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What Web3 Social Networks Will Win? With Lens
Recorded: March 16, 2023 Duration: 1:20:09Space Recording
Full Transcription
are all, you know, focused on trying to onboard people.
And that's a bit of a pain point for a lot of people
is you might want to be on these platforms, but you can't.
It took you two and a half hours to get on Lens today.
So yeah, there's a little bit of pain point there.
There's a bit.
I don't know if that was user error or not.
But yes, trying to figure out how to move these NFTs
that correspond to the ownership of your handles on these things
certainly is not as easy as maybe signing up using email on Web2 things.
But that's what we're going to get into.
Why is it?
Why would you even take the time to do it?
That's what I think a lot of people want to know.
That's what we're here to highlight.
I see Stani on the Ecamm now.
I see him here, which is pretty dope because this is what we do.
We try and do live video here.
Stani, I hope you can hear me.
You might be able to hear me.
Let me try.
Oh, I can hear you.
Maybe I have to.
Let me just configure the setting.
Do you need to be in the Twitter spaces?
You can mute yourself in the Twitter spaces
because your audio will come through our video chat, my friend,
so you can mute yourself in the space,
though people will see you in the space.
And we can just have your audio here as long as you can hear me on this stream,
which it sounds like you can now.
And we think we've figured everything out.
I think we've got it all handled here.
So I just want to reintroduce because now we're back on the space live.
For anyone, as we've seen a bunch of people pile into the room right now,
we'll reset and kick this off yet again here,
which, again, for people who maybe have never heard of coinage before,
I will point out what we are.
We just won an award,
so I can say we're an award-winning community-owned show
covering crypto's biggest questions,
answering the questions our NFT holders want us to answer,
as well as being able to distribute dividends back to active people in our community.
We're giving away NFTs on this space as well.
So if you're listening, sign up using the Gleam link.
That should be pinned to the space.
Chris, yeah, I think we're...
Yeah, it's pinned.
I think we're pinning that one.
We're safe. I did my job.
All right, so there you go.
That's what we're doing here today.
And again, I want to welcome the guest.
Stani here is finally with us.
Stani Kulichov is the founder of Aave and the founder of Lens Protocol.
Stani, thank you so much for joining us today, man.
Yeah, super excited.
It's a nice audience and want to pill more people into Web3 social.
So I think this is the right place to be.
This is the right place to be.
This is where I think, you know, it's been fun to chat with all of the leaders in Web3 social over the last couple of weeks.
As I said, CyberConnect and Favor, I know you know Jonathan well.
A couple Finnish founders.
Never hurts to have Finnish founders back to back.
Of course, Favor is the most popular thing using Lens right now.
All the people piling in onto Lens Protocol, a lot of them coming through Favor.
But first off, just want to start this out by kind of talking about your background and why you wanted to build Lens Protocol.
What the dream of Web3 social even means to you for an audience that might not know what exactly it's all about.
Yeah, I mean, it's I think the social media space in general is super fascinating for a person like me who, you know, I grew up over the Internet.
So when I was very young in my early teen years, you know, I got a computer and since then I was playing video games online as more and more bandwidth came true.
I was able to play more exciting games.
But also the Internet itself provided a lot of access to information globally, which is quite cool because, you know, you weren't limited to the information or peers that, you know, you have locally.
So in some ways, I saw Internet helping to provide access to new relationships, content as well.
And more and more, we people started to actually form relationships online.
So today, I mean, we have five billion users online and almost equal amount of social media users.
So effectively, it's the place where we spend a lot of time and create relationships.
And that's where why social media is important as well.
So it has been a way to democratize access to information, relationships.
But at the same time, I think Web3 Social is kind of like trying to bring a lot of the power to the users and giving them the opportunity to actually have the ownership of the online presence they create.
And that's what's fascinating.
And previously, I've built the Aave protocol with our team.
And what has been fascinating is that everything that we're doing at Aave, we're focusing on creating more access, access to finance, access to social participation.
So what we want to build, basically, a internet where the people are governing them and the applications that they use daily basis, you know, they're able to actually contribute to those applications and decide how they're going to evolve in the future.
So bringing a bit more equal and more accessible internet and social to users.
Yeah, I think, you know, even as someone who's been covering the space, as a journalist covering, you know, Web3 projects out there, I think, you know, the ownership piece of it on social was kind of the first thing that jumped out to me and just kind of like, okay, yeah, there's a lot of reason as to why a user might want to join Web3 social apps like these because you are the product, right?
It's Facebook taking your data. It's Facebook using you to come to the platform or Twitter or whatever it may be to post using that content and that network effect and then making the money and, you know, basically just getting all the upside and you don't get any of it.
But, I mean, there are network effects like that because, you know, once they're built, everyone's on those centralized social media apps, which seems to be maybe the biggest, I guess, hurdle in terms of growing some of these ecosystems.
Is that true? Like, talk to me about what you've seen as maybe the pain points of getting people on ramped in Web3 when it comes to social.
Well, at Lens, what we're actually focusing on then or how we see the Lens protocol, it's a form of a social layer for Web3.
So what we see is that the Web3 ecosystem is growing quite significantly.
So it's not about only the crypto space, but, you know, we have decentralized finance, we have DAOs, where people come together and govern certain type of things, treasuries or activity.
And beyond that, we have also a greater economy that has been growing for the past couple of years, especially with the NFT ecosystem.
So what we're realizing is that in Web3, you have this enormous, well, I won't say enormous, but growing user base that are excited about what the technology can bring and also excited about the idea that many of these networks or products that has been built in the Web3 ecosystem,
you as a user can participate in governing, contributing, and there's interesting values like transparency and a bunch of other valuable things.
So the way we see it is that Lens is a set of primitives that allow you to create a social layer within the Web3 ecosystem.
So we've been focusing on how we can actually make the blockchain ecosystem more social and not kind of like be only on the transactional level.
And as we expand on this idea down the line, what we're believing is that as the technology scales a bit more,
we're able to bring more users that are excited about also those non-financial use cases that are being built at the current moment.
So we have kind of like a two-step process.
Step one is we want to create a place where the Web3 community can come together, share content, and has distribution for different audiences.
And the step two is that, you know, we can onboard new users that maybe Lens Protocol or Web3 Social is their first entry into the crypto economy as well.
Yeah, I think it's been fascinating too because like a lot of those use cases, right, for decentralized finance, for DeFi,
which Aave was clearly a pioneer in building that whole space out.
Maybe there's just not a lot of people who need that in terms of loans and things like that.
But social, everyone knows exactly what that's all about.
That's basically how you interact with the Internet is posting things now for anyone who's on the Internet.
So it does seem like a much better on-ramp, I guess, into the idea of owning everything in the digital world and using blockchain technology to enable that.
I guess, you know, one thing that Christie has flagged in trying to, you know, testing all these things out is just the pain points for, I guess,
even getting some of the NFTs to get onto the platform, which I guess wasn't too different from when Facebook kind of started out.
You had to be, I think, an Ivy League grad.
You had to have like a college email to get on first.
So you want some of that exclusivity.
Is that a piece of it?
Is it purposely hard to get on these things first?
I think for Farcast, you have to DM the guy to even get an account.
Yeah, so basically, I think the way we have approached the, I mean, Lens Protocol is in, it's a private, I mean, it's a beta protocol at this point.
It's on the mainnet, so it's actually in live environment, but it's still beta in the sense that we actually want to ensure that the protocol works as it expected.
But also, we want to be very thoughtful how we grow the protocol.
