Brad Freeman on Lens Protocol, NFTs and owning your social graph

Transcript

what's up friends welcome to web3 academy a place for entrepreneurs creators and marketers to explore and learn how to use web 3 to transform business models and create thriving communities enjoy this next episode gm gm what's up friends welcome to the weekly web 3 doer spotlight today we are spotlighting bradley freeman from lens protocol uh what's up bradley welcome to the show how we doing thanks so much for having me great to be here so stoked to have you as always uh my fellow co-hosts kyle reed head is here as well what's up kai what's up friends i'm excited to talk about lens protocol today one of my

favorites in the space so let's just intro bradley before we jump in here uh bradley is a social growth manager at the ave companies focused on biz business development and partnerships specifically for lens protocol uh which is what we're here to discuss today uh bradley began his career as a management consultant at accenture in new york city uh bradley i also uh was a management consultant back in the day so we can share war stories about that oh boy late nights 80 hour to 100 hour weeks savage um he uh he after accenture he joined tiktok uh where he worked on the distribution business development team in la and he

created tick tock's nft pilot program before joining ave and we really wanted to have bradley on mainly to discuss lens protocol but also his passion for the intersection of media technology entertainment and the innovation of web3 fits so well with what we talk about on a regular basis here on webster academy so really excited to jump in um why don't we just start bradley with your sort of your your web three rabbit hole story we always like to get the rabbit hole story from each one of our guests uh take us through how did you first go down the rabbit hole sure well it uh it's a fairly recent story so i remember it like it was

yesterday um but about a year ago maybe last february right before sort of all the mayhem uh with uh in march with all the nft news my boss at work was literally one day like hey we should look at this thing called non-fungible tokens i've been hearing a little bit about um and i honestly just really respect and admire uh him as a boss and i thought he's really smart and i said if he says something like that it means go learn everything i can and go google everything i can find um and you know within a couple of days of basic research talking about nfts with him we started thinking about wow like this technology could be really cool and a huge innovation for any sort of creative talent um but especially for

tick-tock creators um you know tick-tock has a fundamental question of how do creators on the platform monetize um you know and and something we talk about a lot and we wanted to figure out could we leverage nfts as a way to help creators monetize and as a fan engagement tool and what would that look like if uh you know we could help as a company at the time creators actually do that and be the place where you go where you've never made a video in your life and tic toc helps you find your audience really faster and better than anywhere else makes editing really easy and content creational easy and now take that to the next step and say also you can monetize because today a lot of creators uh grow their community and their audience then

they sort of try and migrate to youtube uh to to get the ad share revenue there and obviously you can't put ad rev you know uh advertisements in the middle of a one to three minute tick tock video or ruin the experience so by necessity tick tock's going to have to figure out some sort of monetization tools that work um and so that was sort of the the premise in the beginning nice and in in that beginning what sort of when you started to do your research you know maybe outside outside of tick tock uh what what caught your interest about about web 3 and what was sort of your first move into web3 was it did you buy some crypto did you buy an nft

uh you know any early stories yeah yeah so um you know as we started looking into like just our basic research we also took full advantage of the fact that you know it was an amazing space and we could probably email a lot of folks and they might we just might be interested in talking to us and we'd like to have a dance uh email address and um we really enjoyed like speaking to a lot of the the ogs and you know about a year ago a little changed this time uh there were not many not nearly as many companies in the space as there are now um and so uh where it really hit me though you know we're trying to think through like you know what could sort of be like a an entry into this space given it's a large uh chinese-owned tech company is a very

niche community that values authenticity um the real like aha moment was actually a year ago today uh when me and my my partner in crime who's now actually my boss and the head of growth at the ave companies um christina um she was my partner in crime on this whole nft project at tick tock but uh we were lucky enough to get permission to go to the bitcoin miami conference last year and today is a year later from that um and that was really where we're like hey you know we've been talking to some companies like we've been trying to like experiment and think through what tick tock might do and it's the first time we kind of ever met other people and um shared a little bit about like how we were thinking about it and people reacted like oh my god this could be

huge like people like it it was it was a crazy feeling um people were so like more excited than we were even and we're like okay we're definitely on to something um how do we convert that uh you know and take this knowledge and all these people we met uh and and convert that into something like in some sort of pilot program and see if we can um get that off the ground internally um and i'll mention as well we met we walked in bitcoin miami and we walked out with a spreadsheet of over 100 people that we me and christina we spoke to in a few days many of those people are some of our closest uh friends partners and uh you know in some cases co-workers today uh but yeah we kind of figured out okay

uh we want to do something we're gonna do like an oscars of tick tock we're gonna auction off iconic tick tock videos as one of ones on ethereum um and we're going to also and that was really to help the creators monetize and tick-tock we said we're not going to take a cut at all um and so uh we picked a few videos that we felt were like both culturally significant and uh you know sort of a moment in internet history that people can relate to um but that also sort of showed something cool about tick-tock as a platform uh implicitly so uh as two examples i'll give like the first was like the board in the house video with curtis roach everyone remembers that beginning of covid like stuck at home tic tic-tac-toe and taken off and uh curtis roach who i'm you know happy to

call like a buddy of mine now he uh he's like an independent music artist from detroit and you know that uh his video uh was sold for i think over it was like 28 at the time i believe and 130 000 and so for a guy from detroit it's got a couple million followers on tick tock to make over a hundred thousand dollars plus another 100 000 from the primary and secondary sales of the limited edition drop we did where we paired the tick tock creators with uh prominent nft artists in his case we paired curtis with a coin artist uh who was so down to help us out with this project and um you know we was really to show the limited editions were to show that uh they were excessively priced for fans

