Stani Kulechov I Onchain Social I Avara Labs I Pragma London 2024

[Music] so with this we are ready to resume and start with our first interview of the day and for the first interview I'd like to bring on stanie who's the founder of avaro labs a lot of you may know Stan from being one of the creators of a protocol but today what we're going to do is talk about lens and if you haven't heard about lens already uh that's not to worry we're going to cover a lot more about what it is where it's going and how it's been growing so far so to have this amazing chat please welcome stannie on [Applause] stage morning GM GM um I want to jump right into what we want to talk about for Lads here so um let's not let's not talk about the the fluff let's go go right in so lens is now permissionless yes what does that mean and uh how was that whole process yeah so um I don't know how many of you maybe just quick question how many of you have a lens profile at the moment that is a lot of an that's quite a lot a lot of uh a lot of pilled pilled people here um but essentially lens is a um um decentralized social network so what we do at at Lens um and what the vision is basically is to enable ownership for your Social Capital meaning your profile the connections you make on the internet um and and using the blockchain in a way to um establish this element of um ownership so it's important because we've um we've all are on online all the time there's you know 5 billion people on on on the internet and almost equal amount of uh people using social um and creating these relationships and and content and practically Social Capital so um with lens we started the whole project um over two years ago um and been building with the same kind of principles that we've done uh with a so how we can actually use the blockchain and use it in a way that we can democratize um either Finance access to finance or access to Social Capital with this ownership component that comes uh from the uh blockchain and we started the project in a very kind of like a small humble way where we didn't really have any answers uh to all these questions and social was something really new to us and to our team um and we were building in in in um uh in a way where we wanted to build this decentralized uh protocol um and see the ecosystem to grow um down the line so we didn't have for example a uh an application we we built a protocol uh participated one of the E Global hackaton um back in couple of years ago and we actually saw developers coming in and and building these um user interfaces and during more recently we um or actually that's more of a community effort where the lens Community wanted to actually see lens going permissionless so previously um you had to actually contact the team or um find some different kind of ways to to get onboarded to lens we wi listed for example people who were participating in E Global hackaton um folks that you know were um dancing at Trav at 4:00 a.m. uh during during um our events um and and effectively what we decided more recently is that you know the technology is stpe enough so we can actually open up for for everyone and now lens is permissionless and that basically means that anyone can go and and mint a profile and that's a social profile that you actually own then that's secured by onchain and the connections you make are also secured by um onchain which is um the vision that we're building that's awesome um it's been a couple weeks what uh what have you you kind of noticed so far after going permission lesson um are there kind of any stats you can share on how that's been yeah surprisingly uh when you make things open people come um so that that was certainly something very exciting that you we saw spikes in profiles obviously there are a lot of people uh probably also here in the audience that has been waiting for a lens profile and they they were able to Mint um during this permissionless period and we've had now 250,000 profiles minted and as a number it's it's quite significant uh for a couple of reasons first it's not a big number if you compare um social media space as a whole uh but it's a big number when you compare how many of us are actually today um interacting with web tree social um and one interesting part is that to Mint a lens profile you pay um roughly $10 with a card payment or um you pay on an onchain transaction and and that's a way to basically generate um sustainable protocol fees um meaning that this decentralized protocol that we will be building um and this shared social network will actually have a treasury that it can actually use then to fund different kinds of projects or redistribute those um funds back to the back to the people who are building and using uh the protocol and creating a bit more sustainable uh ecosystem and as of today I think uh there's almost 1 million worth of uh treasury fees collected to the lens protocol which is quite cool um and this monetization component is really fascinating because social media has a lot of monetization so social media companies in general are the biggest companies in the world um but no one actually from a user perspective sees the monetization because the the the the monetization flow goes from advertisers to the platform um and the user is basically left out of that uh that monetization uh supply chain and by using public blockchain it means that actually it's all visible so we all know what is happening on lens on this shared social media Network and we also uh are able to share that Revenue because as a user you own your audience the connections you make they're not logged in into a platform um that means that now you can actually have a direct control over how you share content to your audience and share Revenue uh with other users on the network that's awesome um I guess one interesting thing that uh that I'm curious to hear about is um there isn't a kind of default or primary app to look at lens and um that seems to be a very intentional decision so why is it that way and kind of how do you think about people interfacing with the protocol yeah it's really interesting question because it's it's something that um quite a lot of of uh people who are following the space are asking us that why why lens doesn't have a one single entry point application where we can drive the traffic and get people uh to on board into the um lens protocol and there's just another kind of like a narrative that has been for a couple of years about you know if you're building um web tree some sort of a project like should you build a protocol or an application or even like protocol first application first and for us it was really kind of like an organic um choice so we felt that if you want to build something that is uh neutral um it's it's really hard to have uh one main application that basically drives all the traffic and and and and then competes with all these other applications that are on the network um and especially in the early stage because in the very early