Nader Dabit is the Director of Developer Relations at Lens Protocol - a composable and decentralized social graph. After a year of prototyping and designing, Lens was released on the Polygon network six months ago. Nader joined the team recently to educated developers about the Lens protocol. Recorded on December 21, 2022 for Crypto Packaged Goods Genius Call series.
To watch the full demo visit https://www.youtube.com/@cryptopackagedgoods
In this episode, you will learn the following:
Follow Nader at https://twitter.com/dabit3
Follow Club CPG at https://twitter.com/CPGCLUB
To learn more about Crypto Packages Goods, visit https://www.cryptopackagedgoods.com/
Mikey Piro
GMGM. We are back with our 18th and final genius call for 2022. We are so excited for what we have in store today. We have probably one of the best protocols out there in terms of identity and identity management that's at the leading edge of how Web Three is taking shape. We're excited to have Nader Dabit from the Lens protocol. He is the Director of Developer Relations at Lens and Ave. In this call, Nader is going to give us a Lens ecosystem overview. We're going to discuss the background and origin of the Lens Protocol and how it was differentiated in the wider ecosystem. He's also going to COVID some very practical use cases as well as conduct some demos where necessary. And don't worry for the podcast listeners, we are going to COVID in depth and word by word, blow by blow account of what's happening on the screen so that you can maximize this wherever you're listening to your podcast. And as I said, Nader is the director of Developer Relations at Lens Protocol. Previously, he led the Developer Advocacy for front end web and mobile at Amazon Web Services and then the Graph Protocol. So with that, we're going to jump right into our 18th genius call. Nader, thank you so much for joining us. Welcome. How's everything going?
Nader Dabit
Hey, very good. Thank you for having me. And I'm excited to be here.
Mikey Piro
Wonderful. So I would love to start with the real deep origins of the Lens Protocol itself, where it started and how it started. Can you provide us some background there?
Nader Dabit
Yeah, the original idea came from a discussion actually that was happening on Twitter about a year and a half ago, I would say. And I think Stanley had sent a tweet out that said basically, would anyone be interested or is it interesting if we would build out like a social protocol that would be built on essentially like Web Three blockchain primitives. And I completely just botched the exact wording of that tweet, but that was the general idea that came from that tweet. There was a lot of like, positive reception there. And from that original discussion, they actually started building Lens for about a year, I think, before it was actually released. And this was before I was part of the team as well. And after prototyping thinking through the design decisions for how this would actually work and spending a lot of time thinking about how they would actually scale this and make this a real world product, they launched it officially on the Polygon network, like on chain with a live implementation of this around six months ago or something like that. And that was when I started actually building on it. And from there I'll kind of go into like how I joined the team, but I've been doing developer education for a while and I had done a video around the time that they had launched the protocol and that video had been really popular, I think within the developer community. A lot of people actually that are building the production apps today on Lens got started to introduce through that video. And since then I've been just really excited about building. So kind of one thing led to another, and now I work with them full time.
Mikey Piro
I share a familiar story and I can empathize with just digging in and starting to do work gets both that practical expertise, but also that notoriety. That's fantastic. I do want to take one half step back and really talk about for folks that are listening and they're like, well, what's the difference between a platform and a protocol? And why do I need a protocol for social? Why can't I just keep using Facebook or Twitter or others? Can you share some light on the stance that Lens takes as a protocol?
