On November 4, Forbes reported that the Web3 social protocol Lens Protocol received investment from FTX Ventures, but did not disclose the specific amount of investment. A spokesperson for the development team behind Aave Protocol and Lens Protocol confirmed that Lens Protocol is raising funds, but did not confirm the size of this round of financing and the end time of the financing transaction.

Recently, the discussion about Lens Protocol has increased again. The floor price of Lens handle NFT has increased from 0.003ETH to 0.018ETH, an increase of 600%. Lens officials also tweeted that they will deploy it on Scroll's Pre-Alpha test network, allowing developers to take the lead in building scalable Web3 social applications.

"Lens Protocol's developer portal is the best he has ever seen in his life. For all those who focus on developers, Lens Protocol clearly sets the funnel and target users, which is a huge inspiration to the market." Carlos, an engineer at DAO solution provider Aragon, wrote on Twitter.

Currently, Lens has officially issued 93,900 Profiles to the community through signing open letters and cooperating with project parties. There are 86,422 holding addresses, a unique holding rate of 92%, and a shelf rate of only 3%. According to the Lens data panel produced by Dune user niftytable, the proportion of users in the Lens ecosystem who interact with the protocol 1-10 times is 76.8%, the proportion of users who interact 10-50 times is 18.2%, and the proportion of users who interact more than 50 times is 5%. The number of monthly active users in the past six months is 10,000-20,000.

This article will explain in detail how the Lens protocol assigns ownership to users, whether the Lens protocol can become a future development trend, how new users can enter the Lens ecosystem, and the interaction of Lens' current ecosystem products.

What is Lens Protocol?

Lens Protocol is a composable decentralized social graph based on the Polygon chain, officially released by the decentralized lending protocol Aave on February 8, 2022. Like our existing social media such as Weibo and Twitter, it has functions such as following, editing information, publishing, commenting, and forwarding posts.

The difference is that all actions taken by users on Lens Protocol are stored on the chain in the form of NFTs, allowing users to own all the content they create. The protocol was designed with modularity in mind from the beginning, allowing for the addition of new features and fixes while ensuring that the content and social relationships owned by users are immutable.

Currently, Web2 networks read data from their centralized databases. Users’ profiles, social circles, and content are locked to specific networks and owned by network operators, which results in each application or network operator constantly playing a zero-sum game for user attention. Moreover, all user behaviors are not common to these applications or networks. For example, your content on Weibo only exists on Weibo. If you want to display it on other platforms, you need to register an account on the corresponding platform to publish the content.

The Lens protocol aims to solve the problems of existing social media. Lens enables creators to own their own connections with the community by allowing users to create profiles and let profiles interact with each other, forming a fully composable and decentralized social graph. Users own all their actions on products built on the Lens protocol, and users can bring them to any application built on the Lens protocol.

Profile NFT is the main object in the Lens protocol. Ownership of this NFT means you can control your own content. A single wallet address can own one or more Profile NFTs. Profile owners create and set personal profiles. Based on profiles, users can follow (support paid and free), post, forward/mirror (support content distribution), comment, Collect (support limited time, limited paid or free), governance, and multi-signature.

As mentioned above, Profile NFT represents the history of all posts, images, comments and other content you have generated. All user behaviors are visualized as NFTs and stored in the user's decentralized wallet, eliminating centralized islands, allowing users to come and go freely, and the platform to be user-centric. The specific implementation form is to tokenize and modularize user behaviors.

Tokenization refers to the Lens protocol confirming ownership on three levels through ERC721 NFT. These three levels are fully combinable as follows:

1) LensHub: Upgradable Contract LensHub is the core entry point for most interactions in the Lens protocol. Almost all interactions start with ERC721 NFT contracts compatible with profiles NFTs, which are minted when profiles are created.

2) FollowNFT: When following a personal profile for the first time, a contract is deployed, making the profile unique and representing the ownership of the follower’s ERC721 NFT contract.

3) CollectNFT: When a post is collected, a contract will be deployed. This contract belongs to this post and represents the ERC721 NFT contract of the Collected post.

Modularity is the core of the Lens protocol, and everything is built on the basis of community expansion and continuous development of new innovative features. The modules are independent and have specific interfaces, and the potential for expansion is infinite while maintaining the current state.

1) Follow module: This module is associated with profiles and contains the logic that is executed when a user tries to follow a given profile.

2) Collect Module: This module is associated with a specific post (except for mirrors which cannot be collected) and contains the logic to be executed when a user attempts to collect a given post.

3) Reference module: This module is associated with a specific post and contains the logic that is executed when a user attempts to comment or mirror a given post.