and they had real world utility attached because we've been reading a lot about how you know you add utility to give uh nfts a uh you know as a fan engagement tool like curtis would like to know who who i'm not just giving free stuff away like for access to free music or merch i'm i'm identifying who might be my biggest fan and so between the primary drop with the one of one and sorry the first drop of the one on ones and the limited edition drops with the with the nft artists curtis roach made over like 200 thousand dollars in a week uh and you know that was honestly i think my career is now chasing the feeling of like doing that like an addict and it was just so much fun right like it was it was innovative it's creative oh i forgot to mention we also had um you

know we've been reading like it was really like building the plane as we go it's like and seeing what we can get approved honestly um because you know it's a large organization and and doing sort of new innovative things can be challenging um but you know we also said okay well we've got these one-of-ones we've got these limited editions and the whole point of this is for this to be understandable and interesting to an average tic tac user and if we do that we're doing our jobs well um and so we also said let's let's go have a museum exhibit uh and let's have a cultural institutional partner like share the stories of why these videos matter and what's an nft and why is tick tock doing this because it's going to mean a lot more coming from you know someone like that than it is from us ourselves you

know patting ourselves in the back or petting our creators in the back and so i was literally like calling around museums in new york like around this time last year like the moma and the whitney and the guggenheim was like hey do you guys want to do this crazy thing with us well we're going to auction tick-tock videos um what they say you know some of them were like no way didn't respond some were mildly interested um but you know i was really asking like a one night event something something and then we found this one museum called the museum of the moving image in queens so a little bit off the beaten path not manhattan um i had never heard of them but apparently many people have and um

basically they're like a museum dedicated to like media film internet history they hadn't existed about cats on the internet they've they've archived the vine catalog of come on like no way and so they got it and they were like forget one night we want to do a one month exhibit about this video the whole thing and we're like these are the people we're going with them um it'll be huge um and uh you know to sort of cap it off like um we also had a lot of other partners too we had like uh we were able to get uh so like the what's a video that lives in your head rent free girl if people are familiar with that one that was a good example of a video where like um someone is

uh you know it's like the first like viral one of the first viral like question and like a video that's designed to be responded to sort of in the remix culture uh theme that really does like is a big part of tick tock um and we paired her with um with garyvee and garyvee stitched the video and said hey your video's been living in my head rent free and this video is going to be an nft and that one sold for like you know another 20 something eve um and we also had another one with um uh this guy fn mecca who's actually a virtual avatar virtual rapper so some people have heard of low michaela um who has about three or four million followers on tick tock but fn mecca has like 10 million and it's like three times as big um and it was this amazing

story because the guy behind him uh is this guy who happens to be the brother of uh one of the co-founders of artifact and like wait a minute look at this incredible story we have two guys crushing it in their respective virtual like like digital lanes one on tick tock and one in uh you know in our artifact uh you know we got to put them together like they're irl brothers doing crazy virtual things and so we had each of these like three drops that were differentiated really cool partners like people were down to help us out which was amazing and a lot of the value that came from really shown up to these conferences and making the personal connections to to actually like share like what we were thinking and we knew as a high bar but the whole

point was we have to do something so authentic uh and so compelling that shows that we really like get it that people can't help but support it and so it was for sure the thing like to that got me into this space over the course of last year i spoke to at least 150 companies and projects and individuals many of whom i like uh you know have been very influential like my life now um and basically once the project tick tock wrapped up um it became sort of clear that like the tictac was interested in doing a pilot but not necessarily much more anytime soon at least as far as i could tell i don't know if that's changed um but i knew that i this is all i wanted to do and really helping creative talent um and and these new sorts of businesses

and projects like dows and other communities and brands figure out how to take advantage of nfts um and thinking through the sort of social and cultural side of web 3 brought me to lens christina who i mentioned briefly before uh she had left just a few months before me to join the ave companies as the head of growth and so she said hey you know we're really starting to focus on lens and i think this might be a good fit given you know our shared experience and interests um in the space and i was like let's do it and and so uh that here i am it's it's the the perfect transition into lens but i just want to go back to tick-tock for one more second because i actually met speaking of conferences brad and i met at the

permissionless conference a couple weeks ago um and uh and we were just chatting can you just tell a bit of a story about like why tick-tock does not want to continue with nfts if there is a story there or like what the hold up was or problems were i just want people to understand a little bit of the inside of like what's going on in these massive huge tech companies yeah i mean like the answer is i don't really know for sure i have my own perspective um you know i it was it was a huge like honor that they trusted me as a fairly junior in the company like person in the company to take on the responsibility and sort of like create this thing out of thin air um you know i my answer's not really specific to tic

tac i'd say it's more of like with large companies particularly in the tech space this is like like with many things beyond just nfts like uh it is hard sometimes to do new innovative projects like the classic innovators dilemma uh when you know doubled its ad revenue from 17 to 34 billion dollars between 2020 and 21 i think and machine is running and the there's a lot of priorities and you know so it's hard to say it's also hard to say if that will stay the case i really do think though like with all like with many things like if you're early like there's sort of a lag time like these companies are large giant cruise ships and it takes some time to turn them so um i certainly respect that they did we

did the pilot and who's who knows you know maybe they'll maybe they'll uh change their tune later but i do know that like whatever they're doing i want to be uh doing it now you know right and that's why you jump shipped over to lens which let's let's talk about lens um so first we have let's just differentiate between a bunch of different uh companies slash protocols that are going here so we have ave the companies which is where you work uh correct and then you have ave the protocol which is for those who don't know is like one of the i guess longer standing most popular most used uh d5 protocols in the space um and then we have lens protocol which is what ave has recently launched uh and actually launched at that permissionless

