Introduction

Lens is a “social graph” base layer specialized for building social media apps on the blockchain. Users create a single Lens profile to use on every social media app built on top of Lens. It comes from the creators of Aave, the largest lending market in DeFi today.

Posted content and user followings are portable, creators can easily monetize their content, and apps are censorship-resistant thanks to the security of the Polygon blockchain. Unlike traditional social media, Lens gives its users true ownership over their data, posts, and value they create online. Oh, and there’s a mascot.

The Problem

Social media is free to use, but we pay with our attention and data. It’s super valuable, and companies look to extract as much profit as possible from selling it to advertisers. This creates pain points for users, and as long as they don’t impact profitability, these pain points are often ignored by social media companies.

Lack of ownership is the biggest pain point of centralized social media. This includes your account, your username, your posted content, your followers, or even the platform itself. All of these things are owned by the company, not the users, so users have no real authority over their own content and data.

Even though creators can often monetize their content with ads, social media companies give creators only a small fraction of what they’re paid by advertisers. Most companies also get paid to put ads directly on users’ feeds as they scroll. So while the value that advertisers pay for is created entirely by users (viewing the ad on their feed), they see $0 of this pay.

Traditional platforms also use infrastructure that suffers from single points of failure. Services may become temporarily unavailable, users can be censored, content and main platforms can be permanently lost, features can suddenly change, and moderation/content algorithms can be bias or dangerous.

The Goal

Lens Protocol is inspiring a new generation of social media where user profiles and social media apps are fully independent of each other, giving the user total ownership over their account and “social capital”.

To make this separation, Lens users own a single profile compatible with every Lens app. This means no more fragmented follower base, no more constant sign up, no more having your username taken by someone or seized by the platform, and no more risk of arbitrarily losing your posted content.

“When you are using one of those centralized social media platforms, you’re basically giving away not just your data but your social capital. The big difference between financial and social capital is that financial capital is something people have to some extent … but social capital is something that every single person in the planet has. Everyone has relationships, and what Lens Protocol is solving is that you have ownership of your social capital.” - Lens Founder Stani Kulechov

Lens is not a social media app itself, but a base layer for building social media apps compatible with Lens profiles. Lens apps and profiles rely on the uptime and security of the Polygon blockchain rather than some centralized server, so users get censorship-resistance, better account security, and consistent uptime.

With this design, social media apps can work just as efficient but without the profit incentive of traditional platforms, giving users way more control. Social media may seem like a small or unimportant niche to some, but we use it for more than we realize.

How Does it Work? Lens Profile

As a base layer protocol, Lens offers all the generic infrastructure needed by social media users and apps. A user’s Lens account is technically their blockchain wallet + a Lens profile (an NFT owned by the user). The profile is the core facet of the protocol.

Posts and interactions aren’t contained to the platforms they’re made on, but are instead stored to the user’s Lens profile. Followers and followings aren’t recorded between platform-specific accounts, but instead between Lens profiles. Users need a wallet to hold their profile NFT and connect to apps. The wallet also comes into play when following others or collecting posts, since users mint an NFT when doing this.

As mentioned, a Lens profile is an NFT. Users mint their profile NFT with a handle (a.k.a username) of their choice, and with this NFT they can:

• post to the profile

• set the handle and profile picture

• configure the profile modules

When a user posts from one Lens app, it technically appears on every Lens app. This is because the post is really made to the user’s Lens profile, and apps are simply an interface to this profile. No matter which platform is used to make the post, the post is always contained to the user’s profile NFT. This is why a profile is needed to use Lens apps in the first place.

Using Lens apps is signless and gasless (besides collects) thanks to the Lens dispatcher subsidized by a Polygon grant.

Comments or “mirrors” (reposts) made by a user are also considered posts that get stored in their profile NFT. For persistence, all posted content (text, image, audio, video) is uploaded to a storage network like IPFS, Arweave, or AWS S3 so users never lose it. Every Lens post has a “Content URI” pointing to where its content is stored.

So since Lens users retain full ownership of their profile NFT, they also retain full ownership of their username and posts within it. This ownership is especially important for censorship resistance and being able to monetize.

“By ownership I mean, when we think about something like holding Bitcoin or Ethereum, there’s no middleman between you and your assets. In the same way, there’s no middleman between you and your profile or the audience you build.” - Lens Founder Stani Kulechov

This is a crucial distinction from traditional social media platforms, as it “releases the reigns” that social media apps have on their users. Apps no longer retain ownership over their users but vice versa, where apps act purely as infrastructure for using the account.

Lens also makes the social media profile programmable and composable, which is especially useful for DAOs and other Web3 communities.

