Nader Dabit, Director of Developer Relations at Aave and Lens ProtocoI talks with Brian Friel about his journey moving from developing in web2 to web3. From creating educational content and authoring one of the first "Intro to Solana" programming articles, to founding Developer DAO and building the infrastructure for the next generation of web3 social apps.

Show Notes:

00:49 - Intro

02:43 - Origin story / Background

06:13 - AHA moment in Web 3.0 ?

10:49 - Lens and Aave

18:30 - Composability between blockchains

21:45 - Advice to newcomers

24:15 - A builder he admires in the Web3 ecosystem

Full Transcript:

Brian (00:00):

Hey, everyone, and welcome to The Zeitgeist, the show where we highlight the founders, developers, and designers who are pushing the Web3 space forward. I'm Brian Friel, developer relations at Phantom. And I'm super excited to introduce our guest, Nader Dabit, the director of developer relations at Aave & Lens Protocol. Nader, welcome to the show.

Nader (00:25):

Hey, thank you for having me. Good to be here.

Brian (00:27):

I'm really excited to talk to you today. A lot of folks may know you from Crypto Twitter. You've been around a lot of different places in the Web3 ecosystem. But for some folks who might not know, you actually wrote one of the earliest intro to Solana programming articles that there were at the time, back in, I believe, summer 2021. And it's special to me, because this is actually the first article that I found on Solana that got me working at Phantom full time. So, before we dive into everything, I want to say thank you and welcome, and it's great to be talking to you today.

Nader (00:58):

Yeah, I remember very clearly when I wrote that article, because at the time I was trying to learn how to build on Solana. And I had a hard time finding all of the pieces that I needed to build out the types of application that I was used to building, just for a hello world type of thing. And I was actually traveling at the time from Croatia, and also Mexico during that week. And I remember just staying up sometimes all night, just trying to figure out what I thought was some basic stuff. And I was like, I have to document this stuff. It has to be documented somewhere, in a way that I would want it.

(01:32):

Because it's probably documented in other ways, like bits and pieces. But putting it all together, I was like, okay, this is going to be what I wanted to find. And I remember when I tweeted it out, it was one of the most popular tweets that I maybe have ever had, in the top five. That tutorial, the reception was just enormous. So, there was a lot of interest in Solana for developers, and I think that this was one of the things that enabled a lot of developers at the time to just get up and running, and see how it felt to build a full-stack application on Solana.

Brian (02:02):

No, I couldn't agree more. It was a time where there was a ton of demand, and just not enough resources or infrastructure. And it's been really cool, to just see all the derivative pieces that have come from that. A ton of folks have taken that article, built their own version, extended it in some ways. And view that and the initial paulx escrow tutorial as the two sparks that kicked off Solana development, and DevRel and all that. But before we get into everything today, you have a really interesting background. You were early to Solana, but then you worked across a number of different protocols already in the Web3 ecosystem. And before that, you were deeply involved in React and Web2 land. Could you walk us through a little bit about who you are and your background?

Nader (02:43):

Yes, so I've been a developer for about 10 years now, a little over 10 years. And I've specialized in, I would say four main areas of specialization during that time. I started off as a front end and single page application developer, I would call it, working with stuff from just plain JavaScript and HTML, to Angular, to React. And then, I moved into mobile development for a little over three years, specializing in cross platform application development with React native.

(03:16):

One of those years I was running a company called React Native Training, where I would train teams of engineers, where they had these siloed teams that were focused on either iOS or Android, and I would introduce them to React Native. And there was quite a bit of demand for that. So, a lot of the clients that I had, were large companies that had a lot of overhead with their developer budgets, and they were trying to find ways to not only have less resources needed to build out applications, but also to be able to build faster, and also to have a better singular code base, so we don't have to have two separate code bases.

(03:54):

So yeah, I had clients like Amazon and Teams at Microsoft, or individual engineers from Microsoft that would come to my training. Teams like Warner Brothers, and banks and stuff, were also my clients. So, that was really fun for about a year. And then, the next thing that I did is, I got interested in cloud computing. So, I ended up moving and working at AWS for a little over three years. And during that time I was doing developer relations there, which is what I'm doing now as well. And after a little over three years there, I got interested in the blockchain space. And I thought that while the work that we were doing at AWS was super important and very real world, there was a lot of applications and companies using it. I thought that the blockchain space was a little more exciting, just because it was newer. I thought the opportunities that were available for this technology, once it became mature enough to actually be usable for the ideas that we had, were really powerful and stuff.

