The Social Web3 | Protocols for a Digital Society | POAP, Lens Protocol, Disco.XYZ

Web3 social media? Decentralized identity? Digital society in the metaverse? On this episode, we unpack the future social world in the metaverse and the protocols that will help shape it. To discuss exactly that, we brought on: Evin McMullen, who's building the world of digital identity, off-chain assets, and metaverse reputation at Disco.xyz, Christina Beltramini from Lens Protocol at Aave, a brand new primitive for Web3 social media platforms, and Isabel Gonzalez, COO at POAP, the Proof of Attendance Protocol. ------ 📣 OPOLIS | Sign Up to Get 1000 $WORK and 1000 $BANK https://bankless.cc/Opolis ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/ 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum 🍵 MATCHA | SMART ORDER ROUTING https://bankless.cc/Matcha 🚀 SLINGSHOT | LAYER 2 SOCIAL TRADING https://bankless.cc/Slingshot 🏦 GEMINI | TURN FIAT INTO CRYPTO https://bankless.cc/Gemini 🦁 BRAVE | THE BROWSER NATIVE WALLET https://bankless.cc/Brave 🦄 UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED FUNDING https://bankless.cc/UniGrants ------ Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 5:30 Introductions & Discussion Foundation 11:42 Web2 Days Are Numbered? 16:44 Bringing More People to Web3 23:15 Preventing Social Dystopia 25:44 Disco.xyz 31:42 Lens Protocol 37:01 POAP 45:20 Web3 Roadmap Debate 53:34 Onboarding 8 Billion People via Social? 1:00:54 Web3 Social in 5 Years 1:06:30 Disclaimers ------ Resources: Evin McMullen on Twitter https://twitter.com/provenauthority Disco.xyz https://www.disco.xyz/ Christina Beltramini LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/christina-beltramini/ Lens Protocol https://twitter.com/LensProtocol Isabel Gonzalez LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/izgnzlz/ POAP https://poap.xyz/ ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hey, Bankless Nation. This is an exciting episode. It's one of my favorite formats, David. This is a panel episode. We're doing this on the social web, Web3.0. Are we about to disrupt Facebook? That's what I want to know. Who's going to be on the panel today? What are we going to be talking about, David?

• 0:35David Hoffman?

  Yeah, there are three different social projects. And that's actually going to be the first question I have for our three panelists is, what is the crux that we're actually talking about? Are we talking about Web3 social media? Are we talking about digital identity? Identity in the metaverse? There's something here, and I want to unpack what that is. So we're bringing three fantastic guests from three fantastic projects, some of which you will be familiar with. We have Evan McMullin out of Disco. We have Christina Beltramini out of Lens Protocol, which is what is being developed by AVE, some superstars over at AVE. And then also Isabel Gonzalez from Poap. Everyone knows Poaps. They are digital memories instantiated as tokens on Ethereum. But are they more than that?

• 1:19David Hoffman?

  And what does that mean in the metaverse? So this is the first crux of the topics that we will be unpacking with these three fantastic guests in this episode, which I've loosely titled "The Social Web 3."

• 1:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think panels are perfect because when we're starting to explore a new topic on Bankless, this is like the fastest way to get something new in your brain. And it's always been sort of since the birth of Ethereum, like a possibility, a narrative, a meme, that we could come and actually build something Web3.0 that disrupts a lot of Web 2.0, all of our legacy social media applications and products, the Facebooks and Twitters of the world. And I've always been somewhat skeptical on crypto's ability to do that. But I think I have renewed hope going into 2022 with some of the decentralized identity. Projects that that are spinning up and some of the work that PoEAP is doing with NFTs and the work Ave is doing as well.

• 2:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  So I think it's time to actually explore this narrative a bit deeper. And that's what we're going to do today on this panel. Guys, before we get in, one quick announcement from our friends at Opulus. So Opulus provides you health insurance and benefits and payroll. If you are a self sovereign employee, if you're trying to get into work for Web three, work for DAOs, and you don't have health insurance, if you don't have a benefits package, that's pretty typical. How do you get that? Rather than get it from your corporate job, you can get that from Opulus. They take care of all of that for you. David, there's a special offer going on as well. That's why this is a, this is something people should check out immediately. What, what is Opulus offering right now?

• 2:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  And how can folks start exploring what's available?

• 3:02David Hoffman?

  Yeah, in addition to healthcare, there's also payroll services as well to make your payment income just very regular. And if you get, if you sign up with Opulus to get your DAO payroll service by Opulus, you get a thousand work tokens and a thousand bank tokens out of the bankless DAO. If you get your paycheck paid to you by Opulus by May 1st, 2022. So you can sign up with them with a link in the show notes and you can get some tokens for receiving some money from your DAO. So basically Opulus is just a collective infrastructure for ensuring stable employment and stable income while you work in the metaverse.

• 3:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Very cool stuff, guys. We will get to the panel in just a minute. Before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.

• 3:46David Hoffman?

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• 4:30David Hoffman?

  Gemini exchange has been my exchange of choice ever since I got into crypto. I use Gemini to both buy the dips and also manage my regular automatic monthly purchases of my preferred crypto asset. On Gemini, you'll find over 50 different cryptos, including many of the top DeFi and metaverse tokens like YFI and Axie Infinity. Using Gemini Earn, you can earn yield on your various cryptos, including 8% on the GUSD stablecoin. Gemini is available in all 50 states and more than 50 countries worldwide. So if you're looking to upgrade your crypto exchange, sign up at Gemini with Gemini.com/goBanklist and get $15 of Bitcoin after you trade $100 or more within the first 30 days. That's Gemini.com/goBanklist. Banklist is proud to be sponsored by Uniswap.

• 5:15David Hoffman?

  Uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure. Instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans, Uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on Ethereum that lets you trade any token at the current market price. No human counterparties or centralized intermediaries, just autonomous code on Ethereum. Input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy. The Uniswap Grants Program is accepting applications for grants. Do you have something of value that you think you want to contribute to the Uniswap ecosystem? No matter how big or small your idea is, you can apply for a unique grant at uniswapgrant.org and help steer Uniswap in the direction that you think it should go. Thank you, Uniswap, for sponsoring Banklist.

• 5:57David Hoffman?

  All right, guys, we're going to go ahead and get started with the Web3 social panel, which we're going to figure out what we're actually talking about right after I introduce our three fantastic sponsors. Coming up first, we've got Evan McMullin, who's building the world of digital identity, off-chain assets, and metaverse reputation at disco.xyz. Evan, welcome to the panel.

• 6:16Speaker 02

  Thank you so much. Glad to be here.

• 6:18David Hoffman?

  We also have Christina Beltramini, who's building the Lens Protocol at AVE along with some social media mafia superstars that AVE has gotten from the Web2 world. Lens Protocol is a brand new primitive for Web3 social media platforms, I think. Christina, welcome to Banklist.

• 6:35Speaker 02

  You think? Well, we'll get into that later, but thanks for having me.

