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

foreign 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 Web 3.0 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 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 uh there's something here and I want to unpack what that is so we're bringing uh three fantastic guests from three fantastic projects uh some of which you will be familiar with we have Evan McMullen 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 poapp everyone knows poapps uh they are digital

memories instantiated as tokens on ethereum but are they more than that and what does that mean in the metaverse so this is the first Crux of the 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. I think panels are perfect because uh when we're starting to explore a new topic on Bank list 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 a like a possibility a narrative a meme

that we could come and actually build something web 3.0 that disrupts a lot of Web 2.0 all of our Legacy social media applications and products the Facebooks and and twitters of the world and I've always been somewhat skeptical on crypto's ability to do that but uh I think I have renewed hope going into 2022 with some of the decentralized identity projects that uh that are spinning up and some of the work that poapp's doing with nfts and the work Ave is doing as well so I think it's time to

actually uh 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 opolis so opolis 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 3 work for Dows 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 opolis 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 uh what is opolis offering right now and how can folks start exploring what's available 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 to get your Dow payroll service by opolis you get a thousand work tokens and a thousand Bank tokens out of the bank list down if you get your paycheck

paid but to you by opolis 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 Dow so uh basically opolis is just a collective infrastructure structure for ensuring stable employment and stable income while you work in the metaverse 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 when you shop for plane tickets you probably use Kayak Expedia or Google to compare ticket prices so why would you limit yourself

to just one exchange when you trade crypto when you make your trades you want to make sure you're getting the best possible price on your trade and that's why you should be using matcha matcha has smart order routing that splits your trade across all the various liquidity sources in ethereum and is also operational on polygon Avalanche Finance smart chain and other chains trading on matcha is super easy because it pools the liquidity for me in a single easy to use platform and allows me to make limit on-chain orders so you can set and forget your D5 trades and they will go through automatically while you're away so when you're making a trade head over to

matcha.xyz slash banklist and connect your wallet to start getting the best prices and most liquidity when you trade your crypto assets the 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 my preferred crypto asset on Gemini you'll find over 50 different cryptos including many of the top defy and metaverse tokens like Wi-Fi and axi infinity using Gemini urn you can earn yield on your various cryptos including eight percent on the ga USD 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 gobanquis and get 15 of Bitcoin after you trade 100 or more within the first 30 days that's gemini.com go bankless bankless is proud to be sponsored by uniswap 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's a 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 it for a unique Grant at uniswap grants.org and helps your uniswap in the direction that you think it should go thank you uniswap

for sponsoring bankless all right guys we're going to go ahead and get started with the web 3 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 McMullen who's building the world of digital identity off-chain assets and metaverse reputation at disco.xyz Evan welcome to the panel thank you so much glad to be here 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 web 2 world lens protocol is a brand new primitive for web3 social media platforms I think Christina welcome to bankless you think we'll we'll get into that later but thanks for having me 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 bankless thank you so much David happy to be here and excited to talk about whatever it is that we're going to talk about today 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 and social media platforms leveraging decentralized identity is the Social Web 3 even a thing at all uh Evan I want to throw that questions to you first what are we actually trying to talk about today so public blockchains are not especially expressive right they're appropriate for data that um 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 um 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 um 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 3 we're going to need some more data Primitives we're going to need some more methods of interaction to

enable true self-sovereignty over all the rest of our activities not just our financial ones and my gut take about the web the Social Web 3 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 uh what is going on over at lens and Ave and what the perspective is on the web 3 social World from from you Christina yeah I think you know the year today is really around you know

what is web 3 social media going to be and I don't think it's going to be Integrations with web 2 um I think web 2 is really going to be forced to adapt as quickly as web 3 adapts and so we can't really rely on web 2 uh because they have their business models and their business models make sense for them all 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 uh Social Web 3

apps but the the whole intention there is you know we need to innovate it ourselves uh in web 3 around this concept of social uh 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 uh social media ecosystem uh in web3 I think of it a little bit like web2 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 web3 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 gosh there are just so many conversations to unpack with what this is going to look like once those rails are actually built uh but I think something that a lot of listeners are familiar with and and Isabelle I just got back from East Denver where people were handing poapps back left and right like I thought I was going to be super cool with my you met David poapp but I collected like 50 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 app I'll give you my PO app for your Pro app Isabel uh talk to us about poapps and how you see poapp fit into the world of like a social crypto enabled future absolutely David thank you and uh by the way so if Denver was a brilliant time and I'm very glad that you got there you've met me co-ops I don't know how many Co-op team members you've met me pull-ups you've collected uh but those that are rare keeping keep hold of them they might be useful one day um that took a little bit so uh here at Co-op we kind of uh are not so much here to talk about uh social media we think uh more

