Introducing Lens Protocol V2

Transcript

[Music] thank you gmgm okay let's do one two three um I think we have to do stronger one two three GM good um so yeah um my name is stani I'm the founder of Ave it's a team behind of a protocol and um that is a D5 protocol for liquidity

and more recently we launched a code stablecoin and also the founder of lens protocol so lens is a web free social layer um so anyone who already is on lens and and has a profile um actually how many of you have a lens profile oh okay so now so you know you want to know all the alpha so how many of you know have a lens profile um and has minted go that's video okay okay who has a lens profile has minted go and has been on a rave pretty good uh we have a thing going on across the lens protocol

so um across different applications there's a hashtag uh summer of lens so um I'm um as a millennial I think hashtag has a lot of um powerful Network effect especially in events like ECC where the community comes together so if you're touching grass here somewhere in Paris post a picture maybe something interesting will will happen um something fascinating is that the idea of the essentially social media and lens coin up took off here at etcc so I've been participating here for a few years now

um talking a lot about um decentralized Finance the Ave ecosystem and more recently also web3 social and back in 2001 there was a lot of excitement about what if we start to actually decentralize the the social media networks that we have um and what what could happen if we bring the concept of ownership to the users uh 2021 I think Jack was saying that he wants to build a social network on bitcoin and we were joking about enrolling that we're going to build one on ethereum and vitalik had an interesting talk about why social media could be

decentralized and what how it could actually help and here afterwards uh last year CC we were actually talking about and presenting lens protocol so something that we were building for a year and published and learned a lot during the process I've been also quite busy recently so I just became a father so in that's an actual uh baby on chain so if you want to follow bear bear dot lens so a lot of things has been happening for for me personally and and over the years and I'm happy to share um everything that I pretty much do because you know it's we're a community

something we actually during the path we learned a lot uh from the ethereum community so I started building um on Smart contracts with with our team back in 2017 early it was a small community but something that is fascinating is that there's so many ideas here and when you build in public openly you get a lot of community contributions and you can actually build better infrastructure better products and everything we were building on lens we tried to take a lot of inspiration of how networks work especially the um

ethereum Network so the way we see is that ethereum network is a a network where we all belong to in a community so within ethereum we have different kinds of choices so we can choose what kind of protocols we are using uh we have the freedom of moving from one protocol to another we have the freedom and choice of of what kind of assets we for example own and together we're a community um but ethereum is also a shared network um and I think this is very important um learning for for our team is that we see ethereum as social so it's a place where we are constantly interacting

um same goes for for example internet so when we look at ethereum and over the past few years we see different kinds of uh actually events where more daily active users are on on the ethereum network for different kinds of social events so I don't know if anyone remembers a few years back when everyone was minting on ethereum cryptocurities who who remembers uh these days okay so that's a social event if you remember the the five summer does anyone remember D4 okay that's the social event is to to the the nft summer um and all these different kinds of events

and and the L2 creates so like their social event they're they're not necessarily reflecting the same social behavior you would have for example in Tick Tock um or Twitter but you discover uh these ethereum-based social events uh through the the kind of a current um uh that to social networks or to on-che data so what we understood quite a lot especially recently uh with uh threads launching um and and within five days reaching 100 million users um we kind of like saw the idea of portability and how much actually provides value and it doesn't really

exist in a in a good shape and form in web3 Social except very recently where um the Instagram users were able to create an account on threads and in simple by doing that threads achieved 100 million users in just uh five days because they actually were doing this in a in a shared social network so they enabled portability and that's pretty strange because normally in web 2 social networks you kind of want to keep things closed and and keep the interactions inside of it uh partly it's quite true for trades to

because if you think about it what actually changed with threads by opening up a bit more the the actually portability or for example different social platforms sharing Revenue with the creators in my opinion pretty much nothing so the way I see it is that portability and and these networks and and the ownership aspect still happens within those uh platforms and and that's where kind of like the difference between platforms and and protocols uh come into place and there is a lot of progression in in in social

