During Chainlink’s 2022 SmartCon event, September 28-29 in New York City, Nasdaq TradeTalks’ Jill Malandrino hosted a two-day interview lineup with founders of influential protocols in the Chainlink ecosystem who were among the conference’s 100+ expert speakers.
After chatting with Tiingo founder Rishi Singh about how democratizing access to financial data spurs innovation, Malandrino met with Stani Kulechov, the founder and CEO of Aave Companies, a web3 lab overseeing the development of open-source, non-custodial liquidity protocol, Aave.
Kulechov is also the founder of Lens Protocol, a permissionless, composable, decentralized social graph that simplifies building web3 social platforms.
Whereas traditional web2 social media platforms require users to build platform-specific content, web3 user-generated content that is created and collected as NFTs on the blockchain allows creators to directly monetize their own media across multiple platforms while retaining ownership of their audience.
“In web3 social and Lens Protocol, you actually create your profile once,” Kulechov said. “You can actually, as a user, go from one application to another without recreating your follower base. You have that ability to collect content as NFTs and then, as a creator, to monetize. So instead of the monetization going to bigger tech companies, the social media platforms, it goes directly to the users.”
He explained how Lens Protocol was inspired by the popularization of NFTs.
“User-generated content already exists in the web3 community as NFT collections. So what we’re doing is we’re extending the concept of user-generated content – not only to digital art, but also music, video, text, anything that you can actually create as a user.”
He said Lens Protocol’s ready-made infrastructure allows anyone to build web3 social media applications where users can create, own, and collect content. The next step and Lens’ “focus point” is making the web3 user experience accessible to “traditional users that are used to web2 social.”
Kulechov envisioned how the future of social media could put users – not platforms – in control.
“For the creators, it, for the first time ever, brings the actual ownership of their audiences to them and creates direct monetization channels and communication broadcasting channels with their audiences and fan bases. If you have a big following, you actually can port that following everywhere you’re going and any application can be built around your audience.”
Watch Jill Malandrino’s full interview with Stani Kulechov on Nasdaq TradeTalks.