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Scaling Lens Livestream
Recorded: April 8, 2025 Duration: 0:58:04Space Recording
Short Summary
Lens has officially launched on Maynet, marking a pivotal moment in its journey towards mainstream adoption. With strategic partnerships and a focus on user experience, the platform aims to leverage its growing user base and innovative features to redefine social connectivity in the blockchain space.
Full Transcription
Hoping this works on the Lens account. Welcome, everyone. I'm very glad to have you here.
I'm here with Stani, the founder of Lens, Alex, the founder of ZKZync, and Anorak, the founder of Avail.
This is Scaling Lens, the livestream where we're going to tell you everything about the Herculean task that was shipping Lance Maynet.
This is, we're so happy to have finally gotten this on Maynet. It's been on since Friday,
and it's been a year long of work and more of R&D, of course. So we're going to ask some questions to each of the founders here. They're going to be
around a growing lens, around scalability, around the Elastic Chain, and we're also going to be
talking about what does it take to actually go beyond crypto users. Because right now we, you know, we're very
happy we have a really big community. Mainstream is almost here in general senses for blockchain,
but the inbound is coming mostly from meme coins, and there's little retention. So here at Lens,
we want to do something different.
We want to give people the social rails
so they're able to connect and grow
and the financial rails
so that they're able to also monetize
and take ownership of their digital lives.
So without further ado,
I'm going to start with Stani.
What made you decide to build LensChain and what capabilities
does it unlock that weren't possible before on general purpose chains?
Thanks, MP, for the introduction. I'm feeling really excited because there's so many OGs in this livestream that's been building and contributing to the ecosystem.
Yeah, I think Lens is a really special project in the sense that it just doesn't unlock one specific thing
or has one specific functionality, but it's a set of different functionalities that benefits everyone.
And the way I think about Lens is that we contribute a lot of value and we have found
ways of actually storing monetary value or the value we do from our work and being able
to exchange that into different currencies and then take those
kind of currencies and spend and buy things that we like or we need.
And something that really doesn't have a good way of capturing value is actually our
identity and our voice and opinions that we create, basically, as a bigger concept of social capital.
And that's been really difficult because the way we build the internet is,
we started from a very decentralized aspect where, you know, let's connect all these computers around the world.
And we have a really decentralized way of connecting and we have a resilient network.
And what later happened is that we saw more of bigger companies being built on the are the biggest, and social media companies,
which are the biggest companies in the planet.
And we give a lot of this social capital
directly to these platforms.
And you can't really take that capital
from one place to another and truly own it.
So what Lens has enabled is that actually,
you know, if you are able to own value like monetary value on chain, you should be able to actually own your distribution, your identity, the name that you have or a username and decide, you know, what to do with that.
create publications where you can govern them with, for example, peers that you create content
together, creating groups. And we're basically using on-chain. And that's the basic purpose.
We think that there is a lot of value in financial systems and these transactions, but we believe that there's even more value
compared to financial value on the social capital space. And that's basically what we create as a
content, opinions and networks amongst each other. So that's the kind of like a vision for Lens and why we've been building and we're extremely committed to the mission
as well.
Thank you, Stani.
So in the grand cosmos of blockchain, Lens is connected to ZK-Sync's Elastic Chain, which
is an infrastructure that allows many chains to interoperate with each other, and in the future
they will be able to send messages to each other. This is the infrastructure that brings the speed
and brings the low costs to Lens. Alex, what benefits can Lenschain bring to such an ecosystem? And how do you see other chains leveraging social primitives once Interop is live on the chain?
So, yeah, the Elastic Network is this infrastructure that connects many chains that are verifiable and secured by ZK Proofs.
And the Interop is not live yet, but we're working towards enabling it in the next couple of months.
Once this happens, I think one really interesting thing that you can think of is before the internet, information traveled on different media.
You would have separate newspapers, separate radios, separate TV sets, and you are not able to combine them.
And the Internet brought all of this together in ways that mashed up information and bundled things and created new synergies that were not previously possible before.
And what Stania just said about the value of social and the value of finance,
blockchains, Web3D technologies, for the first time in history, actually allow these different
types of value exchange to be combined interop, the value of social capital
that Lens is bringing on chain is automatically
becoming available to all other chains and apps
in the Elastic Network ecosystem, the ZcSync ecosystem.