• 6:38David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it sounds like I'm going to get learned a little bit here on the show. And of course, last but not least, you guys all know PoApps. We have Isabel Gonzalez, Chief Operating Officer at PoApp. Isabel, welcome to Banklist.

• 6:50Speaker 03

  Thank you so much, David. Happy to be here and excited to talk about whatever it is that we're gonna talk about today.

• 6:55David Hoffman?

  That's exactly what I want to know first. So what are we talking about? Is this the intersection of social media and crypto? Are we talking about decentralized identity and social media platforms leveraging decentralized identity? Is the social web three even a thing at all? Evan, I want to throw that question to you first. What are we actually trying to talk about today?

• 7:18Speaker 04

  So, public blockchains are not especially expressive, right? They're appropriate for data that can be shared with everyone in the world and on Earth and in space with an internet connection. They're appropriate for data that is immutable and that is always available. But much of the data that pertains to us as people and our human experiences is more organic than that. It needs to change and evolve like we do and it needs to contain, you know, information that's specific to our experiences that maybe isn't appropriate to share with everyone on Earth and in space. And so as we look beyond the chain to fully express ourselves in web three, we're gonna need some more data primitives.

• 7:57Speaker 04

  We're gonna need some more methods of interaction to enable true self-sovereignty over all the rest of our activities, not just our financial ones.

• 8:06David Hoffman?

  And my gut take about the web, the social web three is that it's not going to be one protocol like Facebook is, but it's going to be a collection of many, many protocols. And so I want to go to Christina next to hear about what is going on over at Lens and Ave and what the perspective is on the web three social world from you, Christina.

• 8:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think, you know, the conversation here today is really around, you know, what is web three social media gonna be? And I don't think it's gonna be integrations with web two. I think web two is really gonna be forced to adapt as quickly as web three adapts. And so we can't really rely on web two because they have their business models and their business models make sense for them or as publicly listed companies. And there's a lot of, you know, misaligned agendas. So with the Lens protocol, and we can get into a little bit more around, you know, whether it'll be one protocol, whether it'll be many different. Social web three apps, but the the whole intention there is, you know, we need to innovate ourselves in web three around this concept of social.

• 9:09Speaker 02

  And so Lens Protocol is, you know, really put a stake in the ground and saying, you know, here we are. You know, we want to build on a protocol level. We don't want to compete with one another. We want to all work together to build this new social media ecosystem in web three. I think of it a little bit like web two has, you know, they've got the train lines built and they built the city. And right now we're building the train lines for what is going to be, you know, web three social. And then we'll continue to build the city on top of it. But this is really just a first step and and we're super excited about it.

• 9:39David Hoffman?

  Gosh, there are just so many conversations to unpack with what this is going to look like once those rails are actually built. But I think something that a lot of listeners are familiar with and Isabel, I just got back from East Denver, where people were handing PO apps back left and right. Like, I thought I was going to be super cool with my You Met David PO app. But I collected like fifty of them from other people. And it was one of, it was like a centerpiece of East Denver is like, hey, can I have your PO app? I'll give you my PO app for your PO app. Isabel, talk to us about PO apps and how you see PO app fit into the world of like a social crypto-enabled future.

• 10:16Speaker 03

  Absolutely, David. Thank you. And by the way, so East Denver was a brilliant time. And I'm very glad that you got the You've Met Me PO apps. I don't know how many PO app team member You've Met Me PO apps you've collected. But those are rare. Keep hold of them. They might be useful one day. That's a little bit. So here at PO app, we kind of are not so much here to talk about social media. We think more of ourselves as a protocol preserving all memories for all living human beings, right? And so that tends to touch on identity as like a form of, call it decentralized, bottom-up identity building, where your identity is basically a cumulative sum of like what you've done over the course of your life, right? Like the experiences that you've had in different people, in different places, are the things that you've considered special,

• 10:59Speaker 03

  things you've achieved, things that you were a part of meaningfully in some significant way. And so for us, it's kind of, we do see ourselves interfacing along that piece of identity. Social, yes, to the extent that human identity inherently like we care about having an identity because we care about what it represents to other people, therefore it's inherently social, right? But PO app, I think, is something that is more for building up that kind of. Point in time, decentralized form of

• 11:34Speaker 03

  well, self referencing identities, right? And then how you trust that to other people is as simple as sharing your collection with others.

• 11:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Can we talk a little bit about, you know, web two here for a second? And I'm curious because I guess there's a couple ways we could take this. But my first question is this, very much with some of the movements we've seen in crypto, say DeFi, it's been very intentionally the case that DeFi is saying to you like the banking system, hey, we're going to come eat your lunch. Like DeFi is going to eat traditional finance, right? It'll be slow, it'll gradual be gradual at times, but like the ultimate state of finance is going to be decentralized finance and traditional finance doesn't have a chance. Okay. Is the web three movement saying the same

• 12:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  thing to web two? Is it basically saying Facebook, Twitter, Tik Tok, Instagram, your days are numbered, we're coming for you, you're the next MySpace, web three is the next thing? Or do you see web three living alongside web two a bit more and building something different? I'm curious your take, Christina, from the Avey and Len's side first.

• 12:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure. I think, you know, when you look at DeFi and its success, it didn't incubate within investment banks. It didn't incubate in the, you know, the baseline financial system. And I think we're going to see the same thing with, you know, social media in web three. It's not going to incubate. It might, there might be some crossover as we look at adopting, you know, all web two into web three, hopefully, in a similar way to what's in the trad fi to DeFi transition. And it is happening. It is happening. There is appetite now to play in this space. And I think, you know, with web three social, it's going to start, you know, first in web three, there might be a place for it with web two. But I think ultimately web three, and I'm biased, obviously.

• 13:38Speaker 02

  But I think Web three is is is the future because it solves for, you know, the twenty years of learnings that we have with Web two social where things just don't work. I feel essentially that, you know, I'm renting my space on social media platforms in Web two. I can actually own it uh in Web three and have control and custody, very similar to DeFi, those kind of like similar. Uh, you know, principles of DeFi are actually being brought to Web three social. So I think it's kind of no surprise maybe that Arby's building this. I think it did come as a surprise to a lot of people. Um, but when you kind of distill it back down to basics, it's kind of like the underlying principles are very similar. Um, even when you go into composability as well.

• 14:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  So Evan, Christina's saying, uh, watch out Mark Zuckerberg, we're coming to eat your lunch. Do you agree with that?

• 14:27Speaker 04

  I think that Mark Zuckerberg should start checking under his bed at night for me, Isabel and Christina, because we are the boogeyman now. We are coming for you, Mark. And what that means is that, you know, the the surveillance capitalism ecosystem that has given rise to Web two social media. As Christina noted, means that we are renting our social interactions and paying with our privacy for that rent. Um, so, you know, we, when we interact with Instagram, Instagram messes with how close we think we are to our friends to incentivize us to buy more things. That's not truly a social interaction platform. It's a commerce platform where influence is, you know, is uh is enabled by our organic social contacts.

