Fireside With Lens' Stani Kulechov

hi everyone all right welcome to fireside chat with Stan kov the amazing founder of alals and my name is wean Kim I'm from be crypto so welcome to Soul SNY thank you pleasure to be here all right this is not your first time right no it is and I'm yeah I'm really um uh really happy to actually be here and and see this all Community like it's um it's really um the event is Big um and I met a lot of people and I um I think there's a lot of um excitement around of um crypto at the moment um and also what I've been talking to a lot of people um here and uh we have a lot of community here and I was really surprised so um I have to go more often so you mean a community of a and lens and everything that you ran yeah it's it's interesting because um at um so what we're building and and how we're like organized as a as a team so so there's avara and avar essentially is a um a house of um uh web tree uh protocols and and products and most known um obviously is um the a protocol that we build from the AA Labs um and then obviously lens U from lens labs and lens is a um kind of like a resilient decentralized social protocol meant for Builders um that you can build social experiences and and more recently we um we acquired also a a wallet called family which is focusing more on design and getting more newcomers into the um crypto so we have a lot of things going on at the same time and the way I think about it is that um crypto or let's say web3 um it's not only about uh Financial opportunities but there's a lot to actually create and build uh and Empower people with um non-financial use cases and I think even bigger so I I do think think uh and earlier today I was uh talking with uh with run the the sky uh ex basically well maker um about Defi and things we have to do Sky you mean Sky yeah and we have so much to do at the moment so def5 will take a decade to actually uh adopt but these other exciting use cases for example social gaming and these can actually trigger and go viral very quickly and that's why there's a lot of potential um and that's what we're trying to basically do with aara build around people so not just only financial uh um opportunities but also things that are important for creators um everyday users as well and things that might be more fun as well so we think that our approach is to build more of um all around the next generation of the internet great so for those who might have missed the announcement this morning um um Stan's uh a and runes Sky have announced a kind of strategic partnership and it's called it's uh Sky of force it's a great name uh but um I believe most of the participants in web 3 in Korea know about a know about lens but I don't think many of them understand that they come from the same person like you yeah or like I mean that's um so I do think I I do believe that um we have to build Beyond Finance so that's that's one of the important thing and I do you think finance and defy um it's it's it's going to be the backbone of of everything so first of all um Defy is going to be the infrastructure of all Finance at some point so we don't call it defi it's just part of what we do daily basis and it happens to be on the blockchain um once we solve some of the last mile challenges like scalability that's getting is getting better um privacy and and so forth and how it's going to empower it's going to empower these different types of other use cases and social is also about capital in some ways so um there are a lot of people that have Financial Capital but there's every single person in this room in this event in Soul in Korea around the world that has actually Social Capital now Social Capital means essentially the content we create uh the content we engaged with um or the connections we make here today um or in in our schools um other places um and so forth so that is actually true value that we create and actually is even more impactful to um be able to capture that value and ensure that everyone has ownership and the best tool to create ownership um is blockchain it's not Federated networks um although those are a way to decentralize um some aspect of let's say publishing social networks but blockchain is a way to to create ownership resilient ownership um and being able to do that that essentially creates these networks that can live forever um and I think we we uh we were chatting recently um while waiting about um coin Des Korea and an example for example that um if I understood it doesn't exist uh today too sad yeah it's a sad thing but my take is that being able to create content and having this attention economy um and if you're have a publication there should be ability that publication to live um as long as there's readers and interest or it's culturally relevant piece of content and people who care about the publication essentially should be able to produce content they should have that permission and right and with don't have it today so we have some sort of um community-driven ways of creating content let's say that is very important culturally for example or for the society like Wikipedia as an example um but a lot of those things could actually be on chain the permissions could be on chain the feeds could be on chain social networks connectivity could be on chain um that doesn't mean that the actual content has to be on chain but the the actual owner ownership and the ability to uh publish things and and and and connect with establishing connections that could essentially uh be thank you for mentioning my past job Place Coes carea though it's gone um you while you were talking about the social well social um assets ownership you use the word resilient and also you recently wrote about resilient social networks could you explain uh more about its concept like how can you be resilient about your content you create yeah I think it's also a something that's the