(04:50):

And I felt like it was so early that there was a lot of room for growth, because a lot of these ideas were there and the technology... The primitives were there, but the maturity of those primitives weren't quite there. So, being part of that growth and stuff, to me it seemed really exciting. So yeah, I moved into blockchain space.

Brian (05:07):

And what year was that, Nader, real quick before you jumped in?

Nader (05:11):

So, I joined the blockchain world in April of 2021. So, a year and eight months ago, I guess, seven months ago.

Brian (05:22):

You made a huge impact in just that little time. I would've put you back at least a couple years on that, but that's really cool.

Nader (05:28):

Yeah, definitely the first time I got into this from the perspective of a developer was then, I had dabbled in crypto as an investor before that, but knew nothing about anything actually until then. And then, in that time, in the last 18 months, I've worked at the graph protocol, I've worked with Celestia, which is the first modular blockchain. And now, I'm working with Aave and Lens Protocol.

Brian (05:48):

That's great. And was there anything at that time, you had this great job at AWS, you've written a number of books, React Native in Action, all of these great resources that are used across a number of traditional companies. But was there anything about Web3 in particular that was an aha moment for you, or just made you just say, "I have to work in this space"? Or do you think it was more of a culmination of just years of watching it off to the side?

Nader (06:13):

Yeah, there was a few things. I'll look at this technology as a new way to build certain applications that wasn't possible in the past. I don't look at it as, oh, Web3 is going to replace everything that we had before. Instead, I think I look at it as it's going to probably disrupt certain types of industries, but it also just opens the door for new types of applications that are really exciting to me. And I think the one thing that stood out the most to me, is that we had public immutable and permanent infrastructure that developers could share, and use, and build on top of, almost like the way that we have code that is open source, that everyone can share, and use it, and clone it, and fork it, and do whatever. If we applied those same principles to actual software infrastructure, that was instead of the... We're kind of used to brittle infrastructure.

(07:02):

Most of the time when you're building on top of someone else's API, you don't know if it's going to be there tomorrow or even later today. You also have no control over the access of that. Someone can shut you off, someone can prevent you from using it at any time. So, you can't really share backend infrastructure. So, everyone's out there building out their own backend infrastructure for their own ideas, which is great if you need something custom. But there's a lot of things, I think, that would be very valuable for other people to share and not have to rebuild themselves. But it's just not possible through the traditional software infrastructure primitives that we have. Because a database can go down, someone can go and delete things from a database. You can't depend on that data being there, but with blockchain infrastructure you actually have those properties.

(07:49):

And that's really exciting to me, because what we're seeing exactly I think with Lens, is that if you provide a really high quality backend, and you bring a really high quality API that enables developers to build on top of it, you've done away with a large majority of the work that's needed to build an app, building out the backend. Just imagine if you only had to build out the front end, and you didn't have to worry about this, and everyone could share that backend infrastructure.

(08:16):

And that's what excited me the most. There weren't really a lot of real world implementations of this though at the time. There was NFTs and DeFi stuff, which is great, but I don't think the coming to market use case is going to be that. I think that will be things that are used a lot in the future, but not that.

(08:32):

And then, the other thing that excited me about this stuff, it's payments. And I think that also stablecoins, this idea of stablecoins, and offering stability to currencies around the world that don't have that, was pretty exciting to me. And also, just being able to permissionlessly access and send payments was revolutionary, as someone who has a lot of family in the Middle East and stuff, and is also familiar with what's going on in different parts of the world. I think one thing that was an aha moment for me, was someone was a cryptocurrency is very volatile. And I realized that some people in parts of the world, like the United States and Europe, they don't realize that everyone else's currencies are also volatile. If they think that everyone's currency is the US dollar, just is always... But they don't realize that the majority of the world lives in places that where their currency is just as volatile as cryptocurrency.

(09:20):

So, realizing that so many people just don't understand that, and there's so much privilege in the world that there's opportunities to build out these things, that bring equality around the world for stuff, just having stability in their currencies. So, stable coins to me, are really exciting. And that's again, one of the things that excites me actually about working at Aave is, we're going to be launching a stable coin. So, being able to be part of something like that, is pretty cool.

Brian (09:44):

Yeah, no, I couldn't agree more. And for folks who might be based in the US, or don't have the privilege, not having to worry about their own currency not being stable, even just having to go through the pain of sending a bank wire somewhere across different countries, it's like pulling teeth. And once you send something over crypto rails, and it's near instant, you're paying near nothing, and you realize it's on this public infrastructure that you just talked about. It's like an aha moment, where it's like how could we not use this in some capacity? It's pretty incredible.