• 15:10Speaker 04

  And what we are going to build together, all of us here, is a true social experience where our intended interactions with others are indeed the interactions that we hope to have, where we can have autonomy and control of our expressions of self. And we can, you know, engage with others and enjoy experiences together without the overseeing intervention and, you know, enabling force of some random dude in Mountain View.

• 15:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Evan.

• 15:38Speaker 03

  I think that's actually a really interesting point. For me, it's always been, maybe not always, but I think about coexisting, right? I think the web two platforms, like they have had some utility in the sense of being entertaining and centralization for whatever it's worth, has managed to get some things done, right? Over the history of humanity. But inevitably, like putting the keys into one person's hands, you're going to wind up with at some point misaligned incentives, at some point incentives that kind of tilt towards making the platform less about the user experience and the people that are trying to enjoy themselves and connect, and more about eventually commercialization, because companies need to make money and that's how it goes. I think that there is an interesting point to be made about maybe web two platforms

• 16:21Speaker 03

  and web three ones having just like different fundamental purposes, right? Maybe web two platforms is where we used to go to at some level waste time, at some level find entertainment. Maybe web three platforms is where we go to organize, to empower ourselves, to connect with people on similar missions, and to actually kind of leverage the more interesting and valuable parts of what social platforms can be.

• 16:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  I have another, I guess, follow up on that. So if we are trying to build something unique in web three, and you know, maybe some of the panel think we're here to eat web two's lunch here, how do we bring, how do we bring people to web three? How do we entice them? How do we convince them? There's a lot of people out there who don't really think very much about decentralization, or care about it. Maybe they don't think a lot about privacy either. Is that enough of a carrot for them? Or what do you think the carrot's going to be? Why are they going to flock to these platforms? Evan, let's start with you. What do you think?

• 17:24Speaker 04

  So, in order to bring the next billion users to web three, we need to build the metaverse of fun. And, you know, we can't have a lot of fun together right now. The only thing I know about you is how much money you have and what you've bought recently. I need to know what you like to do. I need to know who you're friends with. I need to know what dreams you have, what aptitudes and skill sets you bring to the table. So that together we can solve more interesting coordination problems than just spending money in your group chat with a bank account or you know the DAOs that we know and love. And so in order to enable the metaverse of fun, we need more expressive data that can demonstrate all of these traits about ourselves in a manner that we can own and control.

• 18:07Speaker 04

  And so in order to bring culture to the metaverse, we need data primitives that can express that culture. We need the ability to interact with one another, you know, more than just pushing money and tradable assets, you know, to and from one another. And so what I think the most exciting promise of the, you know, web three ecosystem of social interactions has nothing to do with the underlying protocol and everything to do with the experiences that we can enable for people when we reduce the switching costs of trying new activities, when we eliminate the need to fill out forms, when you discover new apps and want to integrate. I think that the greatest draw for social web three

• 18:51Speaker 04

  will be the abundance of awesome activities and adventures that we can do together as a result of our protocols, but not, you know, because people are drawn to a fetish of cool protocols. So, you know, the social web means that we build for the personal experience, not just from, you know, from demonstrating what a protocol is capable of.

• 19:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  All that sounds very, very, very human. It sounds very fun. It sounds very experience oriented. Isabel, I'm curious, your take on things. So, I mean, POAP is doing something, I feel like, that your traditional web two companies, social media companies can't do and don't do, which is like this idea of proof of attendance. Is that a new sort of primitive unlock?

• 19:34Speaker 03

  So I think it is. I think that, to give you like a bit of context, I don't know how many people are bankless or in this room or watching live now. I know this, POAP kind of originally was born from this idea of like, what would a decentralized foursquare look like, right? And the reason it kind of goes back to that is foursquare originally was kind of like the checking app that we all knew, loved, right? And you could go and be mayor via your local Pizza Hut and Everything was like dandy. And then one day, they needed to switch business models because that wasn't working out for them so well. And basically, you know, your lifetime of achievements, checking into various places and attending various things, all of a sudden just gone, right? Pull up takes that concept of check-ins, attendance, attestations in general at some level,

• 20:17Speaker 03

  and gives people the right to actually own their own proof of attendance, right? Like, so now that data actually fundamentally belongs to you. And that's what makes the concept so powerful, that like all that stuff that Evan was talking about with the metaverse of fun is something that we're currently witnessing being built out within the pull-up ecosystem, right? There's these integrations for like the craziest things, your Google Drive, your Notion, your Shopify, like every imaginable thing that you want to lock and gate with pull-ups. At this point, I think people have built all that and more. I think we're seeing more and more flood in every day. And, you know, all of it's still very much in beta. It's still very much like, I call it, the user experience, I think, is far from being polished enough to compete with, to really be ready for the mainstream, right?

• 21:02Speaker 03

  It's still kind of like all of that crypto UX, let's say. But with that being said,

• 21:10Speaker 03

  the attendance primitives is a thing. Atestation primitives are a thing, right? Like a proof of doing something, proof of contributing in some particular way. One of the things that we're seeing is that, like, although there's a limit to how rich the pull-up metadata is, you can get proofs of participating in auctions and proofs of, you know, founding a community, proofs of attending the first community call, proofs of being on someone's cap table. And like all of those little things, at the end of the day, it kind of becomes up to individual issuers to unlock certain fun experiences and special things for their collectors. And I think that's kind of like the first step towards exactly what Evan was talking about, right? Is developing like that ecosystem of exciting applications and adventures that we can all go on together.

• 21:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  So Christina, how about you? What do you think about bringing mainstream on and you converting the masses to web three social media?

• 22:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, I definitely think, you know, the metaverse of fun. And we've seen that with NFTs, right? A lot of reasons why NFTs has been such a good onboarding tools is because it is fun to buy these assets and to trade them with your friends and Poop is fun. And I think, you know, when it comes to Lens, you know, we are going to have fun, fun applications built on top. That's, that's the purpose of it. It's going to serve us all different types of social media. But I think, you know, it is a metaverse of need in a way. So I'm going to kind of like take that and it's a blend of the metaverse of need and the metaverse of fun. Because essentially, I think ultimately, when we've seen the adoption of crypto generally, a lot of it, especially when you're looking at Bitcoin in the early days, and you look at the, the countries where that was adopted first,

• 22:47Speaker 02

  it was really those countries that developing countries where people had, you know, the inability to control their wealth. And so we're going to see that as well in web three social and that will be a driver. But I think it might even accelerate it even quicker because you're going to have need combined with fun. And so I think we might even see some form of hyper acceleration here, because you're bringing those two things from two different aspects of crypto together in web three social.

• 23:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  One more quick follow up on this because I can't, can't help it. I do remember a time when Facebook was actually fun. Like, it felt fun. It felt new. It felt novel. It wasn't until like 50, call it 15 years later, when everyone woke up and was like, oh, this is, this is pretty messed up. Like, this is destroying some things in our society. Like, I don't own this platform. Like, is there something to prevent web three from following a similar trajectory where it starts off as the metaverse of fun? And then before you know it, we're in this like new dystopia that that we've created years later. Evan, what do you think about that?