of ourselves as a protocol preserving uh all memories for all living human beings right and uh so that tends to touch on identity as like a form of uh call it decentralized bottom-up identity building where your identity is basically a uh 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 uh things you've achieved uh things that you were a part of meaningfully in some significant way and so uh for us uh it's kind of uh we do see ourselves

interfacing along that uh piece of identity social yes to the extent that uh human identity to be inherently like I we care about having an identity because we care about what it represents to other people therefore it's inherently social right but poem I think is something that is more for building up uh that kind of point in time uh decentralized form of uh well a self-referencing identities right and uh then how you trust that to other

people is as simple as sharing your collection with others can we talk a little bit about um you know web 2 here for for a second and I'm curious because um I guess there's a a couple uh ways we could take this but my my first question is this very much with um some of the movements we've seen in crypto say D5 it's been very intentionally the case that that Defy is saying to you like the banking system hey we're gonna come eat

your lunch like Defy is going to eat traditional Finance right it'll be slow it'll gradually be gradual at times but like the ultimate state of Finance is going to be decentralized finance and uh traditional Finance doesn't have a chance okay is the web 3 movement saying the same thing to web 2 is it basically saying Facebook Twitter Tick Tock Instagram your days are numbered we're coming for you uh

you're the next Myspace web3 is the next thing or do you see web 3 living alongside web 2 a bit more and building something different I'm curious your take uh Christina from from the aveen side first yeah sure I think you know when you look at defy and it's 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 web3

um it's not going to incubate it might there might be some crossover as we look at adopting uh you know all web 2 into web 3 hopefully um in a similar way to we're seeing the Trad fire to D5 transition and it is happening it is happening there is appetite now um to play in this space and I think you know with web 3 social it's going to start you know first in web 3 there might be a place for it with work too but I think ultimately web 3 and I'm biased obviously but I think web3 is is the future because it solves for you

know the 20 years of learnings that we have with web 2 social where things just don't work I feel essentially that you know I'm renting my space on social media Platforms in web 2. I can actually own it uh in web3 and have control and custody very similar to D5 those kind of like similar uh you know principles of defy are actually being brought to web3 social so I think it's kind of no surprise maybe that avi's building this I think it did come as a surprise to a lot of people 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 so Evan Christine is saying uh watch out Mark Zuckerberg we're coming to eat your lunch do you agree with that Mark Zuckerberg should start checking under his bed at night for me Isabella 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 2 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 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 Evan I think that's actually a really interesting point for me it's always been uh maybe not always but I think about coexisting right I think the web 2 platforms like they uh have had some

utility in the sense of being entertaining and uh centralization for whatever it's worth uh has managed to get some things done right over the history of humanity uh but inevitably like putting the keys into one person's hands uh you're gonna wind up with uh at some point mislined incentives at some point uh incentives that kind of tilt towards uh making the platform uh less about with the user experience and the people that are trying to enjoy themselves and connect and more about eventually commercialization because uh companies need to make money and that's how it goes uh I think that there is uh like an interesting point to be made

about maybe one of two platforms and web three ones uh having just like different fundamental purposes right maybe uh web 2 platforms is where we used to go to um at some level waste time at some level find entertainment maybe web three platforms is where we go to uh organize to empower ourselves to connect with people on similar missions and to actually kind of Leverage The more interesting and uh valuable parts of what social platforms can be I I have another uh I guess follow-up on that so if if we are trying to build

something unique in in web3 and uh you know maybe some of the panel think we're here to eat uh web 2's lunch here how do we bring how do we bring people to web3 how do we entice them how do we convince them as a lot of people out there who who don't really think very much about decentralization or or care about it maybe they don't think a lot about about privacy either is is that enough of a carrot for them or what do you think the uh the carrots gonna be why are they going to flock to these platforms uh

Evan let's start with you what do you think so in order to bring the next billion users to web3 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 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 Dows 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 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 in tradable assets you know to to and from one another

um and so what I think the most uh the most exciting promise of the the you know web3 ecosystem of 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 um I think that the greatest draw for social web free will be the abundance of

awesome activities and Adventures that we can do together as a result of our protocols um 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 all that sounds very very uh very human it sounds very fun it sounds very experience oriented uh Isabel I'm curious your take on things so I mean poet is doing something I feel like that um your

traditional web 2 companies social media companies uh can't do and don't do which is like this idea of proof of attendance is that a new sort of primitive unlock um I think that to give you like a bit of context I don't know how many people uh at bankless or in this room or uh watching live now I know this uh pull up kind of originally uh was born from this idea of like a what would a decentralized Foursquare look like right and uh the reason uh it kind of goes back to that is um the FourSquare originally was kind of like the checking out that we all knew loved right and