(10:15):

So, you hit on a couple different things there. You hinted at Lens Protocol and Aave, both of which you are the director of DevRel at. Could you talk us through a little bit about what each of those two protocols are? For folks who have been in crypto for a little while, they probably know Aave, it's a household name. Darling of the DeFi Summer days. But it's quite interesting that then Lens is also under the same house as Aave, two very different protocols. Could you walk us through a little bit about what each of those are doing, and maybe why the similar teams are building both of them?

Nader (10:50):

Yeah, basically I'm working a lot more closely with Lens. Just the first couple of months that I've been here to get a lot of the ideas that I personally had off the ground, as someone who's been building on Lens. And I think we're going to be doing a lot of work in Aave though, starting at the beginning of next year. A lot of work actually is happening right now in Aave, but from the DevRel perspective, we're launching some stuff. So, we're going to use DevRel power to help bring that to market. But yeah, Aave is basically a Defi protocol, and allows people to lend and borrow crypto and real world assets, without having to go through a centralized intermediary. So, that's the main value prop of Aave. And then, Lens is a Web3... Or I wouldn't even bucket in that. It's essentially a social media protocol and social media application API, that allows developers to build social graph applications.

(11:41):

And with Lens, you can have a lot of this backend infrastructure, like I mentioned, already there, ready for you to use to build out applications. And I think that when we think of the five billion or so people on the internet today, we might say there isn't maybe a single thread that ties everyone online together. But if you do look at the most widely used applications in the world today, you could almost probably assume that a high nineties percent of those five billion people around the world, have used a social application so far. So TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, all of these applications, are social graph applications. And they have very similar characteristics. You go to the app, and you have to create a profile. So you do that, you have a profile. You then have the opportunity to create content. You then have the opportunity to follow people. You're then given a feed of content based on who you follow, and then people that are following you, your content is put into their feed.

(12:39):

So, if you think about an application from that perspective, you can actually bucket a large majority of internet traffic into social graph applications. And they all literally copy, and have these exact same characteristics. So, what if we could abstract some of that away, and make it to where people could actually have those features in their application, without having to build all of that from scratch. And that's what Lens is doing. And I think that from the sheer user adoption perspective, it's the first real world use case to me, that actually appeals to people without having to teach them anything off the bat.

(13:15):

And that's just one thing, but making that accessible, is another story, because historically blockchain applications are very not approachable by the average person. In fact, the UX is terrible for most blockchain applications. And I don't think people understand how much friction is involved in most web three applications, for the average person I know at AWS, we would literally spend weeks and months with customers. Sometimes those customers would spend millions of dollars just to remove a couple of hundred milliseconds of latency from one of their APIs, because that latency was costing them millions of dollars in revenue, because they would drop customers or whatever.

(13:56):

So, when you think about a few hundred milliseconds of latency being a huge issue for a real world application. Imagine telling a new customer that they have to first download this wallet that's going to give them these private keys and these seed phrases, and they have to understand how that works. Then, they're going to have to go and find this token somewhere on the internet, and they're going to have to find out how to purchase that token. Then they're going to have to learn which network that token is on, and they're going to have to transfer that token from the place that they bought it, into that new wallet, on the right network that they bought.

(14:30):

Then they're going to have to pay for every transaction that they make on the network. It's crazy to think that the average person is going to be interested in this stuff. And down the road, when people start using DeFi, and stuff like that, they might understand the value that you do probably want to have that security for paying for a transaction, and understanding how all that stuff works. But for onboarding new people, it's just crazy to think that we're going to onboard millions of people this way.

(14:54):

So, the approach beyond having an actual use case that makes sense for the average person, also lowering the barrier to entry for that UX, is a huge thing that we're trying to solve as well. And we have some stuff rolling out next year, that's going to address that. But we've already done some stuff. Or when I say we, I'm really speaking of the Aave engineering team, and the Lens engineering team, who is just really, really incredible. They've already done a lot of stuff. I think that lowers the barrier to entry for users. Gasless transactions, meaning that the user doesn't have to pay for the transaction on the network. Low cost networks like Solana, like Polygon, others out there, make this possible for the first time where you can actually subsidize transactions the same way you can subsidize software infrastructure like AWS.