• 23:51Speaker 04

  I think that the surest way for us to enable a social dystopia is to put everything on chain. If we were concerned about the, you know, nature of our data being used without our consent and control, imagine what will happen when we make all that data available to everyone on Earth and in space. You know, the publicity of our data from Facebook pales in comparison to making it available to that global population, that intergalactic population. And so I think that the way that we maintain our integrity and maintain our humanity in the future of Web3 social is through independent ownership of our data and our expressions

• 24:33Speaker 04

  so that we don't offer the opportunity for some centralized authority to have to be trusted to be good. Rather, instead, we can build into code our autonomy and ensure that we never cede control to some party that we may or may not trust. But beyond that, I think it's very important for us to have transparent governance of the protocols that manage our interactions. So, you know, last, last fall, Francis Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower, shared with all of us that, that in addition to breaches of privacy and, you know, Facebook was perpetuating known harm to young people. You know, they were aware of the fact that Facebook enhanced suicidal

• 25:15Speaker 04

  or grew suicidal ideation, diminished self-esteem and body image of young users, and yet perpetuated those products, you know, prioritizing profit over the safety of young people and lying to investors in the process. But with the transparency and, you know, consent enabled by open protocols like Lens, we can avoid some of that dystopia and we can have, you know, combine the forces of our on-chain expression with the autonomy of ourselves, which is what we're building at Disco.

• 25:45David Hoffman?

  So if we're inside the world of crypto, DeFi famously got built on this concept of composability. And I think it's fair to extrapolate that the Web 3, the social Web 3 will also be highly composable. And I'm generally thinking that there's a lot of surface area for all three of the projects represented here to interact with each other and be built on and using each other's primitives. And so Evan, I kind of want to dig into what you just said as an opportunity to unpack what's going on at Disco. And then we're going to try and connect these things to what's going on at Lens and Poap and see how this world of the social Web 3 kind of becomes bottom-up emergent in the same way that DeFi was. So Evan, you've talked a lot about needing users needing to have their own data

• 26:27David Hoffman?

  and perhaps it not being the best place to put it on-chain. What's going on at the world of Disco? And how does some of the stuff you're building help enable the social Web 3?

• 26:37Speaker 04

  So in the same way that you can carry your tokens from DApp to DApp under your self-sovereign control, Disco enables you to carry your data with you. Disco is like a data backpack where you can carry your data from Web 2 to Web 3 across DApps under your ownership and control. And we are called Disco because we believe that you as an individual are the multifaceted center of the party. Everybody should be coming to you to learn about you instead of you leaving parts of yourself in every app that you visit. And you should choose to reflect your identity to the world in whatever way you decide, whatever circumstance. Because our team's definition of the metaverse is one where you can show up to any digital or physical environment and receive a personalized experience

• 27:21Speaker 04

  as a result of the parts of yourself that you choose to share. And so the way that we are able to build this ecosystem is, I've alluded earlier to a few awesome new crypto primitives. I'm sure the listeners of Bankless are well aware of fungible tokens, of non-fungible tokens, but I'm not sure if they all know about decentralized identifiers and verifiable credentials, which in my humble estimation are my favorite crypto primitives. Although, full disclosure, I do have ERC 721 tattooed on the back of my neck, too. But DIDs and DCEs are Super awesome primitives because they allow us to express pieces of data attestations, as you know, as Bill was describing earlier, that are private, almost like an off-chain NFT.

• 28:06Speaker 04

  Verifiable credentials are these, you know, little self-contained units of data attestations made by one party about another party. And, and sort of in so doing, my Ethereum address can write an attestation about your Bitcoin address. Your Bitcoin address can send that attestation to a DNS record, to an email address, a PGP key. And so decentralized identifiers are sort of the primitives that allow our existing public identifiers, our public keys, our web two identifiers, to talk to each other in the shared language of verifiable credentials, which, like an NFT, are trustless, self-contained, persistent and encrypted.

• 28:48Speaker 04

  However, unlike on-chain assets, they are revocable, can be set to expire or private by default and can be disclosed with whatever granularity you want, whether in plain text or, you know, computation through a zero knowledge proof or something else. And so at Disco, we believe that you should enjoy self-sovereignty over your full human expression, not just your financial expression.

• 29:13David Hoffman?

  Evan, you use one of the, the, my favorite metaphors, which was a data backpack. And Ryan uses this metaphor a lot is that like your Ethereum address is like your inventory for this video game MMORPG that we're all playing. But you use the same metaphor, but for data rather than for assets. And the data that we have in our data backpack are stuff, stuff that you've called verifiable credentials, which I think the listeners might be more familiar with if we, if we call these things like your diploma or your certificate of like completion of something. And these things, what you're building at Disco means that you actually don't have to forcibly disclose all of the data about yourself by putting them on-chain. You can have them in your private off-chain backpack.

• 29:57David Hoffman?

  And then you might take them to a different protocol like Lens Protocol. And Lens Protocol might be able to interoperate with the reputational assets that you have in your data backpack. Is, am I tracking here? Is this all right?

• 30:11Speaker 04

  Absolutely, yes. So you can imagine, you know, in the future, actually in April, you will be able to connect your existing MetaMask, Rainbow, or other, you know, if you're incompatible wallet to disco.xyz and then begin visiting other DApps and, you know, interacting with those DApps. And instead of the data that you create in the DApp going to a centralized database or to the public chain, it will go with you when you leave. So when you go to DApp number two, DApp number two will be able to see the pieces of reputation that you've brought from DApp number one and might be able to decrease the amount of onboarding that you have to do, the amount of forms that you have to fill out, or proofs that you have to furnish in order to optimize your experience in that product. And you can imagine that that composable

• 30:55Speaker 04

  reputation that you build over time from DApp to DApp to DApp, from Web 2 to Web 3, can allow you to accrue quite a lot of info about yourself, proofs of your, you know, previous accomplishments, of your relationships, of your self attestations, your description of yourself. And so, so I love, you know, Ryan's metaphor, and I think that we can kind of extend it here to include not only your on-chain assets being important parts of your backpack or your loot bag, but your off-chain assets as well, the private pieces of information that make you you. And so we also like to say at Disco that life is a giant lark and you're running around without a loot

• 31:36Speaker 04

  bag. So when you make awesome data, you just have to leave it where you've created it. But thanks to Disco, you'll be able to bring it with you.

• 31:44David Hoffman?

  Okay, Christina, I want to see how this plugs into Lens Protocol. Can you just kind of take us, take us a tour under the hood of Lens Protocol? And then perhaps like connect that to how might Lens Protocol appreciate a user that brings their, their own data to what's going on at Lens Protocol? How are these things going to be interoperable?

• 32:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So Evan and I actually, finally enough, talk about this a lot. So Lens Protocol looks at really providing the underlying base layer for the future of social media products. And so the idea is not everything needs to be on-chain. Lens Protocol, you know, you could have, for example, a Tinder on Lens Protocol. You could have new primitives really that really extend beyond current Web 2 social just because of the infrastructure of smart contracts and Web 3 and the ability to build in very creative, interesting use cases. But ultimately, at the end of the day, you know, we need to provide people with tools to bring off-chain data that should never be on-chain.

