 Sonny it's so great to see you. I feel like anytime I've mentioned your name at this conference people's faces light up Your hometown hero you're a rising force in the crypto industry with Ave and now Lens protocol But first off I'd just like to hear what it's like to be back in Helsinki and at slush because I know this isn't your first one I mean It feels very good. It's it feels still home to me. I mean I used to live here for 25 years And you know Ave is a global company and you know, we hire globally we operate globally and you know We have a big decentralization part but seeing so many people here and you know so many believers and excited about web 3 has been Incredible and something I missed quite a lot is the the sauna. So that's that makes me very happy actually and even stay here More Yeah, and I understand that you actually were a volunteer at slush back in the day What's it like now to be on stage speaking to all these people? Yeah, it's interesting because you know, I think it was eight years ago So slush was one of the events that my peers at university convinced to come help and volunteer to set up as well and you know, that was the first time ever I got exposed to Blockchain as well. So I think at that year for some reason there was like a lot of different kinds of Talks about, you know decentralization ethereum and blockchain And I got really excited about that. So that sparked my kind of interest and now we're here seeing myself Sitting here and doing this talk feels a bit surreal to be honest. Yeah, that's a full circle moment. That's awesome Yeah, no, I guess how did that you know that first interest in blockchain Convert into founding Ave and now Lance Yeah, I mean effectively what I liked about Blockchain and decentralization that it's it creates this sense of access. So for me personally I've grew up on internet. So as many of us And internet as back in those days was called but one meaning that you know We can read all the information across globally share that information and and you know get faster news than we see it on on papers, for example And the two for example for me at some point was ability to actually Also kind of like contribute to the internet being able to form relationships And and share content and create content across the globe and I think For me, that's a big kind of like a part of access And what we're doing at Ave regarding access is that we are trying to create access to Finance for example with the Ave protocol. So our protocol has Billions dollars worth of value at the moment on smart contracts and the idea of the protocol is to create a set of rules How you can access to that liquidity in a fair transparent way? And now with the lens protocol, we are basically building the access to your ownership of your social media presence so so basically I Think it's just the evolution of the internet and and that's why it's super exciting Yeah, no, did you take any lessons from building Ave when you started creating lens? You know, was there anything that you did differently with starting this new project? Definitely. So one of the key things about building decentralized technology is that You really should focus on actually building it in a way where it's composable And very unopinionated. So what it means is that? Normally when you build internet applications, you know, you create endpoints API's as we know, right? And you give different kinds of permissions to those API's but in decentralized web tree world How it works is that whenever you create an application and deploy it onto the blockchain what happens is that? You know, anyone can access to that application and that's why we call it permissionless Incomposability means that now that you have an application there It should be able to talk to other applications and someone can come and build the application that is using Your protocol for example, so I think that was very important and the way we build the lens protocol is that it's very Modularized so both of a protocol and lens protocol there is set of smart contracts where the other protocol is more of a monolith It tries to do one thing very well The lens protocol is more about, you know, here's a set of tools and modules that could actually Help you to build better social media applications and and whatever you want to Achieve and basically by the unopinionated Part what I tried to say is that you know, we as developers we try to make less Decisions for you and and basically just create a tool set that you can achieve what you want to build Yeah, what does lens protocol look like right now? You know, how how does someone build and create on this platform? so lens protocol is Deployed on on polygons at the moment. So it's one of the blockchains that has been very close to the ethereum community It's set of smart contracts So what it means actually for end users and and every every one of us is that you can create your social media profile And it's secured by the blockchain and you can establish different kinds of connections with peers And that's secured by the blockchain as well. So effectively what's different with traditional? Social media infrastructure is that normally when you create a profile in Twitter or let's say in tiktok you look your Social capital basically the things you create and connections you make to that platform But we believe that everyone should have access and ownership over their social capital meaning that once you create your profile All these applications and algorithms should actually be You know built for you and not look you somewhere. So effectively you create a profile you make followings And anyone can actually go and permissionlessly build new applications and there's actually even a Finnish company a favorite building Social media application