our protocol you have very active Community Forum that people are going towards and talking about changes uh but also in in lens the actual ideas are happening um on lens itself which is quite cool because people are actively talking about um you know how to manage uh boats how to for example think about trust and safety moderation um you know what could be interesting improvements in the in the protocol or what could be built so it's all happening in the in the in the application in the network itself which is uh quite fascinating uh to see but yeah I'm also like um what else I'm scared um yeah so I'm also scared that you know we get the wrong picture about what we are trying to achieve with web trade social because end of the day like the the outcomes um work when when you have good implementation and good messaging on what you're trying to build um last thing that I'm afraid is is that if everyone is keep building like Twitter clones that's also it's not gonna come into a good um out outcome um I know like there's other uh protocols that are or um I would say like other kind of solutions that are always targeting in similar activities so I would like to see a lot of new kind of experiences as well I think that's a great uh segment to um well my next question was which is there's a lot of Founders in the audience a lot of people are thinking about making more consumer and social apps what advice do you have for them as they think about kind of embarking on that journey is it just about a good user experience or do we need to think about something else how would you approach in 2023 starting a consumer crypto company I think even like the like the there's a big portion of um like a consumer algorithms that that could be billed um and I I think like like the most coolest thing to do is to to use the blockchain and AI uh together uh to build something valuable for the user um and the thing about um uh blockchain or something like lens protocol is that all the data is uh it's public so there's a democratic way to compute uh on on that data which is like amazing um and that means that um you can actually build any kind of an algorithm uh for the end users and because the platform is open you have incentives to actually um build a good algorithm that is useful for the end users and I I usually call I have this concept that I call like um being a liquid citizen it means that for example that in web3 there isn't really much of a mode because the users can move from one protocol to another easily you can delegate uh you can delegate voting power from one person to another um you know you can support another Community by swapping your bags so like there's there's little mode uh which is good for the end users because there's an incentive to build good things um so what's exciting is that um building an algorithms uh which are beneficial for the consumers um that then help those who are building the actual user interfaces and uh doing the actual design part um they can actually benefit and if you build an interesting algorithm or a module into the lens protocol it can be consumed across all the clients or whoever integrates the protocol and that shows like the power of uh distribution and and what you could actually do um so that's like one one big consumer area uh to to focus upon and then applications or use cases where um you uh you you don't need to use the application every day creating a successful application that you need to open once a month once a week could be very fascinating outcome and making it as a successful social media application could be super super um uh interesting for like a the whole big social media uh narrative um yeah and the last thing is that uh just integrating lens into somewhere which where you couldn't expect like like socializing something so something we notice in our team is that blockchain is very transactional um you know Financial transactions but you know being able to integrate social into existing Webster infrastructure is very uh cool because if you're able to use lens to increase engagement uh in in somewhere outside of social by adding a social layer that could be very uh very cool thing to do and a lot of these are also cool hackathon projects um we're we're getting ready to wrap this talk up so if anybody has any questions for stani we can uh I I ask you to kind of come here and come to the mic we get to do a few questions before we kind of do the the next talks but in the meantime as people are coming uh my one other question to you is are there still any misconception about the infrastructure like are are we able to make a consumer app that can have ten thousand hundred thousand users or are we still behind on more scalability solutions needed or the solutions that do exist are are incapable or are not able to handle the current load no that's a great question because um if you need to use everything that is on chain as an infrastructure you will limit the scalability there um we're basically a few months away where you can do 50 50 000 transactions in a second um that's incredible yeah that's so so that's actually um very cool because um we're able to use an infrastructure that is basically uses data availability so the thing with blockchain is that you get execution and data availability as a package but in some cases you might just need one of the sides and it works well with non-financial transactions uh quite well so that scaling is is pretty much uh behind the corner um and then the second thing is like making the experience more smoother for for newcomers who do not have yet this webpage experience and that's something that we're also thinking and working on and those are the cashless and abstractions that you talked about that helps yeah amazing right I think we have a couple questions here uh please uh just go for it I really love this conversation I have a question about people that are not in this room who who are The Taste makers it is really difficult in my opinion to get people that influencing culture right now to be interested in blockchain because