Users without a Lens profile can still enjoy some of the benefits of ownership. Users with only a wallet can still follow Lens users (mint a Follow NFT) or collect posts made by Lens users (mint an NFT of the post).

How Does it Work? Using Lens

Lens profiles contain all the logic for the account, posts, and interactions. These different chunks of logic are split into three main “modules” (smart contracts) corresponding to different functions of a profile. Each profile has these three modules which can be configured by users to customize their Lens experience:

1. Follow

2. Collect

3. Reference

The Follow module lets anyone mint and burn a Follow NFT for a profile. Lens profiles can configure their Follow module and set a price to mint their Follow NFT. This lets content creators offer exclusive access to paid subscribers, or at the very least slightly monetize their follower base (ex: charging a $0.25 fee to follow). Profiles can also go private with this feature.

Each Follow NFT gets a unique ID that increments by 1. Follow NFTs have built-in voting functionality, opening up a realm of possibility with follower governance or “Social DAOs”. Creators can get votes on anything from their followers, and can even assign a voting weight or limit based on the Follower NFT ID. The earliest followers may hold the most weight, or maybe only the first x followers can vote.

With all this said, Follow NFTs may have demand and, in turn, liquid markets. This introduces a unique type of collateral with productive potential in DeFi.

The Collect module lets anyone save a post by minting it as an NFT. This module can be configured by profile owners for each post to let their followers purchase posted content outright. Posters can also set a maximum number of collects or a deadline to collect, and creators may reward collectors to incentivize paid collects (perhaps with an exclusive token-gated livestream). Users can also split revenue from their post’s collect earnings with any other address and at any percentage.

The Reference module lets users interact with a post. With this module, profile owners can decide with each post if they want to limit who can mirror or comment on it. This may be limited to followers only, or could just be restricted entirely.

Other apps may use this module to let anyone “p2p” advertise by financially rewarding users who mirror their post. An advertiser/promoter can deposit a total amount associated with a post, and any user who mirrors it can collect a fixed reward from the deposit (e.g. 5 MATIC). A higher total deposit means being able to afford more mirrors, and therefore more exposure. In short, users get paid by who they provide value to.

Lens apps are simply built as different networking environments compatible with Lens profiles and their modules. Some apps may be specialized for video-sharing or streaming, some may be specialized for business or art, and others may just be generic like Twitter and Instagram. These platforms all use profiles, posts, and interactions, but they have unique designs to accommodate some niche with these underlying features. With Lens, apps have a shared userbase rather than competing against each other.

App developers can seamlessly integrate Lens widgets into their Lens app, and can customize/build out the core modules provided in the Lens SDK. It’s effortless for app developers to make any feature they can think of compatible with Lens profiles. Apps can also offer encrypted direct messaging via the XMTP messaging protocol, which Coinbase recently announced it would use for its blockchain wallet messaging feature.

Builders also have the option to integrate the Lens CultivatorDAO, an organization of community-elected “Cultivators” that filter spam posts, bots, and curate content for app users’ feeds (e.g. content filters available on Lens apps).

How Does it Work? Momoka L3

The Lens team has also announced their own layer 3 network “Momoka”. Lens will leverage Momoka for off-chain data availability in order to scale user transactions and lower costs. The network has already handled over 600,000 transactions according to Lenscan.

How Does it Work? Lens V2

Stani recently announced Lens V2 during a presentation at EthCC, and it has some cool new updates and UX improvements.

The first and probably most exciting feature is “Open Actions”, allowing users to integrate smart contract functionality into their posts. This adds a new layer of complexity to social media for regular users, content creators, and protocols alike. An action could be minting an NFT through a certain marketplace, joining a whitelist, buying tokenized tickets, donating, using DeFi, or really anything else. For safety, any Open Action must be whitelisted by governance before Lens users can integrate it into their posts.

Another V2 feature is the concept of “Collective Value Share” where content creators can further incentivize interactions/shares on their posts. If a user pays to collect a post they saw as the result of someone else boosting the post’s exposure, then the creator can reward the booster (or chain of boosters) with some of the post earnings. As a whole, this incentivizes an algorithm of boosting quality content that others are paying to collect.

The next feature is Open Namespaces, providing way more flexibility to the Lens handle. In V1, handles are inseparable from the underlying profile NFT. If a user wants to get rid of their handle, they have to give up their posts and followers with it. With Open Namespaces, the handle and profile are individual NFTs. The handle is still unique and immutable, but can be transferred and replaced without giving up the underlying account or associated posts/followers.

With Open Namespaces, users can also set their ENS as their profile handle or even customize their suffix to represent a certain Lens community (e.g. sooper.orb).