So one of the earliest things that we actually did instead of basically getting DMs, we definitely did that too and granted access to different developers
that were integrating Lens Protocol or they were building some applications on top of the Lens Protocol.
Favor is a good example, Orb or Butterfly.
But for us, our primary tool has been that we've been whitelisting different kinds of communities and users based on their Web3 footprint.
So what we have been doing is that we've been looking that we have this usage in a particular community.
For example, if you donated grants in Gitcoin or, for example, you hold a particular NFT or you use some of these DeFi protocols,
you've been able, you've been whitelisted your address to actually mint a Lens profile.
And minting a Lens profile means that you actually are creating a profile that is secured by the blockchain,
meaning that once that is done, you own the profile.
So no one can actually come and take that profile away from you.
So you can actually build your social media presence that is everlasting or, for example, a brand,
follow other profiles, and that's also secured by the blockchain.
So no one can actually come and remove followers away from you.
But this Web3 data has been a super exciting experiment for us and kind of like looking at who could be interested in what we're building.
But down the line, the idea is that we open up more and more the whole accessibility into the Lens Protocol.
And down the line, the idea is that in the future, anyone can actually access and mint profiles and then attach their identities,
either creating a dot Lens handle, attaching their ENS name, or creating completely a own identity system as well.
So the idea there is towards kind of like a more adoption.
So for us, it's been mainly granting access to different communities that could be excited about what we've been building so far.
Yeah, when it comes to that, I guess, early traction, a real simple question is what kind of traction have you seen?
You know, people talk about monthly active users, daily active users, people test different metrics.
I mean, which ones are you watching and how does it maybe stack up to, I guess, where your expectations were?
And again, balancing having too many people join a beta project early on.
I think the way we've seen the actually whitelisting happening is that we've tried to be less exclusive.
So we want to have actually a thoughtful growth in the protocol.
But also, you know, if someone is excited about the protocol itself, about WebTree Social or getting there, we've been granting access regardless of their kind of like a social status.
So we try to do it also geographically, very widely distributed.
So, for example, we want to see communities being built on lens protocol from different parts of the world.
That's has been a very important part of our ethos.
But regarding the actual metrics, so we have so far minted 114,000 almost profiles at this point.
And in terms of like the daily active, monthly active users, weekly active users, the typical metrics that we see in WebTree Social, I think we do follow them to some extent.
But I think they don't really apply well into WebTree Social for many reasons, but mainly because if you look at the traditional social media, what is happening is that many of these social media platforms, they're actually relying on advertisement income, which is perfectly fine.
I mean, that might be the case of many of these companies to actually survive and build products.
But it does have some effects where, you know, all the metrics are driven towards how much time you're spending in a particular application.
And the more time you're spending and the more engaged you are and the more often you open the application, the actually more abilities there is to sell ads for you as a user.
But also the platforms can charge more for the apps.
So we don't rely across the protocol on advertising so much at this point.
And the idea is that because Lens is a social layer, it's up to the actual applications or whoever is integrated to decide which primitives to use, because there is the on-chain blockchain part that you could use.
There's also a lot of off-chain tools and components as well.
But you as application developer, you decide what you want to integrate.
And something that we've built in is the monetization layer as well, which basically means that there's a couple of primitives that are important for the users and apps across the whole Lens protocol.
And one is the ability to collect all the user-generated content as NFTs.
So what it means is that the creators, they can actually decide to create their content and mint it on-chain instead of off-chain.
And that means that it becomes an NFT and the followers, your audience as a creator, they can actually come and collect.
And a creator can actually earn fees and also share those fees with anyone that are mirroring the content and mirroring basically a similar to share or retweet.
Or retweeting as it is done on Twitter.
Yes.
The mirroring aspect of all that stuff.
I mean, I think it is.
So you're kind of thinking about it, I think, maybe similarly to how we think about it as well.
I've seen a lot of people, a lot of creators sell collectibles in terms of making either an interview or a podcast.
Even this could be an NFT.
We've kind of taken a different...
What's that?
This could be definitely an NFT on Lens.
So there is actually a few podcasts that are doing quite well.
So there is one podcast done by Rehash and they said collect fees of five Matic, which is roughly $5.
Yes.
They have a few collects per every single episode, which is quite nice.
I mean, it's all about for us to redesigning a bit the monetization layer of not just media, but the content we create over the internet.
Because traditionally, when we create content online, we've used to see that everything is basically free content.
And we also see a lot of content going behind of paywalls.
So when you're trying to access a bigger newspaper to online, quite quickly, they want to sell subscriptions for you or paygate the access to the content.
But what we want to do is that we want to create actually new ways to support the creators that they can actually keep producing more content.
And collecting NFTs definitely opens those doors because, you know, you get the creators.
I think it's been interesting.
So like us, right, at Coinage, like our whole idea is if you mint an NFT, you literally co-own the show with us because it's a DAO co-op.
So our whole idea is, yes, I've seen a lot of collectibles, but what's really the point, right, other than maybe being able to flip it?
There's no real point in owning it necessarily where we legally registered in Colorado, which, by the way, I think, you know, you were just out at Ethan where I was too.
We registered out there.
So our NFT holders, as the show makes money, whether it be through, you know, ads as you're describing them or any other partnerships in the Web3 space,
we can actually distribute dividends back to our NFT holders in a legal way, which to me, I think, you know, gets back to the idea of co-ownership and media and content is, you know,
our whole reason for being is that our NFT holders tell us what to cover.
And there was a huge amount of interest in Web3 social specifically, hence why we did this whole deep dive, because I see it as a good way to kind of, I guess,
the same way you're kind of describing community source content or your followers weighing in on things or, you know, whatever.
And creating that engagement is how you know what your audience, whether it's on Twitter, Facebook, wherever, wants to see.
And really, that's kind of what we've been doing is the ability for people to weigh in and vote on these things.
But then also, as we put the content out, rather than just collect it, literally own it in the sense of, no, we can pay dividends back to our NFT holders.
And that's kind of where Quintage came about.
But I just, again, I go back to kind of like the simplicity of it.
To us, we landed on that model because it was simple to understand.
It's like buy an NFT, call on the show, don't have to worry about anything, don't have to get airdrop tokens or whatever.
It's literally just buy this thing once, participate in the community, call on the show.
And I do wonder, that's one of the things where you look at Web2 social versus Web3 social, the on-ramp of, you know, I did.
Christy's right.
Our head of community is correct.
I did try and spend the last hour getting the Polygon because the lens NFT over to a different wallet to connect with Favor.
And it took a while.
So my question to you, Stani, is, I guess, if this is the early primitives, what is, like, how long will it take before, you know, your grandpa can basically onboard just the same way that he did on Twitter or Facebook in Web3 social?
Yeah, I think that kind of like a challenge always comes when we try to build something for a large audience.
So, for example, like, when we're taking, you know, the stance that, you know, every single user should be a lens user right away, obviously that poses a challenge because different communities are, or different users are living in different kind of platforms.
So, you know, I personally think that our design goal is that we try to design the protocol to be as unopinionated and as flexible as possible, which means that, you know, it could apply to various different use cases.
And maybe you are using only the NFT profiles in your application, but then you have your followers, you know, more traditional setting in a database or some other kind of like a solution.
But when you, for example, if you post content for any of these applications that have integrated lens, the experience is usually quite optimistic in the sense that you don't really wait for the transactions to be mined.
You don't need to sign transactions.
So you activate a so-called dispatcher, which signs transactions for you.
