Original article: "After surpassing 100,000 users, what's next for Lens Protocol?" 》
Author: Runsheng, ChainCatcher
In 2022, Musk acquired Twitter and carried out high-profile transformation, and Twitter users suffered large-scale leaks and other hot topics, which further deepened the criticism of the data security and monopoly of centralized social media. Users expressed their concerns about decentralized social media (Desoc ) The demand for media or tools has become more urgent, and the hot discussion about Web3 social networking has once again reached a climax.
Under this wave of enthusiasm, funds have begun to flow into the decentralized social field at an accelerated pace in the past year. According to RootData data, in 2022, in the field of social entertainment, both the number of financings and the amount of financing increased significantly, with a total of 56 financings. Typical financing events include the decentralized social protocol Farcaster completing a $30 million financing led by a16z.
Although new projects have sprung up like mushrooms after a rain, many Web3 native projects have been actively exploring the transformation of social network models and building new Web3 social networks based on open social graphs, NFTs or token economic models. However, in 2022, the social entertainment track's social entertainment investment projects are mainly concentrated in the seed round stage. This track is still in its early stages of development and its direction is relatively unclear.
Officially launched on May 18, 2022, Polygon's Web3 social graph protocol Lens Protocol is one of the representative projects that began to grow in 2022. The lens ecosystem has more than 50 ecological projects as soon as it was launched. According to its official website data, the number of Lens ecological users has exceeded 100,000, and now stands at 107,972. So, after more than half a year of ecological construction and development, how is Lens developing? As a leading project in the field of decentralized social networking, can we glimpse the prototype of Web3 social networking and the direction of future development through it?
1. What is Lens Protocol?
Lens Protocol is a Web3 social graph protocol based on Polygon and is part of the infrastructure of Web3 social media. The project was developed by the Aave team and designed by some members of the WE3 team. It aims to enable creators to own their own connections with the community, forming a fully composable, user-owned social graph, and users have full control over their on-chain activity trajectory data. On February 8, 2022, Aave founder Stani Kulechov officially announced the Lens protocol.
The Lens protocol mainly operates around "Profile NFT". Profile NFT is the key for users to control their data ownership. It contains the historical records of all posts, mirrors, comments and other content generated by users. With NFT, you have an ID card for the Lens ecosystem. Specifically, users use their wallets to connect to the Lens protocol to create a homepage, which will be minted as a Profile NFT. Only users who hold Profile NFT (content creators) can create content and publish, comment and forward it. These activities will be recorded in the Profile NFT on the chain. Other users without Profile NFT (non-content creators) can only follow the homepage of their favorite bloggers and collect the content published by the content creators, thereby obtaining Follow NFT and Collect NFT.
Different from the front-end dApp social products, the Lens protocol is equivalent to a back-end product serving social media developers. It only provides modular components for developers to freely combine and build new social products. When a user logs in to an application based on the Lens protocol, all the information in the Profile NFT can be synchronized to obtain the activity track on the chain. If the user changes the address, he can also freely transfer the NFT he owns.
The Lens protocol has two major features. The first is the tokenization of content and data ownership. The Lens protocol builds relationships with NFT as the core. The interaction of multiple NFTs presents social behaviors such as following, forwarding, and collecting, forming a social graph to ensure that the content and social relationships owned by users are immutable. Users can independently control the ownership of these NFTs, such as transferring, selling, or participating in governance, and can bring them to any application built on the Lens protocol, which has more advantages in data migration.
The second is component modularity and composability. The Lens protocol provides modular components such as "Profile NFT, Follow NFT, Collect NFT, Mirror NFT", allowing developers to build a variety of social applications on Lens at will, and encourages developers to develop new components to enhance product experience. In addition, other external applications can also access Lens and share the ecological advantages of Lens, that is, any application can integrate the Lens protocol.
2. Current status and problems of Lens Protocol
Given that the Lens protocol is not open to the public, only some addresses that signed the early open letter are currently eligible to mint Profile NFTs (but the NFT can be publicly traded on Opensea). According to data from the Lens official website, as of January 6, 2023, the total number of Profile NFT mints (total number of users) is 107,972, the total number of posts is 942,084, and the total number of followers is 4,125,451.
According to Lens official statistics, each homepage has an average of 8.73 posts and 38.21 followers. Among them, the top-ranked influencer on Lens has received 61,015 followers, the user who posted the most has posted 16,639 posts, and the most popular post has received 424,034 collections. In addition, Dune data shows that among the homepages created by Lens, the posting rate is 54.55%; except for a few days of sharp growth, the number of new users of Lens per day has generally remained below 200.
The above data show that after nearly a year of development, the number of Lens users and activity have grown to a certain extent. Although the number of Lens users is negligible compared to the billions of users of Web2 social media, considering the small user base of the crypto market and the high user experience, Lens' market growth data is full of positive signals.
In addition, Lens has successfully attracted many developers to build the ecosystem through the hackathon LFGrow and two rounds of donation plans so far, and the applications developed around Lens are becoming more and more abundant. Lens divides the current ecological projects into 11 sectors, including social media, tools, DAO, music, etc. According to statistics from the Lens official website, as of January 3, 2023, there are 127 related projects based on the Lens ecosystem.
Source: RootData database
However, Lens also faces problems such as user experience and long-term ecological governance mechanisms. For example, every operation of the user requires signature verification of the wallet address. For high-frequency social applications, actions such as following, commenting, and collecting require payment, and the usage process and experience are all set with thresholds.
In addition, Lens has not yet issued ERC-20 tokens. In this case, it is also necessary to consider how to protect its ecological governance mechanism. At present, it seems that Lens has strong support from the Aave team. Although the amount of financing has not been disclosed, few people will question Aave's strong strength.
