Future Finality [LIVE]: Mass Adoption of Web3 Social

and led protocol all right so uh welcome everyone uh uh thanks so much for being here and join us for our panel on uh Mass adoption of web3 social so uh this is part of uh metal web where I work uh metal work metal web uh research initiative uh which of the episodes we will invite like top uh industry leaders to talk about one subject but anyway um so this this panel Mass adoption of web3 social uh we all know the end game of web3 social is a rich Mass adoption and then a bottle of the bottlenecks here are now number one user onboarding experience number two self-custody of your crypto assets number three unique value add of web3 social in terms of uh user experience so today we are going to dive deeper into these three aspects and um try to see how we up to and then what what Social Web 3 is going to be like in one or two years so without further Ado let's start with our let's start with a brief introduction Chris so I'll use this hi uh my name is Chris golzinski I'm one of the original co-founders of uh Tinder I was one of the inventors of the swipe uh co-creator of bumble as well and I'm building in the web Street web 3 space with a company called Niche uh it's in the web3 social uh kind of reinvention of of uh how we all organize together uh Dows doubts for everybody basically okay hi everyone I'm Sarah Hoople Cher I'm one of the co-founders of Meme and we're building tools for portable communities so that is communities that exist outside the bounds of any single platform and instead are organized around something they want to do together or a shared interest and so we're enabling those communities to create their own on-chain agreements and then connect that agreement to either existing tools or newly built tools that enable collaborative publishing awesome excited to be here thank you for those of you who are here my name is David I'm one of the co-founders at lit protocol it is a distributed Key Management Network and uh what that means is essentially like a distributed custodian uses something called multi-party computation and threshold cryptography to custody a key across a distributed network of nodes and just like with public key cryptography in general there's two services that this network provides which is encryption and digital signatures which both have implications in the context of web3 social on the encryption side things like Access Control token gated content and and various other things that you can do around conditional encryption when you want to store private data on the open web and then on the digital signature side user onboarding basically how do we get to the point where we have decentralized multi-factor authentication where somebody can create a web3 wallet in a way that it there's web 2 ux parity meaning that the flow of multi-factor authentication is the exact same as it is in web 2 no custody in seat phrase Etc but also without having to rely on a centralized custodian in in essentially in a system that is Fault tolerant uh my name is natter dabbit I am the director of developer relations and Ave companies including Lin's protocol which is a web 3 social network and actually web3 social protocol and I'm also the founder of developer Dao which is a social and educational community great thank you yeah let's start um uh I guess my first question would lean toward um user onboarding experience for David so um so everyone knows like for web to your users to come into web3 you know they need to set up a wallet they need to like take care of their like sea phrases it's really annoying right with the current text stack nowadays and evolving Technologies in the account abstraction and NPC how do you see the user onboarding experience for web to users be like in a year or two yeah it's not going to take that long if you go to getlit.dev demo uh there's uh on that page um you can click a button and generate a new wallet that wallet is custody by lit this distributed Key Management Network and the authorization method to use that wallet is something called Web authen apple has a branded version of that called Apple passkey which is uh thumbprint or fingerprint touch on the computer in Biometrics based on the phone and the cool thing about passkey like out of the box this works across all Apple devices Etc um so I would say we're like four to six months away from being able to have the One login for the entire internet that is user credential driven self-sovereign but also has that web 2 ux parity and feel got it yeah that that sounds to be like super super convenient for people coming into web3 and they're managing all of their logins how do you see like the role of private keys are evolving with account abstraction because you know it can be seedless and then it can be broken away into like different pieces through a network what do you see like the role of private keys to play in the future compared to today maybe I mean the the underlying technology of private or excuse me public key cryptography of an asymmetric key pair isn't changing um there's certainly some really interesting stuff around account abstraction which is like a programmable account on ethereum sometimes called a smart contract wallet and uh to date some of the most interesting stuff that has been implemented is around gasless transactions not our team have done some pretty fascinating stuff there so uh user experience isn't just like getting one thing right and then everything falls into place you have to get everything right there's so there's a lot of aspects to it and certainly account abstraction has a role to to play in that um but it's it's part of a longer and sophisticated discussion around like you know it's related to the app train hypothesis if it turns out that we're interacting with a 500 to a thousand different blockchains on a month over month basis that means we need to then launch