that you could go and be mayor of value local Pizza Hut and everything was like Dandy and uh then one day uh they needed to switch business models because that wasn't working out for them so well and uh basically you know your uh lifetime of achievements uh checking into various places and sending various things all of a sudden just gone right um pull up takes that concept of uh check-ins attendance attestations in general at some level and uh 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 uh Evan was talking about with uh the metaverse of fun is something that we're currently witnessing being built out within the co-op ecosystem right there's a these Integrations for uh like the craziest things uh your Google Drive your notion your uh Shopify like uh every imaginable thing that you want to lock and gate with pull-ups at this point uh I think people have built all that more I think we're seeing more and more flooding every day uh and you know all of it's still uh very much in beta it's uh still very much like I call it the user experience I think is far from

being polished enough to compete with uh to really be ready for the mainstream right it's still kind of like all of that crypto ux let's say but uh with that being said um the attendance Primitives is a thing attestation Primitives are a thing right like a proof of doing something proof of uh contributing in some particular way uh one of the things that we're seeing is that like although there's a limit to how rich the poet metadata is uh you can get proofs of uh participating in

auctions and proofs of uh you know founding a community proofs of attending the First Community call proves to be on someone cap table uh and like all of those little things uh 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 uh exactly what Evan was talking about right is developing like that ecosystem of uh exciting applications and Adventures that we can all go on together uh so Christina how about you what do

you think about um bringing mainstream on and uh you converting the masses to web3 social media yeah I definitely 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 um to buy these assets and and to trade them with your friends and pull-up is fun uh 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 um it's going to serve us all different types of

social media but I think you know it is a metabus of need uh 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 it was really those countries that developing countries where people had um you know the inability to control their wealth and so we're going to see that as well uh in web3 Social and that will be a driver but I think it might

even accelerate it even quicker because you're going to have need um combined with fun and so I think we might even see someone hyper acceleration here um because you're bringing those two things from two different aspects of crypto together uh in web3 Social one more quick follow-up on this because I can't help it I I do remember a time when Facebook was actually fun like it 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 web3 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 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 um you know the the publicity of our data from Facebook pales in comparison to making it available to that global population that Intergalactic population um 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 expression so that we don't

offer the opportunity for some centralized authority to have to be trusted to be good um rather instead we can build into code our autonomy and ensure that we never seed control to some party that we may or may not trust um but beyond that I think it's very important for us 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

um that in addition to breaches of privacy and you know Facebook was perpetuating known harm uh to young people um you know they're aware of the fact that Facebook enhanced suicidal or grew suicidal ideation diminished self-esteem and body image of young users and yet perpetuated those products um 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 um you know combine the forces of our on-chain expression with the autonomy of ourselves which is what we're building at disco so if we're inside the world of crypto D5 famously got built on this concept of composability and I think we it's fair to extrapolate that the web 3 The Social Web 3 will also be highly composable and I 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 poapp and see how this world of the Social Web 3 kind of becomes bottom-up immersion in the same way that defy was so so Evan you've talked a lot about needing users needing to have their own data and perhaps it not being the best place to put it on chain what's going on in the world of disco and how does some of the stuff you're building help enable the Social Web 3.

so in the same way that you can carry your tokens from dap to DAP 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 web3 across apps 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 and 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 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 Bank lists are well aware of fungible tokens of non-founder 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 did some VCS are super awesome Primitives because they allow us to express pieces of data at test stations as you know as bill was describing earlier that are private almost like an off-chain nft verifiable credentials are

these you know little self-contained units of data attestations made by one party about another party um and and sort of in so doing my uh 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 um and so decentralized identifiers are sort of The Primitives that allow our existing public identifiers our public Keys our web to identifiers to talk to each other in the shared language of

verifiable credentials which like an nft are trustless self-contained persistent and encrypted 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 um and so at disco we believe that you should enjoy self-sovereignty over your full human expression not just your financial

expression Evan you use one of the the my favorite metaphors which I 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 uh 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 a 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 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 absolutely yes so you can imagine

um you know in the future actually in April you will be able to um connect your existing metamask rainbow or other you know ethereum compatible wallet to disco.xyz and then begin visiting other dapps um and you know interacting with those steps and instead of the data that you create in the DAP going to a centralized database or to the public chain it will go with you when you leave so when you go to deck number two step number two will be able to see the pieces of reputation that you've brought from dap 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 uh to optimize your experience in that product and you can imagine that that composable reputation that you build over time from dap to DAP to DAP 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 descript option of yourself um and so so I love you know Ryan's Ryan's metaphor