Web3 social leader Lens launches V2 version, showcasing five new features

Written by: Jaleel, BlockBeats

Reference Document: “Introducing Lens V2”

On July 17 at 16:55, during the Web3 crypto feast in Paris, on the main stage of the Ethereum EthCC venue, Stani Kulechov, the founder of the leading social protocol Lens Protocol, shared his views on social protocols and also shared his personal joy of becoming a father.

Meanwhile, more importantly for users, Stani announced the launch of Lens Protocol V2 and shared detailed information about V2 on site.

The hype for Lens Protocol V2 began a few days ago, with the Lens official team continuously releasing related content.

Although there was a slight drop in the floor price of the Lens Protocol Profiles NFT due to the initiation of a very limited new invitation system test, it did not affect community discussions.

The reason why the Lens V2 version has received such attention from the community, besides the strong airdrop expectations and user curiosity, is that the community previously asked: "What is Lens lacking that it hasn't opened for public testing yet?"

Stani answered succinctly: "V2."

Although Stani did not mention public registration during the launch of this V2 version, it did not diminish the impact of this V2 version. Let's take a look at the new features worth anticipating.

What new features does Lens V2 bring?

According to the content announced by Stani at the Ethereum EthCC in Paris, we can find some new features of Lens V2: V2 brings greater control for builders, integrators, and those exploring web3-driven experiences. With a focus on "openness and composability, shared benefits, trust, and security," users can now perform external smart contract operations directly within Lens publications, and Lens V2 has added the ability to interact with smart contracts within social media. Lens V2 retains its unique open design space, providing choices for developers and integrators.

Introduction of ERC-6551

In Lens V2, value is accumulated to profile NFTs rather than wallet addresses, thereby expanding the applicability of ERC-721 non-fungible barriers. New features such as new "follow" relationships are enabled. It supports access to multiple communities and creates unique operations for handles and NFTs.

V2 showcases the powerful capabilities of composability by providing support between profiles and ERC-6551. It allows NFTs to have their own social relationships, voice, and monetization opportunities. For example, a CryptoKitty can have a Lens profile, follow other CryptoKitties, and publish content, thereby creating its own value chain.

Profiles serve as the core identifier for all operations. The "follow" relationship in V2 changes from a relationship between profiles and wallets to a relationship between profiles. This change means that all social operations occur between profiles. This improves developers' experience with Lens operations by excluding wallet-based operations.

V2 introduces a new follow architecture. The "follow" relationship in V2 changes from a relationship between profiles and wallets to a relationship between profiles. This change means that all social operations occur between profiles.

NFT tokenization is now optional. All "follow" relationships are attached to profiles rather than followers. If you move a profile from one address to another, your social network will also move with your profile.

Open namespaces. With Lens V2, profiles are handled differently from handles, allowing people to transfer their handles without transferring their profiles, both of which are marked as NFTs.

Profiles can be minted without handles, changed to another available handle, or attached to multiple handles, which can be in the canonical.lens namespace or any other namespace. In the future, open namespaces will be accompanied by namespace modules to create community interaction features based on handles.

Open Operations

In Lens V2, users can now enable and execute any external smart contract operation directly within Lens. This feature can even extend to cross-chain operations with oracle support, such as operations on Ethereum and L2s. This includes whitelisting, publishing music, minting music, minting NFTs, buying and selling ERC-20 or NFTs, joining a DAO, donating to Gitcoin, voting on proposals, etc.

Open operations: "Open operations" create a more native user experience for Lens applications that want to perform external operations directly on Lens. Through open operations, users and developers can "bring their own smart contracts" to enable any external smart contract operation on Lens publications - this can even extend to cross-chain operations with oracle support (such as operations on Ethereum and L2s).

For example, through OpenSea's "mint" open action, users simply click "mint" on a Lens post, and it will directly mint an NFT on Lens via the OpenSea contract. Applications can integrate with various third-party markets and protocols to execute open operations in user-created posts.

All operations can be inserted into the Lens collective value-sharing chain to share value among individuals, applications, algorithms, or other services that add distribution, amplification, curation, or other types of value. By inserting any web3 social application and supporting bidirectional integration, Lens open actions expand the composability and modularity of Lens itself. Thus, many types of innovative internet projects and monetization models can be developed, where social networks collaborate to increase the total value of their audience and content and reward each other.