So you can think of basically any app can now get immediate access to the social score to the social profile
of of the user if the user of course authorizes this authorizes this and you can read the state and history
of the user's transactions
and you can enable
social mechanisms directly
in your financial app
or in your entertainment app
so basically everything becomes
extendable with the
kind of a widget of
social network
coming from Lens which isifiable, which is on-chain,
which is unfakeable, with unfakeable history, unfakeable reputation, which the user truly owns.
And this guarantee that it's really owned by the user and it really belongs to this person and
everything was fairly calculated, all the rules were followed, is extremely important.
This is what creates this additional layer of value
that is coming from the social networks
because it's a different level of trust.
With blockchains, what we're doing is we're automating the...
we're disrupting the trust industry.
You don't have to trust authorities and institutions anymore.
You can trust directly the other other users you can trust smart contracts because you know
they are verifiable and they will be enforced by this technologies so now you can also trust
the social capital of those users and that just becomes extensible in to every app
thank you so much interesting indeed especially if you come to think of the context where
right now people are operating in transacting value and investing all with the accountability
and the identity that's inherited from X, which obviously doesn't give you any guarantees. So the promise
of having a decentralized social life that's also protecting you, but also protecting other
people becomes super, super important. This question is for Anurag. Hi, Anurag. Scaling
Lens through AvaDBA. So basically for everyone that just tuned in, lens is a hybrid
module infrastructure. It's made combining of Lydium, which is DkSync technology, and
available for data availability. So, Anurag, tell us, how did the collaboration originate,
and how will the users and builders benefit from the scale that the DA provides?
Hi, Maria.
So yeah, I mean, in general, when Stani approached us,
initially when he was thinking about the migration,
we worked previously with Polygon as well with the earlier iteration of lens.
The team was looking out for various solutions and after a thorough technical evaluation,
of course we've built this state-of-the-art DTWD solution, for example, with DTWD sampling,
with VLT proofs and such. And so, you know, like, it's a very scalable approach that matches the needs,
what a lens required, for example.
And in general, like, the overall experience with working with the lens team,
you know, it's just starting to be very honest, right?
Like, I mean, it's, you know, like, we've got a bunch of things that we've lined up
including things like you know like using our light lines as messaging relays for example
and so on so a bunch of stuff coming up so there's a bunch of stuff that we've discussed
when we are starting integrating and in general like for this volidium like construction
something like avail is absolutely required
and of course ZK Sync is anyways
very efficient with
posting state drift data
so in general
but overall I just also want to
take this opportunity to commend
the Lens team for taking over this initiative
actually if you're going to look at
some of the most successful
companies or top companies in the world uh all of them focus on social in some way or the other
like be it you know like facebook instagram tick tock you know like and the others for example
and the thing is that over time the problem that lens is is kind of looking at is really like
that what stani mentioned as social capital.
Social capital is actually locked up in proprietary systems, for example.
And, you know, a lot of value just gets locked up, right?
I mean, I still remember when I used to be playing these games from Zynga back in the day on Facebook.
One fine day, Facebook just closed down its API
and Zynga almost went out of business in general.
And so that is the kind of powerful economic effects that social has.
And I think Lens is attempting
some of the most bold problems in the sense that
how can we kind of make this social graph more accessible,
more composable across a variety of use cases,
including economic, including value flows, for example.
And, you know, like, I think we are doing our part
in helping enable that future.
Sometimes I feel like I kind of have the easiest job
amongst three of us because the technology itself
is very complicated.
And from Alex's kind of like team perspective,
that's like, you know, ZK proving systems
and that type of a technology.
And then from Avail and Anorex team,
it's more on the data availability side
and being able to produce high throughput.
So in some ways, I feel like my job is a little bit more easier
because it's more on the kind of like,
then application and user,
but it does have its own kind of like challenges
because I truly think that without this technology
it's really hard to scale to mainstream
because there is, I even think that there hasn't been a moment in
Web3 where you can start actually thinking about mainstream because, you know, the transaction fees has been relatively high,
there's sort of fluctuation, and there's no like a clear path of like how we can actually scale and bring tens of millions and hundreds of millions
of users.
So I do think that it's very complementary to what
we are trying to achieve while still giving the users
the ability to preserve their ownership.
MARIUSZ GASIEWSKI- And that's a nice segue, actually,
for what we're going to talk about now, which is that Lens
chain actually started with already 650,000 accounts on the chain. These accounts belong
to users of the Lens v1 and v2 protocol. We, together with the ZK team, we designed a new custom migration tool.