Nader Dabit
Yeah, there's quite a bit to talk about here. But first of all, I would say that when you think of Facebook, when you think of Twitter, when you think of Instagram, these are actually fully controlled both on the front end and the back end by the teams and companies that build them. They have full control over the API access, meaning that if you wanted to build out your own version of Instagram, you wouldn't be able to kind of take advantage of their back end, their APIs, all of the things that they're using, because they're building it specifically for their individual client applications that they support and they maintain. When you think of a protocol though, you kind of are thinking more about building out the back end infrastructure and making all these APIs and data and everything available permissionlessly to anyone that wants to build on top of it. And when you think about building in this way, you're kind of opening up the door to a lot of innovation and a lot of experimentation. Because if you're a developer and you're thinking about actually building out a competitor to some existing social media app, or you have an idea that you want to implement that's just slightly different, that you want to see if people might like. It's actually quite a heavy lift to compete in the social space, because not only do you have to actually build out the client application, you obviously have to build out the back end. And all of the things that go around content moderation and scalability and just everything that you would need to kind of make a basic prototype be compelling for the average person to use. So when you have something like a protocol like Lens, all of that work has already been done for you. So on the front end, you as a mobile engineer or a web engineer, you can only have to focus on building out the client application and you have all these building blocks, these primitives, and everything already kind of maintained for you, but also improving over time. Like we're continuing to add new features. We're continuing to add or improve scalability. We're continuing to do all this stuff. So you have that back end already kind of built for you. And then maybe equally as important, you also have a built in user base because every application that's built on Lens has all that same user base built in. So when you create a new social media application in the traditional world, you're kind of asking everyone to start from scratch. But when you're building on a protocol where it already has 100,000 or so built in users, even though we're still in beta, we have over 100,000 users. You have 100,000 customers that are already there that would be ready to try your thing out. And they have all of their followers. Their social graph is actually still intact, so they can kind of take all those followers with them. So that's kind of the value proposition there. There's a lot more to it, I would say, but that's the gist of it.
Mikey Piro
We covered a lot of ground there in that statement. What's an example of a primitive? What is a primitive feature that folks who are going to interact with a front end application going to kind of understand and manifest? And then I understand you also have a demonstration for us. Happy to jump into that if it helps explain what that primitive is as well.
Nader Dabit
Yeah, I think the presentation will kind of hopefully clear up maybe some questions that people might have. But a primitive can be anything from an API to an actual, I would say, use case that has already been coded that you could just take advantage of and use. So one example of this is like, we've implemented Xmtp for direct messages through Lin's protocol. And instead of having to build out this functionality from scratch, you can actually just leverage the private messages that we have and leave everything else off. You don't have to actually use everything that's part of the protocol. You can just say, oh, I want to have DMs built into my app and I'm going to use Lens protocol implementation of this. Or let's say that you want to have the ability to follow other users and kind of like, I don't know, interact with them in some way. You can kind of leave everything else off and you can kind of just take advantage of that feature in your app if it makes sense.
Mikey Piro
Fantastic. I think we should get to the presentation so that folks can watch and listen to some of those use cases that have been expertly developed to this point. And then we'll circle back with how people can get involved and how we can further preach the word of Lens to the world. So I'll leave it to you to take it away.
Nader Dabit
Okay, awesome. Yeah, I'll go ahead and share my screen and we will get going here. All right, so, yeah, I'm going to do an intro to Lens and then I'm going to actually build out an example mobile application as best I can during this short amount of time. So my name is Nader. I'm the head of Developer relations or director at Audience Lens. I've been in the developer education space for about seven years. I've been an engineer for almost eleven years, focused mainly on software development for a little over five years and then developer relations which is kind of like a combination of software development and developer education for the last four and a half or so years. And I've also founded a community called Developer. Now Lynn is what I'm going to be focused on today and it's short like description or overview of what it is based on. What we kind of talk about is a composable and decentralized social graph. Now that might not mean a lot to someone because it's so concise. So I want to kind of dive into more what that looks like. So when we think of social graph applications, they all kind of follow a similar pattern. You have the ability to create a profile, you have the ability to follow other people, you have the ability to create your own content, view a feed of other people's content. And then often there's a component of a recommendation