a lot of the creativity um gets inspired amongst these applications that are built and there's um less diversity but over time that client that app diversity will just um expand so what we did is that we simply made the protocol available uh what it means is that we deployed on the test net um code public test net and the main net and and just uh wanted to see what people built and to our surprise uh people started to build so starting from you know H Weekend hackaton online hackaton and and then we actually saw businesses being built um on lens so there applications that also were able to raise funds to build social media applications on lens uh or even tooling which was very surprising and created this kind of like a interesting um lens um economy and I think that was probably uh the best choice we ever made um mainly because if you think about just uh social media Network design if uh if we have one app that drives all the traffic what it means is that pretty much the leading app will always um determin the the the uh social behavior of of the network and our goal is to actually create a uh social network that is shared and you have the portability as a user so you can go from one application to another um you have your identity but then you're able to choose actually what do you want to share with that application from um your identity social graph um and content that's where that's the direction we want to go and it then creates this uh more um uh heterogeneous networks and what I mean by that is that if you go from one lens application to another they all don't look the same or feel the same because um they have their own kind of a Content graphs and um and brings that up diversity and then that's good for the for the protocol and protocol Revenue too that that's a very interesting approach so so maybe for for people in the audience what are some of the interfaces that they can check out to uh to use lens uh there's quite a lot actually there's lot of uh we we quantify that there is probably 400 different projects being built on lens and some are less active so some are more active um some are basically open source uh projects and some are fully focused on actually um consumer audience uh mobile experience um just to mention couple of these um orb or. Club is a interesting project because uh these two Founders actually met in uh e global hackaton um they were randomly hacking on um on lens protocol and and both of these Founders didn't have previous um social media um experience but they got excited about the idea of like what if we have this um Global shared social network that anyone can just tap into um share monetization um so that's a very interesting application because they've they've been building on mobile uh since the very beginning uh and people love it um on lens and another application is is hay which is more of a open source uh project also started in a very uh small um an environment where they participated in online hakon and people just started to that one is just still one person is that right that's a one person team yeah many of these teams that build on lens are really small and that's that's that's really amazing you don't really need a big team to build on lens because the protocol does a lot of the heavy lifting and the tooling that has been built either by the te or by uh the community and hey is actually open source so if if anyone wants to even change you know how a Boton looks on hay or adding a feed or doing any kind of modifications you can actually go and do a pull request and that's the beauty of a open- source development uh on social because you have these Global clients that can actually be can can take any contributions but also um lens is not just about you know text um you have video applications as well tape XYZ is a good example oh great yeah so so this leads to my next question which was um it's not just that this is just a onchain social graph uh the goal here is to actually extend it and and think about some native web 3 uh Integrations or just features so what are some of those here on the protocol and um namely kind of just let's talk about open actions yeah so obviously the idea of of lens is also to um enable creativity and and also enable new kind of a ecosystem where Builders can actually create and expand the protocol so as of today you can go in and create modules that expand um any kind of a social networking behavior um or you can plug into to lens with the open actions so open actions is a way to actually extend uh lens protocol in a way where if you have created something really cool um but you don't want to build an app or maybe you have an app and you have a lot of traffic but you actually want to um have see that so social behavior or action happening directly on on the lens and and lens applications uh you can create an open Action and plug into lens now what it means actually is that you're creating a piece of smart contract code um that basically uh interacts with with lens protocol and and makes the protocol more composable and simple thing I could give an example is that um uh you can uh for example vote on governance directly on the feed uh you can swap uh erc20 tokens ERC 71s directly on the feed so what we're saying is that lot of this um economical activity and any kind of onchain activity doesn't need to happen on a specific application but can it can actually happen directly uh on the feed where the users um attentions are and obviously open actions are built in a way um uh not just in compatibility Mind by but monetization and I think that's really powerful in onchain Social is that um because we're using the onchain element so much you can actually build monetization to these open actions and share fees so you can program an open Action in a way that you know you share fees uh whoever creates content um and and also uh you can distribute the fees between the applications and algorithms in anyone that is part of that um attention um uh cycle as well and I think that's really powerful um in this kind of World um there's the lens engineering team there's the Comm community and then there's kind of the broader ecosystem of lens users how do you think about actually improving the protocol and sort of whose decision is it who's involved how do you think about getting real feedback like do you just treat the the comments from the people with the most amount of users or the most amount of value being driven like how did you actually improve the protocol in this world a very exciting question because um the way I've built protocols in in the past is that um you know especially in in Def um you know security is really important right so building something you know that holds billions fors of value is is a kind of a different uh type of a category compared to example social where you know you're um providing more of a um ownership to Social Capital and and and functionality on social networking so um what I noticed is that um there's a lot of appetite