After surpassing 100,000 users, what should Lens Protocol's next step be?

Author: Runsheng, ChainCatcher

In 2022, Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter and its high-profile transformation, along with the large-scale data leaks affecting Twitter users, further deepened the criticisms regarding data security and monopoly in centralized social media. The demand for decentralized social (Desoc) media or tools became more urgent, and discussions about Web3 social once again reached a climax.

Amid this wave, funding began to accelerate towards the decentralized social sector over the past year. According to RootData, in 2022, both the number of financing rounds and the amount of financing in the social entertainment sector saw significant increases, with a total of 56 financing events. A notable financing event was the decentralized social protocol Farcaster, which completed a $30 million funding round led by a16z.

Despite the emergence of new projects like mushrooms after rain, many Web3 native projects are actively exploring the transformation of social network models and establishing new Web3 social networks based on open social graphs, NFTs, or token economic models. However, in 2022, the projects receiving investment in the social entertainment track were mainly concentrated in the seed round stage, indicating that this track is still in its early development phase, and the direction remains somewhat unclear.

Launched on May 18, 2022, on Polygon, the Web3 social graph protocol Lens Protocol is one of the representative projects that began to grow in 2022. The Lens ecosystem had over 50 ecosystem projects at launch. According to its official website, the number of users in the Lens ecosystem has surpassed 100,000, currently standing at 107,972. So, after more than half a year of ecological construction and development, how has Lens progressed? As a leading project in the decentralized social field, can we glimpse the embryonic form of Web3 social and the direction of its future development through it?

1. What is Lens Protocol?

Lens Protocol is a Web3 social graph protocol based on Polygon, serving as the infrastructure for Web3 social media. The project was developed by the Aave team, with some members of the WE3 team involved in its design, aiming to enable creators to own their connections with the community, forming a fully composable, user-owned social graph where users have complete control over their on-chain activity data. On February 8, 2022, Aave founder Stani Kulechov officially announced the Lens protocol.

The Lens protocol primarily operates around "Profile NFTs." Profile NFTs are key to users controlling their data ownership, containing the historical records of all user-generated posts, mirrors, comments, and other content. Owning an NFT means you possess an identity card for the Lens ecosystem. Specifically, users connect their wallets to the Lens protocol to create a homepage, which is minted as a Profile NFT. Only users holding Profile NFTs (content creators) can create content and publish, comment, and share, with these activities recorded on-chain in the Profile NFT. Other users without Profile NFTs (non-content creators) can only follow their favorite creators' homepages and collect the content they publish, thus obtaining Follow NFTs and Collect NFTs.

Unlike front-end dApp social products, the Lens protocol serves as a back-end product for social media developers, providing modular components for developers to freely combine and build new social products. When users log into an application based on the Lens protocol, they can synchronize all information within their Profile NFTs and obtain their on-chain activity trails. If users change addresses, they can also freely transfer their owned NFTs.

The Lens protocol has two main features: first, the tokenization of content and data ownership. The Lens protocol builds relationships around NFTs, with the interactions of multiple NFTs representing social behaviors such as following, sharing, and collecting, forming a social graph that ensures the immutability of the content and social relationships owned by users. Users can autonomously 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, making data migration more advantageous.

Second, there is modularity and composability of components. The Lens protocol provides modular components such as "Profile NFT, Follow NFT, Collect NFT, Mirror NFT," allowing developers to build diverse social applications on Lens and encouraging them to develop new components to enhance product experience. Additionally, external applications can also integrate with Lens and share its ecological advantages, meaning any application can incorporate the Lens protocol.

2. Current Status and Issues of Lens Protocol

Given that the Lens protocol is not open to the general public, currently only addresses that have signed the early open letter are eligible to mint Profile NFTs (though these NFTs can be publicly traded on Opensea). According to data from the Lens official website, as of January 6, 2023, the total number of minted Profile NFTs (total users) is 107,972, with a total of 942,084 posts and 4,125,451 followers.

According to official statistics from Lens, each homepage averages 8.73 posts and has 38.21 followers. Among them, the highest-ranked influencer on Lens has gained 61,015 followers, the user with the most posts has made 16,639 posts, and the most popular post has received 424,034 collections. Additionally, Dune data shows that the posting rate among homepages minted on Lens is 54.55%; aside from a few days of sharp increases, the daily number of new users on Lens generally remains below 200.

The above data indicates that after nearly a year of development, Lens has seen a certain degree of growth in both user numbers and activity. Although compared to the hundreds of millions of users on Web2 social media, Lens's user base seems minuscule, considering the niche user base of the crypto market and the high barriers to user experience, the market growth data for Lens is filled with positive signals.

Moreover, Lens has successfully attracted many developers for ecological construction through the hackathon LFGrow and two rounds of donation programs, leading to an increasingly rich array of applications developed around Lens. Lens currently categorizes its ecological projects into 11 sectors, including social media, tools, DAOs, and music. According to Lens's official website, as of January 3, 2023, there are already 127 related projects based on the Lens ecosystem.

Source: RootData Database

However, Lens also faces issues such as user experience and long-term ecological governance mechanisms. For instance, every operation a user performs requires a wallet address signature verification, which sets a barrier for high-frequency social applications, as actions like following, commenting, and collecting all require payment, complicating the usage process and experience.

Additionally, Lens has yet to issue an ERC-20 token, raising concerns about how to ensure its ecological governance mechanism. Currently, it appears that Lens has strong backing from the Aave team, although the amount of financing has not been disclosed, few would question Aave's robust strength.