algorithm built in. And often what sets apart maybe some of the applications that gain mass adoption quickly is the quality of that recommendation algorithm. When we also think about, I would say, the majority of internet traffic that's going through http around the world you have 5 billion users right or so. And if you kind of broke apart the applications that those people were using, you would actually come to the conclusion that the large majority, if not all of those people have actually interacted with a social graph application because these applications are very common in our day to day use of the internet. This is different than I would say, most web three or blockchain applications that have a fairly limited scope of what the average user might be interested in. Other than payments. I think payments are definitely something that makes sense to almost everyone in the world. But beyond that I don't think NFCs, I don't think Dowels, I don't think D five even for the average person is that compelling or that interesting. When we think of social graph applications that people use today, twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, even stuff like GitHub, even stuff like I would say to some extent stack overflow like have aspects or components of social graphs built within them. And again, almost any application that has the features I talked about earlier could be considered that. So with that being said, what is Lens and how does it fit into all this stuff? So Lens is at the core is a combination of a set of smart contracts that have been built and deployed to polygon that are completely open source, or they have an implementation of what a social Graph protocol might look like. And then they also have built a developer experience focused API on top of the Lin Smart contract. So for blockchain developers, the limitation often for building out the quality applications that we're used to in the traditional world has to do with the nature of smart contracts themselves and the limitations that come with them. So when we think of an application like Twitter, there are literally infinite ways to access the data that is stored in the database powering Twitter, you can obviously sign in and view the feed of content, you can view your own followers and you can do stuff like that. But there's also a million other things you can do. You can actually do all types of queries and searching and you can say, give me all of the tweets that have been sent in the last hour, or give me all of the followers from this user and there's just a million things that you can do. But in a smart contract, you're limited. You can't actually do any of that stuff. So what often people do to get around that is they find interesting ways to index that information and store it in the database somewhere and then make it accessible to the user. So that's essentially what our graph QL API does. We index all of the information that is being sent through the protocol in a database that we make that accessible using a querying language called GraphQL. And what this essentially does is it gives people the same power that they would in a database query, but from a client side application, which really is very powerful for people, for application developers, because you can build out a mobile or a web application and not have to build out any back end stuff. And you have all the power of a back end developer in this querying language. So in addition to this really high quality API layer, we've also added the ability to implement gasless transactions and also a dispatcher for signless transactions. Gasless transactions go a step further than the average kind of like user experience that you see in most blockchain applications, because most blockchain applications, they require the user to pay for transactions. But because of where we're getting at with these lower cost and modern blockchain networks that are kind of like less than one penny per transaction, we can kind of start treating blockchain architecture the same way that we do traditional software infrastructure. Because when you think about Twitter or you think about Facebook or Instagram, every time that you like a tweet or you're doing something, you're actually incurring some type of server call to that application. But that server cost is so low that it's completely, I would say, abstracted away from the user and it's subsidized by the platform. So the user doesn't obviously pay to like a suite. The user doesn't pay the post to Instagram. Instagram subsidizes that. So what if we could kind of take that same approach to blockchain application, it would require us to have a very low transaction cost. And that's kind of where we're getting at, not only with our current implementation, but especially in our future implementation of our back end. So this means that anyone in the world can actually create a profile and start using this application without needing to onboard through an exchange, buy the proper tokens, send the proper tokens to the right network, transfer those tokens to the right I don't know, to the right token or whatever. Like all this stuff is actually a massive, massive barrier to entry to the average person that isn't crypto native. And by eliminating that, you're opening the door to a massive larger number of people that would actually consider using an application like this. And then the last thing is this dispatcher. This basically means that instead of signing every single transaction, you can dispatch transactions through our API that will allow you to do certain things that are not high value interactions. So if you want to like or create a post or comment on something, you don't have to sign every transaction. Our dispatcher actually takes care of that for you and you can have a higher quality user experience. So those are some of the things that I think set Lens apart from what you see out there. One of the core ideas around Lens is this idea of compatibility. And this is not only from