Lens Protocol: The Current State | TKX Weekly

6 min readMar 6

Lens Protocol, built by the Aave team, is a social protocol for Web3 developers. It serves as a middleware service layer, rather than a frontend product. By using the API provided by the protocol, developers can create social products at a low cost.

Intro

The current social media landscape, exemplified by platforms like Facebook and Twitter, is plagued by several issues:

Lack of user data ownership: Existing social media platforms own user data, including personal information, content, and interests, which they sell to third parties.
Inadequate compensation for content creation: Content creators are not adequately compensated or may not receive any revenue share at all.
Lack of interoperability: Social media platforms often try to do everything to attract users, resulting in a zero-sum game for the platforms themselves.
Censorship and suppression: Social media platforms have the right to censor or suppress content based on their own rules and regulations.

Lens is a social graph protocol built on the Polygon network that introduces composability and open-sourcing, both of which are lacking in traditional social media. With Lens, users have ownership over their content, connections (followings/followers), and on-platform messages.

The key values of the Lens Protocol are:

Users own their own data, which is a fundamental value in crypto.
Lens has built a developer-friendly protocol that reduces the difficulty of developing social dApps.
Lens has developed a set of standards for data formats, enabling interoperability for protocols built on the Lens.

Profile NFT

The Profile NFT serves as the core of the Lens Protocol. Each Profile NFT represents an independent user account and contains user-generated content, such as Publications, Comments, Mirrors, Collects, and more. These contents are linked to the Profile NFT through NFTs or on-chain data. All data generated by a Profile NFT in the Lens Protocol ecosystem can be indexed layer by layer through contract records.

Lens Protocol Ecosystem Analysis

As of early March 23, Lens has over 276,000 users, a significant increase since its introduction. Lens has grown in popularity over time, attracting both new and returning users. However, the number of new users has been affected by the discontinuation of the free mint profile since November 22.

In terms of monthly users and transaction, Lens has shown consistent growth in monthly active users and transactions over the past few months. Despite a decline in the number of new users after November 22nd, Lens has been able to retain its existing users.

Lens has a strong user base, with almost all users having only one profile. This indicates a wide range of unique individuals on the platform. Sixty percent of profiles have more than 10 followers, indicating that the platform is growing and users are actively interacting with each other. This high level of engagement is impressive and demonstrates the quality of the user community on Lens. As more people join, we can expect even more active and engaged users, further enhancing the experience for everyone involved.

Lens has achieved significant user engagement through posts, comments, and mirrors. The level of engagement has been increasing each month, with 45% of users having at least 10 engagements on their profiles. Furthermore, more than 50% of these users have been engaged for over 3 months.

With a transfer rate of 40%, 60% of users choose to keep their Lens profile as their own profile instead of selling it. This may also be due to the fact that most people only have one profile.

Lens Ecosystem

There are several popular dApps on Lens, including Lenster, Phaver, Lenstube, and Lensfrens.

Lenster

Lenster was an early hackathon champion with the goal of reconstructing Web3 social media using Lens as a fundamental, composable social graph. With a familiar user interface, Lenster aims to be a decentralized, permissionless dApp similar to Twitter. Lenster users can post short messages containing text, videos, photos, GIFs, links, and music. Followers can repost or collect them as limited copies in the form of NFTs.

Phaver

Phaver is a mobile social application developed based on Lens. It allows users to maintain complete data sovereignty and creates conditions for large-scale Web3 social applications by bridging the gap between Web2 and Web3 technologies. Its Web2.5 strategy allows anyone to experience all of its content, and it creates a fan graph on the Lens Protocol that only requires an email to log in. Additionally, it provides a unique sharing-to-earnings model that offers individuals a profit-making opportunity for their data in the Web3 era.

Lenstube

Lenstube is a decentralized and permissionless dApp that aims to become the Web3 version of YouTube. Users can upload videos to their own channels, which are permanently stored on the Arweave blockchain and can be viewed as streaming videos provided by Livepeer. By subscribing to a channel (i.e. following through Lens), users can like, dislike, tip, share, or collect limited or unlimited NFT copies of video posts, which can be free or paid.

LensFrens

LensFrens recommends user profiles that users may be interested in based on their wallet history. Users can also directly search for profiles to follow. It can be considered a decentralized graph platform. Personal profile URLs on the Lens protocol will also directly link to the LensFrens page.

Currently, Lens is actively attracting developers to join its ecosystem through grants, hackathons, and other means. For developers, there is both a financial incentive as well as motivation to contribute to the ecosystem as the value of the network continues to increase with the addition of more and more users.

Summary

Lens Protocol is a social protocol built on the Polygon network that enables developers to create social products at a low cost. It addresses issues with current social media platforms, such as lack of user data ownership, inadequate compensation for content creation, lack of interoperability, and censorship.

Over the past few months, Lens has consistently shown growth in monthly active users and transactions, with a high level of user engagement.

Reference

https://dune.com/niftytable/Lens
https://dune.com/sixdegree/lens-protocol-ecosystem-analysis
https://twitter.com/0xsurferboy/status/1621116293469589504

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