double plans protocol and a bunch of other ones. So it's very easy way to focus on the experience layer Moderation layer and algorithms instead of focusing on on the actually creating that network effect So one thing I like to point out is that with lens protocol, you know every application that is Getting new users into the same Protocol can actually access the new applications as well. So it's kind of a thing of where we all build together Yeah, now what if someone said to you? Hey, we have Twitter. We have Facebook with Instagram Why do we need to bring blockchain into social media? How would you defend that? I think you know many of these social platforms they they You know if you ask around, you know, they work pretty well for some people. They don't work pretty well So the the the challenges here is that in many of the platforms and the way web 2 has been built is that you know Interest by itself is a decentralized infrastructure. So, you know, anyone can connect right and you can host a website You can host a server But the challenge is that to make it very easy and convenient We build basically applications to scale to billions of users And that means that you have this kind of like a centralization part. So Today, for example, we have five billion users over the internet at the moment And almost equal amount of social media users and most of these social media users are actually divided between Multiple bigger platforms. So for example If you're not satisfied with the content moderation policies or the trust and safety that the Platform provides you can't actually do a digital exit out of the platform and go to a Another application which is more aligned to your values and in recently we saw with Balenciaga Where they actually left Twitter because of the fact that they didn't get the brand safety that they for example Wanted to be aligned with and I think giving that choice back to the users Is the way to manage these challenges because then you know the platforms can make less decisions for you And you as a user you can actually decide more What you actually want from your social media presence Yeah, now if you have more ownership over your content on social media, what would be the implications for that in the creator economy? Create economies. I mean especially like in Veptree. It's it's very new field You know recently for the past couple of years We saw the rise of the NFTs where you know artists and creators they they could actually launch their own NFT collection art Or maybe music or some sort of other kind of like an exhibition and actually distribute that Creativity directed to their audience, but what we saw actually with the NFT rises is that You actually have direct distribution channel with your audience whoever wants to actually be part of your community And when we look at today the social media platforms one of the combining aspect there is that Many of the bigger platforms they don't necessarily share the revenues Income streams with the creators because they have the power and they have the the mandate to decide How they want to share? There's some tendencies where social media platforms are starting to think about it But still as long as you don't really have that ownership as a creator over your distribution channel You know you're still locked into that platforms Principles and monetization models, but on open protocols The beauty is that anyone can actually come and build new monetization models. They can build new applications and experiences You know and and maybe You as a creator you can actually go to those applications where it reflects most of what your content actually is And and the audience as well With Twitter, we've seen a lot of issues revolving around identity verification spam misinformation Could blockchain help tackle those issues in any way? What's happening on lens? Yeah, that's interesting because you know those like content moderation trust and safety verifications In short, it's a very complex problem to solve And I think that the biggest challenge with with platforms is that they usually try to solve them internally We have this culture in the tree that you know, we try to solve things as a community Meaning for example me or my team. So, you know, I'm not doing this by myself So there's almost 100 people at Ave at this moment and some are focusing on the Ave the the protocol these interest finance some on the social media part But for example, we don't have all the answers, right? but the best way to actually get the best result is to Solve some of these challenges within the community So effectively when you have an open protocol, it means that anyone can actually create their own content moderation policies Algorithms as well and even recently there was a initiative called cultivator now So now is this kind of like a decentralized organization In the blockchain meaning just bunch of internet friends coming together to solve a problem or govern some sort of Treasury and the cultivator now effectively they want to create trust and safety for the other protocol. That's your like primer primer, sorry Primary mission. I need to drink some water. I think my my morning sauna definitely affected my voice You did a smoke one That's for today so regarding the trust and safety is that primary goal for cultivator now is to Enable that across the Ave protocol. Sorry lens protocol, but for the secondary mission is to fork the cultivator now so effectively We create the small communities for trust and safety act as a verificators And I think that's the way to do because there isn't one way to solve The content moderation Challenge and I think that's gonna be the most powerful way to to solve it Yeah, how are you thinking about free speech on lens? I? think as a Protocol all the data