the developer's perspective, but also the user perspective. Because if I build out a new application on top of Lens protocol and I release it to the world, then the average user like myself might log in and see, oh, this is a new app. It's something like YouTube. It's called Lens Tube and it allows me to upload and view videos on Lens. But instead of having to kind of build out my audience and my following there, I immediately have all of the subscribers on day one that I do own. All of the other applications on this I've built up. I've spent time building this network and now it follows me around to every single application that comes online forever in the future. So this is, I think, really compelling to a lot of creators that are a little burnt out on building out their networks over and over and over on every single application that comes online. So let me go over some of the major concepts of Lens. The first and the main one is this idea of a profile. This is kind of the core component of a Lens interaction. When you sign up, you are given a profile and this profile is like the main object on Lens and everything that you do is then attached to this profile. A big difference between this and traditional, I would say maybe implementation of blockchain architecture is that we often talk about, oh, you have ownership. You have this idea of ownership and web three, that you can kind of own your data or own this or on that, but in reality it's not true because you can't take any of this stuff with you. You can't delete it or anything. It's just on chain and it's immutable and it can't be deleted. That basically means that it has different characteristics, but it's not true ownership. Right, but with the implementation that we're starting to see people, I would say, approach that kind of try to solve these problems that haven't been solved in the past, we're actually getting around some of these limitations and I think the implementation that they've chosen for profiles does give you more ownership. In the traditional implementation that I've seen in most blockchain applications because with this profile, because it's just an NFC, you can actually sell this, you can transfer it to a different address if you change wallets, you can kind of move it around or you can burn it. You have full control over essentially like what you do with it. And this profile has all the history of the post, mirrors, comments and other content that you generate. Profiles also have this idea of a profile follow module. And modules are something that are also implementing a couple of different areas on them. And modules, they really allow the user to have a lot more control over the interactions that they are involved with, I would say through the protocol. So for instance, anything that you could think of as a developer or in your mind, I would say, even if you're not a developer that are using on chain information can be programmatically built into this module. So a good example of this might be to say if you're an artist, the only way that you can follow me is if you have collected one of my pieces of art, one of my MSCs or something like that. Or maybe you can say in order to follow me you have to pay $5 or five matic or something like that. Anything that you want to program into this follow module is fair game and therefore people are having a lot more fun and a lot more control over how people can follow them. Publications are the way to actually create content. There are three main types of publications. There's posts, comments and mirrors. Posts or original content comments or messages on posts or messages on comments. And then mirrors are something like a retweet or something like that. And all of this information is posted directly to a user's profile. And the cool thing about publications is that they can actually be collected and they can have their own module configuration set to them as well. And the moment that they're collected, they become minted as an MSP. So if someone wants to say in order to collect this post, you have to pay $5 or something like that. You can do that. And we're seeing a lot of really cool stuff happen with this because when we think of like traditional digital collectibles, it's like very out of reach for the average person in the world because most of the stuff is like hundreds of dollars or thousands of dollars, maybe even $100,000 stuff like the Bourgeois Club stuff. And for the average person, that's actually kind of dumb. It doesn't make sense. But when you have mass number of people, when you have scale and volume, then you can actually make these types of collectibles more accessible. So a good example of this is that people are posting things, collecting anywhere between ten cents to two dollars or $5, but they're having like thousands of people collect, often for a single post. And then that actually adds up to a large amount of money. So we've had someone, the most interesting example, I think of this was someone that posted on Lens that they decided to quit their job and work full time on a Lens client and they set the collect to two Maddock, which is about $2 or less. And they've had like 10,000 people collect that. So just by posting that message on Lens, they made $20,000 and it took them 5 seconds probably to post that. Interesting stuff like that happens at scale when you have a large number of people in a low price. Yeah, the collect modules, what I just mentioned just allows people to make their post as NFPs that link to a publication content Uri, just like a traditional NFC. And you kind of have the ability to upload your content to either IPFS or are we depending on the application's choice of back end storage mechanism that they are using. So next I want to talk about the Lens API a little more. So I'm going to actually go to the Lens API and show you what that looks like. So I'm going to pull up the playground and then also the Lens back. So, like I mentioned, the lens API is a graph QL API. The lens. Graph QL API