 Okay, and now for our next talk on the Web3 social layer, Web3 social, the next wave of innovation by Stani Kulichov. Stani is the founder and CEO of Aave companies. He was studying law at the University of Helsinki when he first began learning about smart contracts and dusts about the Ethereum blockchain network. This led to an exploration of how blockchain technology could impact the traditional financial system. Please welcome Stani to the stage. Thank you. Jim, who is feeling good? Nice. Yeah, so I wanna thank the Ethereum Foundation for organizing DEF CON. It's been a very, very busy week, at least for me and probably for everyone else. There's been a lot of good talks here, and it's the last day, so the best talk is probably amongst here too. I don't wanna brag too much, but today we're gonna talk about Web3 social and as a next innovation. See if we get this, yeah, perfect. So something I wanna talk about is that the innovation for the past years or decades has grown quite substantially and has accelerated. So if you look at back for 100 years, we have technologies, for example, like telephone that has been invented over 100 years ago and it took decades to actually adopt automobiles, cars, for example, took decades as well. And more recently, for example, the television has got higher acceleration and also the infrastructure underneath the internet, the computer. And what we've seen different kinds of patterns is that the more we get infrastructure, the more we get compounding acceleration of innovation. And this is one of the reasons why, for example, the internet infrastructure has grown substantially. And if you look into the, let me guess, oh, okay, cool, yeah, perfect. If you look into the actually recent innovation, what is happening in internet ecosystem is that we have a lot of adoption in a very high acceleration curve online. So what it means that when you have already a complete infrastructure, it's very easy to innovate and have this compounding effect. And recently, we've seen, for example, TikTok being one of the recent examples of how we had a scale adoption from zero users to one billion users in about roughly seven years since the beginning. And I don't know where is this thing I need to point out. Where should I point out? Okay, oh, cool, yeah. So yeah, so what I wanna say is that the internet adoption is global, so we're dealing with technologies that are affecting everyone, every single human in the planet and there's a large scale empowerment that is related to not only the internet, what we're doing here and the Ethereum community and across the blockchain space. I mean, even though with high amount of adoption and penetration, there's still places where in some regions, the adoption of the internet isn't really in its fullest at the moment. So for example, if you look at the graph of the sub-Saharan Africa, we have an option of roughly 30% of population using the internet itself, Colombia is at 70%. So it's very regional and there's still places where we need infrastructure to innovate. But regardless of the infrastructure, things are gonna change quite a lot in the future. So the way I see how innovation works and specifically this particular chart, kind of like I would say like a circle of different components, demonstrates what innovation is for me and like how I approach innovation and what are the ingredients to come up with a product and also get that product into a growth cycle. So obviously you have the opportunity there. So basically you recognize a problem or an opportunity to solve, having knowledge about the problem you're trying to solve, expectations, understanding what people actually need, the talent, the team members that you're building with and the actually craft. And the craft is what I call the product itself. Obviously there's things like funding related and also growth. Now what's super exciting about Web3 and innovation in Web3 is that we rely on open networks. And open networks, they create accessibility. So they create access for everyone here today, for example, to contribute not only what we're building in the Ava team, but any project in the ecosystem because they're relying in the open network idea and open source technology. So yeah, and one important component also is the culture aspect. So culture equals for me also community. So when you build open networks, open infrastructures, you're actually in a different kind of a dynamic setting than as if you will be building a product within a company or a service, for example. This means that when you have accessibility, people across globally, they need to find a way to connect, share ideas, and build actually different kinds of concepts and actual community around a product because accessibility also means that the users are the ones that are part of the innovation flywheel and in an important part actually of making that innovation happen. One important thing I have realized in the past that Web3 is something that's gonna touch everywhere. So it's not only specifically related to one particular area to solve. And we've seen obviously with how Web3 has born. So Bitcoin tried to solve the idea of how we can actually transfer value between humans across globally without intermediaries and create a public money as public goods. And obviously with the innovation of Ethereum and the Ethereum virtual machine, you could actually create programmable applications on the blockchain. Because we tried to solve financial problems and opportunities in the beginning, we started to actually continue solving those within our community. And that's where DeFi has been very successful. So, but to get actually beyond what we have today in our community and the user base, we actually need something more than for example, the decentralized finance. And just an example is that the decentralized finance is incredible innovation, what our space has been able to create. It means that everyone of us has accessibility to a fair, transparent markets across globally. And decentralized finance doesn't look into your background, what you are doing when you're actually participating in these markets or when you're building part of the community. But to get into more bigger adoption, we need to realize that we have to go beyond financial applications and find more things that solve human problems and feed their needs as well. And I personally with my team think that social is the next or at least the killer app for Web3. And the reason is that we currently have almost five billion users on social media and it's growing constantly. We also have equal amount of, almost equal amount of internet users, social media users that we have internet users. So there's a big opportunity in social media and we also see that it's global phenomena. And effectively if you look at this chart here, we see a lot of social media usage in Southern America but also in Asia compared to for example the regions of Europe and North America. And we could actually ask ourselves, why do we have social media? Why social media is important in the first place? So what I have been looking into is that there's definitely a need for people to connect with each other for particular different reasons. And there's also need for create. So humans have always had the idea of being a creator. So here's a picture of one of the oldest findings of creativity back in a long, long time ago. So social media, it allows us to connect with people. One-on-one basis, create relationships and also in groups, coming together and forming a community on topics that we care about it. And social media is very vital to our lives because with internet and being able to connect with each other, we are able to