Smart contract while it's on all of those chains and so the cost Associated that start to come uh into play and I think to me that's one of the really interesting points in the context of like MPC versus is account abstraction but there's also ways for these Technologies to play together for example there's a gentleman by the name of Corbin page who has a product called patch wallet and that is a mechanism for somebody to in a single click generate a new wallet it's tied to their Twitter oauth so it's one click to onboard but the MPC key is a signer on the AAA wallet and when that person gets used to web 3 and starts interacting later on they can call a function to eject to the MPC signer and move to a self-custody key like a ledger or similar later on and it really provides this kind of smooth onboarding ramp in terms of getting into web 3 and keeping the optionality open to move to self-custody for the people on this planet who are excited about that and see it as a privilege rather than those that see it as a burden being your own bank that is got it yeah I guess like based on David's comments I feel like in the future number one setting up a wallet is super simple managing your accounts is super super simple and I think one of the really powerful thing here is also that the composibility of the technology we talked about account abstraction we talked about MPC and then uh uh NATO is going to share with like some of the uh fundamental technology working on with uh lit together so like everything is highly composable but together they are super powerful but currently we are still like scratching only the surface okay I guess like it covers a lot of my next question which uh which is how do you see like self-custody would be our self uh self-cast self-custody would be like you know currently you know people are really stressed about like their C phrases and then is it going to be changed completely in the future does anybody else ever thought on uh are we going to be a self-custody future or not yeah I mean I think that when you look at the user experience we're talking about web 3 social here right so like the user experience of web 3 social versus uh traditional social traditional social you sign in with Google account five seconds you write a tweet and you post and everything works then you're happy and web3 social and web3 applications you ask that user to first go to coinbase and open an account and buy the right token send that token on the right Network to the right wallet understand how that wallet works then you ask them to actually not up and lose their keys and stuff because then they lose everything and they have and they walk away with a bad experience and then we ask them to pay money to actually use your app and then we expect them to wait you know five seconds for the transaction to finalize and then finally anytime they do anything we expect them to sign every single time so over overall The Experience if you kind of use the networks as they exist today is actually really really bad and wallets are just the first entry point into that and you know I think the answer to your question is like we need to kind of have some trade-off because if you can't expose this low-level primitive to the the world you know 99 of the world just doesn't want to deal with this stuff I don't even like dealing with this stuff instead I think you're going to have wallets for financial activity and you might have a wallet for social activity the social wallet might have uh you might say okay I'm gonna allow lens to post on my behalf with this wallet and um you know or I might use some account abstraction and kind of delegate that to a Social account that I already have but like you wouldn't go and put a million dollars in that wallet or even a thousand dollars instead you might use that for that type of activity I think that's where we're headed we can't keep saying oh we're six months away we're 12 months away from getting it right instead you kind of have to deal with what we have today we're able to kind of build a really high quality ux today with a trade-offs in decentralization and those trade-offs are getting better and the underlying Primitives are still decentralized but the middle layer doesn't have to be and then that middle layer I think is where we're seeing all of the Innovation happening today like if you look at all of the protocols that I'm excited about are the ones that have sprung up in the last uh last year stuff like bundler Network for example provides a middle layer between you know our weave it takes like a very very quick transaction time as opposed to a long transaction time it's more accessible but it's centralized so like I think we're seeing more and more about centralization as a trade-off whereas the underlying attack is still decentralized but we need to provide a better ux got it yeah I think it's it's not super super bullish um uh is there anything that you guys still want to add on top of uh Nader's View I think you're absolutely right if you can get it down to like a one button web 2 sign up that's where Mass adoption happens uh just specifically at Niche we've gotten it down to like I can send you a text invite from my dial that I'm in will create you a custodial wall in the background uh through Google storage would anyone get the keys ourselves uh mention the nft that grants you uh permission for the group and now you've got a episode real well then after like my mom has an nft in a custodial wall and she can't even work the TV remote you know what I mean so the the light of the barrier is The more mass adoption for sure yeah I totally agree I think you know the the UI challenge in front of us over the next couple of years is how do we sell the value of SSI and you know data portability and all of these great features of a web 3 wallet while obscuring the crypto for the 95 of users that you know are not attracted