starts being documented right here. And we have all of these different API methods that you can use. And one of the cool things about GraphQL is that you kind of have a self documented API that you can use and play around with, and we're going to kind of look at how that works. But all of these API methods kind of give you different ways to explore the information within lender. So you can say, I want to explore profiles and publications. I want to find if someone follows someone or the followers or the people someone is following. Like all these are different API methods that you can just use in your app. And if we want to test one of these out, we can actually just click here and we can see that all this stuff is really well documented for us here and we can even copy the API method and we can go here into the API core. At API Lens dev, we can just paste that in and we can run and we can get the information back. And what we've done here is we've gone through the Lens documentation, we found an API query, we've copied through our clipboard, and then we've been able to paste into this playground. And this is really powerful and really helpful for developers because like, as a developer, you're trying to build out user interfaces and the user interfaces are just solely dependent on the data that you can kind of retrieve. So being able to visualize this data makes it easy for developers to understand the types of applications and the views that they can build within those applications. So, yeah, length API is pretty simple to use. It uses GraphQL, we're building out better abstractions even on top of it to make it to where you have even less code because with GraphQL it is quite a bit of code. So we're trying to make this to where you only need a couple of bottles of code to work with. But for now, the Lin API using raw Graph QL is kind of the way to go. Next, I want to show how we can actually build out a mobile app using Liz. And to do that, I'm actually going to be using an open source project called React native Lens UI kit. And this project was just released last week by me. Last week, about seven days ago. Original commit two weeks ago. But anyway, this project, React Native Lindu Ikit, kind of abstracts away the need to write a lot of code for application developers to quickly build out their mobile app. And for instance, if you want to build out like, let me take a step back. I guess when you think about an application that used on an everyday basis, you can kind of as a developer understand that a lot of these components are actually reused across many applications. Because like I mentioned, the social graph has a profile, a publication or a post, it has a follower, it has different profiles that you can follow and things like that. So when we kind of componentize that you could say, okay, let's create a profile component, let's create a publication component, let's create whatever individual component that would look like. And then instead of having to write all that code from scratch, you can just import it maybe from a library. And that's kind of what we've done here. And we're also going to be building out like a web version of this. But the general idea is here when Flutter yes, Flutter. Maybe if someone wants Flutter, just drop in and get that conversation started. I'm a big fan of Flutter as well. Anything cross platform is great. Obviously a fan of even native iOS, which is pretty nice these days. But yeah, our first library was React native and we're going to be doing web next. But I'm basically starting off here with a blank application for anyone listening that doesn't see this. On the left hand, the left side of my screen I have a mobile app that's blank, that's a brand new expo app. And then on the right side of the screen I have a lens. It's actually not really Lens, it's just a blank application that is called Lens app. And the only thing that it has is text. And kind of what I want to show is how to use this UI kit. And the first thing that we're going to do is when you open up Twitter, you kind of have two views that you can see. You can either see a feed of posts or you can maybe see like a list of users that either you're following or that you follow or that you search for something like that. So let's first create a view to kind of get it started. That would be maybe a list of profiles and we have like a really nice component called Profiles. You can actually just import react from lens protocol, react native, lens you like, it the long sentence. But what I want to do to get it started, I just want to drop in this profile component and this should get us started and I want to go ahead and save that and see what happens here. So I've imported the Profiles component from this UI kit and now our app is updating and just with a single line of code we have this nice view of profiles coming back. Now this component is actually completely configurable because by default we're sending essentially a query to our API under the hood that says give us the most followed profiles. But we are using react native. And with react native it's built on top of react. And with React you have this idea of props. And props are essentially the properties that you can pass in this argument. So we can actually override this with different queries to kind of get exactly the information, exactly the profile data we want coming back. But by default we give you some smart default that I think are a good way to get started. Now beyond that, what we might want to do, and I'm sorry about the noise over here. I'm kind of outside the restaurant because my office WiFi is off anyway. So to get beyond that, what we want to do is to be able to kind of navigate from one view to the other view. And therefore to do that we're going to need some navigation. So to do that I'm going to kind of build out maybe a couple more screens and then I'm going to stop as far as the presentation is concerned and we're going to kind of go from here back to maybe a Q and A.