You don't pay any gas.
So that's also handled for you.
The content reflects right away.
So all the blockchain logic is abstracted away and it happens in the background.
So our idea within our community has been that, you know, if we want to Web3 Social to actually be even successful within the Web3 community, we have to build these applications as there will be any standard applications online or mobile.
So that has been the aim.
And then the next step is that how do we actually bridge people to create profiles relatively easily, which is by signing with an email or a phone number.
And that is something we're working now with the Lens version 2, where you can actually onboard in a more traditional way, but still have all the benefits that Lens protocol or a blockchain might provide for you.
The address itself, being able to store a Lens profile safely and being able to own the profile, own the audience that you create over Lens and that way to get a bit more in the wider audience.
And of course, like one thing that is interesting about the whole protocol design is that it's not completely on chain.
So there's a lot of parts that are on chain that provides guarantees for the users.
For example, because the protocol is modulized, you can create different kinds of features where, for example, only specific users can be the first person to comment on your post if they follow you and they have a specific NFT or they collected previously.
And this can be done because of the blockchain component.
But then you can also store a lot of the things in a data availability layer and that scales the technology.
So there's the technical obstacles that we're overcoming now.
And also the user experiences is where these two things we're focusing now also on the version 2.
Well, it seems like, you know, everyone is in the same boat as you, right?
Everyone in Web3 Social who's trying to figure this out, figure it, I guess, set it up in a way that really appeals not just to crypto native people, but also people who maybe have never touched.
As you said, it's kind of like the attraction point to bring them into Web3 and crypto.
But I do wonder.
So we titled this space, Who Will Win in Web3 Social?
And I guess getting to that question, one of the things that we've looked at in terms of not just Lens, but kind of everyone, as I said, Farcaster and maybe some of the other, NoSir is another one that, you know, we've seen a lot of Bitcoiners very active in.
But when you kind of piece together the analogy between what's going on with Web3 and all these different projects right now, there are a lot.
But I guess the appeal would be if all of them are built on Lens, they can interact with each other that way.
But if they're not built on Lens, then maybe we're back to kind of like the same walled garden pieces that we saw from a Facebook, you know, a Friendster, a MySpace.
So when you look at who's going to win in Web3 Social, what do you see as maybe the key components to you that would say, you know, this is what people care about or these are the things that are going to enable someone to win?
No, it's a real question.
I think like there is, it's definitely not a winner takes all game.
And Web3 itself never has been.
So I think there is like, if you look into the DeFi ecosystem, there's like plenty of interesting applications that have similar use case and they're thriving quite well.
I think the Web3 Social as a concept, I think we saturate it maybe too much because it includes things that might not have the primitives that Web3 brings.
So for me, for example, it's quite important that you're able to actually secure your ownership of your profile and potentially also your audience that you create.
So those are kind of like a Web3 primitives and being able to also collect content is a Web3 primitive.
So I would say that even if a protocol is or let's say a solution is maybe, you know, the crypto audience might be excited about it necessarily isn't directly Web3.
But what it means actually is that all these solutions are steering towards one direction and just building a foundational layer for social media for the future, regardless if it's, you know, Web3 based or not.
And I think that's the more key point here.
So I think it's important that we all test all these different ideas that we have and they have different use cases.
So, for example, you might be a lens user because you care about the ownership of your, you know, your profile, your audience.
You care about monetization because it's built in.
You care about the idea that, you know, you can create certain type of rules like who can who can follow you, collect your content, share your content as well.
And what's like the cool I mean, there's so many different features you're talking about there.
I mean, like which one's the coolest one to you, I guess, when you compare Web3 social versus Web2 social, because that is one that I was excited about.
All that stuff that you just mentioned.
But I'm curious if you can only pick one to someone who's still on Facebook or Instagram or maybe got banned, kicked off Twitter.
What's the one thing that you point to to say, no, this is better than Web2 social?
Well, to be honest, like I would maybe concretize it into some simple primitives that also doesn't apply only to two lens.
But it's something that many of these ideas are trying to solve.
And one is the portability.
So, for example, if you go to one of these applications and you log in, let's say, in Lancer with your lens profile and post something, you go to, let's say, to Favor, you are able to basically log in and see your followers there and also content that you created.
That is a big moment of realization for many users that, oh, I get it.
It's basically about having this common user pool and being able to contribute that and share content.
And, you know, you can actually port your social identity with you and attach different things.
So what's exciting about Lens is that it's also very composable.
So you can use things like ENS as your identity parts.
You can use something else, verifiable credentials, and at some point also combine like off-chain data with on-chain data as well.
But I think that's one of the simplest examples.
And something that is cool for people who are actually integrating developers is that you can, for example, create content.
A user can create content on one application.
It can be mirrored by a user in another application and collected in a third application.
And all these users and applications can actually share the fees in between.
And it's a bit unheard of thinking about Facebook, Twitter, TikTok sharing fees amongst each other based on who created the content or who amplified the content and who ended up paying for it.
You're twisting my brain there, Stani.
It's kind of so, I mean, that to me is a cool piece because, you know, we're doing this space right now.
We're recording this video to post to YouTube, but we're also live on spaces.
So there's a lot of different elements cross-platform that I think any content creator wants.
And what you just described there is kind of shattering my mind a little bit.
And I think it's important to flex those moments when they happen.
Because, again, like the possibilities are all there, but I guess they're all still based on the idea of getting people onto these platforms or hearing about them first.
I know you guys at Lens have been putting out grants, right?
Favor came around, I think, because of an original grant to build on Lens.
So I guess, I mean, how big of a piece is that in terms of getting, A, content creators, I guess, because that's another huge thing if they have built-in networks on these Web2 platforms, but, B, builders to put things on top of those protocols to attract the eyeballs?
Oh, it's definitely part of, like, I think grants has been always quite heavily in connection with the open source culture.
So, you know, all the code that we produce regarding to Lens, for example, is open source.
Just an example, we give grants for developers, developer grants, design grants, but also we participate and contribute in a lot of hackathons.
So we've always been a part of the Ethereum hackathons that run in different cities, like, for example, a couple of weeks ago in Denver, in Denver.
But the idea there is that, you know, we're able to actually support different kinds of, I would say, experimentations and creativity.
And Lens are one of the open source applications, so was built by one developer in two weeks during a hackathon, which is quite incredible because that's a front end and a client that anyone can actually take, improve, change, and redeploy it or actually go and contribute and improve it itself, which is quite fascinating.
But I think the idea of the grants is to encourage people to actually try and build different things.
And we just want to make it way more easier to build new social media applications because you don't need to create the network effect because you can create something very cool, integrate Lens, and you have 114,000 Web3 users that you could actually test your application with.
So it's definitely encouraging for young developers to try different new things.
And I think personally, yeah.
Well, we're getting flooded with a bunch of people asking how they can get their Lens profile set up.
So, I mean, it's clearly working in terms of a bunch of people listening to the space and still wanting to participate and post content and build in this ecosystem.
So there is that demand, clearly.
Next time you come back, we've got to have some sort of way to maybe give some of these away.
But there's a lot of people who are interested in it.
When it comes to, I guess...
Yeah.
The easiest probably is just to send me a DM on Twitter.
That's the most easiest for finding a telegram.
Your DMs have to probably be, you know, all kinds of crazy right now for that.
That is true, for sure.
No, but one of the things, too, I mean, obviously, that makes it difficult to on-ramp people in terms of growing this super quickly.