Next is Lens ERC-6551 Profiles, allowing NFTs to become Lens profiles. With this, the NFT profile itself can accrue value rather than the profile owner’s address. This is yet another layer of novel complexity that Lens is adding to traditional social media, online communities, and NFT value accrual.

Stani also mentions a new follow structure. By default in V1, follow relationships are recorded by minting a Follow NFT. While this tokenization gives ownership and it opens up some cool economic potential, it’s not ideal for scalability. In V2, the relationship will be recorded within the Lens profile by default and minting a Follow NFT is optional.

Lastly are new security features. Most notably are profile managers, where several users can manage a single profile without having ownership of the profile’s wallet. The profile owner can grant other users different permissions over the profile (making posts, deleting posts, answering DMs, etc.). This is useful for something like collaborative account management, limiting the authority of a social media intern, or even DAO-controlled social media accounts.

V2 is also bringing security features like profile compatibility with hardware wallets, plus the new ability to block other Lens users.

Partnerships and Ecosystem

The Lens ecosystem of apps is pretty impressive and constantly growing. The most outstanding apps are Lenster, DumplingTV, Lenstube, Orb, and Phaver.

Lenster is a desktop social platform that has all the same features as Twitter, but with the added bonus of ownership and easier monetization. It offers the “like” interaction for users, and users can even choose the content algorithm powering their feed.

DumplingTV (DTV) is a desktop streaming platform that curates video content posted by Lens profiles. Users “watch” DTV and sift through media with the option to like, mirror, collect, or comment on it. It’s a fun approach to a curation platform with its retro design and ability to pause, skip, go back, and “change frequencies” on the TV. This app was created by the Lens team themselves.

Lenstube is a desktop platform like YouTube where users have a channel of their posted video content and subscribers (Lens followers). There’s even has a “Bytes” tab for short videos (like Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts). Each video also a Tip button, making content monetization super simple for creators. According to the roadmap, Lenstube is eventually planning to support a mobile version of the app.

Orb and Phaver are both mobile apps. Orb is like LinkedIn, where users can professionally network and showcase their work history, skills, or achievements (e.g. OATs). Users can use Orb’s AI Reader to summarize long posts and digest content quicker and easier. Saved content can be bookmarked into user-labeled categories so it’s organized and easier to refer back to.

Phaver is more like Twitter. Users don't need a Lens profile to use it, but need one to get the app's full functionality. Phaver uniquely rewards certain behavior, such as inviting new users or “staking” popular content. Each day, users can stake up to 5 posts and will earn liquid “Phaver Points" if the staked post becomes popular.

Currently, Lens is only live on the Polygon PoS, however it’s expected to expand to Consensys’s zkEVM “Linea” (kinda sounds like a spell). Lens and a fork of Lenster were live and functional during Linea’s testnet, and Linea’s mainnet went live a few weeks ago. The Lens team has mentioned their focus on zkEVM deployments, which means we could see Lens on other zkEVMs like Polygon’s, Scroll, Starknet, or zkSync.

According to Lenscan, there are over 120,000 Lens profiles and over 4.5 million posts on Lens. TokenTerminal reports ~5,000 daily active users today. It’s important to remember that only whitelisted addresses can mint a Lens profile, so Lens isn’t fully open to the public yet.

Tokenomics

While Lens currently does not have a token, it is speculated that there will be one in the future. Stani and the Lens docs mention intentions to expand to a “broader DAO” and make the protocol “user-owned”, which likely means transitioning from multisig control to onchain token-based governance.

Previously, the official Lens Twitter account made a tweet hinting an airdrop that was deleted shortly after. Coinbase also created a LENS token page which was also quickly taken down after going live.

Conclusion

Simply put, Lens is modern infrastructure for social media apps. It’s important to remember that we use centralized platforms because they were the most practical design for modern systems. Now with the blockchain, an alternative design exists with better compromises, and most importantly, the user is the priority.

Lens is bringing this alternative design to social media, giving users total ownership over their social capital. Besides the fact decentralization improves security, uptime, ownership, and value accrual, it also opens the door for novel innovation with things like tokenization, incentives, governance, and unique app features.

These features and principles are the new era of social media. With the latest excitement around friend.tech and the infinite potential of Lens’s infrastructure, it’s only a matter of time before the next generation of social platforms take over.

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DISCLOSURE: I have a Lens handle and have used a few Lens apps. I was not asked to write this article and have not been compensated in any way. The information provided in this article is solely for educational purposes and should not be considered as financial advice. The views expressed in this article are my own and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any company or organization. Readers should always conduct their own research before making any financial decisions.