At the same time, the industry still has doubts about whether Aave can continue to support Lens. The reason is that since its establishment in 2017, Aave has been constantly adding new assets, ecosystems and product lines. Its ambitions go far beyond lending, and include stablecoins, social media and other fields, which means that Aave's attention is too scattered. As investor Étienne Brunet said, "Aave has a lot of things to build, and it's a bit difficult to see the connection between Aave and Lens."
However, the most important issue facing Lens is still how large-scale adoption is possible. Facing the barriers of binding massive social relationships of Web2 social giants, it is extremely challenging for users to rebuild social relationships from scratch. Perhaps, this problem can only be completely solved after the basic market of the crypto industry increases.
3. Lens Protocol development trends
According to public information reported by the media, after a year of development, Lens has mainly focused on governance, developers and user experience, and enriched the ecosystem. This is the direction Lens will continue to focus on in the short term. In addition, Lens is no longer limited to the Polygon network and has been deployed on Scroll's pre-alpha test network. Multi-chain may be one of its future development strategies.
In terms of governance, Lens chose to improve through a DAO focused on trust and user security. In September 2022, Lens announced that it would establish CultivatorDAO to address spam and robot issues. CultivatorDAO is designed to act transparently and conditionally, and users and developers are free to decide whether they want to "turn on" the curation and management of Cultivator. In addition, members of the Lens community can fork the DAO and create another version to meet their specific needs for content review.
In terms of infrastructure development, Lens focuses on optimizing developers and user experience. For developers, Lens has released the first developer preview of Lens SDK, which allows developers to integrate with Lens in seconds and allows full control over the user experience of the application. For users, Lens decided to use Web3 and the encrypted communication protocol XMTP to provide a secure and private private messaging service between profiles for the entire Lens ecosystem. Currently, users are allowed to send private messages to each other in Lenster without incurring gas fees.
In addition, Lens also enhances the vitality of the ecosystem by integrating other track projects outside of social media. Recently, Aave acquired the NFT mobile game Sonar and promoted its integration with Lens. It is reported that Sonar has 20,000 monthly active users and thousands of NFT holders. After the acquisition, existing Sonar users and Moji holders can create their Lens Profile on claim.lens.xyz.
In addition to Polygon, Lens should seek multi-chain development in the next step. After all, Polygon's user carrying capacity needs to be prepared separately. To this end, Lens was deployed to the pre-alpha test network of the Ethereum expansion project Scroll in October 2022 to support developers in building scalable Web3 social applications.
Regarding the goal of betting on Web3 social media, Aave founder Stani has previously stated publicly that over time, the ultimate goal is to combine Web3 social and DeFi, turning the decentralized social graph into a trust graph, and empowering users around the world by providing low-collateral loans using the Aave protocol.
In other words, Aave's development of Lens is actually a bet on the SocialFi segment. A new challenge for Lens is whether, in addition to meeting the purely on-chain social + financial needs of crypto-native users, it can develop a SocialFi product in the future that can be widely popularized and can simultaneously meet the on-chain and off-chain real-world social + financial needs.
4. Active projects in Lens Protocol ecosystem
Phaver: Share-to-Earn Social App
Phaver is a Share-to-Earn social app for iOS and Android. In Phaver, users can earn money by sharing interesting content. Users can post, add pictures (including instant photos), links (tweets, blogs), products, apps, select content field tags and locations, and browse all content in Lens. After connecting the wallet, Lens Profile users can post directly to Lens through Phaver.
Phaver will issue 5 tokens to users every day, and then users can stake them in 5 posts when browsing the feed. The specific token reward is related to the popularity of the post and the length of the stake, so as to help users discover the best content. The Phaver mobile application is currently invitation-based, and you can go to the project's Discord and Telegram to apply for an invitation code.
Official website: https://phaver.com/
Lenster: Decentralized social application
Lenster is a decentralized social media application built using the Lens protocol, which allows you to connect to a Web3 wallet and log in using Lens. On Lenster, you can post, browse Moments, and explore content trends. You can also directly search for related content posts or user profiles. Posts support formats such as pictures, GIFs, and audio and video.
In addition, when publishing a post on Lenster, you can choose who can access it, such as people you follow, people you follow, friends of friends, and everyone. You can also open the option of whether to be collected by others according to demand, set collection fees for post collectors, and share fees with post referrals. Lenster is one of the 12 winners of the hackathon LFGrow.
Official website: https://lenster.xyz/
Lenstube: Decentralized YouTube
Lenstube is an open source video sharing social media platform built on the Lens protocol and supported by Livepeer and Vercel. When uploading videos, creators can choose the video collection objects, limit the number of collections, video categories, and set collection fees and referral fees. They can also directly forward and synchronize the published videos to Lens.
Official website: https://lenstube.xyz/
ORB: A Web3 professional social media app with an on-chain reputation system
Built using the Lens protocol, ORB is a decentralized professional social media application with an end-to-end on-chain reputation system that connects companies, projects, and users. ORB can create personal decentralized professional profiles and build on-chain credibility by linking various NFTs and POAPs to user experience, education, skills, and projects, as well as explore job opportunities and apply for on-chain identities.
ORB can share ideas on the chain, connect with Web3 people and build communities. In addition, ORB also allows users to use fragmented time to learn Web3 knowledge to obtain NFTs, namely Learn-to-Earn. Currently, ORB is online on the App Store and Google Play, but it is still in internal testing.
Official website: https://orb.ac/
DAOscourse: DAO Governance Platform
DAOscourse is a DAO governance platform built using the Lens protocol that allows contributors to participate in on-chain governance and own their contributions. As a DAO, you can create your own page, expand your audience, and allow contributors to make suggestions, discuss, and vote. In the hackathon LFGrow, DAOscourse was awarded the Best DAO Tool Award.
Official website: https://daoscourse.com/