• 32:47Speaker 02

  Which me, for example, I made the mistake back when I was younger and Facebook was fun. I put way too much online and I feel now I'm paying for it. And so, you know, as we think about Lens and kind of the types of data we want to bring in, we are very cognizant on making sure that not everything needs to be on-chain, but the fundamental infrastructure needs to be there for the protocol to work. So I'll give you one example that we've actually jived on. So, you know, if you do have a Tinder on Web 3, for example, you know, you can't tell the complete picture of me from just the NFTs that I own. So we'll need to wrap in verifiable credentials, which will tell what sex you are. You know, maybe what school you went to, that you still want to be built into that algorithm,

• 33:31Speaker 02

  but you don't want to share that, we'll bring POVs in. So for example, you know, where have you attended and you've received similar POVs? So I think, you know, all of these three things are going to come together. That's one example, but you can also think about, and this is one that I really love on Lens, especially coming from a company, a social media company that was driven based on ads and one algorithm. And imagine being able to choose your own algorithm to get advertised to. So I'm getting paid directly, you know, from brands to service ads on my social. And I'm also getting the ability to choose which algorithm I would like to service to me. So, you know, that will be public, I'll be able to review it. And that algorithm will be based on so much data.

• 34:14Speaker 02

  About myself that I choose to share and not all of it needs to be on chain. And so I think to be able to optimize the products and the different apps and experiences that can really kind of like flip web to social on its head. You need to be able to service all types of data, which is why I see, you know, I, I speak to these ladies quite a bit. And I definitely see the importance of, of bringing all these things together to really optimize lens. You know, in a way where products are really speaking to people and, and algorithms. You know, have the amount of data to be able to compete with web two.

• 34:52Speaker 02

  Oh, you're on mute.

• 34:53Speaker 03

  You're on mute.

• 34:54David Hoffman?

  Thank you. Thank you. Christine, I want to regurgitate what I, what I heard, just to make sure I got it right. So it sounds like lens protocol is like a social media meta protocol. It's not a Facebook, but it's a, it's a protocol that Facebook could in theory be built on. And in the same way that like, uh, Rari is a superset of compound where like you can recreate any sort of borrowing lending parameters using the Rari protocol. Lens protocol is you can have your Twitter, but you can have your Twitter with a tweaked algorithm or infinitely tweaked or tweaked how you see fit. Or it's a, a meta protocol allowing for any type of social media platform to be built on it. If you get the parameters right.

• 35:38David Hoffman?

  So what is actually being put, uh, cause I believe lens protocol is built on Polygon. So what about lens protocols being put on chain and what is it leaving off chain? That enables, uh, social media protocols to kind of pick and choose what they want to do.

• 35:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. So lens protocol is built on an NFT infrastructure layer. And so obviously you need some sort of identifier for your profile. So you will have a profile NFT. Um, and then your social graph will get built based on a follower NFT. Um, which can denote, so for example, I followed Isabel early, um, before she was even part of a power. I would be, I would get minted a follower NFT that would denote me as one of her first followers and one of her first supporters. And so that NFT infrastructure is what builds out the social graph. Uh, and then you obviously have, um, you know, collection. And and and minting of posts and the ability to be able to mirror them. And essentially, if you're a curator and you mirror someone's content,

• 36:33Speaker 02

  you can embed what you would like to get paid. So this whole, this is the core infrastructure of Lens, but the idea is that people go to extend the modules. So, for example, and and not all the data underlying kind of the different products built on top and front ends needs to be on chain, but it does need to be decentralized and have the ability to speak to the underlying protocol. So so that's kind of really on a on a on a high level, how Lens works.

• 37:02David Hoffman?

  So Isabel, I want to turn to you now because I think what these other two platforms need the most is data about their users. Because it wouldn't, these platforms aren't really anything if they aren't fed data. And I don't really think there's any other project that has created a much enough as much data about people and their interactions that that we've had in this crypto world that PoApp has. So can you talk about, also, there's a quote that I that I really, really like, that PoApps are tokens for digital memories. So how can PoApps help instantiate crypto memories into the metaverse? And how do you see PoApps kind of fitting into this, the world of protocolized social media platforms in the future?

• 37:42Speaker 03

  So I think the piece you said about PoApp being, let's say, if Evan and Disco are building the backpack that you carry your data around in, and Lens is building the rails that you carry that data over across from backpack to backpack or from person to person. PoApps are the data that any one individual produces over the course of their life through their interactions with other people, events, communities, educational institutions. And most of that data is like fundamentally, it is primitive in that it kind of requires interpretation. It requires context about what was going on in the organization, in that community, in that individual's life in order to make any sense of it, right? But for a person, it kind of creates this mosaic of

• 38:24Speaker 03

  a mosaic of records that basically tells you exactly what it is that you've been up to. I think since August, probably, since I've gotten into PoApp collecting more or less full time. I have a kind of like a more or less weekly record of the things that I've been doing and when I've been doing them and who I was doing them with. And actually, who else was there with me, right? And who else was doing the same things around the same time, what they were doing? I can kind of go and browse out the people's collections and take a look at what common interests I didn't know I shared with people that are at a certain event, right? And there's a different, like, a wide variety of different ways of looking at attendance at stations.

• 39:02Speaker 03

  And we finally defaulted to a notion that issuers fundamentally are the oracles that tell us who was there at an event, right? Because, okay, so you start getting into very niche cases for proof of attendance. If you jumped the fence at a concert, were you there or not? Right? And so this is a lot of what our curation body is currently going through, you know, on a case by case basis, trying to assess what qualifies as attendance, what qualifies as an event, because these things can kind of get very, very hairy when you start thinking about the details. And the reason it matters so much is precisely what we're discussing here is that if we're kind of providing that fundamental data layer,

• 39:44Speaker 03

  that data layer does need to be clean, it needs to have integrity, it needs to kind of have, it needs to be somewhat reputable, right? And so this is what Poop is doing here.

• 39:56David Hoffman?

  One thing that makes me optimistic about the future of web three social platforms making life more fun is that every time I see someone sharing a Poop with someone else, smiles are happening, like everything, people love to trade Poops. Isabelle, do you have any just experiences or lessons that you've learned from just the insane amount of fun that people have when they share Poops?

• 40:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, let me reflect on that for a moment. So it's this kind of thing that I think happens only when you are getting something that has no strings attached whatsoever, you know? When you're getting a Poop, it's not that you're thinking about future utility, it's not that you're thinking about the impact of trading decisions or your social status or like any of these other super complicated things that make the fun stuff less. Fun. What you're doing is you're getting a PoAP, right? Like, and it's this badge that you don't know what value it will have if, if any, ever. Uh, someone may decide that one day it does, someone may decide that one day it doesn't. Uh, but really, all it is is like a, it's something that is an on-chain record of like pure emotion, right?