But as you said, you kind of want to build and kind of have it all be under control for right now.
But one of the things that I guess, you know, questions, and we're seeing them, too, from our community, a lot of people ask about, all right, what does it look like in terms of moderation on these things?
Because you could potentially, if everyone has to DM you to get in, maybe it attracts people who think similarly to you or any NFT project that's out there.
A lot of times, it might just be the creator attracting their friends.
Like, echo chambers exist, and they especially exist online.
How do you look at that problem in terms of, A, moderation in Web3 Social?
And I guess the flip side of it, which could be very bad, again, as a journalist, we've seen this kind of happen where you get into hate speech or just basically fake news.
Because sometimes the most enraging or provocative rises to the top because of these algorithms.
I mean, is that a piece that you think Web3 is suited for or maybe just as possible to fall victim to as Web2 Social was?
No, these are extremely important topics.
And the way I see it is that when we're building new social media and Web3 Social, for example,
like what we are trying to do with Lens is that we're trying to build just better kind of like a fundamental features.
And I think it's about giving choice and access for the users.
So if you look at, for example, today, if you are using any of the traditional social media applications,
you know, we create a lot of the social capital into those applications.
And that also means that we can't really choose to use other applications and broadcast our content to the same audience.
Instead, we are basically stuck on the same experiences, algorithms, and also same business models,
which all kind of like targets ads and getting the users more and more spend time on those applications.
And the biggest difference is that when you actually change the fundamentals.
So when you give the ownership of the users social capital by allowing them to create a profile that can't be taken away from them
and also ability to create your audience as well and securing that with a blockchain,
what happens there is that now the users have the ability to choose which experiences they want to subscribe to
and also what kind of, you know, content moderation they want to subscribe to
and also trust and safety policies.
So it actually puts these applications and innovators, including me, to think about for the users,
like what is relevant for the user to keep them engaged and be a part of the community.
So how can a user, a vested user in an application?
And that's the fundamental difference.
So, for example, if you have, as a journalist, a lens profile, what it means, and you have your audience,
you will always have the permissionless way to distribute content to your audience.
It's up to the reach layer, the algorithms or, let's say, the user interfaces to further distribute that
and show that content to your users.
But they always have an access to your content.
And that's fundamentally the big change here.
And because the users can actually vote with their feed fairly quickly,
what happens is that they are in a better position to compete,
to innovate more faster and build the kind of like a user as a North Star.
Yeah, it's all fascinating.
I wanted to reserve the last 15 minutes or so for people listening.
If they had questions, if you want to request, feel free on the space.
But, Stani, I think, you know, one of the reasons why I was so excited to talk to you
is it's not always where you find founders, either in Web3 or not,
that are able to build things in totally different worlds.
And I guess maybe people are looking at what Elon Musk is doing with Twitter
and the idea of like a payments app potentially being integrated into it.
And that is interesting.
But then people look at a guy like you who built Aave,
again, one of the most popular DeFi applications out there
that let people borrow and lend automatically with no intermediary.
And then look at you and building Lens and say,
why is this guy building Web3 social?
And so, I mean, I guess, what do you say to people who are looking at that
and wondering, well, what is Stani really doing here?
Because after I chatted with Jonathan from Favor, who was building again on Lens,
he was talking about kind of identity in Web3 and the idea of the trust score
and like really figuring out like how to trust people online in a trustless way,
which is a weird concept.
But are you looking at maybe combining these worlds?
Is the idea that like, okay, quote unquote metaverse is like us existing online.
And that means all the things you post online, your identity online,
but also, I guess, when it comes to credit score, your financial identity online.
Like, how do you think about those things?
Well, the way I see it is that, you know, we at Aave, we build access.
So it's either access to finance or social participation and ownership.
But end of the day, like, you know, if you think about internet in general, it's a big economy.
So, you know, you have social use cases there and social applications,
but at the same time, you have also financial layer there.
So I think everything is kind of like a composable.
The big difference, what's happening on internet now and what's happening in Web3 is that in Web3,
you actually have a permissionless composable layer.
So if you want to build an application that is using Lens and Aave and, you know,
create some sort of a social credit score system,
you're able to do that without asking the permission of the team and just go and build it.
And this creates more and more innovation because it removes the barriers to innovate.
And I think in some ways, I might be a good example where, you know,
I can contribute to everything that is exciting to me.
And as I grew up on the internet and was building Web2 applications,
back when Twitter was being built in my like 18 years,
like it's social for me has been a close thing.
But at the end of the day, I think what it enables is that we will have a basically connected,
composable economy and you can build anything and combine these products together.
And probably we'll see, because of this reason it becomes easier,
we'll see new kind of use cases because I don't think we need to build a new Twitter.
I don't think we need to build a new Instagram,
but we need to build new kinds of interest graphs and applications
and test them out relatively quickly.
And that's where Lens comes into play.
Yeah, it's been fascinating.
I mean, like the Lens Chrome extensions to where you can kind of copy over anything
that you're doing on Twitter onto Lens.
I've been playing around with it.
I was playing around with it today.
So it's pretty fascinating to kind of see that in terms of,
is this, you know, everyone always talks about every other protocol as an Ethereum killer,
but is Web3 Social a Web2 Social killer or will these coexist?
It's the option.
I think it's pretty fascinating.
But yeah, Stani, I appreciate you coming on here to chat with all of the,
you know, to answer all these questions.
As I said, we've been trying to dig into it with all the other people building in Web3 Social,
but not any of them, I don't think, have also built, you know,
a decentralized finance application nearly on the scale of Aave either.
So it's just fascinating to hear all of your ideas.
And again, I want to bring people up in the community
and also mention that we are still running that NFT raffle right now to co-own Coinage.
Our NFT holders are the ones who make this show possible.
And every mint goes to our DAO cooperative,
which enables us to pay dividends back to our NFT holders.
So I appreciate everyone entering the raffle there.
And we will turn to community questions, if that's all right with you, Stani.
We can maybe see if we have any requests.
And I know we do have one.
I know we do have one from someone who's very near and dear to my heart.
Our head of community at Coinage, Christy, is standing by.
And the reason why I wanted her standing by, Stani,
is because she's very familiar with Web2 Social.
She's the one who kind of interacts with Coinage via those platforms.
And we've increasingly been playing around with Favor and Lens.
And we are going to.
So again, I hope that we can partner with you guys
because we want to continue to push our content out on these Web3 native platforms.
But I want to bring her in here for some questions, too,
because she's the one interacting with these.
And, you know, I think she has some questions.
Hi, Stani.
Hey, how are you?
Great. I hear some dishes in the background.
Are you alone or is someone there with you, like, doing dishes?
I think in this household, there's, like, three generations of people
either cooking or, you know, doing something else.
So definitely you're hearing dishes.
Okay, super fair.
Obviously, I'm the social media manager here at Coinage.
But also, you know, back in my heyday, I used to be a little content creator.
And so when I'm listening to you guys chat about, you know, transparency and the blockchain,
I personally, coming into Web3 socials, don't care about any of that data stuff.
I care about how I'm going to make money.
And I think that's, like, most content creators when they're looking to join more platforms.
Like, how does this help me monetize my fan base?
And right now, like, I just don't see that monetization happening in Web3 social.
Like, how are you guys making those changes?
Because collectibles, to me, feels like a little dirty to sell on fans.
Because you're selling them something that they probably won't ever profit from.
Yeah, so we have, in terms of, like, looking at the actual monetization layer within Lens.
So the current economy is, like, roughly 3.5 million.