media and some of the progression is actually good I personally think that with Twitter for example uh what we've seen there happening and and the the all different kinds of Twitter clones they actually kind of like decentralize the landscape a bit at least for the user but essentially they all kind of like build in the same infrastructure which is which is really lacking um giving the rights for the users and what it means is that the people are the product of of these networks because we give all the attention and all the data and we get a little back um there is no ownership for anyone um from user perspective

um there's no really power so you can't really make a big difference or affecting changes of these uh platforms and you don't have a choice and this Choice aspect is very important because um you know if you don't have choice you don't really have an ownership because if you don't if you can't actually go from one place to another it's going to be very hard to prove your ownership but you're bringing the value so you we as the users we we're providing the creativity uh we're establishing the connections the algorithms and and the data but still it's the same exact algorithm that is running over the

internet now um I had this interesting concept I I call the liquid citizen test I've been talking about this uh earlier multiple times um it's still a working piece so don't don't build your thesis yet around this idea uh but the idea is very interesting so the way I see it is that um what liquid networks are and what we are we are liquid citizens so we're able to go from one network to another um without any kind of um foregoing of your Social Capital or ownership so just as an example is that

at some point in web tree this new internet that we are here building excited about we will see a lot of protocols that will look like the same they might be even Forks of each other and this is already happening for example in this influence Finance there's little effort for users to actually switch from one protocol to another move themselves from one Community to support another community and this is wild concept for ownership because if you don't have this ability to to move um then you don't really have the ownership because you are stuck in in a community or in a network so when you have this movability

um you are a liquid citizen today in that two you're basically can't really um leave yourself from the platforms um and if you do if if you really decide to actually leave you become a refugee so you leave everything behind your followers your creations and every artifact that you created or interacted with and that basically means that we the people we are the network and these platforms exist because we engage with them and we create the content but internet doesn't really reflect that and doesn't give that ownership to to the users and that's why we have to take

back the open internet um it's quite interesting because internet started as a decentralized network and later became more centralized for the sake of improving user usability user experience um and today internet is pretty much owned by big Tech and bigger companies but it can be actually more Equitable and have a positive sum game for for the users and the more open networks we're building you know the more choice we give to the users so if if you're building something in web 3 or in Social in the kind of

like an aim that you want to give as much as possible to the users and enable Choice the more Innovation we see and I think this is a very valuable because when you have to choose whether you build open source or something else that opens open source flywheel creates that Innovation and creates those interesting use cases and effectively we will have a internet that actually benefits all and people powered social networks where you have actually saying how the network will evolve in the future um and and because you have the the because you are a liquid citizen it

means that you can actually affect interchanges by actually uh switching networks in between switching experiences um and everything will be built around you because you create the network and you have countless of possibilities what you can actually do and what you can build as well as a developer and something we figured out that we don't really have all the answers um what we uh what we think about where social media goes we understand that internet is social today there's five billion users online and almost equal amount of uh social media users but what we understand is that if we build this openly uh in a way where

everyone can contribute um for example we recently launched Libs which is lens Improvement proposal so anyone can actually come and contribute ideas we can build something that aligns with with everyone's values and also can create different kinds of communities um and most importantly we build a protocol so lens is a protocol that enables the ownership and and these different use cases uh to be a shared network so the same way as ethereum works as a shared network lens is is about uh not only about sharing the benefits but also reusing existing infrastructure Innovation and

experiences that we have built and that should help also the cold start issues because if you can build and innovate on existing networks you reduce the cold start issue so if you can't Leverage The users that are already in the in the ecosystem by building some interesting experience that helps to add value to the whole ecosystem and everyone benefits and the most importantly is that to get more adoption to actually get the 3 and web 3 social to the next level we have to build great social experiences uh building a protocol isn't

enough we have to actually build experiences we have to be humble uh we have to actually acknowledge that if we want people to use outside of this conference uh lens or or any webcam [Music] public goods we have to build extremely good experiences and we need more people that have have that experience and excitement to to build but further Ado I want to introduce now the lens protocol V2 so we've been building this for for the past year now um and let's protocol V2 is is basically we introduced a lot of the learnings