This migration took 125 gigabytes of chain storage logs and other data
and migrated effectively about 45,000 weekly active users.
and a monthly weekly active users.
This took about a month and it was only possible
by the collaboration of the ZK team and the Lens team.
So I wanted Tani and Alex to talk a little bit
about this process because we managed to actually preserve
all the content, all the connections
and all the digital footprint of every single user on Lens.
And this is incredibly important.
Indeed, that was a very remarkable technical piece of work. Really grateful to the Lens team
for cooperating on this. It was a teamwork between MetaLabs and L lands uh it was 200 gigabytes of just pure state
so they like it was a multi-step process and and the there is now a special migration framework
that can be applied to any chain uh what we did is uh we first took this snapshot of the state and imported that from the Polygon and...
The data was scattered across Polygon and Momoka.
It's a separate scaling solution, also based on Polygon.
So we had to take it from there, create the snapshot,
and then actually launch it on a separate ecosystem and rerun all the transactions
so we reproduce all of the logs
so that on a technical level,
every single piece of data,
not just a final state, but also historic state.
So you can run up and see the history of transactions
with full compatibility with existing previous tools,
previous applications that were reading the state,
were reapplied
and then this new chain was actually deployed uh on in a live production system so basically you
can now take anything and migrate to the elastic network using this and this is a fantastic outcome
for the elastic network but also for lens uh because it's, like, hopefully it was a delightful experience for Lens users and the Lens team.
Yeah, I mean, end of the day, like, what we were thinking about it is that we want to do, you know, we want to do something that is very seamless for the users. And we know that we weren't actually like touching financial data
and financial transactions.
It's more of like ownership of social connectivity
and profiles and whatnot.
So we took a kind of like a different approach
than typically we do with smart contact-based systems
at Avara, where Lens is part of.
And we wanted to ensure that if we provide
a new environment for the users how do we ensure that they don't need to that the whole process
isn't painful and they don't need to actually do anything so how can we enable it out of the box
so a lot of work went in true actually,
and we were debating quite a lot, you know,
whether it's still to do the migration.
And I think we found a really good common path
together with the Lens team and the Matterlabs team as well
on how we approach the migration and a framework
was born out of that.
And the reason why this is
really important is that over the history of on chain we've we've seen um innovation happen
across different networks and for anyone that knows uh innovation and technology can be a
really important uh driver and enabler so so we want to be somewhere where we can, for example, scale.
So our target audience is, for example,
hundreds of millions of users and billions of users down the line.
And we knew that, for example,
with existing setup that we had on Polygon
that really wasn't servicing the purpose,
that the unique economics of gas costs and everything associated with that just wouldn't servicing the purpose. We, that the unique economics of gas costs and everything associated that just wouldn't
work down the line.
Plus, we wanted stronger alignment with Ethereum as well and actually the L2 that contributes
into the ecosystem.
So being able to do this is really remarkable.
to do this is really remarkable. There's other apps that really want to migrate as well. So I
There's other apps that really want to migrate as well.
remember over a year ago seeing a post from the, I guess it was a founder of Frentech who was
offering $1 million for anyone that could migrate Frentech to another chain, to their own chain
specifically for example. So you know there is a need for this and
data migrations between networks should happen really smoothly and easily and I'm super happy
that we're we're able to actually execute on this it was a lot of work and a lot of preparation
and a lot of data but turned out to be really well and I think this is an extremely good learning for all the builders out there and developers
is that you can choose the best technology
and then figure out how do you move your community
without creating any types of fragmentation.
And this is actually really amazing
because every single post that is created on Lens,
any transaction is actually happening at the created on Lens,
any transaction is actually happening at the moment
on Lens chain.
And that means the users, they don't need to fight
for gas price of other applications in the ecosystem
that don't really contribute to Lens.
And I think just by removing that piece of it,
the actual transaction costs with the same level of security
are much more cheaper at the moment.
So there's a direct utility.
And I like what, MP, you said about that in the beginning
that Lens chain has already hundreds of thousands
of profiles and active users and there's apps at the moment.
And this is really cool because um this is one of
those rare uh uh migrations or let's say rare l2 launches where you already have applications and
users and this type of uh migration and moving to l2 specifically supports that user use case
specifically supports that user use case makes scaling much more efficient and then also
reduces the the transaction costs and that's is possible because we put all these technologies
together and i just want to add that one thing i really admire about the avara team is is this
deep focus on user experience and making things spotless and completely seamless.