conference um and this is sort of like a decentralized um social layer which we're gonna talk about a lot as well uh is that the three is there more obviously that is that that covers it yeah i'm like there's ave the companies uh like so i'm unemployed the ave companies um which has created ave the protocol which is now fully decentralized i mean ave companies also created lens which is not yet fully decentralized because we just launched right so walk us through we want to focus and dive deeper into into lens of course because we want to talk on the social media side of things so why don't you just walk us through what lenses um and and really what problem it's solving right because like we already have social media so why

are we creating another social media uh so just talk about the the problem that's happening in in the web two world i guess we can call it and how lens sort of can fix that totally uh so lens is an open social graph protocol which i tell people and sometimes this just seems like words to them which is totally understandable um so the way i think about it is um you know we have you guys familiar with the phrase it like not your keys not your crypto right like the whole idea that in one of the core values of web3 and of crypto in particular is that you custody and you hold your own assets um and typically we're talking about financial assets um or assets that can have financial components but we don't really apply that logic yet to our social lives and our social media

presences which are also assets uh you know and so the the whole idea is today you don't actually own your social media profiles you don't own the connections and followers um or who you the relations of who you follow um and you also don't really even own the content that you create and generate on uh social media sites like facebook instagram youtube tick tock you name it um and so that creates problems that i think people have started to notice but really haven't thought about as something that is a solvable problem uh so people have content taken down all the time like elon twitter censorship is putting a spotlight on this whole thing uh when i was at tick tock and i told people people figured out i worked there

the number one question i would get from people is can you get me unbanned or can you help me get my videos back that were removed and i thought that was so strange i'm like oh this can't be happening that much like it happens all the time our own founder of the army company stani uh was banned from twitter just like a matter of uh months ago uh for making a joke about becoming the interim ceo of twitter um and so the whole point is like you know we treat this like going to the dry cleaner almost we're like part of playing the games you lose an item every now and then um or you get banned entirely uh when really like there are alternatives out there and like you should be able to not only from a speech and censorship perspective own the content that you create um so that

if tomorrow twitter bans you still have every post you've made every follower you've gotten um all of that you can port it over somewhere else but you also should have more control over how your data is used and monetized the whole business model for facebook instagram google all of these huge companies that we think are not will always be here and are not going anywhere are advertising revenue businesses where they collect data about you they sell it to advertisers and that is the business model um and as a result we are you know people say like it's free you're the product and that's absolutely the case um and so only now uh only recent history and uh and spec is explicitly focused on by lens is the ability to

give people a way to own the content they create own their relationships with their followers that if you're banned on a social platform you still have a way to on that relationship um and uh take control over your profile and your data um and there's some pretty interesting things that happen in a world where things are structured that way the simplest way to think about it is you know every time you go to a new social app you create a new profile you have to set up a new account you get everyone you know to re-follow you um and and that's because each of these uh big companies want to create a walled garden they have their own graph meaning their own understanding of you and who you know and your interests and who and all that um and that's why uh fundamentally we only have like four or five big social

apps and it's so hard to create new ones uh because you know you need to scale a network to get millions and millions of users for it to ever even become a thing because again those networks need the data and the connections between you to be for you to get a lot of value out of it so uh if you think of it sort of how we do at lens is uh when i own all of my followers in that relationship and i own all the content every post every video every tweet i've ever made i can now very easily plug into an app a new social app uh and bring all the content and my network with me which means if i'm building these apps for developer now the incentive structures have changed

and you can now create an app where you don't have to worry necessarily as much about how do i get millions and millions of followers and growth hack this and get funding and like you know take tax spent billions of dollars on acquiring customers and putting advertisers everybody can download the app um you know not obviously not many people can do that uh particularly not small individuals who like are working with their buddies on a web 3 project or something um so now the incentive is i just need to create an incredible user experience for my target user and they will bring their followers with them and it's almost like instead of and i wish i could take credit for creating this but i didn't say this um but it's like instead of in web 2 it's like you go and plug into the app and you have to go set up your life

there and now uh with adapts built on lens like the apps come to you and plug into you and everything you're already doing so let's just clarify every second so lens protocol is not the application it is not like the instagram or the tick tock or the twitter it is like an underlying foundational layer in which potentially instagram and twitter and that could build on top of let's assume they probably won't but maybe but really anyone can build on top of because it's open and permissionless and anyone who does build on top of it um when someone like uses that app and follows other people they're not following them in that app they're actually following them from the underlying like lens protocol layer and

then you can just move from one app to the other whether it's a youtube style a twitter style an instagram style and your followers and i guess all of your content just all moves with you from one app to the next exactly that's exactly right um and so the whole point is yeah lens is an underlying protocol upon which uh others can build applications or integrate with lens uh and so our we already have a very robust and like vibrant ecosystem that we launched just over two weeks ago we've over 50 applications that have already been built uh we have a ton more there's this guy miguel uh who is the the purple haired dev from constitution doubt who is literally churning out an app a day um

which is pretty wild um like for example yesterday he released something on lens that says hey when i post any content to lens by what we call our publication module like so like a post that post can also automatically be linked to your twitter and so when i click on one on lens it's automatically distributing the same tweet or the same content twitter um and so that's the whole point right like now instead like of course it's not an ideal user experience to go have to post on lens and then also go post the same thing on twitter if you want to keep a record of this but i did not expect this quickly to get start to see tools that are already bridging this gap and making it you know substantially improved so so yeah people build apps on

top of lens um and and there's a ton to choose from and we're really really focused right now particularly on our grants program and showing up these hackathons these conferences to really like get people excited about uh building on lens and showing what they can do so you said there's like more than 50 apps already what are these apps can you just sort of explain like what like how the heck do we have 50 social media apps already what's going on here yeah so there's there's quite a few i'll highlight a couple um so there's one that there are some that are like the best features from our web to our favorite web 2 products like reimagined and web 3. so uh one that i love to talk about is um it's called klypto um gabriel haynes