way I build products is that um I never get anything right at the first try um the same goes with um AA for example we had to iterate few times in the beginning to find uh what's what do the users want and and what's what's valuable and then essentially optimize that so what I learned with um building social networks that's and and tooling for developers to to build applications and and use cases I I learned that um actually decentralization doesn't matter and I'm not saying that in the sense that decentralization is a very loaded word so it can mean different things to different people first of all and second of all a decentralization in sense is a spectrum so what is the right amount of decentralization you need for particular use case and what I think actually matters for social and let's say for for defi as well and and everything else that we build on chain is resiliency so how do you create resiliency in different use cases and in Social what it means is that decentralization necessarily is n um the goal the goal is to create a resilient infrastructure that provides value than to actually um developers or end users that that actually then are using these different applications and they have sense of ownership um so there's two things there the the the value comes in the sense that uh you can trust that you can build your social capital in a particular application or a network and you can essentially rely on a resilient Network that that Social Capital that you created and invested in doesn't disappear um and it happens ongoing basis so it's quite common that the end users as a kind of like a mass user base they don't necessarily care about decentralization or that their account accounts exist but once it happens it kind of sucks I think the same argument goes into Finance as well like why people should care about Finance or let's say defi um as long as you can you know it's easy to use you will use whatever is easiest for you but once there is a bank that actually goes under the water or there's actually a a problematic um problem in the system then it actually matters that why why didn't we build this in the right way in the good way and I think that's the that's the value added here is that we have a better technology and we can create ownership and once we do we have more interesting use cases and people will contribute to the content in a new ways so if you actually have more power as a user you have more choice you can choose the applications Builders can get build in a different way they that's the that's the approach there and also one thing about what we're building on lens is interesting is that it's like a shared resilient social network so every application that is built on on lens whether it's successful or not it will always compound the user base so it always leaves more than than it takes and that's like a really interesting value proposition for someone who is building from scratch okay avara um announced back in May I think um the development of the lens Network how is it how is it different from lens protocol that is already there lens protocol is just smart contracts that are social features and what we did is we try to map out different social um actions or um social behavior that is happening online and and essentially turn them into smart contracts and by doing that we create this idea of the ownership so if you follow someone on chain um or you create your IDE identity social identity on chain um and you have only you're the only one who has a key to to make changes that's ownership for you um because you remove that ability from a platform to to do that um and today's social networks are built in a way that's where essentially give all the data um all the control and we basically are the product as the users so the actual lens Network what we realize is that if we want to make this uh technology scalable we have to have scale on the network level and I think scalability is something that has been worked upon over the years now and it's getting into better place so when we started lens we didn't really have adoption on LT and today there's LTS and the transaction cost is significantly lower but they're not as low as they should be so you can enable more for social and consumer use cases and just to give you an example is that um and users they need to have a similar experience that they're having now with any online application so they don't want to deal with things like gas um installing a wallet um confirming transactions that needs to like be in the past that's like if if you're building consumer if you're building social that's the mindset like you have to think you can't think like a an an an typical web3 developer you have to rethink the way you build abstract all these uh Technologies away and provide the best experience essentially and lens network is is just a extremely cheap place to transact and create social transactions and because we're using validum which is parted by ZK sync so what it means is that we're using ethereum for um storing State transitions but the actual state of the network is in a data availability layer and what we're doing here in essence is that we're just using the right amount of security that the blockchain provides to establish data Integrity to give you the ownership to ensure that accounts are accurate let's say if there's payments uh Revenue sharing or or whatnot so that data is accurate and it has enough resiliency um but not the same amount that you would use to store the most valuable things uh in the world that might belong in more like ethereum and these underlying networks so that's the idea of of of lens network is just en enabling uh infrastructure and lens protocols so the V3 is what we're building on top is essentially these social features on chain on lens Network it's a stack for Developers to to build um resilient social applications right good