And you can see it in every product from Ava to Family Wallet, which is a fantastic,
I think the best Ethereum wallet that you can possibly get the mainstream users on,
to this approach to making sure that everything works completely out of the box for the end user.
This obsession with detail is um is really rare and this is why we're
so excited to partner with with avara and with the lens team and this is something we share we
from on the metal apps on the kissing site we work we're not building the front and facing things
we're which much more in the under the hood with protocol, but we are building four teams who are like this,
who are obsessed with end-user experience,
and we're giving the best tools,
like native account abstraction,
the new SSO wallet,
the single sign-on embedded wallet experience,
and so on, to make this one-click,
JustWorks experience possible.
Thank you so much, both.
And Anurag, I also wanted to tap into this topic with you
because obviously the amount of data and the smooth migration
would only be possible because we have this infrastructure
that makes sure that we're able to migrate
and that we're able to offer people unprecedented levels of speed and scalability in the new network.
Do you envision more use cases needing these kind of operations within the avail ecosystem?
in blockchains is really this you know like increasing trend of um you know like um people
wanting to do more um roll-up constructions or l2 constructions uh um rather than being on um or
their own specific app chains uh where they can control things like you know like transaction
contention and such for example just to have better ux and so so lesser l1s are being launched
in general compared to the number of l2s for example different execution environments and so
on and so like i think tooling is moving in such a way that like for example in regular web technology if instagram would you know like change the data centers for
example the user doesn't really come to know right like i mean and so essentially you know
like that sort of tooling um is is is now becoming more and more mature and of course this is perhaps
one of the first few migrations uh in general but I think this is going to be a growing trend.
I mean, essentially, till today, one problem that I've seen in blockchains is users have to experience blockchains at a very low level.
They have to go down to the brass tacks
and understand the blockchain environment and so on.
I think this is one of the first steps of abstracting that experience away.
Within migration, users didn't even know that the infrastructure had changed,
but it had changed to more verifiable infrastructure
and in a way that their flow was not interrupted.
I think that is commendable.
And I'm pretty sure a lot of other teams
who will come after this will
follow this path
to migrate
whatever data
they have from existing infrastructure into this
new infrastructure. But I think
this is overall, this is all
mirroring a trend from moving
from shared block space to dedicated block space and so on. And I think these are all
very important tools for developer teams such as Lens, for example, who can then just focus on what is most important
is the end user experience.
Yeah, and talking about end user experience,
first of all, we ask the audience to send us some questions.
This is a live stream about scaling Lens
and everything that it takes from the tech perspective, but also from the user
perspective. So we will be answering those questions that actually respond to the live
stream. The rest of the questions, they will be answered at some point, but we're not going to be
able to provide answers to everything. With regards to going beyond crypto users, obviously, social is one of those verticals
that can reach mass adoption because people inherently need to connect. They need,
obviously, they also need to earn, but most of it, they really want to connect. So,
let's start it, Stani, with crypto users, creators and communities.
What's the strategy for scaling Lens beyond the Web3 audience into mainstream social users?
Yeah, that's really exciting because I think we're entering into a chapter for for lens where we're actually all the technical uh barriers to to scale
to a a consumer adoption uh not obviously the full list of let's say uh five billion users or so
um but basically to a significant consumer adoption is actually not possible from technical perspective and infrastructure.
So there is scaling at the moment that is basically solved with CK Sync and Avail.
Also the ability to onboard users is solved in the sense that anyone with an email phone number can create a family account and that
could be embedded into any application across the lens ecosystem.
So those things are there and the on-drops is still a topic that needs a little bit more
work across our space in general. But I think we're very close to that.
So from infrastructure perspective, that's pretty much done.
So I think now where we can actually put a lot of emphasis is actually the application layer,
supporting existing applications and ideas, attracting new developers,
and building some of the applications also ourselves as of our team and support existing partners.
I think the way to scale actually and create something really unique and interesting is when everyone is trying to achieve that and going to be also a very interesting developer program coming up, which actually me and also MP are working at this moment, which is going to be really exciting for existing builders, but also newcomers that really want to build something. lens is 10 times more powerful than existing social apps if you go and build on your own is
that every user you onboard to lens or some other application on boards to lens is shared across
the whole ecosystem so that means that every application that is onboarding or
that is onboarding or is basically active for a while,
still onboard to the ecosystem.
