Lens launches mainnet today, bringing a potential new era to SocialFi

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About 11 months after its initial announcement, the mainnet of Lens Chain goes live today with its V3 deployment.

Lens Protocol launched in February 2022 on the Polygon sidechain. 

In May 2024, Lens announced that it was migrating off Polygon to its own L2 chain built within the zkSync Elastic Network. For the deal, Lens was reportedly paid 0.5% of the total ZK token supply (worth about $6.5M today).

The shift to its own L2, however, was motivated primarily by costs and scalability. 

Building Lens on the Polygon sidechain made sense in 2021, but once L2s were available, they provided a better cost basis for transactions, Lens founder Stani Kulechov told me last September at Token2049 Singapore.

“The costs on Polygon don’t scale to mainstream usage for social transactions. Compared to a rollup, the cost savings looks 30 to 50 times lower,” Kulechov said.

Rather than posting data to the Ethereum L1, Lens Chain is using Avail as its data availability (DA) layer. That makes Lens Chain technically a validium rollup that also enjoys the security of Ethereum’s settlement.

Lens’ migration to its own chain is purportedly one of the largest. According to an official blog, the entire social graph to be migrated comes out to about 125GB of historical data and 12M+ content posts.

Users on Lens Chain will enjoy near-zero gas fees and can pay in Aave’s GHO stablecoin.

All content will also be stored onchain. This is thanks to Grove, Lens’ new storage infrastructure. Grove allows developers on Lens to have customizable access and control over user data. Platform data can be either permanent or deleted.

This makes all Lens’ social data fully onchain and decentralized, in contrast to competing Web3 social platforms like Farcaster, where only user profiles are onchain.

This, at its core, is what forms the foundation of Lens V3, what the team has termed a modular social protocol.

In addition, Grove also promises to deliver the “speed and cost-efficiency of leading Web2 solutions like AWS S3 and Cloudflare R2,” its blog says.

The state of Lens

Today, Lens boasts about 650,000 user profiles and 28 million social connections.

That is still a far cry from being a serious challenge to traditional social media platforms, but consider how far the promise of “social media on the blockchain” has come.

As far back as 2016, companies like Steem, a social project that was bought by the Tron Foundation in 2020 and subsequently hardforked by its original community into what is known today as the HIVE blockchain.

What does Lens do differently?

Recall that Lens is not a social media platform per se, but a protocol where apps can be built on top of it.

Lens’ protocol is decidedly taking a builder-centric growth strategy. Lens wants to target app builders, in particular Web2 developers who have historically been deterred by the clunky UX and complexity of Web3.

“Our strategy focuses on social plus finance apps: projects where people connect, create and earn. Just like YouTube unlocked a new class of creators, Lens is unlocking a new class of SocialFi apps,” the Lens team told Blockworks.

In other words, the freedom to monetize on a permissionless infrastructure without gatekeepers.

Signature Lens apps since day one are migrating to Lens chains. These include the Twitter-like apps such as Orb and Hey, the AI launchpad Bonsai, Tape, a Tiktok-like short-form app, and more.

It’s hard to imagine Web3 socials ever toppling the incumbent Big Tech platforms today. But take heart in the fact that the mainstream media and experts of the 2000s felt just the same about competitors to MySpace.

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