(15:38):

When you use an app by Twitter, you're incurring cost on their backend, but it's so small that the company eats that, and pays for that software infrastructure themselves. You don't expect to pay for a tweet. When you tweet, you don't expect to have to pay them to do that. It's like that would be crazy. So, that's where we're getting, I think, with more scalable blockchain infrastructure. And that's one of the things that they implemented into Lens. And then, the other thing is that they implemented, is a dispatcher that allows you to delegate your signing to an abstraction that allows you to do certain things on chain, but not everything. So, you don't want to be able to send money without having to sign a transaction. That would be a security concern. But posting something to a social network that's delegated without you having to sign, makes a lot of sense. Because you could always go back.

(16:24):

And obviously, we've never even really, that I know I've had any issues with this, but let's say that you did something wrong and then posted a post that you didn't like. We have a soft delete feature in the API, you can go and delete something. But I guess my general point is that being able to post, and comment, and stuff, you shouldn't have to sign for all of these different interactions. And that's what the delegator allows you to do. You just have the same user experience that you would in a traditional Web2 app.

Brian (16:49):

Yeah, totally. You touched earlier on just a couple milliseconds, a hundred milliseconds of latency, makes the difference in user attention spans. Imagine having to go find that browser extension pop up. It's going to make you not want to tweet as much, second guess some of your actions. And then I agree as well, even we've seen this from a wallet side, a lot of... I think this is definitely where the space is going. Having some permissioned system right now, if you think of permissions with wallets, pretty much all of them just, it's a connect. And then by default, you could have any permissions, but it requires manual approval. And I think we're almost training users negatively in that sense, when everything's a pop-up action, they start to not take pop-ups as seriously.

(17:31):

But if we could make a system where we know certain actions are safe, we don't even have to alert you about this. But then, there is a transaction that potentially you'll be exchanging funds in this transaction, you should review this manually before sending it, that's definitely moving in the right direction. So, that's really cool to see that you guys are already building on that front.

(17:49):

You touched a little bit too about just how these blockchain ecosystems, up until now, have been largely inaccessible. And I would argue, also largely siloed from one another. There's a lot of different ecosystems out there. You've spent time at other projects that touch multiple different blockchains, multiple different layers. You're at the graph, you're at Celestia. Now you're at Aave and Lens, which is all over the EVM ecosystem. Can you speak a little bit to how you see everything that we're building in Web3, all these different blockchains, how some of these might compose over time? What is your worldview when you're working across all these different siloed ecosystems today?

Nader (18:31):

The thing that really turned me off a little bit when I started really understanding the ecosystem in general, was this Maximalism that you see. And I thought it was really toxic and stuff. And I didn't really like that at all. And so, that was one of the reasons I went to work with Celestia. I really liked their approach to technology, and I like the solution that they're bringing to the table and stuff. But I also really liked the founders, I would say anti-maximalist approach to their communications and stuff like that. And I just think that being so bought into a single idea, prevents you from seeing and understanding everything else that's out there. So, I don't know... Not only think it's just toxic in general, but I also think it's very limiting for your own career and your own understanding of the whole landscape.

(19:18):

Because if you box yourself in, you're preventing yourself from doing any research or understanding everything else out there in the world. So, my take has always been to really try to do due diligence on all of the different technologies that are out there, and try to truly understand them, and not have any bias to the way I look at something new. And really try to get to the bottom of it. But it's hard, because there's just so many different things that are happening at a given time. And there's also so many people that are shilling their own thing, without being very honest about what are the trade-offs sometimes. So, it is challenging to understand everything that's going out there. But yeah, my take is to always try to say, "Okay, this thing is here. I'm going to do some research." And once I understand it, I want to know the trade-offs, and I want to speak honestly about those trade-offs in the future.

(20:10):

Because nothing is perfect, and very rarely is something legitimate actually not worth anything at all. You'll see people that try to talk about certain technologies, as if they're completely worthless. When in reality, there's a trade-off there, that's actually being made, and they're just trying to make their thing look better by talking negatively about the other thing. But I think most of the technologies... Not all, but most of the technologies that make it into the mainstream, do have a good value proposition. The question is whether or not that is the right long term trade off to make. Those are the questions that I think that we don't always know the answer to.

Brian (20:47):

No, couldn't agree more. And I think it times up really well with what we're doing over here at Phantom. I think by the time this episode is live, we'll be taking the first few people off our beta wait list, for a multi chain Phantom, where it's all going to be one aggregated view of switching chains, and we agree that we want to get past the maximalism front. There's a lot of really awesome work being done across the VM ecosystem, across the Solana space, and everything in between. And I think it's a really cool time for the industry to be bringing this all together. I couldn't be more excited.

