Aave team's new work Lens: When social relationships become public utilities
Among the existing social products, Lens seems to be the most focused on expanding developers, operating the social protocol almost with the logic of a public chain.Author: echo_z
In the world of Web2, social interaction has always been the most exciting track: it can explode with massive traffic in a short time, the accumulated social relationships can form a solid moat, and the endless features and content allow everyone to gain new product experiences. Every internet native is a user of social products, and this track has the broadest user base and the most unpredictable demands.
In the development of Web3, Defi has already emerged as a solid landing track, with products like Aave and Uniswap meeting basic needs such as lending and trading, forming stable business models. For Web3 to continue to expand, it must extend more stable and sustainable tracks and products; otherwise, it will always be in the stage of passing the parcel.
Among the emerging tracks, social interaction is undoubtedly eye-catching and has attracted a large amount of capital and teams to enter the field. The following diagram shows the categories and representative products related to social interaction, including credential verification, social media, social graphs, information streams, social tokens, and other applications. There are many performers on stage, but no blockbuster application has emerged that can rival Web2.
It is difficult to predict what the social scene of Web3 will look like in the future, but starting from the design philosophy of existing products, we may be able to imagine a bit about the future. This article hopes to use the infrastructure protocol Lens Protocol as a starting point to glimpse the prospects of Web3 social interaction.
Lens Protocol is a project born with a golden key, established by Stani Kulechov, the founder of Aave. It is a decentralized social graph that encourages other teams to build different social products based on Lens's social graph and functional modules. Lens Protocol was launched on the Polygon mainnet on May 18, and it is worth our early trial and research.
Table of Contents:
Product Mechanism 1.1 Infrastructure: NFT-based architecture and extendable functional modules 1.2 Architectural Significance: Openness and Assetization of Social Content
Current Operations
Team and Financing
Advantages and Risks
Appendix
1. Product Mechanism
Since Lens itself is an infrastructure rather than a complete front-end social product, the product mechanism of Lens is mainly reflected in its architecture and functional modules, which will be introduced in this article. Only by understanding Lens's architecture can one understand the social world it can realize.
1.1 Infrastructure: NFT-based architecture and extendable functional modules
The architectural feature of Lens lies in its high dependence on NFTs. All user actions are recorded as an NFT or part of an NFT's information. All NFTs are of the ERC-721 standard and are divided into three categories: Profile NFT, Follow NFT, and Collect NFT.
The Profile NFT is similar to a complete personal account. After minting a Profile NFT, users can create a username, publish posts/comments/retweets under this account, and all this information belongs to the Profile NFT. In other words, all content published by the user is in the user's wallet, realizing the user's ownership of the content.
The content storage logic is quite simple; all content only saves a URL address on-chain, which points to the specific content stored off-chain. The off-chain storage method is determined by the front-end product, which can be decentralized IPFS/Arweave or centralized AWS S3.
For example, in the testnet, after creating a Profile NFT using any product built on Lens, one can see in Polygonscan that a Lens Protocol Profile (LPP) NFT was generated under this transaction, encoded as 643, indicating that this is the 643rd Profile NFT established on the testnet.
Transaction record of generating Profile NFT
After following other users, the follower will receive a Follow NFT. As shown in the figure below, a Follow NFT with the number 66 was generated under this record, indicating that this is the 66th account to follow this user. All social relationships are recorded in the form of NFTs, and the order of following is also recorded, providing various possibilities for future applications, such as the gated case mentioned on the official website: fan clubs can stipulate that only users holding the top 1,000 Follow NFTs can enter the club, and influencers can stipulate that only users who follow them can retweet content, etc.
Transaction record of generating Follow NFT
The last category is the Collect NFT. Collecting (Collect) is equivalent to minting someone else's published content as an NFT. The content here includes any posts or comments published by anyone, but not retweets. Of course, thresholds can also be set for the collecting behavior, such as restricting only followers to collect. Each content's Collect NFT also has a number that records the order of collection.
Transaction record of generating Collect NFT
In addition to the NFT-based architecture, the functional modules are also a feature of Lens. Lens provides some basic functional modules, and developers can extend functionalities based on these, making them open-source for other development teams to use.
The existing functional modules of Lens include: Follow, Collect, and Reference. The Follow module implements the follow function; the Collect module allows other users to mint content as NFTs; the Reference module defines the relationship of content to content, determining which users can comment or retweet the original content.
Lens encourages developers to create more functional modules. For example, in the hackathon held by Lens in March, functional modules developed based on Lens were set as a theme, resulting in products like NFT auctions and automatic payments from advertisers for promoted content.
1.2 Architectural Significance: Openness and Assetization of Social Content
The above architecture brings two aspects of significance: the openness and assetization of social content.
In terms of openness, since Lens stores all content published by users and all established social relationships on-chain, it is open to everyone.
This is actually a common feature of Web3 social products, as seen in running products like Cyberconnect and 5degrees, which have also established public social graphs. Although there is a problem of homogeneity, this remains the area with the most imaginative potential for Web3 social products.
When social relationships become public infrastructure, users can experience any new product with their accumulated social relationships without being tied to any single product. As Lens founder Stani recently stated in an interview (link in the appendix), what excites him most about Web3 social products is new front-end experiences and diverse algorithms, even envisioning a new business model for recommendation algorithms: developers can train different algorithms for users to choose from, with each algorithm represented as an NFT, and utility tokens can be generated around this algorithm, requiring users to pay corresponding tokens to use a certain algorithm. Social relationships are no longer a moat for a single product but rather public production materials, allowing users to freely choose product experiences, and the social graph becomes a product development platform.
