Epicenter brings you in-depth conversations about the technical, economic and social implications of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies. Every week, we interview business leaders, engineers academics and entrepreneurs, and bring you a diverse spectrum of opinions and points of view. Epicenter is hosted by Sebastien Couture, Brian Fabian Crain, Friederike Ernst, Meher Roy and Felix Lutsch. Since 2014, our episodes have been downloaded over 8 million times.
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episode 512: Stani Kulechov: Lens Protocol – Decentralised Social Media Primitive
Social media revolves around content creation, and while the content itself could be tokenised through NFTs, SocialFi aims to take it a step further. The recently released friend.tech app went to show that users might be interested in something more than just content - creator shares. This implicitly links back to handles and profiles, and we can slowly start to unveil the primitives of social media. Lens Protocol predates the friend.tech venture, in both timeline, as well as scope. While social media became synonymous with monopolistic central entities, Lens Protocol aims to build the decentralised bedrock for Web3’s social layer. These primitives would not only be interoperable with any Web3 application, but they would redefine content creation, feed generation and monetisation.
We were joined by Stani Kulechov, founder of Lens Protocol & Aave, to discuss decentralised social graphs and how to leverage smart contracts to build the primitives for Web3's social layer.
Topics covered in this episode:
- The vision behind Lens
- Lens V2 and smart contract capabilities
- Social media development platform
- Defining the Web3 social media primitive
- Feed generation algorithm on Lens
- Integrating on-chain and off-chain infrastructure
- The tragedy of the commons in decentralised social media
- Can a public good architecture also accommodate private goods?
- Growth model, sponsored transactions and monetisation
- Governance and decentralised social media
Episode links:
- Stani Kulechov on Twitter
- Lens Protocol on Twitter
- Aave on Twitter
This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst & Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/512