So it actually makes the growth and adoption more easier
when you think about when everyone is basically just building
to an existing audience that
is interested in social apps you know they have wallet balances they all have uh go the stable
coin which is the native asset of of the ava sort of the uh lens ecosystem from actually backed by
the ava ecosystem so that's really uh exciting so i think there's more and more reasons to build on Lens,
and we made it extremely easy with the developer dashboard as well, and just making it super easy
to deploy these social primitives and use them. So that's going to be a big part of our strategy.
Thank you, Stani. We're getting two super interesting questions from the audience with
regards to um scalability and one that really made me think um it's uh maybe i'll ask them i'll ask
it now for you for all of you um just a full disclosure i'm translating with grok. So it might not be so accurate. But this is from Monkey D. Long from
China. And they're mentioning what an ordinary Chinese user needs to do to play with Lens.
The first step is install the Google Trio and download a BPM software. Second step is download
a centralized exchange like Binance. Third step is learn how to exchange
RMB into USDT. Then the fourth one is purchasing ETH. Then learn to use a wallet and transfer ETH
to the wallet. Learn to use a DEX and purchase Go with ETH. Purchase a Go, a Lens account and then
log into the Lens website and bridge GoToLens. As a social product,
MonkeyBee says, after going through all of these seven major funnels, how many users and how much
platform traffic will remain? And this is such a fair question, because it really makes us think
about it. And this is a like Alex and and stanny said it's a platform that already um irons out a lot
of the ux problems with crypto but people still need to do these steps um so how are we planning
to address these challenges i can you can start answering maybe standing and i can expand uh but
this is an obvious problem that's been in crypto for a while. And there are solutions to this.
There are on-ramps.
There is, basically, there are different components that solve this.
You need a great wallet that enables you to onboard very easily.
For most people, this means seedless, just connect with your email, phone number, and start using it.
Then there are on-ramps.
They are geographically distributed.
The biggest part of the on-ramp challenge is local compliance.
So obviously, some companies will serve Europe, some companies will serve the U.S.,
Latam, China, Southeast Asia, and so on.
So you need
to integrate them together, and you need to
build them into the application itself.
So that for you
to start, well, to start using the social
IP, you probably don't need this, but in
order to participate in the broader
financial ecosystem and some interesting use cases,
you will need this on wraps.
So you need to get all of this together, And this is hard because you need to get the
integrations all separate. And then each app would have to go and talk to all the on-ramp
partners and try to build their own wallet experience and do all these different steps
on their own, which does not scale because it's an end-to-end problem. And every one of the end
participants have to perform every single one of these M steps, which
is the Cartesian product is the square complexity of this.
So what we're doing on our side, and Stani can then share
what Lance is doing with this, is we have built
the protocol infrastructure to make the
wallet experience fantastic
and this is being used now by
family
to make the on-ramping
just on account creation
side easy and then
ZK-Sync is integrating
all the different on-ramp solutions
and the native
interop in the elastic
network makes it directly available to every application and every wallet that wants to use
them without having to think about the fees the gas bridging all of that is completely abstracted
away and there is zero effort required from the app builders or the wallet builders to integrate them separately.
They're all available as a simple widget
which goes through the Elastic Network entry points,
such as the ksync era, into the Lens chain,
and into the apps.
And Stani, how are you thinking about the integration of family, Lens itself, the
Songgram widgets?
Yeah, exactly. So I think what we saw so far is first and foremost, the ability to
generate a wallet, email, phone number, that's relatively easy.
It used to be painful with having a browser extension, having seed words that you have
to basically write and then understanding the assets itself and signing and so forth.
It's not very intuitive.
So I think that's quite sold well and something I love to use and always see, actually see a lot of builders using is ConnectKit to connecting the wallet.
And we made it even easier to just continue with the family account there where, you know, you don't need to re-login again,
which is same way as like, let's say you will have a Google account or some other social account that you use today online.
So that's part of the result.
One really important part of the result is the economic unit of the network, which is the ghost table coin.