• 41:03Speaker 03

  Uh, it's a emotion, it's the memory that you had here. That is the value it has. It is purely a personal kind of value. And whether or not it develops into more than that is kind of like irrelevant because the actual point is that you are getting, um, essentially a gift from the person who put this together that they were thinking enough about the attendance to take, uh, you know, the time to, Christ, um, get a creator to put some art together and write some nice copy and mint the goddamn thing. And go through the process of creation, figure out how to distribute it. And, uh, you know, if the distribution is nice, then now things, you know, might be really nice because you may, maybe you even got this uh, on a nice little patch like the ones you've seen us handing out in NFT NYC. Maybe you got it on like a, some kind of a physical, um, little pin.

• 41:47Speaker 03

  And so you get to have like, you know, a nice little piece of something you like. And also an NFT can represent that forever. So you don't have to feel bad about throwing it out later. So it's like a, it's, it's this nice little thing where you get to, for a moment in your life, experience, um, pure joy and lack of responsibility for whatever happens with this item. Right? And you still get to remember what happens and you kind of get to also connect with all these people. And I think, uh, over time, people do develop like a sense of, um, sentimental attachment to their collections, right? Uh, cause you look through and you see like the wonderful times that you've spent with, uh, some of your favorite people or what have may become your favorite people one day in the future.

• 42:28David Hoffman?

  I'm reminded of, uh, Marie Kondo's advice where if it sparks joy, but you don't physically need it, you can take a picture of it and then throw the item out. And I feel like that's what a PoAP is, is you don't need the sticker because it has, it's now a PoAP in your Ethereum address and it can spark joy for you just by sitting.

• 42:45Speaker 03

  Forever.

• 42:45David Hoffman?

  Forever.

• 42:46Speaker 03

  And you don't need to worry about forgetting. It's on the blockchain.

• 42:48David Hoffman?

  It's on the blockchain. Uh, okay, guys.

• 42:51Speaker 02

  And you can match with someone on Lens if you have the same PoAP.

• 42:54David Hoffman?

  Yes.

• 42:55Speaker 03

  Uh, you can. I think that we actually have in mind like an idea for a pull-up Tinder. That like one day I'd like to be matched with people that have strong overlap in pull-up collections to me. Because I feel like those people would be my friends. It's friends that I didn't have the chance to meet whenever I was, wherever I was.

• 43:13David Hoffman?

  Well, guys, I think this is actually leading right into what I want to talk about next, which is how this whole Web3 social will actually roll out. And this is a running joke I've had with Evan before. Is the first Web3 social app going to be a dating app? There's actually reasoning as to why this might be true. So that's going to be the first question that I come back with. Right after we talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. Slingshot is a decentralized trading platform that combines the performance and ease of a centralized exchange with the openness and transparency of DeFi. Slingshot aggregates liquidity from all of DeFi in order to find the best price on thousands of crypto assets. Every token on Slingshot comes with a price chart and trade logs to give you insights into the market's activity in real time.

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• 46:06David Hoffman?

  Alright guys, we are back with our Web3 social panel and the thing that I think we're kind of coming to a head on is that we have these three different protocols that I think all really interoperate well with each other. We have PoApps for instantiating memories and indicating who and what and where we care about. We have Lens Protocol, which can help these social graphs be built around these things. And then we have Disco, which allows people to choose how much data or revoke how much data they want to give out to the world. And so really, to me, I'm seeing just the ingredients for just a grand just matchmaker system where our values and our interests are verifiably true and on-chain and available

• 46:49David Hoffman?

  to others and all of a sudden like we get to find other people aligned in those interests better than before. Evan, is this kind of how you see this roadmap for Web3 social kind of being laid out?

• 47:02Speaker 04

  Absolutely. I think that with fully expressive data about ourselves, we can rock up to any app or environment and ask the question, you know, does my data fit your requirements? And as, as we've seen in, you know, in the web free space already with the, I think it's the Lonely Apes dating app or something like that. You know, human coordination problems take many shapes and sizes, but perhaps one of the most fundamental of human coordination problems is dating. And so being able to identify other people who share interests, experiences, aptitudes, you know, preferences with you, often right now in, you know, the web two dating world, that requires you to articulate a lot of those things,

• 47:46Speaker 04

  to go out of your way to say what you like, to mark on a dating app your preferences. But with the awesome ability to capture your experiences, capture your data with Disco, Poap, Lens and others, now we can allow those algorithms to do a lot of matching for us. So whether, you know, we share Poapps in common, whether we went to the same college, our, you know, gender expression preferences in our partners, all of these forms of data can do the introducing for us so that we can enjoy an algorithmically selected set of potential partners with whom we can solve our romantic coordination problems.

• 48:28David Hoffman?

  Christina, do you have any, want to riff on that at all?

• 48:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, I have a little bit of a different take on the data. So we've been talking a lot about, you know, from a consumer perspective, how this helps us. But I think at the same time, we need to think about how are we going to bootstrap web three social? And I think by nature of the infrastructure and the fact that, you know, you do have the social graph interoperable, is that you're going to have developers that are going to be able to build products, you know, for the sake of building a product and they're going to have a repository of data to be able to build that based off and a guaranteed social graph. Because when you come, you bring in networks and they don't need to spend money bootstrapping, but they can still be able to build really important tools for us and have the data. Without necessarily having access or ownership of that data.

• 49:16Speaker 02

  And so I think that's a really interesting, um, you know, thing that I do want to call out uh, about lens is, you know, it not only is it important for us as consumers of social media, but also for builders out there because you know, they're going to have, uh, you know, the, the, the social network is, is going to come and they don't need to, I was at TikTok. TikTok spent, you know, billions of dollars on, on user acquisition to be able to compete. But now if you have a, a strong product, you also have the access to data that everyone else does on an equal footing. Uh, and so I, I think that's a, that's going to be, um, you know, a very different proposition in this new world.

• 49:53David Hoffman?

  Isabel, what thoughts have, have come to mind while these other two panelists have given their answers?

• 49:57Speaker 03

  So there, there are two very, very different threads here and I'm not sure whether I follow, uh, the dating and matchmaking or the builders, uh, maybe let me start with the builders because I think that is, uh, one of the more interesting things that we've kind of seen at co-op, uh, over the course of building out, uh, you know, this many tented called, uh, octopus ecosystem of, uh, preservation of memories and then editing that you can do once you've done that. Um, at this point, I think we've got like a probably between 50, 75, maybe running up to a hundred, uh, integrations, uh, applications, uh, various sorts of fun things that you can do once you have some pull-ups in your wallet and, uh, if you're an issuer that wants to kind of provide that added value. And I think one of the interesting things that we've kind of seen is this opportunity actually like, uh, go one step further and connect the builders to other builders, right?

• 50:42Speaker 03

  You start kind of connecting, uh, different apps that are building different things that you kind of see the interfaces and, uh, once those start to like plug and play together. And I say, I think that's like where, where probably lens is going to fit in, uh, as a fundamental infrastructure that like that isn't going to have to be, maybe we still have the discoverability problem, but at least the, uh, interface problem is one that is, uh, minimized. Uh, I think to the point, uh, maybe going back to, uh, our, you know, world's best dating app, uh, you know, forget the dating thing. I want to meet people who are on the same mission. Like I want to meet, uh, friends who've had like the same ideas about the same things that I've been thinking about for the last five years. And see where it is that we, you know, maybe had the opportunity to connect, like missed each other.

