Resilient Social Networks - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2024

so we're going to talk about building resilient networks so I did my homework I looked at the dictionary and resilience uh means by Marian Webster dictionary the ability of something to return to its original shape after it has been pulled stretched pressed bent Etc So it's b basically being elastic right and you started of a lens and you're running uh those acquired business like go with an h and um Family sonar how come you came up with this um idea of resilience yeah I mean we can even think about like uh I mean that's a really nice definition what resilience is and I I think a lot in the space we we always tune into and and lay out foundations around decentralization and I think decentralization is a very loaded word because um it means different things to different people for some it means having enough um users or community members to to to govern a a public good for some it means that there is less single point of failures for some it means that you know um if if you don't agree with decisions you can actually Fork a system and and create a new community uh around that and and then there's like a bunch of people online like finding like what's decentralization and there's another like uh group of people that then are fighting like what is sufficient decentralization and I think it's really hard to really Point down like what is the purpose of of that discussion um because it has so many vectors um and and what what I think why like resiliency is is much better um better kind of like a value and and principle to to um build upon is is because a a resilient system is easier to recognize so with when I started building um earlier um a and back in the Ean days um I was trying to figure out how to build a system that works by itself and that was the the promise of of of ethereum and and and and this blockchain technology is that you can create something and and deploy it and it can in in in best case scenario it can it can live forever so you can create this Unstoppable forever applications and now more that time passes and the space is growing and we see for example defi growing um there's like a less actually focus on making like why the this into the system it's more about resiliency so how do we create uh Financial systems social networks or any other types of functions in a way that there is least amount of um failure points single point of failure and that includes let's say the the the the protocol architecture uh resiliency against uh the founding teams Founders investors and um governments uh fake news any type of thing that distur disturbs the the main function of of a a a um use case essentially and and that's why it's important and when you build social networking what I realize is that um if you think about decentralization it's going to be hard to to build upon because um social like decentralization has a cost so if if anyone is familiar with the whole blockchain tremma scalability decentralization and and security you can't really have everything uh together at at once so you have to compromise so when we think about social and consumer applications you have to a little bit compromise or not even compromise but you have to apply the right amount of uh security to make a system uh resilient and what we have for example with let's say l1's and l2s they provide certain amount of uh security uh with let's say rollups with a lower transaction cost but that's not that's not enough for example building something where the application layer will be um consumer and with um hundreds of millions of uh transactions so it's kind of a choosing a tradeoff or right amount of application into making a system that is resilient enough of of these different types of uh threats from what I understand is a resilient approach could be um when well it could be described as when the rights like freedom of speeches or the content moderation are pulled in opposing uh directions we should be able to maintain the right status and the spectrum of those rights am I getting it right I think so I mean the first question that people ask usually is that if people have free speech um how do you solve motivation and and and whatnot and I I think um we do for example have free speech in in in in um in in real life and and obviously that it's still argu be limited in some cases and and and Free Speech doesn't necessarily mean that um you can say things that are legal or creates some sort of uh um illegal actions or or consequences uh from that but essentially what what I even like to use is not the word Free Speech because it's such a another uh word that is essentially like politically loaded but voice so everyone has a voice uh today so like we in this event we can talk to people we can meet everyone and we can express things so we can say things out loud but if you think about the digital word and how it's built today and social networks that voice that you have can actually be taken away uh from you so what what I'm trying to figure out is that how do we build um infrastructure over online where you can have an identity and you can have that voice and essentially um there's nothing that can actually take that voice away from you and and then if you think about motivation and and and effectiv that reach how your message should reach that is more of like an application layer um problem to solve so everyone on a network layer should have a voice and you should be able to communicate with everyone the way you want to um so that's the kind of like a resiliency uh part and then the motivation part um is something that can be built on the application layer and then that also gives users more power and more choice because as a user you can choose the right communities uh the right moderation the right Discovery and you're not really boxed into one application where you can't really leave because you leave all your Social Capital behind