And it's a really big problem, to be honest, if you have a volatile asset as the gas token,
because usually the gas token
actually determines the whole uh economical unit of the network and what typically happens with a lot of applications is that uh you're getting paid with volatile currency or you're buying
volatile currency so if a user onboards directly from fiat um and they buy let's say 20 bucks of world currency and in a
week it's let's say 15 you know they're quite confused because where did they
spend rest of the funds so the volatility is really not great for
consumer payments so that's also sold I think the last kind of bit that we have
to solve is the the fiat component how someone can get with zero fees from fiat directly onto Lens, the whole elastic chain and use all this, the whole ecosystem without really having the bottlenecks and I think the existing solutions aren't all very
straightforward you know onboarding with cards it's the payments are extremely
high the fees are extremely high and the acceptance rate is very low as well so
there are some better solutions but that's still something where we have to
work upon so once you get into the ecosystem, it's relatively easy to hash out a lot of these issues.
And also on Lens, one thing we want to solve
in the next couple of weeks is that every profile on Lens
is actually a smart account,
means that you can spend funds through your smart account.
We want to make it easier to actually spend natively from
your wallet and also spend native go instead of let's say wrapped go um so that support will
comment uh simplifies a lot of uh bottlenecks as well but yeah there's still a lot to do on on the
ux anurag what's your take on these?
Yeah, so actually I've been spending the last few days in Hong Kong, so I've been talking
to a lot of local players here in general.
So there's been the tooling around liquidity, on-ramping, off-ramping, that has improved
a lot. You know, like in, in Hong Kong, especially, you know, like the regulator has brought support
for, you know, like on, on, on ramps off ramps, for example, in general and, and variety
of other countries are also adding support.
So I think we we've been working um um tangentially with you know like
one of our partners because a lot of a lot of the roll-ups on top of avail uh had um issues with you
know kind of bringing liquidity to their uh into their uh chains at the outset uh whether this is
from other chains or from uh from from fiat for example And so we've been thinking about building this middleware,
so to speak, so that can be useful to app devs on top of all
chains in the available ecosystem in general.
And so initially, one of our partners
works on this more liquidity,
solver liquidity sort of
use case.
And this is something
I wanted to demo
this to you later as well, but
we just did this
rigging of the
Aave UI in the sense, I i mean just a hacky way of you know like
basically feeding unified balance of assets across chains um into the away ui so that the you know
it would kind of take the unified balance of the user on each chain um and not not for um you know
like per chain basis for example again unrelated but
yeah I mean having said that right like see
the I think things have improved
a lot from
let's say 2-3 years
ago like off ramping
on ramping
liquidity especially in
lot of the major stable coins
has improved a lot
so that the slippage isn't that too high.
So I think what we are doing, of course, there's still work to be done,
but I think the pieces are coming together.
You know, like taking the on-ramp, for example, the gas token abstraction thing,
not having to approve manually, for example, all of that,
you know, like things like family, things like smart accounts on ZK-Sync, for example,
things like, you know, like being able to, you know, like swap whatever asset the user has
converts into the off-ramp into, let's say, Go, for example.
converts into the off-ramp into, let's say, Go, for example.
So it'll take slightly more time,
but I think we'll be able to come up with some middleware
that'll be useful to the app dev to kind of abstract this for the user.
Hopefully, you know, we should reach a position
where the user doesn't really need to kind of have to,
you know, like pay fees every time every time for example especially with smart accounts
and such thank you yeah from my experience uh the what's the ecosystem is very very self-conscious
when it comes to onboarding and it's a and general ux and the ux that we see now in several of the
apps obviously including family is way better than what we see now in several of the apps, obviously, including family,
is way better than what we see, for example, in an online bank or something like that. Fintech
is quite close, but there's nothing like a really good Web3 app with regards to UX. So I think we
are poised to be able to onboard millions of people in this regard.
But there's obviously another thing that comes with onboarding
millions, and it's actually on the user side.
What is the switch that people need
to make to be able to trust Web3 platforms
or to be able to understand that Web3 platforms are better
for them, they're more fair and more equitable?
And anyone can answer this question, of course.
Alex, do you want to give a first shot?
Yeah, I was thinking, you know, there are multiple components to this.
There are fundamentals, and then there is education to the users
to understand these fundamentals.
So the big unlock for trust is actually using blockchains
as they were intended to use by satoshi vitalik and you know the um the the
the hardcore uh blockchain thinkers you're building systems that are verifiable that don't require
trust and you gain trust in the systems by observing them operate over a long period of time
with extremely high incentives locked in and not making mistakes,
not violating the rules. The rules of the game are fair and equal to everyone. And it's not that
you have someone in a position of power who can arbitrarily overwrite that. So I think the
education part comes from this observation over a long period of time.