learn from each other directly from the people. Rather than example from institutions, we also have the sense of belonging when we can create communities. And part of the adoption also is that we can actually do this connectivity in scale across the globe. And I really love this particular slide because there's this concept of six degrees of separation, which means that we all people here and everywhere are connected to each other across six hops of friends of friends. So to any person in the planet. And there's actually recent studies as well that this hope distance actually is becoming even more narrow. And we see that it's roughly 4.7 degrees. So almost every fifth person you are connected with in the planet. And part of that is because the connectivity is more easier. We have access to internet. We can connect to anyone, any person in the planet on the topics that are interesting for us. So what happens when we are actually using social media is that we create social capital. Social capital is something we all have regardless of the technology. So we have social capital when we are forming friendships when we are connecting with people when we are sharing ideas or sharing news. The big problem at the moment is that we create a lot of this social capital actually online. And we're using platforms such as the bigger social media platforms where we are creating this networks and connectivity. And at the same time we're publishing content. And these platforms are designed to thrive as a basic platform instead of actually thriving to preserve your social capital or aligned with your own ideas. So what I see is that the web to social is at the moment a zero sum game for many participants that create social capital. And one of the issues is that all of the users are actually locked in a particular platform. So you can't actually take your social capital and do a digital exit and transport it to a new platform or a new venue where you might find interesting ways to connect with your peers and share ideas. Creators at the current state lack of distribution and for the same reasons you are locked in into these particular platforms. And also it's very hard to actually monetize beyond sharing the traffic of what you're getting to maybe your homepage. And for the developers, there is actually lack of freedom to come and build and innovate ways to how to connect with people, innovate on the experiences as well and create new applications and new networks. So I believe that web to social is right for disruption at the moment. And I think web to social is something that creates the positive sum value. So it builds the value for the users and it builds the value for the community. And what I wanna introduce here is the web to social layer, the components that are actually and the ingredients that bring these benefits for all those three parties, the users, the creators and also the developers. So why web to is a game changer especially in the social space because the creators are getting ownership of their content distribution. So you as a creator can actually decide how you distribute content to your audience. You also own that relationship between you and your peers and it's not locked into a particular platform. And because you're not locked into a particular platform, as a user you have the choice to actually select the experiences and the algorithms that serve you the most and are aligned with you the most. And for developers, it means also when all of the web to is built on top of the open networks, you have the accessibility to improve these networks and actually develop them further. So you have access to develop the networks. And web to space, I mean, it's still growing quite a lot. There's more investments in the region. We also have locally here in Colombia, 6.1% are owning cryptocurrency. And we also see here in Colombia that it's one of the countries that are getting accelerated adoption at the moment including some of these countries in Asia like Vietnam, also India, Turkey and amongst others. So we're in this perspective, we're in the right place to talk about Web3 as an open networks and how we could build them further. So we see Web3 social as a greenfield of opportunity. There are ingredients that are very valuable when you build Web3 social. So the networks must be open, meaning that anyone can actually compute on the data that is on Web3 social can actually use these components, smart contract libraries and also take what is already existing, improve it and make it available to people. And also one key point is the decentralization. So what makes Web3 social very valuable is the architecture. And the architecture is where you as a user own your profile on chain and you own your social graph and connectivity which means that you own your social capital. And here's the social layer where individuals they have their identity. You have social verification when you are connecting with the peers and for the groups, what you can do is that you have community owned interest graphs, open algorithms. So when we take the base layer and give the ownership to the users and what it allows us to do is that first time ever anyone can actually build new algorithms and these algorithms do not need to be black boxes. They can actually be transparent algorithms where developers are explaining what kind of algorithm and what data points that algorithm is using and that brings alignment between developers, the users and the communities. And for creators, it means that actually when you own your distribution channel, it also unlocks your new ways of actually creating content and creating experiences based on the Web3 social footprint. And also monetization is key part. So monetization is and financialization is something that is part of the Web3 value proposition. And with the idea of owning the identity, at the same time, it means that you can actually own the way you monetize and you don't have to be relying on the platforms but actually find a venue with your social graph and with your profile and actually distribute the content and monetize the way you want. So Web3 social, it unlocks the power of creativity, connections, and it brings more innovation. So what we did with financial applications, we can actually do the same for non-financial applications. And the reason why it's important for us is that this is the path how we can bring more users into the space. It means that people who don't necessarily have that financial capital but they're rich on social capital can actually have their ownership of that and enter into the space and use non-financial applications and also generate value for them. And what's interesting about social capital compared to financial capital is that financial capital you can spend but social capital is something that you can carry through your whole life. And this is why we need actually people to come to the Web3 space through also non-financial applications and building more utility. So one big question for us is that who will build this new generation social media applications? And we have a perfect answer for this one. It's you. Since you are here at DEF CON and it's a developer conference, I'm pretty sure that there are people here that can take the opportunity and build some very interesting applications and use cases and empower the users and empower the creators and other developers and even create social media applications that have better values, transparency and are aligned with different user bases as well. Last thing is that if you don't have a lens profile yet, you can scan this QR code and later you can claim a lens profile and you can actually test drive Web3 social as well. Thank you everyone.