And we're talking about a beta protocol where this number consists of actually the NFT sales,
how people are earning also for amplifying the content,
but also basically building brands or building profiles and transferring those profiles.
So what's interesting observation for us is that, you know,
actually the NFTs are building kind of like a new design of,
and that design is open-ended.
So there's no right way to use NFTs for monetization.
But what it does, actually, it creates this idea of that the content that you create
and sharing the message, that's actually a digital consumable.
And the interesting part here is that, you know, there's in history ways where content has been
in a position where you can actually consume it for free or you can pay for a content.
So, for example, like a very small example is that, you know, you can go and buy a book
and read it, or you can go to a library and get the book and read it without paying.
So in some ways, NFTs are in one way to show that I want to support this creator to actually create a bit more.
And not just kind of like from the perspective of maybe giving tips,
but actually perspective that I want this creator to actually being able to build a business,
whether it's some sort of digital news agency or it's just artwork or anything else.
And then there's the idea of the programmability because it's on chain.
You can actually create different kinds of utilities or engagement experiences.
So one example is that, you know, if you have collected NFT before,
you can actually be the first person to comment or collect the next one
or any other type of interactions where you can join a group discussion with the creator.
So it creates like an open-ended design,
but it also changes our mindsets about like how we think about content and monetization
because our minds has been a bit about, you know, you have to pay to consume either always
or, you know, the internet is free and everyone can access the content.
So it's hard to actually create anything payable,
but it's actually a way of demonstrating that, you know, you as a creator,
you create content and you should be able to monetize and also you have an audience.
So let's say if you have 10,000 or 5,000 followers on Lens, that audience is with you.
So wherever you go, it doesn't disappear.
And interestingly, what's fascinating for me personally is to see like how people are starting
to actually use these NFTs as a way to actually signal that I want this creator to create more.
And another example is that you go into a, you know, rock concert to actually see a band playing live
while having that record somewhere in your shelf.
And you're doing that because you want to have an experience.
And at the same time, you want to actually have the ability to go there
and tell other people that you were there, for example, or have an experience with your friends.
But NFTs make a digital version of that and it opens kind of like the science space.
So it's fascinating.
I think there's like a bunch of different ways.
That to me is honestly, so again, I quit the traditional media world at CNBC and Yahoo
to come over here in the Web3 content creation space because not necessarily because of collectibles
so much as true ownership using NFTs, which again, everything you're describing,
we kind of offer and the co-founder of Netflix is one of our NFT holders as well.
And he sees kind of where this whole thing is going to unlock all these things.
And that to me is so, that's what's fascinating is no one really knows the answers yet
because again, it's just like a base layer being laid down.
Our model is just buy the NFT and then vote on everything that we do separately,
kind of off chain using a bunch of different tools.
But I could see where a creator, Christy, might more so want to use the actual platform,
the native platform they're posting to.
No, yeah.
I like the whole like use an NFT, you can be the first to comment thing
because every first comment on every post I do is like request for feet pics.
So it'd be nice to cleanse that, you know, Stani?
No one's ever asked me for this.
You don't have great feet.
I wouldn't ask you either.
Stani, I have another follow up.
You said we don't need to create another Twitter.
I think you should.
Okay.
Because Elon is tweeting some crazy stuff and we got to have a backup.
Stani got bounced.
That's why, that's where it came from.
Stani got bounced from Twitter.
You got bounced from Twitter, Stani?
That is true.
Yeah.
Yeah, that is true.
I tweeted something about becoming an interim CEO of Twitter as a parody.
But that was actually an interesting moment for me because, you know,
when you get banned, you lose your voice.
So even though like our goal is to, you know, create just, you know,
better social media and, you know, create more opportunities to others to build,
we also think about this kind of like a moment.
So at that point, you really don't have your audience.
And so all the followers are kind of like gone for a while.
So I think that's why it's important to have this ownership of your account and follower base.
Yeah, it's also fun.
So I was like creeping on your Twitter, obviously, like any good social media manager.
And you're really normal.
I hate to say it, but like, how are you a CEO of a social media platform?
Like, if you want to be like Elon, which who does, honestly, you should start tweeting out some crazy stuff.
See where it goes, you know?
Well, I think that's why he doesn't want to do that, Chris.
I know, but if we want to pull more people to Web3, we need like an eccentric egomaniac running the show.
So Stani, you should tweet something crazy like, Kanye, let's run for president again, you know?
Yeah, I probably should.
But that's the interesting part about these protocols that are blockchain-based.
At the end of the day, you know, they have a founding team.
It's like Ava had a founding team.
And down the line, it was decentralized into community-owned protocol.
And that's kind of like a pathway for blockchain-based Web3 social protocols as well.
Because at the end of the day, you don't want something as big as a social media, like a digital town square being governed by individuals.
You want that to be governed by a community.
And also, you want to also have the ability for those people in the community that aren't agreeing with the current consensus that they can actually fork it and do something else.
So I think that's the powerful idea about Web3 social and open source, where, you know, anyone can actually fork and build something more different.
Yeah, I think that's...
I mean, that...
I think Stani's an altruist.
I'm kind of liking this vibe.
I mean, that's why I was saying, you know, our NFT holders can fire me at any point.
It's not just me running the show here.
Stop saying that, Zach, because when they fire you, we have to find a backup.
That's going to be a lot of work for me.
It is a lot of work for you.
But no, we are.
So, I mean, Stani, when we signed up for Lens this morning, we were at one follower, I think.
Now we're up to 23.
Someone just tweeted that.
So that's not a lot.
That's a 20, 100% increase, Chrissy.
That's embarrassing.
Chrissy's getting a raise.
Yeah, I'm not getting a raise based off this conversation.
But, Stani, that's one thing that I noticed on Lens.
Like, I'm on Lens, Barcaster.
I'm on all of these Web3 social...
Well, not Lens, because I've been DMing you for months now and I can't get on.
I'm begging for scraps on the Lens DMs.
Yes, he's going to help you now.
Thank God, Stani.
Is it about the feetpick stuff?
Because I won't post those on Lens.
I refuse.
So I did have a question about, like, the engagement, though.
Because we have such few followers on Lens, but other Web3 socials, we're sort of getting
more traction on engagement.
Is that fake or where is this coming from?
Yeah.
So actually, we have a lot of posts indicating that many of the creators that are on Lens,
and especially Web3 creators, that they are actually getting better engagement on Lens.
And I've been thinking quite a lot and looking into the data and trying to understand why this
is happening.
And I've seen this in other social media platforms with similar discussions.
So one of the interesting things is that what Web3 users want to do also is, especially
creators, they also want to talk to Web3 native audiences.
And some of the reasons for that is because they know the concept, for example, of collecting
and a lot of the things that the creators are doing or referring to might be about NFTs.
But down the line, it's basically a common interest that brings everyone together and
creates a lot of engagement.
But nothing stops for all the users and creators to post about, for example, pictures of dogs.
So if you go today to one of the apps in Lens Protocol and you look into my profile, you
will see that, you know, today I posted a picture of a, my breakfast, which was basically
waffle and chicken.
So, you know, and it's like a finish, a finish delicacy, I believe.
It's actually, it's, it's, I think it's a Southern American thing.
Yes, that it is.
Snoop Dogg, I believe also, you know, I've been to Roscoe's.
Roscoe's very good.
How do you know Snoop Dogg's breakfast?
I think he tweeted it.
Ultimately, that's an interesting point because, you know, I, my interest is in WebTree, but
I'm a human and I have different identities.