• 51:28Speaker 03

  And I, I think that's kind of where I see application for maybe one of the, you know, if we talk about like what the first web three social app is. At some level, all humans have been trying to do with social media since, I don't know, social media was a thing, is like find each other, right? If you think about like Twitter versus Facebook and why all of us ended up on Twitter. It's an ecosystem for the dissemination of ideas, somehow like that, right? And so as a result of this rampant dissemination of ideas and our follower networks and whatnot, eventually when we all meet in real life, it's like, you feel like these are your kin, you feel like these are people that you connect with on a fundamental level. And I think what I'm really excited about in terms of like a web three, especially like a bottom up driven

• 52:14Speaker 03

  picture of identity and how that might inform social applications is literally just the ability to facilitate those meaningful connections, those connections that are going to be meaningful and valuable and interesting to people, right? As opposed to having the discovery problem or the, call it the validation problem, right? Where there's another thing like Evan was saying, something about needing to provide this information to the application. The other, let's say awkward elephant in the room with regards to web to coordination problems between people. You need to figure out how you tell if someone is telling the truth, right? An attestation that someone gives at the point of time that they're filling in application of a dating app

• 52:56Speaker 03

  is a very different thing versus a history that you've been building and maintaining for going on two, three years, however long that you've been living your life, right? And so I think one of the maybe good cases for web three social apps in general is just like the fact of having that history that is verifiable, immutable, and whatever, in whatever sense of their forever, whether it's on-chain, off-chain, private, public. But it's something that was written before the need for it to be written arose, right? And I think that actually is kind of a really key thing when it comes to connecting people and meeting boys.

• 53:35David Hoffman?

  So I have this, I think it's more legitimate than a conspiracy, but I'll call it a conspiracy just because that's fun. The internet was initially adopted as a social use case. People with like-minded interests all ended up in the same forums so they could talk about the same things. And that was Web 1. And Web 2 was really just an extrapolation of that. It's like, oh, let's make it easier for all these people to find each other. And then it turns out that they could just like, you know, extract money from us via advertisements.

• 54:05Speaker 03

  It was like, let's make it easier, but then let's monetize it.

• 54:07David Hoffman?

  But then let's monetize it, right. And I'm also, I'm friends with a guy, Michael Wong, at the Bankless team who works in virtual reality, who's also convinced that virtual reality is not going to take off until social use cases about virtual reality take off. And so I'm wondering if there's a pattern here where, you know, we, me and Ryan, back in the depths of the bear market, we're like, man, as soon as the world gets this DeFi thing, crypto is going to take over. And like, no, it wasn't DeFi that really brought crypto to the world. It was NFTs. And NFTs are a very cultural and very social use case. And so I'm wondering, is crypto really going to come to dominate the world via the social

• 54:48David Hoffman?

  use cases that it brings? And what's it really going to take for us to allow, for onboard, what is a Web 2 level of users into Web 3? Is it really going to be the social Web 3 era, or the social Web 3 protocols that really do this? Isabel, I'll throw it back to you.

• 55:03Speaker 03

  So David, you know, this is something that we've thought about a lot, especially as we're building out Poop, making it easy for normal people to use for normal things that they may want to do in the normal course of their lives. There's a reason that you're able to claim a Poop with an email and migrate it to a wallet at some later point in time. We do not want to assume that people who want to have, you know, verifiable proof of their attendance at something, or their enjoyment of some particular moment, necessarily need to know what MetaMask is, or what crypto is, or what wallets, NFTs, any of that. As far as we are concerned, we are, and because it's a preservation of memories, this is a token that you get for being here. And the implementation detail is completely relevant, right? I think when it comes to

• 55:49Speaker 03

  Like the crypto social use case, ultimately, we need to be building applications and tools that people that are in that can use it in their in the course of their everyday lives, right? Until it's like enough of a thing that you don't need to worry about, Chris, like how NFC works or how payment networks work or how anything else in now, you know, as I go through my day to day, I don't usually have to worry about, is this transaction going to fail? Do I need to bump the gas? Like things like that, I think. Ultimately, it is a little bit of a usability problem as much as as it is a need problem, right? Like on the one hand, it is definitely that it's going to be the fun that brings people in. On the other, we also need to make it safe enough to have fun.

• 56:33Speaker 03

  One of the things with using crypto applications today is that like, unless you're used to crypto world, it is a terrifying experience. Like you click some buttons and you sign some things and it tells you it's a wire in contract. And like, honestly, any normal person would be baffled, right? And so I think, to put it like that in summary, it's like, yes, it's the social thing, but it's also just realistically the maturity of the ecosystem.

• 56:58David Hoffman?

  Christina, I want to throw the same question to you. Is it going to be the social elements of crypto that onboards eight billion people?

• 57:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think crypto obviously has cycles. And so, you know, usability is going to be a big driver of the next mainstream cycle for all crypto products. So whether that's DeFi, whether that's social, I do think with NFTs, what we did see was that's the closest thing to culture that we've encountered, right? And that was the biggest driver versus need. And so, you know, when we think about, you know, web, web three, social, I, I do think, you know, there's going to be, it's going to, network effects take a long time. And I think there is going to be, you know, initial hotbeds of, of culture, which is what drive people to web three social. And it will have an amplified effect because you're bringing in your network.

• 57:48Speaker 02

  Similar to how, like, I, I don't mean to give this example again, but when I was at TikTok, right? What, why is TikTok so relevant? Because that's where culture happens in a social setting. And so. I think that is a good leading indicator of like, you know, how our social platform is going to evolve. Um. But I do think, you know, who who would have thought we would have been having this conversation a year ago about building social on Ethereum, right? Polygon was was still kind of, you know, growing and gaining momentum. And and now, you know, we have these layer twos that we weren't even talking about at the table here um last year. So I do think usability and the tech is going to drive this. But I think the initial driver, at least, you know, from the the web three perspective, is going to be culture.

• 58:32Speaker 02

  That's going to bring people and it's going to those people that are on the fringes in this cycle um will start to adopt probably if they weren't in NFTs, maybe they'll be driven because one of their favorite creators has realized the benefits um of owning uh and rewarding their fans in an in an independent way. Uh. So I I I do think that, you know, usability is is is something we we talk about it all a lot. And I don't think the initial, you know, web three platforms are going to be able to offer the same uh, you know, consumer experience as, you know, web two. Um. It'll take something else to get those people there. So whether it's need, culture, um and then we're kind of just susceptible to to like the overall web three adoption cycles.

• 59:12David Hoffman?

  Evan, where do you think the world of social is involved with onboarding as many people as possible into this industry?

