Web3 Social Graph Protocol Lens Protocol Secures $15 Million in Funding

The Web3 social graph protocol Lens Protocol recently completed a $15 million financing round. Let's take a look back at this highly promising Web3 social protocol and its early participation opportunities.

According to reports, the Web3 social protocol Lens Protocol has received investment from a well-known venture capital firm, although the specific investment amount has not been disclosed. A spokesperson for the development teams behind Aave Protocol and Lens Protocol has confirmed that Lens Protocol is in the process of raising funds, but did not confirm the scale and end date of this funding round.

Recently, Lens Protocol has once again become a hot topic, with its handle NFT floor price rising from 0.003ETH to 0.018ETH, an increase of 600%. The Lens team has also announced the deployment on a certain testnet, allowing developers to be at the forefront of building scalable Web3 social applications.

An engineer from a certain DAO solution provider stated on social media: "The developer portal of Lens Protocol is the best I have ever seen. For all developer-centric projects, Lens Protocol clearly sets the funnel and target users, which brings great inspiration to the market."

Currently, Lens has issued 93,900 Profiles to the community through various means, with 86,422 unique holding addresses and a unique holding rate as high as 92%, while the listing rate is only 3%. According to a data analysis platform, 76.8% of users in the Lens ecosystem have interacted with the protocol 1-10 times, 18.2% of users have interacted 10-50 times, and 5% have interacted more than 50 times. In the past six months, the monthly active user count has been between 10,000 to 20,000.

What is Lens Protocol?

Lens Protocol is a composable decentralized social graph based on a certain public chain. Similar to existing social media, it has features such as following, editing profiles, posting, commenting, and reposting.

The difference is that all actions taken by users on the Lens Protocol are stored on-chain in the form of NFTs, allowing users to own all the content they create. This protocol was designed with modularity in mind from the beginning, allowing for the addition of new features and fixes while ensuring that the content and social relationships owned by users are immutable.

Currently, Web2 networks read data from their centralized databases, where users' profiles, social circles, and content are locked into specific networks and owned by network operators. This leads to each application or network operator constantly engaging in a zero-sum game for users' attention. Moreover, users' behaviors are not shared across these applications or networks; for example, the content you have on one platform only exists on that platform, and to showcase it on another platform, you need to register an account on the corresponding platform and publish the content yourself.

The Lens protocol aims to address the issues existing in current social media. Lens allows users to create profiles( and enables profiles to interact with each other, allowing creators to maintain their connection with the community, forming a fully composable, decentralized social graph. All ownership of actions taken by users on products built on the Lens protocol belongs to the users, who can transfer it to any application built on the Lens protocol.

Profile NFT is the main object in the Lens protocol. Owning this NFT means you can control your own content. A single wallet address can own one or more Profile NFTs. Profiles owners create and set personal profiles. Based on profiles, users can follow ), support paid and free (, post, re-share/mirror ), support content distribution (, comment, Collect ), support time-limited, limited paid or free options (, governance, and multi-signature.

Profile NFTs represent the history of all posts, mirrors, comments, and other content generated by you. They materialize all user actions into NFTs, stored in the user's decentralized wallet, eliminating centralized silos, allowing users to move freely, and enabling the platform to be user-centric. The specific implementation involves tokenizing and modularizing user actions.

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Development Trends of the Future of Social Media: Rights Returning to Users

The CEO of a well-known decentralized lending protocol mentioned at a conference: The development from television to the current social software has been so rapid that there is already a very complete infrastructure, making it easy to innovate and generate compound effects. It can be seen that a certain short video platform took 7 years to grow from 0 to 1 billion users. Internet applications are globally accessible, just like a certain public chain ecosystem and community.

Accessibility is the most important part of the innovation flywheel, and social will be the next killer app with network effects. The reason is that there are currently 5 billion users on social media, and this number is constantly increasing. People need to connect with each other, need to create and innovate, and will create communities to generate a sense of belonging. This, in turn, generates social capital.

However, many social media platforms currently do not protect users' social capital or allow you to express what you want to express. Online socializing is still a zero-sum game; you cannot transfer your social assets. You are locked into a certain platform and cannot obtain the benefits that belong to you.

On Web3 social platforms, users have ownership of content distribution and can decide how to distribute content to their followers. They are not locked into a specific platform and do not need to log in with a specific identity, allowing users to freely choose the platform with the best services and algorithms.

From an individual identity perspective, users create profiles and social graphs on Web3 open platforms, forming a connective architecture that generates social capital. From an organizational standpoint, users generate social validation, and communities can freely construct new algorithms to maintain consensus within the community. From a creator's perspective, they have their own distribution channels, allowing them to monetize their content, and users also have the means to create their unique monetization methods. Monetization and financialization are part of the value proposition of Web3 social networks.