So I want to also talk about other things and, you know, and that brings the people outside
of the WebTree space, like as we have better tech and as we have, you know, better experiences,
you know, we, as, as, you know, WebTree people, we're still humans and we'll talk about, you
know, what we ate on a breakfast or what we stumbled upon or share opinions that are outside
of the space and that brings in more engagement also in users outside of the WebTree space
on the long run.
Yeah.
Okay.
I have one more question because Guz is like shouting at me to shut up.
Do you have beef with Elon Musk now?
No, no, I don't have.
I mean, I have a different, I have a different purpose in, in, in what we're building.
And, you know, our team is very, very much on a mission of, of actually like building
something that is very valuable for everyone.
I personally think, I think some of these larger social media companies, they, they will
look into some sort of a decentralization, maybe into more like federated models as well.
But I think end of the day, our goal is to create just tools to, to create new and exciting
use cases as well.
So that's what are kind of like a path.
And there's plenty of room to build, you know, just, just better online presence at
this moment.
See, he's so nice.
He's too nice about everything.
I would have beef with Elon if you lost me.
That's how I would answer.
That's how I would answer too.
Oh yeah, screw you, Elon.
I already have beef with him.
He doesn't even know who I am.
No, he doesn't.
But he will one day, Christy.
He will one day if we keep this up.
Stani, I wanted to also ask, I mean, obviously this is a space kind of dedicated to Web3
social, but, you know, considering the fact that you've built Aave and are, you
know, kind of focused on the DeFi space as well.
I wanted to get your take on what we're seeing play out kind of macro-wise right now when
we talk about the banking crisis and the idea of, I think, a lot of centralized players getting
cut off.
You saw Silvergate get shut down, or they shut themselves down, basically.
And then you looked at what happened with Silicon Valley Bank, and then you saw what happened
with Signature Bank.
I'm curious to get your take on what that means for the wider crypto space.
When you have such huge pressure on the banking sector and basically U.S. regulators now saying,
don't bank any crypto company.
Yeah, I mean, it's definitely difficult for the, you know, crypto entrepreneurs and also
people who work in the space.
But also, at the same time, you know, it's just another kind of like evidence that why,
you know, Web3 and decentralized technologies are important.
So, you know, where, for example, Bitcoin was there to solve kind of like the idea that
you don't need to bank with middlemen.
It's very powerful.
And with Ethereum and Ethereum virtual machine, you can actually create more programmable finance
and what that, that is what, for example, Aave protocol is.
So, we noticed for the past year that a lot of decentralized providers didn't succeed in the space.
But also now, the whole finance sector and banking is under a big stress test.
And the decentralized systems are also very beneficial because they're transparent.
So, it's easier to understand and see and quantify the risks that are in the space.
Well, that's all true.
I think that's what everyone loves you for.
That's what everyone loves Aave and all these other DeFi platforms for is the transparency
of it.
And banks really aren't transparent at all.
No one knew exactly what, you know, the loan books look like that's at Silicon Valley Bank.
No one knew what kind of position any of these banks were in, which is, again, why I think
transparency in Web3 wins over anything in Web2.
But, you know, specifically the on-ramp of money flowing in, whether it's dollars, euros, or whatever,
money flowing into the crypto ecosystem.
I mean, is that a problem when you think about, you know, obviously, once you're in
the ecosystem, you'll use Aave or whatever in DeFi.
But for the people who maybe just want to buy their first Bitcoin, if the banking rails
aren't there, or to your point that startups can't actually have banking partners, how
big of a damper that is on the whole ecosystem growing?
I think it is.
I think it's definitely like hurting the space, definitely, especially because there's so
much innovation and especially it just brings better risk management into all finance in
general.
But there's also a solution where, you know, if everyone starts to, you know, pay salaries
in crypto or stable coins and all the merchants start to accept online and offline also crypto,
you know, we can actually do the switch really quickly and the scalability is there also with
things that are built on top of Ethereum, like the scalability solutions or using something
like Polygon or Avalanche where you have more throughput.
So there's definitely options.
But I think things will go slowly, which is also good for finance because you never want
to roll out financial applications or financial systems too quickly.
So I think a good financial system is something that has been tested for a couple of decades
until it's like fully adopted by every single person on the planet.
Yeah, you mentioned Avalanche.
Sean Wu, also a CoinNFT holder.
So shout out to the Avalanche team and shout out to him.
But you did mention stable coins there too.
And I feel like that's another one in terms of stressors in the DeFi ecosystem.
I mean, did you see anything stand out to you when USDC de-pegged all the way down to,
I think it was what, like 88 cents and the idea of that one being maybe the most trusted
stable coins, given kind of how much transparency there is in terms of its banking relationships,
but $3 billion stuck at Silicon Valley Bank and everyone was panicking.
I mean, did that expose anything around crypto being built on these rails?
Because it is still dollars in the bank somewhere if you're dealing with stable coins touching
dollars.
I mean, did it expose maybe some of the vulnerability when it comes to crypto, DeFi and banking in
that relationship?
I think in, I mean, DeFi as a space, you know, it's quite open-ended as well.
So anyone can come and build innovation.
And I saw some things where, for example, that you had a hard-coded value for a USD stable
coin, which obviously costs value because the actual value was way less than in certain
points of the time than the actual registered value.
But then when you look at, for example, the Aave protocol, you know, when the value has decreased,
some of the positions were liquidated as expected.
So DeFi is a way to also like a kind of like a build very resilient systems, as long as
the governance and people who are participating and contributing can come together and decide
upon those rules.
So I definitely like think it's open-ended space, which is great.
But at the same time, to build something resilient, it really takes a strong community and teams
behind of it to build.
And everything outside of DeFi, obviously, finance affects crypto in general.
So, you know, definitely that was a thing that affected the space.
You were late to hop on here.
So I didn't have a chance to ask you if you had a hard out.
I want to be respectful of your time because I know, you know, every guest that comes on
Coinage, we never want to go too long with them.
And I know there might be like a couple of questions left from people.
So if you want to stick around and answer them, you can, but no pressure to.
And while we bring them up, I did have one more.
I could take one question.
After that, I need to go to eat.
I assumed.
That's what the dishes are clanking for back there.
There's some food being served up.
All right.
Well, Christy, do we have one person who wants to come and maybe ask one?
I mean, if they're I still have one, but I don't want to waste it if he's only got time
for one.
Yeah, he's only got time for one.
Fuck it.
I'm going to ask it.
Sonny, I mean, if there's an accident.
So whenever it comes to, you know, people making mistakes, we always ask the question
for like super smart founders in the space, things where they maybe have assumptions, get
those assumptions wrong in crypto, in Web3.
Was there one that stands out to you where you're like, OK, I wasn't right on that one.
Maybe big mistakes that Sonny's made in his life.
Yeah, I think there's multiple of those kind of scenarios.
And it's quite normal because, you know, you have to change a lot of strategy all the time
and adjust whatever you might be, for example, building.
But I think maybe in kind of like every release that we had, we have some sort of ideas that
we could have done things differently.
Definitely one thing that I noticed is that the value of the community is very important.
So like there's a group of people that are super excited about what you're building and
being able to talk to them a bit more.
And it's something that I realized a bit more later, a couple of years ago.
So I think that's something like end of the day, like even when we're building open, accessible
technology and trying to empower people, end of the day, we're building products and
and being able to understand what users like and they don't like is very important.
So that was like a learning that we we had quite early, early on.