Once you see differences between something like Ethereum and L2's built on Ethereum that derive
the security properties and verifiability from Ethereum by using zero knowledge proofs for scale,
you just cannot scale this trustlessness without zero
knowledge proofs really on blockchain systems. And you compare
this class of systems to something that is fairly
centralized and can be arbitrarily changed. And the
baseline is centralized components, like the social
platforms of the web tool where people can be deplatformed,
their accounts can be shut down. We see all of that. This is a very salient example of
how a trusted system can backfire. And then you compare it to this world of verifiable systems.
That would be my guess, my attempt to answer the question.
Oh, that was, go ahead, Adirak.
Yeah, no, I mean, see, my way of looking at this is essentially,
building these kind of platforms on on Web3 infrastructure is really like you're
building on unstoppable platforms, really. As i gave the example of you know like uh like a facebook shutting off access
to his api with and zynga shutting down right like what we really need to demonstrate um you know
like with something like lens is is like social proof of useful applications being built on the open social platform that lens is
and that you know like even lens doesn't have the power to kind of you know like stop
the app from you know like running or you know like shutting off access to the data, for example. And so I think some of this proof comes from actually demonstrating this in action.
I mean, if Facebook hadn't shut off Zynga's access,
this problem would not be very well understood, for example.
And I think it's just like,
in general, like the power of the decentralized verifiable systems are the unstoppableness.
And if we are able to kind of succinctly demonstrate this,
I think, you know, like there's loads of app developers
who want to kind of get on this.
We just need to do a little bit more education.
Yeah, no, I agree everything. of get on this we just we just need to do a little bit more education
yeah no I agree everything and maybe to say something also like a little bit deviating is that the education is is needed to root the kind of like the
reasons why why we're doing this and also why it's important, but also kind of like manage expectations
where let's say like 8 billion people,
they kind of want to know the why or not,
but they just want to use things that are useful for them.
And at that point, what really scales is simplicity.
And I think that it's important that there are people like us
that we understand the benefits of decentralization, scales is simplicity. And I think that it's important that there are people like us that, you know,
we understand the benefits of decentralization, resilient systems,
and the fact that no one can actually, like, take your username or your followers,
you know, and if you don't like a platform, someone else can come and build a new app.
So there's really...
The power is at the hands of the users but from the experience perspective um obviously we need to be in a place where
all of the complexities and thinking not just complexities but thinking is is removed away
from the users where they can just use and trust that the system is built in a way
that it's resilient and give them these guarantees. Because once we go to that path, it's really hard
to go, you know, if you think something that we previously built, like with Aave, like if Aave is
used as a backbone for finance, It's more efficient, better.
It's harder to go and build something that is more centralized.
You know, we don't see centralized lending anymore
because DeFi won on that category.
And with social fly and social networking on chain,
it will win as well over time.
It's a question of like building those exciting
experiences and that's where we need developers and and we need to build together
and tapping onto that uh bringing developers because of course we want to bring the users
but we need to provide them the experiences that they actually need. We need to provide them if they want to connect,
then we need to provide them good solid platform that allows them to enjoy the experience and not
having to jump through hooks. And crucial are the developers that already have the chops that are
coming from web two that are looking for better systems that are also looking to push the boundaries of technology, especially with infrastructure
like ZK rollups and AVADA.
So what's the message from you three to the builders that want to join us in Web3 and
push the boundaries?
I think what really helps a lot of these developers also is incentives.
And I'm not just thinking about what's the sudden reward for building, but actually,
if you build on chain, what really changes?
And when I started building applications applications that was the time when when
basically you know iphone was coming and you know you were able to build on on app store and get
this like extreme distribution to to a a big user base uh for example so obviously there is still
incentives to build because of that distribution there but like if you look at on building on chain yeah you know
it's it's it's much more fair and transparent environment and there's much
more flexibility what what you could actually do because you're not
restricted for let's say very strict requirements of app store, but you can actually build and innovate.
It's permissionless.
There's no 30% tariffs of everything
that you are building, giving that as fees.
In fact, it's an environment where you can build something
and you can actually start monetizing from very early on
and actually distribute ownership for your community.
And the speed of actually seeing those results
and applying monetization rails is quite fast.
And I think these network effects are going to compound in further when,
you know,
we make it easier for people to come with Fiat and create a quick wallet
and which already exists with, for example,
with the family accounts and just participate.