to that and often are turned off by them I'll uh I'll attempt to steal man your point a little bit which is I think there's actually a distinction between what you're saying and what Nader is saying which is there's a real key distinction between something that's like custodial or centralized versus something that is progressively decentralized which is to say that the thing that is progressively decentralized is attempting to make a network and is by default going to be an open system which lets you get that interoperability benefit and so like a lot of teams that have built custodial wallets have been like hey can we integrate with lit we're just like it makes absolutely no sense for us to like do individual Integrations with custodial wallets um and so even like a bundler if you're in this process of progressive decentralization the fact that you're building something from the network context rather than the pure centralized context lets you get that interoperably interoperability benefit while the underlying technology is becoming distributed um but you know there's Shades of Gray of course and I tend to agree with your points also right yeah then I guess like now let's start deep deep uh let's dive deeper into web 3 social in particular so I this question I want to give it to Chris uh so um you are the co-founder of Tinder you're the co-creator of bumble uh what was the experience of Designing successful social product what from web3 that attracted you to come and build what would be like the next killer product that you can you think you can only build with web3 Technologies I I think making them move from web 2 to web 3 like there's definitely like a technological barrier I think for traditional web 2 Builders but if you can get past the technology I think what what the value props that it it enables uh us to give to new consumers I think sets a new bar uh for for what the new products are going to be because I think the more we can abstract away the technology and give people the uh the benefit of it right that's that's when people are going to start to to use things and see benefit of it because I mean if I'm gonna be in a decentralized network just for the sake of being in a centralized Network what's what's the point of it I could just as well go to Twitter or whatever there's got to be some type of like overall thing that that can only happen in a decentralized network right so it's taking a hypothesis on the technology rather than just putting the technology forward and it's a it's a real challenge I think for web 2 uh Founders that to get over that technological barrier and understand and like digest it all down into like what is that core benefit yeah I agree I think like the abstraction of technology is really important and speaking on to this I think lens is like awesome in this sense because you know the clear value proposition is that every people know about web3 is decentralization a decentralized data ownership and incentive players and then you know on that layer um lens has already built the good infrastructure that developers can use and then focus more on the product Market fit and then what the unique you use to experience of web through social there is so on this um NATO can you can you tell us more about like if I'm like a web 2 social application founder coming to lens what can I build what are the tools yeah first of all I agree with everything like what you just said and understanding your background and stuff it's really awesome to see you here so just wanted to throw that out there but um yeah I mean I think that we care about decentralization but but really no one else cares you know if they're not in the blockchain space and we tell them the value prop is decentralization they're gonna like roll their eyes or whatever but but decentralization brings about things that are possible that we can kind of hopefully um represent in our applications that we don't have to explain to people they'll just use it and realize oh this is just better and I think that that's where we're headed that's where we're focused and I think that's that's where a lot of the more like successful products are going to land in the next six to 12 months um they're gonna you know abstract away the infrastructure like like you mentioned they're going to build higher quality products with a better user experience and we have to realize that again people don't care about blockchain uh the average person if we want someone to use our app it just needs to be better period so um it lends some of the stuff that we're doing to make that possible um you know you mentioned the gasless transactions we're basically treating our blockchain infrastructure like AWS review Google cloud is treated by Twitter and Instagram and everyone else like we don't expect someone to pay for that we subsidize that because you can do that now because the protocols are now less than one penny to transact they're getting cheaper and cheaper you know data availability experimentations are happening um we're getting to the point where you know the the infrastructure can completely be subsidized therefore the user obviously shouldn't have to pay for that like we're Way Beyond that I think the next step is to implement user experiences that automate the signing of transactions for for a low value transactions like posting and commenting and stuff so that's what lens does as well we built a centralized API layer that abstracts away all this stuff you sign up into an app you start posting and you close the app and it feels just like Twitter but you now also have built-in payments for uh experiences like for example we had a creator that quit their job and they posted on lens hey I'm quitting my job to work on the lens Out full time if you want to support me you can collect this post for two dollars and for two dollars you know it basically turns it into an nft but like you know