Well, I think it's probably a startup at this point.
That's true.
And I think it's, you know, it's a good it's a good reminder that you should come back on
here and we'll share our learnings as we as we dive deeper in the lens.
Christy will share her her pain points as well if you come back on.
But I appreciate you taking the hour to chat with us.
I really do.
So Stani Kulachov, appreciate you coming on.
The founder of Aave, founder of Lens.
Thanks again, man.
You got to come back soon.
Thank you so much for having me.
All right.
Appreciate it, man.
We'll chat again soon.
And we're going to stay on the space here because we have a few people here and we didn't
get to bring them up for questions, Christy.
So that was on me.
I selfishly took our last question with Stani.
That's, you know, again, do I feel good about it?
Not really.
But did I do it?
Yes, I absolutely did it.
I had to do it.
Yeah, we have like three people here asking for questions or a few more.
They just kind of dropped off after we said goodbye to Stani.
Well, that'll happen sometimes.
But, you know, I think there's still a lot of unanswered questions in regards to Web3
Social.
And I think there's also a lot of unanswered questions in terms of who won our gleam as
well as we're giving away free coinage NFTs.
And that is something that I would be excited to share with our first winner, which we'll tweet
that out, actually.
We already did.
Okay, very great.
Christy's on it.
Christy's on it as always.
I don't need to tell you how to do your job.
Yeah, you don't have your phone on you, so you can't see.
We've been tweeting this whole time.
But yeah, we did pull a winner already, and I DMed him.
All right.
Well, that's good.
I mean, so the other thing, too, here, Christy, is the idea of everything that stands out in
Web3 Social.
And the next one we're going to be chatting with is Farcaster.
Oh, I'm so excited for that one.
Not that I wasn't excited for Lens, because I obviously begged them for a Lens NFT so I can get
That's the whole point.
That's why we set the spaces up to begin with.
That's not why we set the spaces up.
It wasn't to educate people on Lens.
That's not true.
It was so that I could just plead for a profile.
Well, Christy will do that from time to time.
Christy thinks selfishly.
For everyone listening, this is why.
Was I the one that took that last question, Zach?
Oh, fair enough.
That's actually a good point.
All right.
Fair.
Fair.
But I do it for the community, Christy.
That's the whole point.
I try and defend everybody in the community, try and get those questions answered.
You know what I'm saying?
So for the community, you didn't let the community ask questions.
I see your logic.
It makes sense.
No, we were listening in the Discord, which, by the way, if you haven't joined the Quintage
Discord, that's where we take a lot of these questions from.
Shout out to everybody who's been doing that and weighing in on these interviews ahead of
time.
And our NFT holders who also do that and tell us which guests to bring on, which is how
we landed Stani.
So I want to thank everybody who's put in the work for this one.
Okay.
Do you want to throw on some questions for people who are requesting here?
I'm going to throw up.
None of your names are easy to pronounce.
Let's do Vic C. Ronic.
Yep.
Can't do that one.
Don't understand that.
Can Vic BNB?
This name is not something that is an actual name.
You know, Christy, once you add them as speakers, you can just, once they unmute, then they can
just.
I did.
Great.
I'm just not unmuting.
I'll add another one until you start talking.
Peter, you're up.
It's just going to be a mess until.
Well, here's the question I have for you, Christy, right?
When we talk about all this stuff is, I mean, obviously there's an on-ramp for using all
these platforms.
And as you've kind of highlighted, and I think as everyone in this space has highlighted,
the biggest on-ramp problem is just getting the NFT first to use the thing.
Yeah.
But then also then it's like the onboarding beyond it is a little tricky.
You definitely have to know how to use all these things.
And there's a learning curve.
Yeah.
And it's also frustrating because I'm not going on these platforms because I'm a crypto
girl or like a Web3 native person.
I'm going on it because I want to post some selfies and become a micro-influencer on the
next big platform.
That's what everyone, I think, always constantly is looking for, right?
It's like if you're early on the platform, like those people as music, musically, you
remember that one that kind of got in Vine, RIP Vine, but musically and TikTok.
I know.
I was pretty big on Vine.
I'm sure you were.
It was nice.
Peter, I'm sorry.
We talked over you.
You can ask your question now.
That's Zach's fault, not mine.
Yeah.
Hi, everyone.
Hi, Peter.
Nice to meet you.
I have just one question.
I'm just joining Coinage through Lens Protocol.
I want to ask, what's the project all about?
What was the long-term plan since we've heard about Lens Protocol?
So what was the collaboration all about?
Oh, the collaboration with Lens, like how'd that come about?
Me DM spamming them mostly, right, Zach?
Something like that.
I mean, yes, Donnie's been a friend for a bit.
But yes, the idea, I mean, so first it was through Favor, actually.
So it was us chatting with Favor, the big project on top of Lens, which also partnered
with CyberConnect, which is another Web3 program and protocol.
So I think it's been fun to watch how all of these exist.
And you heard Stani talking about it, is that it's not a one-winner-take-all space.
It's like all of these things trying to leverage and build relationships with each other to
on-ramp more and more users.
So that's, I mean, we're a perfect example.
So Coinage being the community-owned crypto show, posting all these things, like we kind
of came to the space through Favor, and then he put us in touch with Stani, and that's
kind of how it goes.
It's like a snowball effect.
And I would like to explore what he was talking about in terms of posting more.
on these platforms to maybe get some of that going.
I like when you look at me when you say that, because you know that's just more work on
my plate.
But okay, I'll do it.
Okay, it's also the one thing I noticed during this interview, and I really wanted to ask
Stani about this, but I couldn't get him in, is getting onto these platforms, it kind
of feels like you have to know someone who knows someone.
It's all networking.
But I think that's purposely, like you heard him say it, right?
Facebook was hard to get on, and it was like, I want to get on, and it made you want it
more.
That is true.
It's like when someone ignores you.
It's like dating.
It's like you say, you're not going to get it.
It's not going to happen.
It's never going to work out between us, and they want it more.
And that's exactly, I think, the game that's being played by all these Web3 social platforms.
Yeah, but it's kind of annoying.
Of course.
I mean, that's not a real business model.
I mean, DMing the founder of a platform, obviously, Facebook wouldn't have scaled to the global
behemoth it is if Zuck still was shooting out texts.
But can't they start doing, I don't know, partnerships with platforms to make it easier
for people to join?
I think that's what this guy just asked about, which is exactly what we should be working
We'd love to on-ramp.
Letting our NFT people just automatically join Lens?
Well, what we'd love to do is on-ramp, yeah, more people into the space, and I think that'd
be great.
So let's work on that one.
I can reach out to them after this.
That's a good one.
We'll work on that.
Yeah, but we can't promise that, Zach, because neither of us work for Lens.
That's actually, yeah, to answer the question that was just asked, we can't promise anything
like that.
But I think it is a good, it's a good point that all of these are working together.
Other things that jumped out from what we heard from Stani, though, Christy, I don't
know if you had anything else jump out around all that.
There were a few things, because like when I asked about engagement, he said it was really
high on Lens, but I haven't seen that.
Like, I'm on favor, and I don't get any hits on anything, which is wild.
Yeah, a lot of the, I mean, again, that's kind of like the element of even Dows, an
NFT community struggle with the same thing, where it's like, if you're paying for people
to participate, is that really an ecosystem that's going to be sustainable?
That's what we want, though.
I want to be paid to participate.
Absolutely.
Who are you talking to?
Stop talking to them.
I want that.