that we um we had and the feedback that we got from the community over the past year and it's been such an exciting time to actually build something as a social protocol so what's new uh there's three different areas we were focusing um basically getting things right that we got wrong and I would say that maybe half of the things we got wrong and half we got right uh one important thing is the openness and composibility extending lens protocol to support everything that there is in in the battery on a shared network including shared benefits so how do we actually include everyone into the value chain and trust and safety so if

we're building this together how we can actually build safely in a way where it's a nice place for everyone um so what happened we basically rewrote the whole code base um we wanted to focus quite a lot into the uh developer experience um creating a lot of open design space so developers have more choice two-way integration so how can lens actually benefit the existing and future protocols um in a battery and also expand more of the use cases and enable a good feedback loop for a monetization layer

so one of the main features that we have that I'm personally super excited about is a feature called open actions so open actions enables users to perform any external actions smart contract based actions directly on lens publication so what it actually means is that we're extending the functionality of lens but also introducing the idea of that whatever you build in web3 you can bring that Innovation into lens and enable that directly in a post that the user creates and it enables the idea also of bringing your own smart contracts so if you're a

Creator and you want to Mint for example with manifold openc Zora or whatever that platform is sound XYZ you can come and do that on lens and it's it's more composable now as well and the idea here is to make the experience more native so you can actually do this functionality directly through lens and support all these protocols and here's how currently the lens actions work the publication action so you can now create content whether it's music uh whether it's an interesting discussion and you have commenting mirroring and and the web c native collect feature but in the future now

with lens V2 you can extend to any kind of action there might be so an example could be that you can create a post and and add a mint button that means an openc nft let's say on polygon or minting to an oracle sound XYZ nft on ethereum can be to buy a nft ticket joining a wait list joining a dow or anything you can actually imagine donating to bitcoin so these open actions are pretty much an open ended design space to integrate your Innovation into lens

um and you can even buy for example two you can create a post of your land in sandbox and describe that land that you have and the history and what you have done previously and allow other users on the protocol to actually buy that land or donate to public goods through git coin with quadratic funding um it can be even Financial actions such as for example swap an asset on uniswap or borrow go from the other protocol anything that is on a shared network can be integrated

and we really want to see interesting use cases we want to see what you can actually build with this feature and how far you can actually go and to get an open Action into distribution across all the lens clients you can create a lens Improvement proposal on action you might have that can be integrated into the whole lens code Base Library and used by all these applications that are supporting lens as a social layer another interesting feature we have is the collective value share so we wanted to improve uh the value sharing of all the artifacts that are traded on lens

and the way we basically did it is we wanted to ensure that lens as an ecosystem has a good feedback loop on value sharing so everyone shares whatever they create and it's incentivized to distribute content for example and create content and consume content as well and what it means is that if you have a interesting content and you create something different applications that are showing and distributing the content the algorithms even whoever is actually contributing to your content um they can all be in the same value Loop so you can pass any lens profile to to share Revenue across the whole

content supply chain meaning that if you build an exciting algorithm you can use that algorithm and reward it to distribute your content to new user bases just taking a concrete example is that you can create a content in a music NFD platform called riff and that same content can be surfaced via algorithm in orb and then collected eventually um on on butterfly and all of the actors and entities in this value Loop can actually benefit from that monetization and and hopefully this creates interesting mechanics systems and new ways and design space for users

and creators to to create interesting content are instant device to create a new open public algorithms and exciting experiences as well um we have upgraded profiles now so we did little well quite a lot of work on the uh profile architecture that we have um and one of the key things we have is a concept called open name spaces so we changed the way that the lens profiles are working now um so previously you can own a profile that is token as snfd and that profile has a handle that you minted doing a Genesis for example now the profiles are separated from the handles are separated

from the profiles and the profiles are nfts and also the handles are nfts that creates an open namespace that you can actually not only change your handle to something else you can have multiple handles per profile so you can actually reconstruct your identity but also it gives more power if you're using ens because you can create a lens profile and simply already attach an enf name that you might own and you can do more with ens to lens ecosystem and this creates foundations to namespace modules to actually innovate and create interesting programmability

