Stephan on Warpcast

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Stephan pfp

Can someone explain to me why a social protocol needs an evm and zk proofs for every state change pls https://x.com/LensProtocol/status/1790458242855751950

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María Paula pfp

Reading the blogpost would help. Not every state change needs “an evm and zkproofs”

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Stephan pfp

from what i understand lens data which is on-chain (posts, user data, social graph, and reactions) is going to move to an evm-based validium blockchain which needs to post state proofs to an L1 am i misunderstanding something? https://app.t2.world/article/clw6l2z0018727620mc1dq26xr2 - this is the blogpost i read

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María Paula pfp

A little bit only! It’s about design choices: Lens Network believes on everything onchain. If we come up with an architecture that makes onchain-ness light and easy for builders and users, why is it overengineered? Lens will be hybrid as well - in order for lighter proofs for social data.

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Stephan pfp

i suppose we mostly differ philosophically. imo the use of a blockchain for this is overkill because social doesn't need strong consistency guarantees, state growth is unsustainable due to lack of state rent, and it leads to premature ossification of the protocol and weird abstractions like everything-is-an-NFT

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Special Agent Royo pfp

Special Agent Royo

Why do you think Lens stops at social? It has never been about social media but about building a market on social graph primitives.

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Stephan pfp

Then why put everything on chain and not just the social graph?

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María Paula pfp

Gm - when talking about the network, the modularity of the architecture allows devs to choose what goes on chain vs what doesnt. While the primitives for onchain will be there, client teams will be the ones deciding.

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Stephan pfp

can you elaborate on what you mean by the modularity of the architecture? what are devs' options when it comes to putting things onchain? my understanding is that posts, reactions, profile data, and follows are the primitives that always go onchain. is that right? thank you!

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María Paula pfp

The main primitives will be onchain like posts, accounts, usernames, follows. Stuff like reactions and others that may not need core ownership can live offchain ,depending on how the app wants to build it. We are exploring network messages which will enable this kind of thing

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María Paula pfp

Lens Network will serve unlimited users, and with tech getting cheaper there is no reason why we won’t be able to use blockchain as your database and not a centralized database. ATM, the argument against onchain-ness is about scale and cost, once that comes down it would not make sense to use a centralised database.

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Stephan pfp

my concern is that the benefits using of a blockchain diminish when it becomes very hard to sync and run a node wrt cost - posting and verifying validity proofs is cheap, but computing them is not. i would be curious to hear what you expect the total operational costs of migrating lens to a validium will be

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Stephan pfp

operational costs *after migrating

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María Paula pfp

its becoming cheaper and cheaper, actually zkSync’s proofs can ben validated on a mobile phone

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Stephan pfp

the whole point of SNARK proofs is that they can be validated cheaply - the problem is that it is very expensive to generate them

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María Paula pfp

we’ll make it easy to resync all data with a single command and abstract that pain away. Proofs are cheap and going to be 10x cheaper when zkSync do proof aggregation in Q3 - a validium is roughly 100x cheaper then a rollup - with computers getting cheaper and cheaper every month its going to become even more cheaper

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Stephan pfp

it doesn't matter if it's 100 commands or 1 command, when the state is multiple terabytes it's going to be hard for people to download & store. this is going to be a problem for all decentralized social networks evetually, which is why it's important to be extremely conservative with what you put in the network state

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