into that um application and and a and a platform so they they kind of are um it is a gravity that has opposing forces but I think one side belongs to the actually resiliency layer and the other side belongs into the application and Discovery layer where you can solve that that moderation uh problem I I want to come back to the decentralized part um cuz um I thought by Nature being decentralized can be resilient because uh even when there's a flow in a single node uh we can hold the security of the whole network but with the the remaining nose am I wrong about this well I think the decentralization aspect is is definitely the the foundation so so the so the reasons we're building for example lens um onchain and using the blockchain is because it's the it's the main technology that actually can provide data integrity and and there's data Integrity because there's a thing called consensus so there's there's some sort of a way for for all these nodes to reach an agreement what is right and wrong so when you have ability to to have a consensus over data then the next step is just replicate that data with with as many point many um hubs as possible like noes as possible and when you compare for example other Alternatives with um the typical like um client server model obviously you don't have that resiliency with Federated models um you kind of think you have resiliency but you kind of end up in a system where these Federated um hubs become actually um growing um data hubs and essentially data dictatorships so there's there's basically no way to ensure that a a um Federated server um upholds the data is if there is no consensus because the one of the beauties of of the blockchain is that if one node leave the system another node comes back and there's an incentives to uphold the network and and that's the resiliency that's that's proven for ethereum uh with the up times and and um without being able to be broken over the years essentially but I think the key component is here is that how much of that decentralization you need to apply to specific use cases now with D5 we learn quite well that it's a financial infrastructure defi is going to be the whole backbone of all uh Financial transactions at some point it has to be resilient it has to be very um resilient so using high security there makes sense um but then you have other types of uh Capital like Social Capital which is different from Financial Capital where it's what we create as identities online all the time it's the connections we make online uh it's the content we create and the content we distribute to our audiences so we all have social capital it's not really valued because the ownership isn't given to us as users uh at the moment so back to that decentralization aspect is that um we don't need to look into um building the most decentralized uh social network we need to look into how we build the most resilient social network that it's still scalable and going back to that blockchain Trel challenge um you can't have scale decentralization and security at the same time but you need to know how much of each ingredient you have to apply so defi you have to apply a lot of security you might have a lot of decentralization and maybe very little scalability payments that can be built on on top of this existing defi infrastructure maybe there you need more scalability maybe less security um and then when we we look into consumer and social applications and use cases you need enough security that you can establish ownership which is essentially owning your identity your connections um and the networks and and distribution that you have um on chain that no one can take that away from you and it's essentially a public good that everyone can build applications and endpoints and uh expand your uh experience so I think it's it's a more of like um moving out of that like light switch uh approach of using the blockchain into kind of like um tuning in enough like decentralization volume that we we get the resiliency that we need but we achieve the scalability of of getting social into um into the mainstream and I do think that while defi is the product Market fit now on on chain um it's going to take a decade to actually take adoption and social is something where we can move much more faster uh and bring much more quicker and more users into the uh space but still lens wants to become a large and great social media I guess and on its website it says an open social network where users own their content and connections so which is basically a social media and but I think you have to still compete against those social media Giants I don't have to mention their names but what's your strategy on that fight I think everything we do in in this space we're always competing against the big giants because end of the day we're recreating the internet so we're we're building um for an an an audience and an infrastructure that kind of like already exists yeah a lot of these bigger social networks they were created when internet became more usable you had enough bandwidth to actually load pictures instead of just text you have more band wids to actually upload and and download and and watch and stream videos and and and this infrastructure is is is built obviously the whole original idea of the internet was to to build a decentralized network that provides access to everyone um and provides some guarantees of accessibility uh even ownership but because of the usability challenge what happened actually is that we built a internet where we have mostly a handful of companies owning most of the data um most owning most of the platform monetizations um and essentially it's really hard to compete with those networks and it's it's only going to get more difficult because the more data these companies have the better machine learning algorithms they can create the more actually power they can take away from users which is basically Bally us and building something that gives more