At the same time, creators build products based on the Lens protocol without worrying about user growth. The user growth of Web3 products relies on ecosystem and industry development, and the speed of industry growth far exceeds the product's own ability to attract users.

In a public letter from the founder of a leading exchange on its fifth anniversary in 2022, it was disclosed that the number of users has reached 120 million, a benefit brought about by the rapid development of the entire industry. For the creators, choosing the right ecosystem and direction will yield twice the result with half the effort.

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How New Users Can Enter the Lens Ecosystem

Lens initially distributed Profiles to the community by signing an open letter and collaborating with the project party. After users receive their Profiles, they can set their lens handle) similar to a username on a social media platform(. They can then follow, post, comment, and collect on products built on Lens.

According to a certain data analysis platform, Lens Profiles grow by 10,000 to 20,000 each month, a portion of which comes from Lens public letter signing and collaborative project activities.

New users now have three channels to obtain Profiles. The first is to go to the Lens official website to sign the open letter and wait for the issuance of Profiles, with an uncertain waiting time depending on official announcements; the second is to purchase from the secondary market of a certain NFT trading platform; the third is to pay attention to Lens official activities, which will occasionally cooperate with project parties to distribute Profiles.

A profile is not just a personal social circle; you can develop products on it, such as doing business. You can engage in e-commerce, create paid knowledge services, and so on. A founder of a well-known lending protocol stated on July 13, 2022, that within a month of the mainnet launch, Lens Protocol users had earned over $125,000 without intermediaries.

There are currently two opposing viewpoints in the community regarding whether Lens Profiles will be open for application in the future:

One option may never be open, which prevents sybil attacks and reduces dead accounts. Because Lens handles are tradable, they provide a channel for users who genuinely want to participate in the Lens ecosystem. If users want to put all their social behaviors on-chain, they can purchase through the secondary market.

Another view is that it will be open; not being open, while preventing cheating, raises the entry threshold and costs for ordinary people, greatly hindering the development of the protocol itself.

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Lens Ecosystem Product Experience

At the beginning of its launch, Lens Protocol opened a funding program to individuals, independent teams, non-profit organizations, companies, universities, and scholars, including but not limited to the following types of projects: analysis, collection, creator monetization, community tools, curation, DAO tools, developer tools, personal identity, mobile experience, social media, spam/moderation, ticketing/events. Below are the currently selected ecological projects by Lens official.

Lensfrens

Lensfrens is a curation webpage for Lens Profiles built by the Lens team. LensFrens recommends profiles that users may be interested in based on their wallet history. Users can also directly search for profiles to follow on Lensfrens. The personal profile homepage of users on the Lens protocol will also directly link to the LensFrens page.

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Lenster

Lenster is a decentralized social media application built on the Lens protocol, and it is also one of the 12 winning projects of the Lens hackathon LFGrow. The official social media following is 15K, and the community channel has 12K users.

Users can display the NFTs in their wallets used to log in to Lenster and the parsed ENS domain names in their personal Profiles. Similar to a well-known social platform, users can follow, post on Lenster, support images, GIFs, audio, and videos ), comment, forward/mirror, collect posts, and also directly search for related content posts or user Profiles. Users can allow or remove these modules in the settings of their Lenster personal homepage.

When posting on Lenster, you can choose the accessible objects ( people you follow, people who follow you, friends of friends, and everyone ). You can also open options for whether other users can bookmark your post as needed, and you can set a collection fee for post collectors. Lenster has also launched content distribution; if a user pays to bookmark a post through your forwarding, you will also receive a share. The default value is currently 15%.

Lenstube

Lenstube is an open-source video sharing social media platform, supported by a certain video infrastructure protocol and a certain cloud platform. Similar to Lenster, creators can choose the video Collect object when uploading videos, limit the number of Collects, set the video category, as well as establish collection fees and recommendation fees. They can also directly forward and synchronize the published videos to Lens. The official social media follower count is 8.8K.

ORB

ORB is a decentralized professional social media application with an end-to-end on-chain reputation system that connects companies, projects, and users, suitable for Web3 professionals. ORB has been launched on a certain application store, and users can apply for internal testing. The number of users following the social media is 16K, and the number of users in the community channel is 10K.

Users on ORB can create personal decentralized professional profiles and establish on-chain credibility by linking various NFTs and POAPs to their experiences, education, skills, and projects. They can also explore job opportunities and apply for on-chain identities, share their thoughts on-chain, connect with Web3 individuals, and build communities. Additionally, users can take advantage of fragmented time to earn NFTs by learning about Web3, known as Learn-to-Earn.

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