• 59:19Speaker 04

  I mean, it is integral. It is the magnet that draws us all in. Um. You know, NFT is, as as you stated earlier, we're really the first clear vessel for culture because they're the most expressive primitive that we've had yet. And, you know, they're an accessible primitive due to the incredible tooling and accessibility provided by amazing teams like Poap that diminished the onboarding costs and the complexity for users to be able to engage with these primitives. And now, thanks to verifiable credentials, we have even more expressive primitives that can contain any payload we want. Uh, you know, video, image, text, keys, proof of friendship, proof of chill, birthday party invitations, you name it. Um. In a form that is, uh, you know, trustless, independently verifiable, but revocable.

• 1:00:03Speaker 04

  And so now that we have all these really cool tools, the only way that we can make them accessible. As both Christine and Isabel noted, is to address the biggest blocker to Web3 adoption, which is usability. And so if we have an incredibly usable, joyful, personal, human experience, there needs to be something to draw people through that user journey, through that experience. And that draw is culture. And so I think a combination of, you know, low complexity, readily useful tools, as Isabel noted earlier, that fit into our existing lives and do not demand that we meaningfully change and exert more effort in new ways, but rather capture downstream what we are already doing so that we can, you know,

• 1:00:48Speaker 04

  enjoy the activities we already want to be doing in a faster, cheaper, more secure, more independent way.

• 1:00:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes, this has been a fantastic panel and I think very useful, very insightful for anyone who wants to go from, you know, zero to sixty on Web3, social and what's going on in the space.

• 1:01:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  I want to maybe take us home with this last question then. So you sparked our imagination a little bit on what this world could look at, could look like in the future. And I think my ask is that you tell us a bit more about that. So what is social media going to look like in our world in five years from now? Let's say if Web3 social is successful, if your visions are successful, what's the world going to look like? Evan, why don't we start with you?

• 1:01:39Speaker 04

  The world is going to look like one where we are able to enjoy all of the connectivity that we can today with our friends, but we can do it without the watchful eye of some Web2 company intervening in our interactions. I think that this world looks like one where we're able to capture our proofs of non-financial work, whether it's listening to a thousand hours a month of Elenium, or, you know, buying merchandise, going to concerts, showing up at MeDepts. Our ability to capture and represent all of the data that makes us us will then lead to a much more authentic and expressive, organic and natural feeling way to interact with the

• 1:02:23Speaker 04

  world, way to discover friends who are well suited to our interests and our lifestyles, and to generally lessen the effort that we have to put in to find awesome communities and join them.

• 1:02:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Christina, what would you add about this new world if Web3 social is successful?

• 1:02:40Speaker 02

  I think Web3 social is really gonna push like the potential of social. Because we talked about composability and tooling and and kind of decentralized building. And I think, you know, by virtue of smart contracts and what can be built into them and different conditioning. I think we're going to see some really, really interesting projects that, you know, sitting here today. We wouldn't have even imagined, just because when you put all those Lego blocks together and you give people kind of choice and freedom and tools to really build and to bring networks and to build to service different needs. I think we're gonna see kind of, we talk, we talk about this all the time. At AVE, where we're working with a company called We3

• 1:03:24Speaker 02

  to help us think about all the different types of products that can be developed on Lens. And I come out of that and my mind is, my mind is blown. And if you go on lens.dev and you go to the bottom, we're slowly starting to bring some of these concepts out. Some of them, you know, even like DAO tooling and profiles. And how do you think about merging two social profiles together and things like that? So it's gonna get quirky really quickly. So I encourage everyone to go to lens.dev and to keep track of all of these, these wacky ideas that we're throwing out there because it's fun and they all service needs. And we can't even predict where Web3 is gonna go.

• 1:04:04Speaker 02

  And part of, you know, Web3 social is servicing new Web3 primitives as well.

• 1:04:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  Isabel, take us home. Where's this all gonna go in five years if Web3 is successful?

• 1:04:15Speaker 03

  At the end of the day, you're looking at just an augmentation in net human potential period, right? At the end of the day, like the way that people have evolved is through social connections. It's through connecting with other people who have complementary beliefs that are working on similar problems that are driving in similar directions, right? And that's kind of like how we make our biggest discoveries, our biggest steps forward, how we address challenges that humanity has been dealing with for a long time. And I think that where I really see it. Is that like this, all this enabling people to connect in new and more interesting ways. This bringing people together in ways that is, let's say, more, on the one hand, private from watchful eyes, on the other, targeted based on personal data that those people are choosing

• 1:05:00Speaker 03

  to expose about themselves, you're looking at the ability to form those more relevant connections faster, right? And when you do that, I think there's an incredible world of possibility that opens up that people can do things that we today can't even imagine. So I think that's Web3.

• 1:05:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Super exciting. It feels very much like Web3 social is maybe where DeFi was four or five years ago, where we're in this era where we're developing primitives and envisioning the future, and the future certainly looks bright. I left this panel with a lot of questions answered. So for that panelists, I thank you very much.

• 1:05:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  I do have one outstanding question, though, of course, which may not be answered in this panel is, does Evan really have an ERC 721 tattoo on the back of her neck?

• 1:05:51Speaker 03

  He does.

• 1:05:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Maybe we'll never know.

• 1:05:53Speaker 04

  Oh, am I, am I a canonical member of Inked Out? Absolutely, yes. Let me see if I can show you guys.

• 1:06:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is real.

• 1:06:01Speaker 04

  See?

• 1:06:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow.

• 1:06:02Speaker 03

  It's really a

• 1:06:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Booth of Ink right here.

• 1:06:05Speaker 04

  We gotta commit to immutability if we want to ask the rest of the world to join us.

• 1:06:09David Hoffman?

  Wait, Evan, I'm sorry. I didn't have the right camera highlighted. Can you show that again? And then also leave a like, so zoom highlights you.

• 1:06:16Speaker 04

  All right. Are you guys able to see?

• 1:06:18David Hoffman?

  There we go.

• 1:06:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Ink of Ink, ERC 721. Amazing.

• 1:06:22Speaker 04

  Inked out for life.

• 1:06:24Speaker 04

  Oh, I hope my mom's not watching this.

• 1:06:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  She just learned something. All right, guys, risks and disclaimers, of course. I feel like we didn't even talk about financial topics, so maybe I don't even need to say, none of this was financial advice. Eth is risky, DeFi is risky. You could definitely lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.

• 1:06:49David Hoffman?

  Hey, we hope you enjoyed the video. If you did, head over to Bankless HQ right now to develop your crypto investing skills and learn how to free yourself from banks and gain your financial independence. We recommend joining our daily newsletter, podcast, and community as a Bankless Premium subscriber to get the most out of your Bankless experience. You'll get access to our market analysis, our alpha leaks, and exclusive content, and even the Bankless token for airdrops, raffles, and unlocks. If you're interested in crypto, the Bankless community is where you want to be. Click the link in the description to become a Bankless Premium subscriber today. Also, don't forget to subscribe to the channel for in-depth interviews with industry leaders, Ask Me Anythings, and weekly rollups where we summarize the week in crypto and other

• 1:07:34David Hoffman?

  fantastic content. Thanks everyone for watching and being on the journey as we build out the Bankless Nation.