power to the users you'll always go against you know the big um the big platforms the same is happening with theal Finance um you know the whole idea in the beginning was to actually make this infrastructure to to actually build better Financial infrastructure and 7 years later we now have actually financial institutions that are interested in defi so we have black rock we have credit in s um so they're actually joining the movement and I think the same thing will happen with social is that um the centralized social networks or let's say resilient social networks they they're going to gain momentum amongst their communities they are going to empower a lot of users and those are who going to be early they're going to benefit the most but at some point this technology will just go into adoption into the bigger platforms as well and then the question is there how do you ensure actually that the the application of that technology is is correct and we have the same problem in defi with Central Bank digital currencies where you know we want to use the blockchain but we want to still hold all the uh all the keys and and control over over the value and and and the infrastructure so so this battle will be going on for for as long as we have this kind of like a um disparity going on but at the same time the blockchain technology is um advancing extremely fast and it is very apt to very sensitive to the trends and what do you think um are what kind of techn Technologies are crucial in order to achieve that uh resilient social networks do you think well onchain is just one part of social networking onchain is something that enables access control and access control enables ownership and everyone probably here is already an owner so you own a a particular asset um you know it might be e or it might be a stable coin um but the ownership can be also owning you know a piece of identity um a piece of a network of of your friends and and your followers or it can be an ownership of actually writing into a collaborative uh newsletter so so so there's a lot of ownership surface um a available that we can build buil in social networking in consumer media and then obviously the second piece of it is actually the the the media piece and a lot of the media is obviously today stored in centralized databases but that can be stored in in the centralized systems um decentralized storage um I mean IP AAS is a really great piece of technology and and and lot of for example nft meta data a lot of metad data is stored on on ipfs today the challenge is obviously is that we need to make these Technologies also compatible with the types of uh everyday usage that we have for example we should be able to remove data from ipas and control have more control over it um because end of the day people want to uh remove things maybe that they posted uh online a few years ago so on chain part is for ownership um the storage that is mutable is for that kind of like a u media storage aspect and then when you put these two pieces together from developers perspective you can actually then build very interesting uh algorithms because what lens is actually trying to also do from developers perspective is to actually democratize the access to to to compute and build algorithms and build better Discovery um and that creates more competition and and I would say even arm race to to build algorithms that users really want and and the switch cost is extremely low and I think that's going to be really uh important all right our time is almost up but I should ask this final question lens is now evolving into a lens Network how can the existing lens protocol uh fit into this new network can you answer it shortly maybe yeah we think that lens we don't talk much about the network because um the network is just an infrastructure to make make extremely cheap transactions and I think um a lot of the scaling technology has evolved into layer twos with rollups but that's just not enough for social and consumer transactions so the the big problem is that if you want to put scale and do a lot of transaction the rollups will not be um in a price point that is acceptable for consumers consumers will not want to pay for transaction cost no one is going to go to internet and and pay for every single click or every single domain they're writing it's we're still living in a in a phase where you know you had to pay for every text message you're sending so that's where like the blockchain um is today lens network is simply removing that it's it's going to make blockchain free and what it means is that it's so inexpensive because of the architecture of using so-called validium which is utilizing ethereum with a data availability layer and that means that the transaction costs are so low that developers they don't want to pass this transaction cost back to the end user the same way for example if you're using uh internet application today developers aren't passing their AWS or any other like domain cost for the end users that's how we should buil uh web three today and the lens network is essentially just enabling that simple uh concept of of making uh blockchain free to use for the end users and then the lens uh protocol itself itself is is something where we take all these social networking features and and put them on chain where ownership is relevant and that might be for example creating um social grafts um and that can be a global application specific creating for example uh feeds um creating uh usernames for applications or joining the the kind of like a global name space uh or creating onchain communities so what we're doing essentially with the um lens protocol is we enabling of ownership over social and giving the power back to the users and the network itself is just a piece of infrastructure that makes it uh really affordable and scalable for for mainstream um and all this we're going to launch in the next um couple of months so it's going to be really busy for us