to actually contribute to lens in and we have um this uh framework called lens Improvement proposals and it follows a little bit the same uh framework as the a Improvement proposals or ethereum Improvement proposals where anyone can come and and actually um open uh a liip and and a liip is basically a proposal or a discussion about uh some sort of a protocol Improvement and it doesn't really have to be uh uh necessarily related direct to the protocol or the parameters it can be just standardization between applications um that are have integrated uh for example uh lens so that's very open collaborative way to to build lens and um surprisingly there are actually developers that really are already contributing to the lens protocol outside of the team and I was surprised how um quick this um progress has been um and I think also because it's a little bit easier to to build um on a non-financial Network and and I think um it's so so early that there is so much uh to actually contribute and and build and I just think lens in general it's so um in its early stage that there's a lot of Evol evolvement and developments that can be done so it's very community-driven uh development um but the our team is um excited to uh set out a new vision as well what we want to uh contribute in the future and bring that Vision as well to the community and see what actually uh uh make sense and what people get excited about awesome um maybe just to focus on just one example like what's been a a good feedback you received from the the the proposal so far or just even anecdotal from kind of going permissionless has there been something that's been super requested yeah I I think something what people are excited about how these apps will share monetization amongst each other and with the protocol so now there was a lip 16 um recently that was uh merged which which basically means that all these um all the all the monetization that happens on on lens for example for paid collect so people are creating content they're tokenizing it and other users are collecting it really great way to monetized for for creators paid follows a lot of this economic activity is happening on lens and lip 16 actually um collects um a little bit of protocol fees for uh for these activities and now kind of like the next question is and and what we're trying to think in um in the lens ecosystem is that how these different applications will share uh protocol fees um and any any fees that are uh on on top of that so an example is that you might create content or moneti create content on one application uh let's say on orb and someone else collects it on for example hay um and how this apps distribute fees uh among each other and I think that's where the real uh Power of um shared social network comes when actually everyone who is contributing um on application Level they're also sharing the upside and benefiting of building on a shared infrastructure and I think that's going to be really really cool nice um well as kind of uh my my last question here uh I want to get a little bit more uh more philosophical um do you do you think that it is possible to have a decentralized social network that that scales and um and um it is kind of ultimately Successful by some definition and obviously you're betting on this so the answer is yes but kind of what do you think is required for us to get there yeah that's that's that's a good point so when it comes to scale there's two scaling uh questions one is the technological scaling and the other one is that will people care or use this interest social um I think from the technical scaling uh solution obviously lenses today on on on polygon and and I think the future of scaling um I I think the whole uh ethereum ecosystem has done a lot of work on scaling uh to this point so we have rollups now where a lot of the scaling happens and um I personally think rollups is going to be the place for doing Financial transactions and you know having protocols like a and and defi um there but when it comes to social transactions we have to go one way um both and and and and and basically figure out um a way to scale so same goes with gaming where we need certain amount of security um so we we have that onchain component um but we don't need the same amount of security for example that our D5 protocol needs on uh l2s so that's something we're working on from the technical perspective and I think we're going to be able with our next uh technical commitment to scale to I think roughly 50 million transactions uh per second and just to give is I hear there right 50 million is it yeah 5050 million transactions per second okay this is going to be fun just to give an example uh Twitter during a FIFA World Cup um end game they had 30 million transactions per second so that's pretty much what you need for technical scale um I would argue um and obviously then you can still do Financial transactions and you can use some you can use rollup for for those and then the the question about whether people will use um the centralized networks I I think it's about you know rebuilding the internet that's what we're here for right so we're basically just rebuilding the financial um ecosystem uh the internet uh in general in a way where um there's more user ownership um it's more Equitable and and you have more neutral networks um that basically benefits the people and I think that uh as as a protocol lens probably will be something that the the mainstream users will not um really put lot of attention once it scales it's just an infrastructure same as for example the IP protocol or email as a protocol that just is in the background um and and then most of the actual value to the users will happen um with these different algorithms and use cases and and applications through their experiences uh effectively and I also think that to get more people into the web tree we have to build ex new experiences so end of the day you know a lot of people participate in crypto Twitter um and those networks are very strong and they they will get people back but to get new audiences we just have to build new experiences and I think that's where that's where the app developers can actually Thrive and if they have the best tools in terms of monetization ownership um and that's something that lens is is providing um they have far better chances to succeed and if their application doesn't succeed they have far better chanes uh and also monetization already to maybe try another application and every single app that is build on the shared network it just compounds the user base um and compounds the opportunity for everyone to come um and and build and succeed I think that's a very optimistic note to end on stany this is this has been a wonderful chat so it's almost full market so it had to be a little bit optimistic well I can tell CU 50 million transactions I think we we need a second talk today well thank you so much uh for taking the time and I can't wait to have other people try that too