created it uh he is uh basically it's a decentralized version of cameo the the video you know app so he applied back in the day to be a creator on cameo and was rejected for whatever reason and he said fine well i'm gonna go build my own version and i'm gonna make it that creators can sell videos like cameo style videos as nfts to fans um and so he's already working on that another one that's being used pretty uh pretty heavily is lenster uh which uh this guy his uh twitter handles at yoginth um he created it's like a decentralized version of twitter um and what's cool is he really does leverage a lot of some of the best features so one

of the cool things that i enjoyed most about uh lens is we have something called a collect module and so when i see a post uh like it can be an instagram a picture like a photo it can be any type of media publication you shared a thing you you choose to share um i can collect that post meaning because the post itself is an nft sort of lens is really powered by we've talked about that much yet but that's really powered by nfts we're built on polygon and so you have a profile nft when i follow you or you follow me that is a follow nft that's dynamically up uh updated in your profile um when you publish content that's all again everything is packaged up in your in your profile nft um and so hold on let's dive into those so what

sort of entities we have like our our account name so like think you're at whatever your twitter handle is that in this instance it's whatever your name is dot lens and that's an nft and then every piece of content you create is a form of nft as well and then when you follow someone or someone follows you that creates an nft that's true that's exactly right why is that necessary for that to be an nft that's a great question so nfts really allow us to like un like it's really what empowers the uh the portability and composability that is sort of central to lens um so i would think of these nfts not in the traditional sense of like collectibles and artwork um i would think of them much more as

nfts as a tool uh and so when you have your profile and like here's a good example um because really take advantage of smart contracts if i'm a creator and i have a profile i say hey if you want to follow me i can set whatever follow logic i want i can say anyone can follow me i can say only if you hold a certain nft or a set of nfts for the collection or you pay me five usdc a month like a patreon subscription model or you are one of my first thousand followers which we can identify because when you issue a follow nfp so when i follow you there's an id associated with it so you know if i'm your first hundred thousandth or millionth follower

um which is an indicator in many cases you know in some cases at least of like being early to someone right and having a way to show that um and so all of that logic is really powered by smart contracts um and you know erc 721 tokens which are nfts so um it makes it makes me think about uh cans festival just happened uh the uh which most people know is like movies film festival right and i was reading uh just the other day a summary of it and talking about how much nfts and web 3 held the stage at cans and one thing that one guy was talking about was how a lot of the language around nfts is very difficult for the masses to

understand right now people don't know what entities are there's actually quite a negative image towards them in the media and in general public which is a real shame and i think that'll change and he actually said that he stopped using the word nfts and he started just saying access gated and that's exactly what you're saying is really nfts are away the reason you're using nfts in lens protocol is just a way to to gate access to certain things which i really thought was a great flip of just the language and the understanding because yeah why wouldn't we want to be able to simply gate access to our biggest fans versus our newest fans or our most loyal fans there's so much

opportunity to build a deeper relationship with them through this this model and this this protocol layer that you guys are building yeah i i think that's a great way of putting it and and i think there's two other sort of specific benefits you get from this sort of architecture with nfts um there's this token gated access so you can already see all the imagine all the opportunities for creators or for brands or experiences um but then there's also the portability component right so uh i can two examples quickly like one i can go and build a brand and all the posts like like an online brand like a uh and i can go one day and decide like either as the owner of that

brand and the owner of the profile where all this thing has been to sell it one day like a business very easily or right because i'm a super fan of some artists that blows up tomorrow because their song went viral on tick tock and they're huge and they were on lens and i'm their fifth follower and they have that like all the things they do all the tour tickets all the utilities packed into like you get this if you pay for it or you're one of my top 10 first 10 fans now i have this you've got all this utility built up from being early and i can go sell that right then and there so that's really the portability component the other part that's a little more subtle but i think is really important is around attribution um and and tracking so today a good example is uh

on twitter if you post something and i share it like i retweet you and then because i retweet it because of my audience like i drive a bunch of new followers to you uh and you benefit from that today like you and i don't know exactly how how many people i drove to you and how valuable i was twitter probably knows that and like you and i don't and he was the the original creator would like to know that so you can understand who are the taste makers who are your biggest supporters who are your biggest haters because they drive a lot of engagement too you know um and me on the flip side as a consumer of your content or as a fan i get i want to get credit right like i want to know hey like i have been this helpful to

supporting someone um and then you can bring in pretty quickly the uh like financial incentives too to set up like pretty quickly an affiliate marketing program so you can say hey i'm creating this post and for every new follower i can attribute to you i'll give you a dollar or i'll give you a cut of the ad revenue from the video that was posted or or whatever you want um i tested this out myself recently uh just to see i've never post i've never sold an nft in my life but i went on to lenster i have one of those uh my favorite photos i took in la um where i minted my first nft or got my crypto venetian um and like it's in venice uh like right by the the gallery bright moments gallery

where where it happened and um i said hey look i'm gonna auction off this picture it's really meaningful to me here's the story of how i got my nft a little post and i said hey um you you if you want to collect this post using the collect module uh the collect feature uh you have to pay me uh 5.2 matic and there are 52 copies in honor of crypto venetian number 52 which is like three bucks it's really not uh i'm not really trying to you know retire on this one but uh and i said hey and if you share this meaning if you we call it a mirror uh and someone buys it because of your mirror i will give you 52 of the revenue from that sale uh and just to see if people would do it and it was this is my mind you were on