Mikey Piro
Yes. And I can. Just jump in and give some voice over here while you're typing away. So some of the things that Nader has really emphasized and if you're following along just by the podcast or just listening from wherever you're listening, it's literally 35 lines, 25 lines of code that have been generating a pretty impressive view of everybody that's followed. Right now Nader is pulling in another tab and so on that tab you'll be able to have who you are following and on one tab you'll have a list of folks to follow. The speed with which this is happening is pretty impressive and I'm thankful that we're able to just watch the functions get put right up on the screen. I am excited for the preview of the web version of this. I think it's going to move things forward significantly and then we'll get into some Q and A that I have some questions about just getting involved and where we're going to have the ability to really show folks where this documentation is. We touched on it earlier. It's Docs lens XYZ docs, very comprehensive set of documentation that we can go and look at and pull through. The library that matter is pulling from right now is a library that's on GitHub, all out in the open that is. And I'm just going to pull up the explicit one. It's GitHub comlensprocol and then react native lensuikit. We're going to put all these into the show notes as well so folks can easily find them. But it's been a really important view that it's impressive to watch Nader just on the fly here. In a couple of seconds, pull up what the base part of an app will look like and how we can generate from this UI kit, which is again in alpha but still working pretty well and open for feedback, a really great way for us to quickly prototype a lot of things.
Nader Dabit
Yes, thank you for that. And I just had to go ahead and refactor to add navigation because what we want to do is essentially add a new feature to this app that allows us to click on one of these profiles and take an action. So I basically dropped in a navigator component here. I have this profiles component here and what I want to do is add an on click handler here and here. We're basically saying when someone presses the profile, we want to navigate to a new component that gives us a so we basically have this list of profiles. When someone clicks on the profile, we want to navigate to the profile details of that user. So think of Twitter. You see a list of users, you click on that user and you see the user's details. So you see their post, you see their bio, all that stuff. So that's kind of the view that we want to create. Again, these are very common components in almost every such would be asked. So therefore I'm going to create a new file called View Profile JS. And this component is going to be more code than what we've done before, but we don't need all that code. Let's start off with just about eleven lines of code and this component with just these eleven lines of code will show all of that information. And this will kind of be a great next step for our app. In order to make that work, I'm going to go here into the navigation and I'm going to go ahead and import that new component. And this is going to be called View Profile from the View Profile and then we're going to add one more screen here that allows us to view that profile. And then we've added again an onpress handler when someone presses the profile wants to navigate that. So if everything is working properly, we should be able to click on Links protocol and we have an error. I know where that air is from. The live coding is always interesting anyway. So we're going to try that again. We're going to click on Standing and now we see that when we click on Stani, we actually see a feed of all of its posts and we've literally written probably 30 lines of code. And we have kind of like the core component of a social app. We have a lot of complex features like hegenation, meaning like when you get to the bottom of the page we fetch additional posts. We have the ability to click on handlers to handle actions like collecting and liking and parting and commenting, all that stuff. Anyway, so this is kind of just I'm going to stop here. I can actually keep going and build out a few more features. But this is more of just an introduction to kind of like let you see how you could use a library like this to get you started and less of like us building out a full fledged job.
Mikey Piro
Love it, love the potential and love the possibilities here for practical kind of overviews of Lens, the wallet that you connect and then claim your lens profile in. For folks that are CPG, we're working hard to get some more folks onto Lens. We've been experimenting with it as a core team. In the background. What are some of the things that folks can expect to see in their wallets that have the Lens protocol connected to it as a polygon token and as things accumulate?
Nader Dabit
So what can people expect to be able to do with their profile, I guess you say?
Mikey Piro
Yeah, and how they go check that wallet. We've heard in the past there's a lot of lens protocol IDs and profiles in it. So what are some of the things that when you connect your wallet, what you can expect to be able to do and see?