is raw. So for example, you have accessibility you can You know, you anyone can create a profile you can publish content But effectively where most of the work will happen either true Manual work or algorithms is gonna be on the Middleware so all the apis that are actually used showing for the experience layers, which are applications What content to create to users now? Here's the interesting thing is that if you think about free speech today, you know, you can actually go to the internet and You know share your opinions and there's a lot of platforms to do that But the challenge is also like how do you moderate? this the the Free speech as well and and create trust and safety back to the primary issue And I think when you actually go deep dive into this problem I think the issue is that you know many of the people they they can't express themselves in a once particular platform Well in a web 3 we really don't have platforms. We have protocols meaning that Pretty much everything is open to you, but it's up to the community to decide what is something that should be moderated or? amplified to across audiences, and I think that's where The bigger value so you can achieve free speech, but you can achieve at the same time trust and safety and none of the Solutions will be ever perfect And I think that's why social media is a way more trickier space than than anything else in a web 3 at this moment Yeah, I think Elon Musk is seeing how tricky social media can be right now What advice would you give him as we see more employees leave Twitter? I mean besides implementing the lens protocol, you mean I don't know, you know Twitter is challenging, right? So I mean they're iterating quite fast and and you know Experimenting so in one way that that is interesting approach, but also they have a lot of time to you know make the platform perfect But once again, you know, I Personally believe that on every single application and infrastructure that should be open network So what we did for example with decentralized finance, you know, we created a public good infrastructure as well So meaning that we believe that some of the financial infrastructures to rely upon You know public code open source And accessibility and I think the same should be achieved in the social media space And I think we're very early. I mean lens protocol is something that we have been working for One and a half years and we've been in Mainnet Roughly for the past few months So I would say like there's a lot of infrastructure still to be built, but I personally believe Quite heavily that web 3 in social is the future because it creates opportunities. It enables access And it enables also micro communities. So for example, you don't need to necessarily use the bigger applications, maybe your social media Needs are fulfilled in a smaller community and on top of that Maybe you can experiment with new type of applications where, you know, likes are not the new metric the the metric you follow But we can actually build applications that think about more mental health, you know Reduce anxiety and just leave a better positive impact for the society Are you thinking about revenue at all with lens? That's fascinating Topic because you know, there's revenue models that could be created on the protocol level But the way I see it is that most of the revenue will happen on actually in the application Layer, but I think being open networks and building on top of the open networks. It will definitely change the way that Consumers will use these applications based on what revenue models they choose So if you are going to rely heavily on advertising that isn't really Something that that your audience is excited about You will lose users But if you are actually trying to create a community around your application and find how to monetize from that community as power users Maybe that will be the way to go Because the biggest difference here is that the shift the powership and the dynamics change from actually from platforms and shareholders Companies to actually users. So this means not only that we can create better Applications and experiences for these users, but we actually can create better monetization models and users They want to pay for content if it's good curated content and it's really is something that It's it benefits them or makes them happier Would there be any sort of blue check system on lens or would it just depend on what communities want and what they're building? It's pretty much community driven. So part of our development model at all that we tried to leave as many of the Kind of like decisions to be made by the community And actually that's where the best decisions are made. So we're still a small team. So So little we could actually achieve But also some of these challenges are big enough that they should be handled publicly. So Typically when you think about Beptree in general and decent trust organizations a lot of the discussions and improvements they happen actually in an open public discussion forums and I think that's the Exciting part of of the infrastructure that we're building because you know, it doesn't happen in a closed doors Based on decisions that you know might not be very beneficial for the for the users But actually you have to publicly argue why a particular decisions should be made or an experimentation and I personally think it's it's the way to build something That should be a public good that is accessible to anyone Yeah, what's next for lens and when are you planning on opening it up to more users? So currently our team is focusing on actually the data availability part So we build a protocol where there's an amazing community at the moment So I don't know how many of you already have a lens profile or have even a Ethereum address I think