luncheon we lost like a week ago so the protocol's not for a week it was shared like 32 times and there have been like 13 of them sold so far some of which from me some from people who saw it shared um and i thought it was like so cool and i thought like that's there's something here like there's make something accessible and also a way to like collect and curate like your media i think a lot of like my media consumption diet and like what are my favorite posts i see on twitter what are my favorite tik tok accounts one of my favorite youtube videos of all time my favorite artists and i have a way to track that now by collecting them and hopefully in the future someone else will make a front end where i can organize and display all that and say like here's my

media dashboard if you like if you value my opinion on you know what shows to watch take a lot of pride in my recommendations like i have all this stuff stored in one place and you can go check it out and in a future future state you know if i contribute that i got someone to go watch some show on netflix like netflix should you know give me a couple bucks or a discount on my subscription or something true though yeah yeah it really gets you thinking about like especially when you think about there's so few content consumers or creators relative to the number of people who consume content like every person who posts on reddit there's probably like 100 who could just lurk um and uh if you think everyone's a content consumer everyone has a taste and an opinion and everyone should be able to

like being getting attribution should be a fact of life um i i kind of chuckle to myself when i think about it now it's like you'll see on tick tock like so these controversies are such a remix culture right like someone some unknown person makes a new viral dance and then a mega star on tick tock goes and you know does the dance and then the mega star gets the credit and tick tock says hey you user be sure to track and give credit and they're putting that on like people using tick tock to to give attribution like that's going to work and scale like yeah wouldn't it be nice i i wish we were going to walk like that um but this should really is like a good example of something specific that's powered by an enabled by nfts and a new way of thinking about how to

use social media that currently doesn't exist in most cases in web 2. well that's this this unlock of digital ownership and being able to own everything in your social you know world or your social platform just allows for all this stuff to happen right interoperability programmability to do all these really cool things um one of the biggest problems in social media right now i feel like is these bots and scammers and fake accounts i can only assume that lens protocol is fixing this somehow i don't know what it is but i'm wondering if you can talk about this because i have someone right now who's created a fake account of my instagram and is dming every single one of my friends every single day right now and i get a message from like five people a day and

he goes hey how are you doing how's your crypto investing going and he's trying to scam yeah and it's like my mom gets it my mom is like i don't know is this you like what's going on here so like it's a pain and like mine's a very small it just started happening but this is happening to just millions of people and it's such a pain does lens protocol fix this how does web3 fix this i'm sure it does it fixes everything so please talk about this yeah um it's a great question um you know the short answer is we definitely think about it a lot and i think we're still figuring out how we're going to manage it i think part of the answer lies in um again the fl going back to the flexibility and like uh usability of of how lens is structured

so again people are building apps on top of lens and so i'm sure people will find creative ways to ha make you prove your humanity to be able to interact with those apps basically that to say like i'm not actually exactly sure how we will um combat all bots ever like i think we've already seen a couple uh but uh you know on like some some lens apps um but the whole point is like individual projects will have the ability to to kind of solve this for themselves and of course we will be helping them along the way in the meantime lens is a this is part of the reason like lens is a white list only right now to meant to profile is like as we think through these problems um but it's super important and

uh again i think one thing that does change a little bit is if we go back to the incentive structure a lot of these big web 2 companies their incentive is to have uh more accounts more engagement like uh and in some ways like this is what elon keeps poking at with uh prague uh twitter is like he's like just give me a straight answer how many bots are there because i know that like the company gets some sort of value out of having like bots on there even if they to the detriment of the users and the user experience um we're not gonna i don't think we're gonna suffer from those same incentive structures again because it's really about creating uh experiences for individuals where you own your content you know i as an individual don't want to deal with bots unless they're like

useful and like you know the kind that help you get you know tickets to your favorite concert before everyone else what about the idea so when you think of okay social media goes on the blockchain right we create a protocol around this is there gas fees or is there cost associated with it because that's one thing i'm sure it's not for every transaction everything you do on there but is there anything that you do have to pay gas for when you're using lens product oh a couple things so uh first and foremost we're built on polygon because we really are confident that uh they are we've seen how seriously they're thinking about like uh layer two scaling solutions and being a highly scalable platform um the second thing is we've been actually at least for now and i think we've planned to continue this

for some time we've been covering the gas for every transaction on lens so far and i mean it's been like you know not for me to say because like our genius product and dev teams like optimize the gas and do all that but like um so far that's been working quite well of course as we scale in a world where there's the number of clicks and transactions if every transaction is a click you know doing some sort of action on uh commenting or posting or whatever in a world where we scale like this is an important question that we'll have to solve um but i'm confident that we will figure it out and that we have a lot of great partners to help us figure it out but in the meantime yeah lens is totally gasless or many apps onlines are gasless rather

and and yeah like it's been going well quite well so far so how how much will users interact with lens the lens protocol versus the apps built on top will will will we sort of walk through like the the basics of what a user's onboarding would look like they first yeah you i'll let you walk through it so so the user so our listeners can really understand like what these steps are and how this compares to web 2 social yeah so the answer is like for most people if you're not a developer like you're just going

to deal with your whole experience it's front ends um and really lens like my product manager makes me say this all the time like as a mantra like lens is a database it's a shared public database uh and uh that anyone can pull from and so your entire all my entire experience as as someone who works like on lens has been via these front ends since we launched so the front door is uh the lens claim page uh claim.lens.xyz i believe and that's where you go to mint your profile nft uh so you'll you'll connect your wallet you'll say hey i'm gonna try and get this handle see if it's available um and then you met your profile and then from there uh from that website you can either go to there's a we created a