Of course, homogeneity will inevitably lead to competition, and users' social relationships can only accumulate within limited protocols. For social graph protocols, the most important thing is to accumulate users and build blockbusters. Lens is actively operating developers, with a total of 124 projects appearing in the March hackathon. This strategic step is indeed necessary and will have a greater chance of success than building a single product.
In terms of assetization, this is a point that distinguishes Lens from other social graph protocols. In fact, NFTs are also a way of recording data; as long as they are made public on-chain, anyone can airdrop NFTs or any form of credential verification based on the data. Lens directly utilizes NFTs to mark all user behaviors with asset attributes.
How much social relationships can be worth in real money is still unanswered in reality, and Stani did not deliberately emphasize the buying and selling of NFTs representing social relationships in the interview. However, when users see their homepage and follow relationships as unique NFTs that can be traded in their wallets, it will indeed create an awareness of assets. Moreover, many projects' airdrops also include early community members, which is also a reflection of social relationships. When social relationships can yield benefits, there will inevitably be market prices. The assetization of social relationships is likely to become an important part of the Web3 social scene.
2. Current Operations
The Lens protocol's previous tests were conducted on the Polygon Mumbai testnet, and it just launched on the Polygon mainnet on May 18 (the day before yesterday). Currently, Lens has not released a token plan, and the focus remains on expanding the development team.
With the mainnet launch, the official has also introduced the following four products.
Source: https://lens.xyz/#apps
1) Lensfrens, created by the Lens team, is a front-end interface specifically for following/unfollowing different users. The functionality is very simple, with only the follow and unfollow features. Currently, Lens products still have limitations for users; only those who previously signed on the Lens official website and obtained whitelist qualifications can create a Profile NFT; otherwise, they can only perform follow operations. The official website mentions that the next step will open usage qualifications to ENS domain holders.
Some users have set follow restrictions, allowing only those who have created a Profile NFT to follow them (as shown in the second example in the figure below), reflecting Lens's NFT credential functionality.
Source: https://lens.xyz/#apps
In addition, using Lens products does not require payment for the time being; the on-chain transaction fees are covered by the team, and users only need to sign. However, due to the low cost of Polygon, as shown in the figure below, following someone only costs $0.03, which is about one-tenth of the transaction fee on L2 networks like Arb/OP, making it relatively low burden for users.
Lensfrens follow record
2) Lenster, a social product similar to Facebook, allows users to post, comment, retweet, and follow others, create their own communities, and post discussions within the community, essentially realizing Facebook's social functions. Lenster is a project from the LFGrow hackathon held by Lens in March, and it currently appears to be the most complete project built on Lens.
Since the social graph is an underlying infrastructure, using both products simultaneously allows users to feel the interoperability of social relationships—who they follow in Product A will sync to Product B. Of course, due to Lens's restrictions, only some users can create Profile NFTs.
Source: https://lenster.xyz/
3) Phaver, a mobile application available on iOS and Android, allows users to register with an email and view all published content on Lens. However, to create their own Profile, they must also have whitelist qualifications from Lens. Additionally, Phaver encourages users to discover quality content early, giving each user five tokens daily, which they can stake on promising content, potentially earning rewards in the future.
Phaver "Feed" interface
4) Iris, another social application similar to Facebook, but it is not yet very complete.
Source: https://irisapp.xyz/
In addition, there were many other types of projects in the hackathon. I have organized information on 12 finalist projects from the hackathon as follows:
Source: https://showcase.ethglobal.com/lfgrow
Overall, there are not many mature projects, and products like advertising networks and algorithms require a lot of BD resources or sufficient data training, which is not an overnight effort. The early launched products are more community-oriented and relatively lightweight.
Currently, the number of users who have established Profile NFTs on Lens has exceeded 7,000, showing high interest.
Contract address: 0xDb46d1Dc155634FbC732f92E853b10B288AD5a1d
3. Team and Financing
A significant part of Lens's appeal lies in the background of its founder: Stani Kulechov is also the founder and CEO of Aave, one of the few successful serial entrepreneurs in the crypto space. Stani previously joked on Twitter about joining Twitter as a temporary CEO, which led to a brief ban.
Backed by the Aave team, Lens should have ample funding and has not disclosed any financing information.
4. Advantages and Risks
In the social track, Lens occupies a favorable position: developing basic modules allows other development teams to create products based on the social graph. As long as a blockbuster is produced, social relationships can accumulate in the protocol, increasing Lens's protocol value and providing more user resources for future products. Among existing social products, Lens seems to be the most focused on expanding developers, almost operating the social protocol with the logic of a public chain.
The challenge Lens faces is also the challenge of the entire social track: what kind of product can make users willing to continue using it, or even migrate from other platforms? This is the most difficult question, and I can only throw out some ideas.
The success of social products requires at least these necessary conditions:
1) Fresh and high-quality user experiences, such as WeChat making message sending free, TikTok providing an immersive experience through short videos, which often rely on changes in media to bring leaps in front-end experiences, but this is not exclusive to Web3;
2) Continuous user growth, where Web2 requires constant spending on advertising, while Web3 relies on token economies to achieve user growth through token incentives. For example, after ENS announced the release of its token, the number of new registrations per month was about three times that of the past;
3) Events with widespread dissemination effects, such as Vitalik openly using an ENS domain as his Twitter name, undoubtedly promoting ENS, and Elon Musk's affinity for Dogecoin also significantly boosted the project's visibility.
Products on the Lens platform will likely need to operate around 2) and 3). We will wait and see.
5. Appendix
Official Docs:
https://docs.lens.xyz/docs
Interview with Lens founder Stani:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8-s5pE1bLI
Showcase of 12 selected projects from the Lens hackathon:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaWE33EJFBg&list=RDCMUCfF9ZO8Ug4xkAJd4aeT5HA&startradio=1&rv=GaWE33EJFBg&t=7; https://showcase.ethglobal.com/lfgrow