quite many I saw I talked to a lot of people today yesterday at the lens booth here and I I basically white listed quite a lot of our addresses But if you don't have one you can DM me on I don't know in the legacy social media platforms like Twitter And I can help you out but for us now that there's a nice seat of a community We're actually focusing on solving the data of availability part so that we can actually scale To the same level of where the bigger social media Platforms are at the moment So that's going to be our focus for the next upcoming once And also, you know, there's sort of progress in the community as well, you know There's community development. There's interesting applications being built In order we will we're super excited where things are moving towards. Yeah I was going to ask about scalability because I feel like that's thrown around so much in web 3 How are you approaching making lens more scalable? So here's the thing. So, you know Blockchain for a long time didn't have much scalability because we all were transacting on Ethereum network And for the reason that that's where the security is same with Bitcoin, but Bitcoin doesn't have a Computer running on the blockchain through virtual machine Polygon has been amazing compromise to actually have a bit more scalability But now there's more innovation in the space. So we have so-called layer 2s. We call them Roll-ups. So basically you transact on off chain data layer And you take the state of the transaction in Periodically and submit the hash of it into the Ethereum network Meaning that you're actually securing your off-chain transactions with the security of Ethereum and Why this is groundbreaking is because now first time ever you can actually build non-financial applications On top of the blockchain ecosystem And I think it's very valuable because as I mentioned, there's five billion internet users almost equal amount of social media users and there's also big Space of actually Gamers as well and the gaming industry. So I believe that's basically the next wave of users will come from non-financial applications You know when you tell to your friend, do you want to? Download MetaMask or one of these wallets and start buying NFTs or you know Depositing into Aave and doing a financial transaction. There might be some hesitance But then when you say actually do you want to just create a post, you know And it's quite cool because you can make and memory out of it You start to actually see more people getting excited about it and experiment So what I think is that non-financial applications and the scalability with the layer 2s and using different kinds of data Availability layers that we have that simply you don't need to necessarily have all the transactions on the blockchain You can add privacy So lens protocol is just to guarantee what you can do and secure in terms of your profile your follower network But it's up to the applications and users to choose what tools they want to use So I think the scalability is there And that's where we are kind of like a wrapping up and and finalizing on our side before we can actually open the floodgates So a lot has happened in crypto in the last two weeks And of course I'm referring here to the spectacular downfall of FTX How do you think that will impact interest in DeFi and decentralized applications like lens? So that is interesting question because I think that crypto is quite small space. So for example In general like a crypto consists of actually, you know the trading activity also the technologies and the tech stacks and in general kind of like a bigger Term called web 3, right? So we have a lot of interesting startups here at slash for example, and there's more and more talks about web 3 So the space is actually very big even in a smaller scale So there's a lot of diversity of different kinds of things that are happening And I think when it comes to actually the FTX and and and and DeFi So I think personally that you know DeFi is built to solve issues like giving your your funds to an exchange as a custody and reduce that kind of like risk that you have So one thing about DeFi is that you know, it's effectively set of rules. So people usually say that there's no Rules in in decentralized finance or crypto, but actually those smart contracts There are set of rules, but those rules are governed by the community So meaning that the communities decide, you know, what those applications can do and I think for decent as finance It's definitely is another example where you know, why we need decent as finance and why these rules must be codified and make as public good and part of every crypto infrastructure whether it's a centralized service provider or something else because we need that transparency and traceability and I think it's Definitely, it's interesting times, but I think at the same time it's a big opportunity for decent as finance as well Yeah, and I guess just for my last question. What have been your impressions of slush this time around? Well, you know, I I'm I'm very Surprised how fucking good slush is so I've been in so many conferences this year You know group the conferences and tech conferences and it's super interesting to see the excitement here and slush is a paid place where ideas flow from AI from web 3 and It's the only conference where actually people come to me from different industries and talk about how web 3 could be interesting or Let's say how AI could be used in somewhere like in web 3 Social and for me, it's an exciting opportunity to meet a lot of people and and founders as well and startups and and All the users as well that are using our products on a daily basis, so I'm super honored to be here Yeah, thank you so much, Stani. It was great talking with you. Thank you, Hannah