Nader Dabit
Yeah, you'll immediately have access to the entire ecosystem of Lens application. Obviously, like right off the bat and right now I think they're around 100 or so that are, quote unquote, live. I would probably argue that maybe 20 or so those or 30 or so are quality enough that I would recommend people taking this seriously. A lot of them will be that at some point they'll be able to kind of be a little bit further along with more work. But again, six months old so far, so pretty happy with where things are at now. You can view kind of a good overview of the ecosystem at Lens XYZ and you can actually also see the ability to kind of see documentation that kind of gives you some guidelines to how you might participate in the ecosystem in different ways. So, for instance, if you're a developer, you might want to build something on Lands. You might have a good idea, but you don't want to kind of like, maybe build this in a silo. You can get connected with other developers or you can even get a grant to kind of help fund some of that work through our grant program.
Mikey Piro
Amazing. So our builders Club, which is what the Genius calls are specifically here for, constantly bring together their ideas and what they're working on. It would be fantastic if we could have a way again, we'll publish in the show notes where folks can get involved in specifically finding other developers and also the grant program sounds like a really great asset and resource for the grant program. I think one of the things that we've seen with both the Polygon Dow and a couple of other folks that do them, what is the frequency with which folks can request grants? Is there a window? Is it monthly? Is it quarterly?
Nader Dabit
Yeah, we do a monthly review. We do a monthly review of grants and they typically range in the ballpark of like 2000, $15,000 for the whole grant. And that money, let's say 15,000, would be kind of flipped across a couple of milestones. And then beyond that, we would probably want to kind of look at more of like an investment type of opportunity either with us or maybe helping you get connected for larger grants than that. But yeah, that's kind of how it works. Now you would be eligible for anywhere between $2,000 to get you started. We would also provide marketing resources and developer resources and as much support as we can offer. Obviously we're kind of a lean team, but we do what we can to provide all the developer support that we can around answering engineering types of questions and stuff like that.
Mikey Piro
Fantastic. Thank you for sharing that. In terms of the next steps for Lens, what are some of the feature sets that are high priority or some of the primitives that are high priority for you and what gets you most excited about the next six months for Lens?
Nader Dabit
Yeah, let's say the three main things that I think we're focused on are around scalability accessibility and I would say UX. So the first thing we need to tackle the scalability because the reason we're still in beta well, there's a couple of reasons still in beta, but one of the main reasons we're still in beta is that if we took the permissionless access off of the protocol, we would far extend what polygon can handle at the moment. In fact, we're already often having a large portion of the polygon blocks that are just purely a lot of them are just Lens transactions and we're in a closed beta. So yeah, we want to make sure that when we open the doors we're actually able to handle that scale. And we've already built out something that is really, really interesting. You've probably seen Danny like mention it if you're keeping up something that can scale up to 50,000 transactions per second. And I think that if we can hit that number then we're going to be more than good for a while. Like it'll take us a while to even need that much scalability because if you look at something like Twitter, I think Elon Musk tweeted out like during the World Cup Hype, the very top of the height so far they were processing something like 20,000 operations or tweets per second. Beyond just tweets, you're thinking about like retweets all that other stuff. They're probably closer to like 50 to 100,000 transactions per second. But anyway, scalability is one where we're not only focused on that when I say we, the engineering team has actually already kind of prototyped and built out a proof of concept that works well and now we're testing it before we put it into production. So once it's in production, we can then move to opening the door to permissionless access and that will mean anyone in the world can just sign up for Lens like they can for Twitter and have an account and start posting. And I think at that point a lot of the applications that are being built today and that have been built will just get a new onboarding of a ton of new users and it will be kind of like hopefully a really great time to be a developer or to be running an app within length. Some of the stuff that I'm most excited about beyond that are some things that we're doing around wallet user experience while at UX that will kind of hopefully remove that final layer of friction for the average user around the world to use something like this. Because as crypto native people, we're kind of used to dealing with seat phrases and private keys and stuff like that. But for the average person, this is actually a huge friction point. So we need to find ways to abstract that stuff and we're working on our own way of doing that and then finally monetization for the developers, we have something that will be really interesting. I think that isn't a token. It's just a way for someone to make money as a developer by building out their client application on top of land through the platform. And that will be something that will be released in the first quarter of next year as well.