once one thing goes wrong nfts rug pulls anything else language in general turns them off from the idea of investing in this field long term so I'm wondering the concept that you're describing seems like a pretty great solution for Content creators to transition out of just investing in web 2 platforms and starting to build their own thing so what would be a really good advice to make this palatable for them to get interested that's a that's a very good question because what what we have noticed that a lot of the people who are in the space um from that creativity and and perspective and and create culture and create a lot of exciting things um they're they're actually they're very early in the state that you know you you have a lot of bottlenecks in the experience as well and and the usability isn't there um and that's what we've seen as well so we've seen that um the the audience that is on lens for example it's pretty much web3 audience uh it consists a lot of from creators as well so um we have a lot of music creators artists uh but they have over excitement about web3 that got them into the space um and and the hardest part is actually like how we cross line for for people and creators that necessarily don't want to do the same technical heavy lift um or a learning curve and and get onboarded quickly and and to do it in a more uh scaled way and I I personally think there's um two things obviously one is is the idea that we can make the experience easier that's where something like account abstraction and and being able to come with your email um create a profile and every everything is abstracted away so we already abstracted away um paying for gas abstracted away signing transactions uh we have to abstract a way of creating or seeing a wallet wallet address as well or even thinking about networks we just need to abstract everything um away behind of the scenes and that's actually not a big thing to do that's very easy to be honest and I think the next thing is that we need to show the the value that comes actually um when you're using um something like lens uh and and you know that you actually have an audience and what it means when you can actually have an ownership of the relationship that you you create um and also direct monetization and and how you can get high signal and something I noticed about um lens which surprised me is that because it's a small network uh at this point and concentrated audience um you can have a higher signal between the peers so people who get excited about what you create um and especially or this cause can be found relatively surfaced relatively easily and that's why we see a lot of um uh comments about that that the users are getting more engaged content um and more engagement on the content um I don't know if it sticks as the protocol grows down the line um but also like those upsides is something that the the the creators should should basically have um so I I think the the user usability um and the second is that being able to sing uh value where you can create a content with five other people uh and then that content becomes very you know valuable and and and you can share that upside monetization with with whoever was was involved is is a very big thing basically using the on-chain infrastructure to settle um the the transactioning of all the the content that you create and the whole content supply chain maybe a simple kind of question in addition to what you said is like do they need to know there's crypto power features in this or no kind of no because I think you really can move a lot of things away um but what you can signal is that what guarantees they're getting so you know if if they're using if there's new technology underlying uh the the applications they're using what is the benefit there so being able to share those benefits is valuable I think it's it goes same way with with nfts for example it's it's important to explain that um you know it's verified content there's timestamps can't be changed and whatnot and you know there's then there's this programmability but you don't need to do like all the layers but enough to actually say like why is this uh so valuable and important just like the surface um we uh and I mean all of us like we're very bad at actually ex like coming up with terms and explaining things as a community so uh we need to get better on the messaging um we should be less naive because you know we get really tired of like explaining like things in a simple way we feel very comfortable when we can find other people that we can talk in the same jargon and language and you know we we feel privileged as well you know it's it's just like I feel so bad sometimes because um we have a lot of technicality you know but it doesn't get us anywhere if we can't like explain things very easily and this is everywhere in technology so you always need to build a bridge um and I I think you know the car industry is quite an interesting example even before Henry Ford so before the mass production of cars you know they came up with things like horsepower um they named cars after horses and and basically said that this is like an upgrade of of a previous um uh thing that they they owned or or had so that is where we have to work with with the community a bit more and and just kind of like take the effort of explaining things and coming up with language that is easy as well thank you amazing we have two more questions go for it hey thank you for all the work you're doing around bringing the hard problems of social networks to the masses and jailbreaking from the silos I noticed a number of patterns in what you were talking around I've personally spent a lot of time on digital identity and as you said language is where it's at one of the key design principles I've heard which feels like a really good lens if you will is Agents languages and perspectives and as a core ontology big word sorry to basically be able to interact with any layer of the stack have you come across Nicholas Luck's work on perspectivism yet um no have you any thoughts about how to