little app called uh lens friends which is a way to discover other profiles uh that other lens profiles that um are optimized based on like recommendations based on like what's in your wallet so do we have any poeps in common do we have any nfts in common and uh we have some really uh smart dudes who came over from twitter from their data science team who are working on like making that a much more robust experience and beyond just things in your wallet but like other info that you care to share and then you know from there you can also go check out kind of wherever you want to go but that's really beef up your profile um you can add any social links so this is one of one of the first use cases of a lens profile is as a super link in bio tool so i can go in

there and the whole idea is like if i want to follow like you kyle like i'm tired of following you on twitter and your youtube and you're this and you're that like i want to follow you and anything you care to share uh that you want me to know about um and that's why you can have multi you'll be able to have multiple lens profiles you want to have a pseudonymous anonymous or you know irl ver you know uh version of yourself um and then from there you can really go and check out any of the apps you want um we're working on like highlighting and like making it clearer like what is out there right like it's so new so that's on my to-do list honestly um but the other thing i'll mention is you do not need to wait for a lens profile to be able to enjoy uh many of

the things that lens has to offer maybe apps that lends a built on lens and the reason for that is when i when we talked about the follows if i follow you my wallet is issuing a follow and like it's issuing a file entity to the profile so wallets follow profiles meaning you today can go onto lens friends and go and follow whoever you want um assuming that they've said anyone can follow they might have said you'd pay me five manic a month or something like that if they or they might have chosen to be private and so there's a lot you can do and and my goal at least you know from the growth side of the house is right now we're really focused on helping grow more follows and grow more profiles and so far we have over a hundred

thousand follows that have been generated across over i think ten ten maybe now twelve thousand uh profiles that have been minted in two weeks it's almost almost like eight or nine or ten follows per profile on average um so it's it we're off to the races but this is a it's a long game for sure i've been writing about how in web 3 i think people are going to start to be able to follow wallets or follow like profiles of someone and then they can go from one app to another i never knew it was actually going to be a thing and then lens protocol lunch and i was like oh sick it's happening here it is yeah so i i love that um can you talk about so lens is is a protocol and it's not decentralized yet but it is going to become decentralized and i don't know if

you can sort of like talk more about that but i'd love to just hear like how that works like how do you all of a sudden just become a decentralized protocol versus you know a centralized protocol um and and why does ave or lens want to become a decentralized poker like what is the benefit uh in in going that route yeah well uh it's a great question so you know the the goal that you know like all projects they start central or like many practices rather uh they start centralized and they have the the goal of eventually decentralizing because the whole point is in if we're going to go out there and preach about how you know we shouldn't be able to sense you no one treatment sends you like uh you know you should have ownership over sort of the

you know your data and so again going back to the core mission and vision and values for lens like that exists in a really only in like a decentralized way now i'll also mention we have an api that people can plug into um which we do take more of a perspective on but again you don't have to use our api um so it's not saying like uh we're not trying to say like oh we're decentralizing it we have no no role in it anymore you know like we we still will be investing heavily in making the the protocol usable um and and making it more user-friendly and again create like uh hoping like fostering the ecosystem around it basically um you know it it we don't want to eliminate oral say just trust us like we won't censor you we

want to we want to practice what we preach and you know frankly if we don't like like what kind of world is that like what do we even you know what's the point of lens right like we got to we got to do what we say we want to do and it just takes time yeah for sure and so lens is currently on polygon um it seems that a lot of people believe that this space is going to go multi-chain and and for sure multi layer two um that's and that's already kind of playing out and happening is there sort of a road map uh or like is it even possible for lens to then go across other chains because like if lens becomes the like default layer for social media what about the people who are on solana or the people who are on i don't know

optimism or whatever um they have to come over to polygon or is do you guys think you'll branch out and try to become a layer across multi chains as the obviously the tech's not ready for that yet but like as that builds out is there any have you guys been talking about that at all yeah so uh the the first now says you don't need to be uh you don't need to build on lens only exclusively to get a lot of the benefits of lens uh so you can also be a user like you can also be on many other chains and and use one simply as the social layer like the glue between uh you know all the different users and stakeholders so as a simple example if you were a member of a dow and that dao you know membership is powered by some

nft on ethereum uh you can still have lens where everyone in that dow has a profile and their lens profile nft still lives in the same wallet address as the one they use to hold their token it's obviously on one's on polygon mainnet and the others uh nfts on uh ethereum uh so you get a lot of the benefits still um i'm not really sure like you know i think we probably have ambitions to like the monsoon future like i'm not i'm not totally sure we're really not there like there yet um but we definitely have ambition that like everyone can take advantage of lens and what we've to offer of course there will be more uh you will get more value uh in terms of like what you can do uh if you're built on lens um and and that's why we're seeing a lot of you know but it doesn't

mean like building online must be done by everyone like as you can imagine like any of the specific uh types of people whether it's social media particularly creative talent but like social media uh users uh uh and more are uh you know are people who are gonna get the most value at least first i think another way to think about like having a social layer um is uh you know if are you guys familiar with that running app strava where you like record your runs yeah that's taking the act of going on a run and recording it and then you making it social meaning you can go participate in leaderboards and competitions and see what your friends are doing like it's strava fundamentally is creating a social graph is what we mean by a social

graph like for the activity of running um and so you can get that same you can apply that same logic and power it violence for whatever you may be doing on whatever chain wherever you are you know in what religion interesting okay a couple questions about uh sort of the some things that you've said in terms of the objectives of getting more daps more builders more users so i just want to kind of i'll go through three and then i'll let you answer the three so um first is if people are you trying to get more people on lens protocol there right now and if people want to do that can they do that second is um how are you guys getting more