Mikey Piro
Very exciting circling to the wallet perspective. Just as a follow on question, does that mean that Lens will provide a method of instantiating noncustodial wallets? Or is it more of just abstracting the onboarding and delaying it for folks who at some point will need to take custody of a wallet?
Nader Dabit
Yeah, it's something that I'm not able to really speak to because of the nature of the privacy that is kind of built around that project because it's actually something that was very private before I even joined. And it's kind of like the general idea, though, is around kind of like a combination of what you just said, but I can't really go into details. I would just say I think it's one of the better approaches around lowering the barrier to entry for the average person to be able to kind of get started with a quote unquote blockchain wallet. But I think that we should also go beyond that and think, what about the word wallet itself is actually not maybe the right word, I think, for most people because for something like Lens, I don't know, a profile might make a lot more sense. Right. Just rethinking a lot of the things that we're kind of used to thinking maybe right now would be the approach that I think we're taking.
Mikey Piro
It does bring up an interesting concept of is your wallet your profile? Is your profile your wallet? And I think that's probably along the lines of the thought process you're going through. And we've had interesting internal debates about how do you put forward your expertise and or your job experience in web three. And a lot of times it's your wallet. And so they're sort of synonymous with who you are in the web three space is very much your zero X profile. I really appreciate the time that you've put forward here today. One last query that I will put forward to you is for the builders in this space that are slugging away on web three, what is the piece of advice that you have for them in terms of the next six months and how we're operating through what's pretty much a bear market at this point in time?
Nader Dabit
Yeah, definitely a bear market. I mean, I'm kind of relatively new to this as well. I've been in the States for only a little under two years. I've worked with people that have been working on this stuff since 2016. So I feel like a nuube compared to them. But my advice is that if you still believe in this stuff, then try to find interesting things to work on that provide like a true benefit to the average person around the world. I think a lot of the mistakes that people make is that they build for a few thousand people that are very hard for Crypto native people. And you're kind of not really doing anything, in my opinion, when you're doing that because you're just building for the small group of people. Instead, we need to build for everyone in the world. In order to do that, you need to provide something that is valuable to them. And you have to rethink about maybe some of the assumptions that you have right now. Because as a software engineer that's worked at AWS and all these other places for eight years before coming to Crypto, last few years, we never worried about, oh, I'm building this on this type of database, or I'm building with this type of API. It was all about the value proposition of the application that you're building. Is it going to benefit the average person? Is it better? Is it ten times better than maybe what they already have? And if you kind of think about it in that way, there are really a few gems that you can kind of maybe find that are enabled through blockchain technology that are not enabled in any other way and then stay away from all the other stuff that's just kind of mopping it.
Mikey Piro
Thank you. Very prescient words for what is a relatively nascent field and fun and on the cutting edge of what we hope the future is. I definitely agree that you need to build for the masses and you need to have utility that comes along with it. We've been saying it for a long time. Now is the time to do it. And I think the next six months, the next year, next year and a half, are going to really separate out the folks that are able to do that from the folks that aren't. It's not to say that the Web Three maxis aren't important, but for sure, scale is an important lever for adoption. Well, Nader, thank you so much for joining us for all the folks that are following along. Hope you enjoyed this as much as I did. We will be back in the new year with another genius call for the 2023 season. I can't believe it's the middle of December. Thanks, everyone, especially to Chad and Janet and all the mods who help us make CPG what it is on a daily basis. Find us again at Crypto podcast goods and we look forward to catching up with you in the new year and in the chat. Thanks to everybody.