address the number of ontologies that or perspectives in a given room in an integrated fashion no but I so the the good thing about my uh my job is that like I try to solve as many of the challenges we have but the good thing is that I really don't need to solve all of them and it's actually better if I don't have to because um I think that the problems we're trying to solve uh as a team and as a community are bigger than like our um they're bigger than us in short meaning that we we need people in the community to to talk about various different things and being able to contribute um and if those topics become uh more um they get more they get more elevated because they're they're meaningful challenges um they should be then solved in a more like a whole Community scale uh in my opinion and I think it's a good thing because it means that you know anyone can um contribute but also like uh start uh start solving a meaningful problem um you know it it's the same thing that I was doing with with Ave and this and just Finance so I always had a passion of about finance and and during this years it it actually grew even stronger but my actual background never was Finance uh neither I have anything to do with uh in terms of like academic background in in Social but it's what is interesting is that you can ignite some of these projects and probably starting to solve some of these problems um and then you can get people who are um have that um and I would say like in enthusiasm but also uh some sort of a passion of solving and and contributing in in some ways and I think one thing I I like to see more is that all of this interesting challenges coming up within lens protocol and you know people can actually talk about them uh openly and I think there is where we can actually solve a lot of a lot of the things because we don't really have an answer to everything um and and that's where we need more more uh people to contribute to that's my my short answer thank you thank you it's uh one of the two hardest problem in computer science or a cash invalidation and naming things and then or and to figure out one at a time here hi stani thank you for sharing your potential of uh web3 social media and lens I would like to have your views on guest list transactions because we are Builders as well as users of uh lens it's very frictionless but at the end someone has to pay guest fees right so how uh like sustainable it is in Long Run that's a good question so a lot of the transaction doesn't necessarily need to happen on chain which means that you can decrease the the cost of the transactioning to a fraction what it is today uh which is great um and I actually think that the the gas corresponds down to the idea in in um uh in a protocol like lens is that what is the what is the actual cost that you have or or a price tag you have to put um to prevent spam um or or any kind of like a very content that that doesn't necessarily have a wide audience or audience at all um so that's that's one thing and how to minimize uh that cost uh in various different things cool thing about the the the the blockchain is that you have a lot of data available um in fact the way we build um the way we build the um Unchained infrastructure is that it's public so pretty much like everyone has a balance sheet at this point and depending on on how much you transact on chain that's valuable um data to to decrease the cost of of something like um super attacks or or spams and spam and whatnot so um eventually there might be some sort of uh still cost Associated to that but whoever pays it should be the one who captures the value out of it so the something that was super surprising to me is that um the actual user isn't the the one only that captures value so there's users there's algorithms um there's clients there's the protocol itself there's modules because you know someone can create a module into the other protocol that is kind of like part of the protocol but also it's external module that can capture value um and somehow we need to figure out uh out of this like a feedback loop where which elements will be paying I personally think what will happen is that we'll see like a middleware where um you will have this kind of dispatcher symbol that we're running at Ave which is actually permissionless anyone can fund but you can create one of those um and and whitelist users for some reputation for example and provide gas as transactions but you have some sort of value capture mechanism there as well we just saw safe announce uh sponsor gas and abstraction through 4337 and and I think we're getting to a point where at least I think one way of thinking about this would be if you are a client on top of any of these networks this could be a good replacement for your infrastructure cost which now doesn't come into play and and that plus the the role of Technologies we're seeing the way we get to the batch a lot more transactions just keep data available which you talked about also helps us sort of get a anywhere from 10 to 1000 x if not more reduction into fees but yeah because we still have an infrastructure costs um today the all the applications we're using um it's going to be close to the same so end of the day at some point it's more about like what is the cost of um uh matching a user with an audience basically and and Discovery so it it's a very open as you see like some of this topics are very widely open um and I I personally think it's a lot of these things can be solved by experimentations um and we can try different things that's the beauty of lens um you know everyone can actually contribute in solving some of these challenges um and uh it actually uh there's there's there might be multiple solutions to the same uh thing actually the same way as you know we have multiple clients for uh running the ethereum software and contributing to the network and I think something similar will will happen with lens amazing well stani thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us today and uh really appreciate it thank you cardigan thank you everyone