followers and if our listeners want to be followers how can they do that and third is some of the listeners are builders and they're looking to build right now and thinking about building web3 companies and i guess you mentioned the grant program before and i feel like maybe tell us a little bit about that and how builders could get involved in building on on lens if you can handle those three questions all the while so real quick first one was uh how can i set up my lens handle second how to become a follower third how to build got it so uh to set up your again so to mint a profile uh it's currently still a white list um but that will change very very soon because obviously everyone

that's the challenger however it's like we're so excited like let us do it let us play with it uh and we're like yes we want to as well like it's very important um so very very soon i'll say um in like in the meantime uh you know what i'd recommend answer your second question is what can you do right now if you if you weren't on the white list if you didn't sign the uh we had an open letter that went out uh before i even joined the company actually um but uh if you didn't sign that you can still go and what i'd suggest you do is go and follow profiles on lens that you find interesting and compelling um and and mess around with some of the apps so um even if you can't uh do everything there's a lot you can do um i'd

particularly shout out again lenster um and uh i think that's probably a great place to start um so and then if you're a builder um and we have our grants from yes we do have a grants program um we are about we've announced cohort we call them cohort zero the seedlings uh they've been announced a few months ago we got the saplings cohort one um coming up soon we actually are going to be announcing those soon and then we have a lot of ambition to do a lot more um hackathons grants um we have a form we also i'll say like we want like when we see projects on twitter like from this guy miguel for example or others we're like oh we should totally like do a spot grant for something like that so if you're building on lens and you're building citing stuff like we will we want to

notice it we want to hear about it um and we will be announcing you know over the course of the year many many more opportunities to uh to get a grant from lens um we are really really excited and we have also i should mention some great like partners who uh other protocols who we work with that make a lot of more robust activities and ones possible so for example live peer they really focused on how do you do decentralized video content right it's very data intensive that's gonna require its own whole infrastructure and so video is a huge part of social media and so lens and life here working together is like they're great to work with and we're excited to to explore with them similar with like lit protocol so encrypt encryption right like you don't want every tweet to

not ever be able to be deleted and it's up there forever and so having a way to encrypt messages um and content uh and get it is really important um you know we there's just uh we talk to a lot of different folks and so um even if you're not able to build on lenses i'd say if your builder like start thinking about what those look like the other thing i'll mention is on our website on lens.dev i would really check out the developer garden um so it's just lens is actually we update it as lens.xyz there's the developer garden and there's also this page called the ideas page which is ideas.lens.xyz where we have like thought starters on what will lens look like how could you apply lens like music and artists gaming and game creators uh

curation uh you know and governance you know all these sorts of things and and they're really thought started to get people thinking about like what does it even mean to a mat reimagine what this looks like or how can i apply lens and what it does in this area it's super cool and i imagine it is very difficult to build what you guys are building like i think building social media is already really really tough thing to do and now it's like building a protocol is also really difficult and you guys are like oh let's do them both let's just do it all together so for the listeners go help lens you know go sign up follow go get a grant and help build like go help them because what they're doing is amazing what do

you find are the biggest challenges like i imagine like web 3 is not mobile friendly yet everything we do in social is mobile uh i imagine that's probably a big challenge right now i don't know maybe you guys are gonna be the first to bring web 3 to mobile um what are you guys seeing as like some of the biggest challenges or like you know roadblocks that you're gonna hit um you know as you try to build out this future of of lens yeah so uh i mean fundamentally we know we're playing a long game here um and that we're we're trying to do something to disrupt uh like the biggest companies that we with whose products we literally use every single day and and so you know scaling the the network of people who hold lens profiles like while

we talked earlier like we still as a protocol still like we have to get millions and millions of people uh you know using lens and understanding what it's for and why it's important so first and foremost is getting the message out um and and so you know coming here like with you guys is obviously helpful for that um because what we found is like uh even with with these challenges like we have to have a ton of experiences and apps built on top like when we have to we do go get creators right like if devs are the creators of the engine that power all the every social media apps no one's posting there's no app uh by similar logic if people aren't building on your protocol like you're not gonna go anywhere um right lucky enough at least just like so far like we've had a ton of enthusiasm

and excitement and cool things coming out but the ecosystem has to evolve so much to the point that by the time i'm hitting up people i know like creators on tiktok who've got like sizable followings they're not doing me a favor by checking out lens like there is immediate value add that they're going to get from trying out apps built on lens that they're not getting in web 2. and the way we think about that is like um you know there's three incentives really that creators care about which is can i monetize can i grow my audience or can i deepen my connections and do new things with my existing audience and so really the focus is you know i want i want to be able to say hey if you're a music creator like here are 10 apps uh 10 things you can go to right now on lens

that you're not able to do um and that's like the way if you're not able to like a lot of people are not going to get the mission of lens just from me telling them about it or they'll appreciate it may not try it um we're going to need to get that message through by showing not telling and by having incredible experiences that people can use um so that's big picture like the hard part right is making it so that it's so compelling and on par like you know with the user friendliness and speed and accessibility of our you know web 2 counterparts um so you know it's that's also the most exciting thing though right is to to do it and to to be part of building it and to spend every day talking and thinking about it so you

know i'm certainly up for the challenge i know my uh the rest of the ave company's team is and it seems like a lot of other people are too absolutely and so as we start to wrap up i just have one more question about lens so a lot of our listeners are builders um and they're creating companies and they're entrepreneurs that want to either build a protocol or you know build something in web3 and one of the things that's always interesting to me in web 3 is how is how are these protocols generating revenue so they can continue to be around long term um right now it sounds like lens is paying for all gas fees so there's expenses where does the revenues come from like what's the business model for lens protocol if that's even a thing yet maybe you're just gonna you guys are