you wouldn't think that in nft because both nfts were used to are worth like a thousand and ten thousand a hundred thousand dollars but at scale uh we had ten thousand or twelve thousand people collect this he made twenty five thousand dollars off of essentially was a five second tweet and stuff like that just isn't possible with other types of you know infrastructure so we need to kind of build more experiences that enable stuff like that and um and just really also build really high quality developer experience because we want developers to be experimenting and building out new interfaces and uh and then seeing what happens what works what doesn't work a lot of experimentation so um that's just the general idea of some of the stuff we're working on yeah and I I really like the way that you articulated that like in the beginning you said the benefits of decentralization then you got to the digital assets and digital ownership which is like the big benefit and one of the things that I really like about lenses I feel like it really Nails the mental model of what it is to be a Creator in web3 which is like you're just kind of generating artifacts in perpetuity that may or may not become Collectibles over time right if like the Beatles were doing that when they first started and you were the first one to catch that wave and they released like a one of 100 thing or early post that got collected all of a sudden that becomes like maybe that artifact becomes a collectible over time and then that's the way that we work together for example is then the collectible can like additional utility can be and be imbued into it like letting you decrypt content for example in the case of gated Publications right yeah um yeah I guess then my next question would be you know like a year ago every everyone when talking about like web3 social it's like social fi like social and finance seems to be like web3 social but then they might not be right so like how do you understand about like the fight in Social do you think Financial infrastructure is really important um in Matthew social yes agree yes every single uh like Social Circle or network that I'm in uh whether it's IRL whether it's digital even web3 has some type of consumerism associated with it like uh I use Facebook groups specifically I don't like Facebook personally uh but I collect Star Wars stuff like the old Star Wars stuff uh that's where the people that collect Star Wars people are so I have to go to where the people are right so it it's I think it's contingent upon what your networks do uh who they are and like what you're what you're passing back and forth and like I said it I would challenge you to find some some group that doesn't have some uh aspect of consumerism whether it's like doing events together or like you know like we got to raise 20 bucks to all go to whatever you know and because it's all built in with web3 it's just there for us I mean there's so much value that gets leaked out in web 2 products through the payment process through marketplaces through any type of that all that value is just like literally gone and as well as consumer confidence if I use PayPal for X Y and Z you know yeah no I think what what Chris said that I really like how Financial transactions play into their Community like what those value exchanges want that they want to have and with whom um and absolutely we should allow them to plug in the tools to enable that that's one of the key advantages of web3 I think when we lead with the tokenomics when we talk about communities and web3 we can see some distorted incentives and so I think our view is always like lead with the communities let them decide how they want to design their communities and the financials and then let them plug in the tools that let them do that yeah just for uh I I totally agree there's like very much a a dow worldview as it relates to Social and social finance and then on the other end of the spectrum is the Degen world view right like step in from Solana and things like that and so it's pretty interesting there's definitely this conversation that emerges which is like what's the killer app that is going to get to a million users in a week in the same way that like Facebook and Snapchat did as it relates to the method of interaction and For Better or Worse like d gen based applications are the things that have like gotten overnight success and crazy attraction in the world of like looking for hits and experimentation as it relates to like social media uh products in general not just in web 3. great yeah I I guess like just now like we mentioned the word Community several times and it's like a down panel as well so I think one thing that I see unique in web3 Social is a Community Driven social networking you know like we have so many small doubts people come together talk about something they're interested in um they can have like AMA spaces we rarely see this kind of interaction happening so recurrently and so frequent in web 2 world so can you guys let us know a little bit more about how you guys think about the Community Driven social networking and then uh dial for everybody I I know like Chris and uh Sarah you guys are doing something related to that can you let us know more yeah sure I can start so we are all about portable communities and we see the atomic unit of building for communities as this community agreement so what's the underlying you can think of it as like a self-sovereign identity at the community level so what does it mean for a community to have a singular credential that contains all of the design nuances of that Community who's in it what's required to be a part of this community what roles and permissions do the members have what tools do they want to use together and then that basically becomes a credential that they can use to access tools across the web and those could be web 2 tools too so I think sometimes when