with namespaces and also nfts can have a profile so we focus quite a lot on empowering the ERC 655 one standard so basically how we can actually increase and enable the the value accrual instead of an address or let's say instead of a wallet address directly to the actual lens profile nft or the nft that is holding a lens profile so effectively when an nft like this very handsome crypto Kitty can have a profile it actually enables voice as well so you can follow other nfts with your NFD you

can talk create content to your nft and create additional value um it's an interesting example but we're super excited to see how this feature is going to be used in the future but also it enables the same way as the name spaces enables actually a access and keys to different kinds of community is that can be created across the lens ecosystem we have a new follow architecture so previously follows were Minted as nfds and we decided that that this that isn't necessarily the best way to um have the follow relationships so all

the follows are happening now from one profile to another and um the tokenization is still available if you want to preserve economical rights if you follow someone that is somehow a valuable connection to you or publicly you can still create that tokenization and use the economical rights if you want to use nft as a collateral or some other feature use cases another feature that is very valuable and this is probably asked the most is the profile manager um and I really wish that this was implemented in a day one uh but here it is

um so what it means is that you can actually create a profile manager and Grant different kinds of Rights um to different addresses and lens profiles so these rights are non-economical uh basically social actions that can be for example posting um can be for example mirroring so if you have a you know if you have a brand and maybe you have an intern that you want only to post on certain hours and not in the late hours you can even set that kind of a time limit but what it enables is that as a community you can start managing a lens profile which is very cool because it enables dowels to manage effectively their profiles and

also multi-six um one interesting idea towards the profile manager is that you can store your profile safely in a cold storage and delegate the actual social actions into a wallet that you use day-to-day basis but also what it allows you to do is that you can delegate the social actions into an application where you can create an experience where you don't have to sign any transaction in the future so no metamod pop-ups no no gaslights and silence transactions but also taking it to the next level um yeah so we have also a couple of

interesting safety features on-chain blocking is interesting so obviously you can um block different users and do that on a more kind of like a client level application Level uh but you can also do that on chain which means that a profile can't interact with with your profile we also improved quite a lot the profile safety so recently with lip 4 we introduced the profile guardian and I think this is very cool um so we've seen a lot of phishing attacks recently where users are losing their nfts and because this particular user here had the profile Guardian set by default on as

most of the users now everything else was trained from the wallet except the lens profile which is quite amazing and I really hope that this is an innovation that would actually be taking across the nft ecosystem as well and we already introduced that a bit earlier because we saw it as a concern Yeah so basically the whole summary is uh here we implemented some other things like the ERC 1271 so smart contracts can sign as well makes it a bit more easier metadata V3 that's outside of the protocol but also interesting standard I'd recommend to look so you can create spaces across different applications other type of content what Publications

are now standardized as well so I hope I don't forget anything but if I do you can go to the GitHub and and look at the code and see what is all there and most importantly you can actually contribute in public and the code should be public now as we speak and we have a code arena public code Arena contest as well where anyone can participate and find different kind of uh security aspects and and try to figure out and read the coding and participate so that starts also today at 8 00 PM if you want to attribute and find anything you can get rewards for that

yeah so if you want to get into the wait list so lens is still beta so we are going to run lens protocol completely publicly open so anyone can create a profile in the future and it's going to be fully accessible and now I think we're gonna release a test net pretty soon and meanwhile you can join a wait list either for V1 or later for B2 so if you scan this QR code hopefully it works I don't know I think it works um and there is also one of the clients that are building on top of lens or they

actually created Etc community so if you already have a lens profile and if you have orb or not you can download it with this QR code you can actually join the orb Etc community and and share different kinds of news and things with each HTC um yeah basically that's it and and I would like to thank Etc the whole organization Betina and our team for for everything they've done it's been incredible ride um and it's still going to be a long ride and and um thank you for giving me the opportunity to come to talk um so much thank you [Music]

[Applause] [Music] [Music] thank you [Music]