waiting until you get really big and then you'll figure it out what is the deal there it's a great question we really haven't been talk like like haven't been focused on that yeah you know okay it's like the uh the like you know as well as a foreign constantly although we are familiar with the web 2 companies we'll figure out how to monetize later let's build something good right yeah it's actually that's not you know getting you addicted to you know checking your phone or addicted to likes or whatever like let's focus on building the the right like the product and the the experience right now um so let me update you i'll have an update for you on that later um okay but in the meantime uh yeah we are just so excited you know we we're just in the the top of the first inning not even maybe we'll be

at the pledge of allegiance not the pledge really the fresh bangle banner so i guess i guess that's one of the benefits of being started or born out of ave right a successful you know protocol company already that they can just start to build these things and not have to worry about revenues right now um so that's that's amazing you can just focus on building a great product that gives a lot of value and uh and i think that's one of the the amazing things about about lens and where it's going i gotta ask i'm a big fan of ave i love what avi's been doing since the beginning stani's an amazing um you know entrepreneur uh you guys have you know you have avery the protocol you have lens protocol what are you guys doing next like can

you just take me to the future of ave for a second like when you guys are in your board rooms talking and you're like i don't know if you do that maybe you're on zoom rooms uh i hope but uh like what's your guys future plans here are you guys just taking over the whole world or what uh well i'll definitely say the lens is certainly a priority right now given we launched two weeks ago um but i think to answer your question like uh more more directly like uh people when they hear of the ave companies they think oh abe defy it's a defy thing um and i think stani you know as demonstrated by lens and really like if you see his presence online like how he thinks it's like like the ave companies are really a web free company and uh you know we started with

a defy protocol now a social protocol um and and they've been working on this for like over a year like back when i like a year ago when i was at bitcoin miami just learning what the hell an nft was you know we got these people like building this whole uh like working on lens i think i can't even believe they're seeing that like far ahead because i c i resonate a lot with it but i don't even know like what anyone else or is it too soon is it too you know like who knows um but like it really does seem like social summer is upon us and like the it you know talk about social app layer of of web3 is like is is happening here now and and it's really exciting to see lens be part of it so i don't know

what what other stuff we got what sony's got next you know uh but i i have no doubt in my mind that there's certainly more ground to cover here and we're not done anytime soon well we can't we can't wait to see it that's for sure uh before we wrap up i want to give you a chance bradley to give any sort of show of lens of ave of yourself where can people follow you anything you want to recommend our listeners to do to get more involved with lens uh or any anything you want to promote the floor is yours thank you yeah well everyone be ready to to mint a lens profile when the time is right we will be very clear about when when people can do it so that you too can meant to

profile in the meantime seriously go try out check out the developer guard and the ideas page go check out apps built on lens i think um lens friends and leinster are both good places to start to see what profiles really look like and how people are using them and also see what kind of content's being posted and then if you want to stay really up to speed on like what lens is doing check out the discord um and also follow the lens protocol twitter account for sure um and follow stani if you haven't already because um he's got some very entertaining content in addition to being very informative um and uh and yeah that's that's the the shill for now i guess what what's your lens handle how do i follow you on lens twitter handle just like my instagram i

am brad or bradley in this case brattlebradley.lens do we have time for a speed round can we make a speed run happen yeah you got a few more minutes for us okay awesome and just to mention quickly all those uh links and uh pages that uh brad mentioned will be in the show notes so uh we'll make sure you guys got links to those uh okay speed round uh let's let's start with um i was gonna usually the first speed round question is favorite person to follow on twitter so i'm gonna flip this and i'm gonna say favorite person to follow on lens um he's like there's only 20 people

honestly paula miguel follow up miguel piedra i think he spells his name this guy's turning out an app a day on lens doing some crazy stuff so he's wild amazing uh okay other than uh then lens let's go let's actually go out of the ave ecosystem for a second uh favorite other project could be a protocol could be an nft and i wouldn't even say favorite something that's kept catching your interest that you've been uh um interested in recently uh anything out there that you're you're you're eyeing colors community down i'm big fans and so i i used to watch their video i still watch their music videos uh you know

incredible and now they're really like a music artist focused community focusing creation that's now really taking serious steps to to be an early member of the web3 community and i think it's great because music artists have so much to gain from web 3 that they i think they get the most screwed in the current web 2 uh structure so keep paying attention to them okay awesome colors community we'll definitely check that out uh favorite slang word in web 3 or token name there's so many funny token names out there uh which which one uh makes you laugh oh m3 slang uh we say we say uh

friend like f-r-e-n like all the time at work and like i catch myself writing it in emails like i probably stick to regular english um well that's probably going to be my favorite so i got a good chuckle every time awesome awesome well with that thank you so much for being such a good friend today and for showing up for all of our listeners this was awesome uh we're definitely gonna have to do a part two i feel like we're about to do a part two in a week based at the rate you guys are moving right now it feels that way um i'd love to i'd love to introduce you to some other members of the team um you know and yeah we're so we really appreciate the support and we're so excited to see

um you guys and and really everyone um you know joining lens and checking out what we're doing pretty soon awesome brad thank you so much and uh excited to uh to see more of your content on lens thanks so much talk to y'all later have a great one cheers thank you for listening to web3 academy we hope this helps you along your web 3 journey if it does please share this episode and subscribe so you don't miss the next one by the way if you have yet to join the discord community you are missing out this is where all the magic happens this is where we learn where we ask questions where we network uh you want to be in there the link to join is in the description below and finally a quick disclaimer nothing in this podcast

was financial advice crypto and web3 can be risky you can literally lose it all in fact if you invest on account of what we say you probably will lose it all so don't do that in all honesty the point of this podcast is to remove the noise of markets and price and focus on utility and implementation anyway so you should not take any of this as financial advice thank you friends and see you in the next one