And everything that is built is accessible because in some ways,
all these networks that we've built, they are like,
I like to compare to gaming consoles
because it's some sort of like distribution as well
where, you know, if you have a gaming console
or if you are on chain, you can use everything.
Like you basically have your wallet,
you know, you can double up your funds
and you can start spending
and you can quickly go to the next application without free creating accounts and
you have financial applications, non financial, social applications.
It's just a complete new paradigm of developing
and an environment that is much more fair for developers
and much more transparency.
And you can deploy right away.
There is no one really stopping you and much more transparency and you can deploy right away.
There's no one really stopping you
imposing any conditions of what you can actually build.
And I think that's really cool.
I wanna add that the really interesting opportunities
in technology emerge when there is a new window of, you know,
shift of technological paradigms or product or social paradigms,
like when the internet first emerged
and then the mobile phones first appeared
and you could build the apps and then blockchain came along.
And I think now is one of these windows
where the infrastructure just became mature enough
to build usable apps and uh you have the platforms like plans where you can be building on and
you can tap into an existing distribution so if you read if you just build a really interesting
social product it will be something
that will be highlighted by the lens team by zk sync by uh by avail like you will be showcased and
like you will get a lot of eyeballs on on this so all you need to do is experiment with the product
and you can just focus on on the actual product you don't need to spend a lot of time uh bothering
with infrastructure
and solving technical complexities.
So it's a really, really interesting
moment of opportunity, which I encourage
everyone to capture, and we're
here to support you.
The ONS team,
first of all, but also Ziki Sync on the technical
front. And if you are
building something that will eventually
reach escape velocity and become super big, then, of course, you can also spin off your own chain and still be interoperable with Lens and you still have access to all the accounts and all the users and kind of like follow the path of Lens on becoming your own ecosystem.
So I think that's also very interesting.
Thank you. Anurag, closing remarks?
Yeah. So yeah, I mean, I think
Alex also hinted, right? I mean, essentially
great opportunities really started the intersection
of what is emerging
tech, for example, and what is a little bit traditional right like so
essentially so this is really you know like social meeting blockchains also you know like social
meeting financial primitives for example and so i mean i almost liken this to you know like
like when a new country is being developed right like? Like, I mean, that is when you have the best opportunities
to take advantage of.
You might be a little early, but in general, you know,
like there's a lot to learn.
And there is like wild space for experimentation
because the infrastructure has been now abstracted away.
As Eric said, it's like now at that stage
where you don't need to tinker around with low-level blockchain constructs.
You just kind of go to the Lens developer platform, use all the primitives that the team has already kind of, you know, like access to.
And then basically try different sorts of things, you know, like I would say, especially, especially on intersection, like, uh, of,
you know, like what is already out there in web to, uh, there, right.
Like, I mean, so maybe this can be social plus gaming, social plus finance, for example,
and so much more, right.
Like, I mean, uh, I mean, I was on a panel earlier today, for example, and you know,
like one of our, my fellow team panel members has been working on
this thing called intelligent DeFi you know like for example like like why do all users on DeFi
protocols have the same user experience irrespective of whether they are they're trading
in hundred dollars or or 10 million for example. Why is there no differentiation like the
centralized exchanges? How do you build those
kind of experiences, for example?
And all of that goes
down to, can we kind of have
this, let's say, a social score,
for example, or an activity
indicator, for
example, which you can
allow the interface to
change, for example, personalize the interface, for example, which you can, you know, kind of allow the interface to kind of change for
a personalize the interface, for example.
So, I mean, there's a, there's, I mean, this is just one of the examples.
I mean, this is not even a very end user example, right?
Like, I mean, but it can be a very valuable product component that can feed into a lot
of other protocols.
And, and, you know, like there's bunch of other ideas that you know like um i have in mind that you know like app devs can um work on but really i mean this is like
you know like a movement that has started and you know like uh uh the first um a few people
you know of course get you know like outside support uh in general. That's just how it goes, right? Like for example. And
in general, I would certainly encourage all app devs to try.
Thank you so much. This is a movement indeed and we're just getting started.
We've run out of time, but I want to thank everyone in the audience and Stani,
Alex, and Anorak for this. This has been really nice and hope to see you again very soon. Bye,
everyone. Yep. Thank you all. Bye. Thank you. Bye. Thank you. Bye.