Lens V2 creates an open operation that allows creators to mint NFT collectibles directly on Lens, showcasing the benefits this feature brings to builders in web3, who can benefit from the shared network. Lens V2 allows users to create an open operation that can be used throughout the entire Lens network in applications, making their innovations visible. Open operations can be proposed as LIPs and built together.

Shared Value

Collective value sharing achieves new network effects that grow with each interaction. It rewards individuals, applications, algorithms, and networks for their positive contributions to the value chain. Individual contributors and the ecosystem share benefits. Lens believes that the value chain can reward the positive contributions of individuals, applications, algorithms, and networks.

With Lens V2, Lens increases the opportunities for value sharing among users, algorithms, curators, and applications. Everyone can share revenue and reward collaborative actions. For example, someone can post on Orb; another user can comment, and another user can collect it—perhaps in another application, like Buttrfly, where algorithms present content to curators, who bring in more audiences. In this case, the original publisher may want to share revenue to reward users, applications, and algorithms that contribute to every step of the value chain, thereby strengthening the value chain and enhancing ecosystem partnerships and their business models.

This new programmable monetization layer can be extended to reward any user or application that adds value to actions. It allows individuals to choose to implement monetization models that reward beneficial and altruistic behaviors, which in turn supports collaboration between networks and sustainable ecosystem growth on shared networks.

Access Asset Management

In Lens V2, users can delegate operations to any wallet, following the relationship between profiles and wallets. Alternatively, profiles can be directly stored on hardware wallets and used with another wallet. When using one or more addresses, DAO or community profiles can be stored on multiple signatures. The improved profile manager offers stronger security.

Open Namespace

In Lens V2, the new profile manager feature allows Lens profiles to delegate social operations to different wallets. The profile manager enhances the security layer of Lens profiles, allowing users to store their profiles directly on hardware wallets and use them with any other wallet. This feature also allows DAO or community profiles to be stored in smart contracts while being usable from one or more other addresses. Social operations can be delegated to applications to improve the user experience of gasless and unsigned transactions. Users can also set an address that follows the account abstraction standard as a profile manager, unlocking exciting new use cases for profile management.

Some security-related features (such as burning profiles and requiring asset management for profile transfers) are excluded from the profile manager to include an additional security layer. The profile manager allows you to build different profile presets, providing rules for different use cases and switching between them. These rules can be adjusted through LIP proposals.

In addition, the new features of Lens V2 include:

Improved profile security. LIP-4 introduces the Profile Guardian, which enhances profile security and minimizes phishing profile takeovers. V2 also adds native reference publications, facilitating greater engagement and creating a streamlined standard for the implementation of the entire protocol. It is comparable to referencing tweets. V2 adds on-chain blocking. Blocked profiles cannot follow profiles, comment, mirror, quote, collect, or perform any open operations on their content. This can be enforced in the Lens application, and by default, they will comply with on-chain blocking standards.

Lens V2 will also host a public Code4rena smart contract security competition, inviting the community to discover bugs and improvements in the protocol and share findings directly on Lens. For more information about the Lens Protocol V2 architecture, please visit the documentation.

Lens aims to return social capital to users

Since Elon Musk introduced a limited traffic policy, temporarily imposing restrictions on Twitter users reading tweets, Mark Zuckerberg quickly launched a new app, Threads, to compete with Twitter. Lens seems to have become anxious and has been taking frequent actions.

From announcing the launch of the Optimistic L3 scaling solution Bonsai's beta, which will handle ultra-large-scale transactions; to securing a new round of $15 million in funding co-invested by Tencent Global; to releasing the LIP-4 proposal aimed at introducing the "Profile Guardian" to help Lens users guard against phishing, and initiating a new invitation system test, along with the most important recent news—launching Lens V2. Lens has made rapid progress recently.

In a guest appearance on Decrypt's "gm" podcast, Stani elaborated on using the Lens protocol and compared it to Bitcoin: "When using Bitcoin, users essentially own their own money and their own value storage. With the Lens protocol, users can own their own social capital and their own social presence." Stani believes that financial capital is something most people have, but social capital is something everyone in the world possesses.

As of today, Stani continues to practice returning social capital to users through Lens. The details of the announced Lens Protocol V2 also seem to bring Lens closer to their original vision of establishing an open and decentralized social layer for the web, benefiting all stakeholders in social media (builders, users, creators, and brands).