The following figure shows some of the contracts required for tokenization and modularization deployed on the Lens protocol:

The governance mentioned above is based on the interaction of the Follow NFT contract of profiles, which also includes power delegation, power delegation of transactions, the ability to obtain specific block values, and the total supply of delegations to obtain specific block values. Of course, delegation is silent by default, so followers need to delegate to themselves or another trusted user to participate in governance. Therefore, users can create a DAO by deploying a contract based on the Lens protocol that interfaces with the built-in functions of Follow NFT.

The operations that can be authorized by multi-signature are: setting governance and emergency management addresses, setting treasury addresses and fees, whitelisting assets, moving the Lens protocol system to Publishing Paused or completely suspended, whitelisting addresses to create profiles, whitelisting Follow, Collect, and Reference modules, and upgrading Lens protocol contracts. The following operations cannot be performed: transferring funds from any user of the system, destroying any Follow or Collect NFT, destroying or editing any non-Lens NFT, and editing any other deployed contracts on the Lens protocol.

As the true owner of the content, creators no longer need to worry about losing their content, users, and business models based on changes in the algorithms and policies of a single platform. In addition, every application using the Lens protocol benefits and contributes to the entire ecosystem, turning the zero-sum game of Web2 into a collaborative game. Developers can truly focus on designing meaningful social experiences without resorting to feedback mechanisms to lock in user attention.

Future development trend of social networking: power returns to users

Stani, CEO of decentralized lending protocol Aave, mentioned at Ethereum Devcon6 in Bogota: From television to current social software, the development is so rapid that there is already a very complete infrastructure, which makes it easy to innovate and produce compound effects. It can be seen that Tiktok took 7 years to grow from 0 to 1 billion users. Internet applications are globally accessible, just like the Ethereum ecosystem and community.

Accessibility is the most important part of the innovation flywheel, and social will be the next killer application with network effects. The reason is that there are currently 5 billion users on social media, and it is growing. People need to connect with each other, create and create, and create communities to generate a sense of belonging. In this way, social capital is generated.

But many social media platforms currently do not protect users’ social capital or allow you to express what you want. Online social networking is still a zero-sum game. You cannot transfer your social assets. You are locked into a certain platform and cannot get your own benefits.

On the Web3 social platform, users have ownership of content distribution and can decide how to distribute content to users who follow you. They will not be locked into a specific platform and do not need to log in with a specific identity. Users can freely choose the platform with the best service and algorithm.

From the perspective of personal identity, users create connected structures such as personal profiles and social graphs on the Web3 open platform, thereby generating social capital. From the perspective of organizations, users generate social verification, and the community can also freely build new algorithms to keep the community consensus consistent. From the perspective of creators, they have their own distribution channels and can monetize their own content. Users also have the ability to create their own unique monetization methods. Monetization and financialization are part of the value proposition of Web3 social networks.

At the same time, creators can build products based on the Lens protocol without worrying about user growth. The user growth of Web3 products depends on the development of the ecosystem and industry, and the speed of industry growth is much faster than the product itself to attract users.

In 2022, Binance's fifth anniversary founder's open letter revealed that the number of users reached 120 million, which is a bonus brought by the rapid development of the entire industry. For the founder, choosing the right ecology and direction will achieve twice the result with half the effort.

How do new users enter the Lens ecosystem?

In the early days, Lens distributed Profiles to the community by signing open letters and cooperating with project parties. After receiving Profiles, users can set up a lens handle (similar to a Twitter handle, Twitter name). Then they can follow, post, comment, and collect products built on Lens.

According to the Lens data dashboard created by Dune user niftytable, the number of Lens Profiles increases by 10,000 to 20,000 each month, partly due to the signing of the Lens open letter and collaborative project activities.

New users now have three channels to obtain Profiles. The first is to go to the Lens official website to sign an open letter and wait for the issuance of Profiles. The waiting time is uncertain and depends on the official announcement. The second is to purchase on the Opensea secondary market. The third is to pay attention to Lens official activities. From time to time, we will cooperate with the project party to issue Profiles.

A Profile is not just a personal social circle, you can develop products on it, such as doing business. You can do e-commerce, knowledge payment, etc. Stani, the founder of AAVE and Lens Protocol, tweeted on July 13, 2022 that within one month of the mainnet launch, Lens Protocol users have earned more than $125,000 without middlemen.

There are currently two opposing views in the community regarding whether Lens Profiles will be open for application in the future:

One possibility is that it will never be opened, which prevents freeloaders and reduces dead accounts. Because Lens handles are tradable, it provides a channel for users who really want to participate in the Lens ecosystem. If users want to put all their social behaviors on the chain, they can buy them through the secondary market.

The other is that it will be open. Although not opening it up can prevent cheating, it raises the entry threshold and cost for ordinary people, greatly hindering the development of the protocol itself.