news for developers but I want to come back to the reality of the social media landscape because uh I believe a lot of people here are using social media as well but most of them are actually just consumers they don't create or they don't produce they don't write they might take some pictures but so in that kind of landscape how do you envision web 3 social network like um lens be changing um this this kind of dynamic or the typical situation that we're in I I you say that most of the users will always be like consuming so that's going to be maybe maybe um l L might enable more creators and you want to invest and become a Creator because you have more opportunity and you you create your audience once you don't need to recreate it all the time so across all these applications that are built on lens um in future applications you just need one account and you can essentially log into any app but um you might have more creators because you have less things to manage but I think there's going to be always more consumers that consume um let's say content and and I do think that for creators it's extremely big value proposition because you own your distribution it's it's just like a incredible if you just like stop for a moment and just like think about it like if any of these applications just go down for any reason you still have everything you created that's amazing and that's why it's really big for the the the creators because they own their distribution and they can even monetize that distribution share that with different applications um and even incentivise and share all the way back to the end user so maybe for the end user they obviously can can actually benefit from more open transparent landscape open and transparent algorithms they actually see what's happening um behind the scenes and they have more power because they can actually choose these use cases and and choose their um apps that they want to use so if you don't specifically like an algorithm you can switch uh to another one if you don't like an experience an app you can change to another one without rebuilding everything you um you have and that's that's not the reality that's that's actually not the reality today with existing social networks so the value per position is incredibly big and the path to get there is is really long because social media companies they're biggest platforms and companies in the world so being able to actually win Market here is going to be a long game and I think one that really helps a lot is what blockchain is really good at good at is um sharing incentives and I think that's going to be big part of it of actually uh fueling some of the growth but I do think it's going to take um significant time to all of this um technology to to get adoption so good for all the participants I do think that um soul in in Korea is a very interesting um Market from social and and mainly because things that go viral they go viral big here and that's why it's it's quite fascinating um market and I do think that social is something that can actually move really fast it just requires the right type of eon content right top of a network effect within that social network and something can become overnight success that won't necessarily happen in in let's say in let's say defi in in a financial context that will take years to mature because everyone has to have certainty so that's why I'm I'm I'm super excited to build this um from the social perspective and then once you have onchain social networks you can connect these two things you can connect the fincial uh aspect and the social aspect and bring that not just the power to the users but also make social more fair and distribute the incentives um accordingly I only have 10 seconds left but this I want to ask this question desperately um Simon from hash this I mentioned it this morning too but uh South Korea is now going through a big Saga and uh debate about the def fake pornography which is has become a big social problem right now how can web three social media guarantee or ensure the Integrity or the safety of the network can I can you answer maybe shortly a little bit yeah one important thing about building resilient networks is that they're open and transparent so these algorithm in in most cases they should be transparent you should understand and easily to understand what's happening there and resiliency means resiliency and ability to participate on the protocol level so it doesn't mean that actually you can go and do illegal thing things and be irresponsible that's that's not the case and and I think that's a common misconception um what actually these resilient social networks will actually even do is that you can build in a lot of these safety mechanisms uh into it into these um use cases and just an example is that you can add Community moderation which is transparent auditable um and also share incentives for doing that work which is not the same case at the moment with bigger social networks so you can actually create this tools and and build in so that can be done on a more of a protocol level but then obviously it's the responsibility of these applications to then moderate and I will say curate U the content for their user bases and I think that's where the power comes so they should be ability to actually even Evol engage with the community and decide what type of a news might be actually um real or not and I think some of these bigger platforms have been even building their applic toward that this direction that they try to engage their communities but I think you need that transparency um to go forward so I think down the line it's an application Level uh problem but the tools are already there and if we make it more transparent it's much more easier to swall than that it is uh today all right thank you it was stany from alvara and I was wome from being crypto thank you very much thank you