(21:17):

So, a few more questions here for you as we wrap up. You've hit on a lot across your journey through Web2 to Web3, everything that's going on now in Web3, across Lens and Aave. If you were a new dev coming in here, let's say you have TypeScript experience, your classic what you would need for some Web3 JS work, how would you point new developers who are interested in the space and coming into the space, and wanting to potentially contribute, and end up working full-time in this industry?

Nader (21:46):

Yeah, I think front end developers are just very uniquely suited, but also they are in a great position, and huge opportunities lie to them without having to learn a lot of new stuff, which is really cool, and really exciting. At least for me, as someone who is for the most part, just a front end or a mobile developer. I thought that it was very approachable to get into this space, because every application still needs a front end. The only difference is that instead of sending an HTTP or GraphQL request, a traditional HTTP request, you're sending an RPC request for the most part, to transact with these different networks and stuff. And I think that's the main thing that you would have to just try to dive into a little bit, and understand. And then, you probably would be ready to start doing some interviews.

(22:29):

And I think if you're a good front end engineer, even with the market as it is today, there's still a very good demand for that. I think the challenge has always been for junior engineers to get their foot in the door, unfortunately. I think it is still somewhat of a challenge if you're a junior, to land that first role. But beyond that, I think that if you have some skillset on the front end, you can get started with... Most companies that are hiring will probably give you a shot. If you've done just even the slightest amount of due diligence, to understand what are these client side libraries. So, you have things like Ethers.js, you have things like Solana.js. I believe we have WalletConnect, Rainbow Wallet. And then, I think that you probably know some of the more Solana specific wallet adapters, and stuff for JavaScript.

(23:14):

Anyway. So experiment, figure out which ecosystem you want to be in. Look at all the different client side libraries and stuff that are there. Just build out a couple of apps over the week, literally just building out two or three apps, and throwing on your GitHub, will probably set you apart from 99% of the people out there. And yeah, it's really not rocket science, I don't think, to get hired in this industry if you're a friend and developer. So, that would be my take, is just to realize that 95% of your skills are transferable. The other 5% is just understanding these blockchain specific interactions with RPCs, and the wallet stuff as well, which is the web3 blockchain version of identity.

Brian (23:50):

I couldn't agree more. Building in public, building out that resume, is such a stronger signal than anything else in this space. And it can be done. It's just a couple of weeks. If you put the hard work into it, you already have the skillset. It's just about showing your work at that point. Well Nader, this has been awesome. One closing question we ask all our guests, and I'd love to hear this from you, is who is a builder that you admire in the Web3 ecosystem?

Nader (24:16):

Wow, that's a good question. I think that there's not just a single one, there's just really so many. I would say that if I had to point out maybe a couple of people, one of them would definitely be the team I have here, that I've met here at Lance and Ave. They're not really that active, or as active on social media, I would say. But I want to give a shout-out to Josh, who is the main backend engineer on Lens. He's just incredible. He'll come up with a solution for what is a problem that maybe has never been solved before, an idea. And then, he'll actually have implemented that in sometimes days or weeks. And just seeing that done on a consistent basis, is just really wild. There's a lot of developers from within developer DAO, that I would shout out. I think that engineers over at Celestia, like Mustafa Al-Bassam, and the rest of the folks over there, are really incredible. There's a lot of high quality people that are building right now. It's hard to say anyone without feeling like I'm leaving a bunch of people out, to be honest.

Brian (25:17):

That's a good sign though.

Nader (25:18):

But yeah, but Armani Ferrante. Armani is in this salon ecosystem. He's definitely one of my favorites as well.

Brian (25:24):

Oh, that's awesome. Well, I couldn't agree more. Lots of great names all through that list. No shortage of folks in this industry, who are working hard every day to push this space forward. Nader, thanks so much for coming on the show. Where can folks go to learn more about what you're up to at Lens?

Nader (25:39):

Yeah, I would just say, you can go to my Lens profile. It's nader.lens, on any of the lens front ends, like Lenster, on Twitter, on DaBa3. And then, I have my personal webpage set up on RWE, that's my links to my YouTube and stuff. And that's on nader.rwe.dev.

Brian (25:58):

Awesome. Nader Dabit, thanks for coming on the Zeitgeist.

Nader (25:59):

Thank you for having me.

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