At the same time, there are still doubts within the industry about whether Aave can continue to support Lens. The reasoning is that since Aave's establishment in 2017, it has been continuously adding new assets, ecosystems, and product lines, with ambitions far exceeding the lending scope, venturing into areas such as stablecoins and social media, which means Aave's attention may be too dispersed. As investor Étienne Brunet stated, "Aave has a ton of things to build, and it's a bit hard to see the connection between Aave and Lens."

However, the most critical issue currently facing Lens remains: how can large-scale adoption be achieved? Faced with the barriers of Web2 social giants binding vast social relationships, it is extremely challenging for users to rebuild social connections from scratch. Perhaps this issue can only be thoroughly resolved once the foundational user base of the crypto industry increases.

3. Development Trends of Lens Protocol

From publicly available information reported by the media, after a year of development, Lens is primarily focusing on governance, developers, and user experience to enrich its ecosystem, which is the direction Lens will continue to push in the short term. Additionally, Lens is no longer limited to the Polygon network and has deployed on the pre-alpha testnet of Scroll, indicating that multi-chain may be one of its future development strategies.

In terms of governance, Lens has chosen to improve through a DAO focused on trust and user safety. In September 2022, Lens announced the establishment of CultivatorDAO to address spam and bot issues. CultivatorDAO aims to take action transparently and conditionally, allowing users and developers to freely decide whether they wish to "open" the planning and management of Cultivator. Furthermore, members of the Lens community can fork the DAO and create another version to meet their specific content moderation needs.

In terms of infrastructure development, Lens emphasizes optimizing the developer and user experience. For developers, Lens has released the first developer preview of the Lens SDK, allowing developers to integrate with Lens in seconds and gain complete control over the user experience of their applications. For users, Lens has decided to adopt the Web3 and encrypted communication protocol XMTP to provide secure and private direct messaging services between Profiles throughout the Lens ecosystem, currently allowing users to send private messages to each other in Lenster without incurring gas fees.

Additionally, Lens is enhancing the vitality of its ecosystem by integrating projects from outside the social media sector. Recently, Aave acquired the NFT mobile game Sonar and is promoting 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.

Beyond Polygon, Lens is likely to seek multi-chain development next, as the user capacity of Polygon requires further preparation. To this end, Lens deployed to the pre-alpha testnet of the Ethereum scaling project Scroll in October 2022, supporting developers in building scalable Web3 social applications.

Regarding the goal of betting on Web3 social media, Aave founder Stani has previously stated that over time, the ultimate goal is to combine Web3 social and DeFi, transforming the decentralized social graph into a trust graph, empowering users worldwide by providing low-collateral loans through the Aave protocol.

In other words, Aave's development of Lens is essentially a bet on the SocialFi niche. A new challenge for Lens is whether it can develop SocialFi products that can be widely adopted while meeting both on-chain and off-chain real-world social and financial needs, in addition to satisfying the pure on-chain social + financial needs of crypto-native users.

4. Active Projects in the Lens Protocol Ecosystem

Phaver: Share-to-Earn Social Application

Phaver is a Share-to-Earn social application available for iOS and Android. In Phaver, users can earn rewards by sharing interesting content. Users can post, add images (including instant photos), links (tweets, blogs), products, applications, select content area tags, and locations, as well as browse all content in Lens. After connecting their wallets, Lens Profile users can directly post to Lens through Phaver.

Phaver distributes 5 tokens to users daily, which they can stake on 5 posts while browsing the Feed. The specific token rewards are related to the popularity of the posts and the staking duration, helping users discover the highest quality content. The Phaver mobile application is currently invite-only, and users can apply for an invitation code through the project's Discord and Telegram.

Official website: https://phaver.com/

Lenster: Decentralized Social Application

Lenster is a decentralized social media application built using the Lens protocol, allowing users to connect their Web3 wallets and log in using Lens. Users can post, browse their social circles, and explore content trends, as well as directly search for relevant content posts or user Profiles, with posts supporting formats like images, GIFs, and audio/video.

Additionally, when posting on Lenster, users can choose the audience, such as people they follow, those who follow them, friends of friends, or everyone. They can also decide whether to allow others to collect their posts, set collection fees for collectors, and share fees with post recommenders. Lenster is one of the 12 winners of the LFGrow hackathon.

Official website: https://lenster.xyz/

Lenstube: Decentralized "YouTube"

Lenstube is an open-source video-sharing social media platform built on the Lens protocol, supported by Livepeer and Vercel. Creators can choose the collection audience when uploading videos, limit the number of collectors, set video categories, collection fees, and recommendation fees, and can also directly share published videos to Lens.

Official website: https://lenstube.xyz/

ORB: Web3 Professional Social Media Application with On-Chain Reputation System

ORB is built using the Lens protocol and 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 establish on-chain credibility by linking various NFTs and POAPs with user experiences, education, skills, and projects, as well as exploring job opportunities and applying for on-chain identities.

ORB allows users to share ideas on-chain, connect with Web3 individuals, and build communities. Additionally, ORB enables users to earn NFTs by learning about Web3 knowledge during fragmented time, i.e., Learn-to-Earn. Currently, ORB has launched on the App Store and Google Play, but it is still in beta testing.

Official website: https://orb.ac/

DAOscourse: DAO Governance Platform

DAOscourse is a DAO governance platform built using the Lens protocol, allowing contributors to participate in on-chain governance and own their contributions. As a DAO, it can create its own page, expand its audience, and allow contributors to propose suggestions, discuss, and vote. DAOscourse was awarded the Best DAO Tool at the LFGrow hackathon.

Official website: https://daoscourse.com/