we talk about community and we talk about web 3 we're talking about Dows but actually we're talking about really onboarding the world users to web3 we need to think of community in a much broader term in a much broader sense and so we think of communities as really any group of people who want to do anything together and so you start thinking about you know what would it look like if I can show up with my singular identity I can be a part of hundreds of communities which sounds overwhelming when you define that as Dao's but is actually much more Nimble when you think of it as like Oh I'm a member of my neighborhood I am a you know one of two members in the community that is my marriage I am a parent in the school district I am a member of the meme team like I'm a part of dozens if not hundreds of communities every single day and so I think the promise of web 3 is that you can show up with one identity and participate in a bunch of different communities and uh what we're trying to enable is that you have the tools to do what you want to do with each of those communities in a really scaled way so I think the other advantage of it is it's incredibly convenient when we think about onboarding users you know imagine like you run a book club for example right and today in the web 2 world you invite your book club members you maybe discuss books together on WhatsApp you create a discussion guide on Google Docs you post reviews to Goodreads and then someone wants to join your group it's a really annoying process right now to add them to all of those different channels and platforms and so really what the promise of web 3 holds a few years down the road is that you add someone to your community and suddenly overnight they have the right permissions the right access to all of the tools that they want to use together that's a very powerful onboarding mechanism you mentioned you mentioned uh Dows for everybody too so to follow with with Community I think the thing that really attracts us uh at Niche around this is like you're right you're in networks that drive identity background shared interest Hobbies all that kind of stuff the thing the thing that makes it all possible for us is Dallas because Dallas allows uh decentralized uh uh uh ownership distributed ownership right and privacy and what that means to the end consumer is it gives them agency over their networks and I think it gives them ownership over what they actually produce in that networks and then if you can distill all that down to something of like you know you you own the networks that you're in you have agency over how they run that's a that's a digestible value prop I think to Everyday users like a Facebook group user yeah great yeah I think like uh you know after this panel I feel like number one user on boarding is like simple and fast custody is more stress stress less people get to manage their different accounts uh granting them different uh assets and permissions and then there are protocols building like really strong fundamental layer that embed all of the fundamental value adds of what the core fundamental value out of web 3 social of uh decentralized ownership and incentive layer and then we talked about the financial incentives uh you know the the the potential of monetization on top of this network uh and one more really unique thing is the Community Driven Dao Centric uh social networking I think that that's um I I think like whenever I think about only the the buzzwords or the gimmick it's like really vague but then if we look at like all of these more puzzles technical puzzles coming together conversibility that's really powerful so like we have like two more minutes left um let's go through uh one thing that you guys you want to tell the audience about about you guys or like in what circumstances they should talk to you okay yeah so um if you want to check out lens protocol as a developer definitely check out our docs docs.lens.xyz if you want to handle come find me or go to the lens Booth pick up some swag and that's about it thanks for checking this out you've been a great moderator thank you for having me yeah uh thanks for being here um and if you want to look at programmatic signing and conditional encryption via a distributed Key Management network uh you'll see a few people floating around with a lit LED cube today also all the docs are at lipprotocol.

com and uh yeah excited to be here thanks again um cool so we are out one of the first tools that we're working on which is a community publishing tool called Symphony it allows the members of a community to decide together and Discord what to publish to a shared Twitter account and we'll be adding um more Platforms in the future so you could you know decide in slack together what to publish to lens for example so more to come but we'd love you to check it out and give us feedback uh you can download niche in the IOS app store where I was only right now only uh we're in open Beta uh Niche member owned clubs uh it's nft gated interest-based clubs uh check it out uh we're gonna start monetizing I think maybe next week so we're going to run a little Charity test uh if anybody wants to talk about NFC gated uh social networks let me know right so like uh yeah so this is uh our actually our very first episode of future finality our research uh media series um after each panel we are going to research uh we are gonna also release a research article on top of what we have discussed and then a little bit more of the fundamental understanding of social fi we will keep bothering you guys in terms of you know the views today we try to like get into all these like fundamental pieces of social fight together so that people can understand the Technologies we're building something real rather than only the jargons so uh follow us at meta web uh Twitter at metaweb VC uh we'll see you around thanks thanks guys thank you [Applause] hello