It's the network effect of all these things, you know?
I just, okay, so Instagram, Facebook, they all just moved away from NFTs, which I think
is a massive mistake.
Yeah, we didn't ask him about that either.
That was a big question.
I had a lot of questions I didn't get to, because someone kept talking.
We'll have Stani come back.
Who was that, Zach?
You're right.
Who was that?
We'll have Stani come back.
Okay.
But yeah, you're right.
I think, you know, a lot of people celebrated.
Zach Abrams, our head writer, was bringing this up.
He was celebrating the fact that, you know, early on in the bull run, you had Coinbase
adding their NFT kind of platform, and everyone was like, this is going to change the game.
This is going to on-ramp everybody.
And it really didn't move the needle.
Same thing with Instagram adding NFTs.
It was like, how many people got deeper into NFTs because that happened, and then they shut
it down?
I can't say one person saw that on Instagram and thought, wow, NFTs are cool now.
No, that's not what's going to do it.
That's why they canceled it out.
No one even knew how to make their profile picture in NFT because it was so confusing,
and half the NFTs didn't even work for it.
Ours didn't work.
Coinage NFTs wouldn't load.
Yeah, they were late to 1155s in terms of support for that.
I think they eventually got there, though.
Credit to that.
And maybe added some other elements as well.
But yeah, I don't think it was a focus.
In terms of all my internal conversations with people working at Facebook, they had like
25 different projects that also got shut down.
Okay, so we did get a tweet saying they actually give out lens profiles through apps,
building on it, so apps can give out the profiles, which means we just have to build an app.
That's it.
Oh, okay.
Seems like a pretty easy...
Zach, you can get on that, right?
I'll get on it right now.
You ever do some dev work?
A few days in my life I have.
Yeah, sure.
When?
You go to coinage.media, you can see some of the dev work that we've thrown together.
That we have a dev team doing that.
Hey, hey, don't expose my secrets on the space.
Yeah, people are just begging for lens profiles right now.
On behalf of coinage, their social media manager, please beg for me.
I beg for myself.
I came in here with only selfish means.
I can't beg for everybody.
That is the secret.
That is how everything works.
That's capitalism.
That's crypto.
It's everyone out for themselves and maybe the community at the same time.
There is something that our head writer was asking about, too, is like the data collection.
Basically, let me read his message that he sent to me, is that when you're doing all this free-form social platform stuff, there's no barrier for hate speech.
There's no barrier for kind of any of that stuff.
And you know what?
Honestly, Twitter's kind of going that route, too.
So whatever.
But shouldn't that be in there?
Yes, I mean, we were talking about that with the CEO of Favor as well in terms of moderation.
It basically becomes moderate yourselves.
It basically becomes community moderation, which Twitter's already kind of building pieces of that into community notes around people's tweets, which a lot of people have celebrated.
It's unclear if that's working necessarily the right way.
But, you know, moderation on all these things is important and obviously hate speech.
It will be interesting to see.
Next week, we are speaking with the founder of Akash Network, a decentralized cloud provider, which is an interesting project when it comes to not just having your stuff on AWS, a single point of failure for a lot of these projects being built up, and content being housed on AWS.
We saw that with Truth Social or Parler, one of those apps that got deplatformed and everyone on the right was saying, hey, what the hell?
Yeah, let's not mention Truth Social.
A lot of it was because, you know, AWS and the App Store basically said, no, no, because of January 6th, we don't want to have this content up.
And, you know, regardless of where you fall on that, it was true that Amazon basically could just shut your whole thing off and you basically had nowhere to turn.
So we'll be chatting with him because the same thing exists.
Is hate speech good if you can't take it off the Internet?
I don't know.
Is that a future we all want to live in?
I don't know.
Well, we'll talk to him next week.
That's next week's space.
That's not this week's space.
Wait, we're having the Amazon person on next week?
I'm having the Akash.
Akash?
Yeah, Akash Network.
Greg's coming back on.
Oh, okay.
Good old Greg.
He's in the community.
He is in the community.
I think there was a question of what we are, and by the way, what coinage, because I can get into that because it sounds like the question may have been, what is coinage also all about?
Which, by the way, if you're listening and you want to be involved as a co-owner, go ahead and DM us because we are constantly adding people to our list.
But essentially, as we've highlighted, the co-founder of Netflix, John Woo, a bunch of big names in crypto, trying to prove out what a community-owned media brand can be.
And we just won an award.
It was Bloomberg, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Coinage who won a Cebu Award for our reporting.
And the idea being that if you buy the NFT, you can vote on what we cover, what the big stories in crypto are, which guests we should have on, but then also be rewarded if coinage makes money through sponsorships or if the show gets picked up.
We can pay dividends back to active community members.
Okay, who's going to vote not to sell an ad and make money, though?
Not me.
I'll come after you, okay, because I also have an NFT, and I need that paycheck.
That's right.
That's right.
Not that we're promising paychecks.
But if we give back to the whole community moderation, that kind of sucks.
Community moderation sucks?
It doesn't work.
We see that that doesn't work.
Like, Elon is out here destroying Twitter for me.
Trump has a Twitter account again.
I know I'm going to make people mad, but you know that's not my vibe.
I don't see this working out.
I think maybe Web3 Social could be a safer place, you know?
Maybe put up some barriers.
I'm all for that.
I don't know.
Cueing on conspiracy theories.
So this is the other thing, right?
Actually, shout out to Nate.
Our whole video kind of aged pretty well, right?
It was like lab leak.
Lab leak for COVID?
Couldn't say it.
Wasn't allowed to say it.
We couldn't say anything in our videos.
It would get taken down.
Can't say lab leak.
But now, interesting, looking back.
What?
Well, that was like moderated away from being like something that someone could say, right?
You couldn't say COVID came from lab.
Jon Stewart.
Couldn't ask about it.
And then, now it's like, okay, maybe that's what, actually, that's what they're saying happened.
The government's saying that's what happened.
So it's just kind of interesting to think about moderation.
What does that even mean, right?
You know what I love about these spaces, Zach, is you start off and you're so formal and you're like, hey, I'm Zach Guzman.
This is coinage.
And by the end, you're like, COVID came from lab, everybody.
Then it just devolves into me being Alex Jones.
Yeah.
Then you're like my old grandpa on the porch, like preaching to people.
Well, I aged quite a bit during these spaces, Christy.
I'll have, you know, but I think we can probably wrap it there because Stani's gone and we've, we've, we've, somehow we all go back to COVID when it comes to moderation.
We got to stop doing that.
But we're on Twitter, so it's a safe space for this conversation.
Literal space and it is safe.
But I want to thank everybody for listening to this coinage chat.
I want to thank Christy for making our coinage debut, for hopping on the mic since her days at iHeartRadio.
If I can dox you again.
God, you're such a doxer.
I'll just keep doxing you.
I'll just keep doxing you.
Yeah, but thanks everybody for listening.
And again, congratulations to our winners on the Gleam link.
We'll continue to announce those.
If you won, congrats to the coinage ecosystem.
You are welcomed to join us on the spaces and continue to enjoy in the upside of owning a community-owned cooperative show.
Thanks everybody for listening.
I'm Zach Kuzma, I'm the host of Coinage.
Be sure to follow us if you don't already and tune in to our spaces and watch our shows on YouTube.
Have a great day, everybody.
Have a great day, everybody.
Have a great day, everybody.
Have a great day.
Host
Coinage
from
Coinage Caucus
Lens
from
Lens Protocol