Lens Ecosystem Product Experience

When Lens Protocol was first launched, it opened a funding program to individuals, independent teams, non-profit organizations, companies, universities, and scholars, including but not limited to the following types of projects: analysis, collection, creator profit, community tools, curation, DAO tools, developer tools, personal identity, mobile experience, social media, spam/audit, ticketing/events. The following are the ecological projects currently selected by Lens:

Lens frenz

Lensfrens is a Lens Profiles curation webpage built by the Lens team. LensFrens will recommend profiles that users may be interested in based on their wallet history. Users can also search for profiles directly on Lensfrens to follow. The user's personal profile homepage on the Lens protocol will also jump directly to the LensFrens page.

https://www.lensfrens.xyz/

lenses

Lenster is a decentralized social media application built on the Lens protocol and one of the 12 winning projects in Lens' hackathon LFGrow. The official Twitter account has 15K followers and the Discord channel has 12K users.

The NFTs and parsed ENS domain names in the wallet used by users to log in to Lenster are also displayed in personal profiles. Similar to Twitter, users can follow, post (supports pictures, GIFs, audio and video), comment, forward/mirror, collect posts on Lenster, and can also directly search for related content posts or user profiles. Users can allow or remove these modules in the Lenster personal homepage settings.

When you publish a post on Lenster, you can choose who can access it (people you follow, people you follow, friends of friends, and everyone). You can also choose whether to allow other users to collect the post as needed, and you can set a collection fee for post collectors. Lenster has also launched content distribution. If a user pays to collect a post through your forwarding, you will also get a share. The current default value is 15%.

Official website: https://lenster.xyz/

Lenstube

Lenstube is an open source video sharing social media platform powered by Livepeer and Vercel. Like Lenster, creators can select video collectors when uploading videos, limit the number of collectors, video categories, and set collection fees and referral fees. They can also directly forward and synchronize the published videos to Lens. The official Twitter account has 8.8K followers.

https://lenstube.xyz/

ORB

ORB is a decentralized professional social media application with an end-to-end on-chain reputation system that can connect companies, projects, and users, suitable for Web3 practitioners. ORB has been launched on the App Store and Google Play, and users can apply for internal testing. The number of Twitter followers is 16K, and the number of Discord channel users is 10K.

On ORB, users can create personal decentralized professional profiles and establish on-chain credibility by linking various NFTs and POAPs with user experience, education, skills, and projects, as well as explore job opportunities and apply for on-chain identities. They can also share their ideas on the chain, connect with Web3 people, and build communities. In addition, users can also use fragmented time to learn Web3 knowledge to obtain NFTs, namely Learn-to-Earn.

Official website: https://orb.ac/

Phaver

Phaver is a Share-to-Earn decentralized social application, supported by Lens. The official Twitter account has 55K followers and the Discord channel has 41K users.

Users can post posts, article links, products, and applications on Phaver, and can also browse all the content of users in Lens. Lens users can post directly to Lens through Phaver. Phaver is currently in the internal testing stage (Lens Profile username can be used as an internal testing invitation code).

Phaver issues 5 tokens to users every day, and users can stake them to 5 posts when browsing content. 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. At the same time, you can be active on Phaver, interact more with the official Twitter and Discord, and meet the conditions to obtain Phaver's SBT.

Official website: https://phaver.com/

Rememe

Rememe is an on-chain meme generator based on the Lens protocol, built by Newt, an experimental group of the Aave team. Users can directly authorize the release of memes on Lenster after making them.

Official website: https://www.rememe.lol/

LensPort

LensPort is an NFT market for content and Profile transactions on the Lens protocol. It was launched in October 2022, with 4.4K followers on its official Twitter account. LensPort combines social platforms with NFT markets, where users can post, discover, and sell posts, purchase posts, discover popular posts and Profiles collected, and trade Profiles. However, the number of users is relatively small at present, and the transaction volume of Lens Profile is less than 1 ETH.

Official website: https://lensport.io/

Lensta

Lensta is an image streaming platform for the Lens protocol, where users can browse the latest, most popular, mirrored/forwarded, and most collected posts with images in Lens protocol products.

https://www.lensta.xyz/

The founder of NFT secondary creation community CreatorDAO, dashuo, once said on social media that the official Lens protocol has been very restrained in terms of user growth. For example, it did not aggregate and recommend content, and did not recommend content algorithms, which was not conducive to the activeness and retention of protocol and platform users. However, user historical behavior data is NFT-ized and stored in the user's personal wallet. Users no longer have to worry about being blocked, and do not have to waste energy on multiple unconnected Web2 platforms. They can leave the platform at any time without any loss.

For us personally, now may be the best time to understand and enter the Lens ecosystem, enrich our historical behavior on the Lens protocol, and generate more NFT data.