Lens Protocol

Lens Protocol is a composable and decentralized social graph that aims to be a Web3 social network. It was created by the same team as Aave.

Basics

• Based in:
• Started in / Announced on: 8-2-2022
• Testnet release:
• Mainnet release: 5-2022

History

• From Cointelegraph (2-2023):

"One of Kulechov’s biggest moments in 2022 came in April when he was temporarily suspended from Twitter after he tweeted jokes about becoming interim CEO just after the platform’s acquisition by Elon Musk. Ironically, Musk’s takeover of the social media giant was reportedly in an effort for more free speech, though Kulechov’s suspension didn’t speak to such a change. He used it as a moment to highlight the potential of decentralized social media networks. One month after his suspension from Twitter, Aave announced that Lens Protocol was live on the Polygon mainnet."

Audits & Exploits

• Bug bounty program can be found [insert here].

Technology

• Whitepaper or docs can be found [insert here].
• Code can be viewed [insert here].

Implementations

• Built on: Polygon (8-2-2022)

How it works

• From Decentral Park Capital (2-2-2023):

"A permissionless, composable and decentralized social graph enabling the development of on-chain social media applications. Social graph refers to the fact that Lens has produced the underlying tooling, i.e. likes, profiles etc., that developers can leverage out-of-the-box to develop social media applications."

• From Kerman Kohli (4-11-2022):

"The protocol relies on Polygon NFT’s, more specifically the Lens Profile NFT, ownership of this gives the user control over their content. The cool thing about the Profile NFTs is that it allows you to post Publications. Publications come in three variations; Posts, Comments and Mirrors (shares). Additionally, Profile NFTs contain a FollowModule.

This module allows different accounts to be issued Follow NFTs in order to record their relationship to the main profile on-chain. It’s worth noting that Publications are NOT NFT's. And the data that these Publications contain, can be stored on either a decentralized protocol such as IPFS, Arweave or a centralized storage provider like AWS S3. With this architecture, any applications can plug into Lens Protocol, and any user can bring their Profile to any application built on top of Lens."

Roadmap

• Can be found [Insert link here].

Usage

• From Decentral Park Capital (2-2-2023):

"To date, the most successful applications built upon Lens Protocol include Lenster, which can be thought of as a decentralized Twitter and Lenstube, which can be thought of as a decentralized YouTube. Interestingly though, we’ve seen mobile-first applications developed in the past few months, with the introduction of Orb, a mobile-first decentralized Twitter, and Lensta, a mobile-first decentralized Instagram."

• From Kerman Kohli (4-11-2022):

"Given that Lens mostly relies on NFTs, we can see from the dashboard above that there’s been 92,011 NFT Profiles minted, with 424,576 posts, 173,299 comments across all of these. We can also see that there’s 677 active users in the last 24 hours."

• From Our Network (10-9-2022):

"The protocol has surpassed 63k profiles minted to-date (across ~59k unique holders), with high volume spurts seen around strategic growth enabled partnerships. Its most popular app – Lenster, a “web3 Twitter” - has amassed nearly 250k posts. Following a second partnership with learn and earn platform, RabbitHole, the protocol saw average daily posts jump from ~2k to ~4k. Despite some regression, daily posts remain elevated well above the June–August plateau."

Competition

• From Decentral Park Capital (2-2-2023):

"Fully on-chain messaging and social media has a distinct advantage over the platforms used today within the web2 world, communication is inherently cryptographically encoded and self-custodied by storing messaging history directly within wallets, with no need for third-party storage solutions."

Pros and Cons

Cons

• Had recent investment from Alameda Research (11-2022), which came out during the FTX crash. This could mean fall-out risk.

Team, Funding and Partners

Team

• Full team can be found [here].

Funding

• Aave has raised $15 million to fund Lens (8-6-2023):

"The fundraising round was led by IDEO CoLab Ventures with participation from funds including General Catalyst, Variant, Blockchain Capital, and Palm Tree, as well as DAOs such as Flamingo DAO, Punk DAO, and DAOJones. Angel investors who participated in the raise include Web3 entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan, Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal, Uniswap CEO Hayden Adams, and The Sandbox co-founder Sebastien Borget."

• Had recent investment from Alameda Research (11-2022), which came out during the FTX crash.

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