Donovan Choy

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About 11 months after its initial <a href="https://x.com/StaniKulechov/status/1790458663926219212">announcement</a>, the mainnet of Lens Chain goes live today with its V3 deployment.



Lens Protocol launched in February 2022 on the Polygon sidechain.&nbsp;



In May 2024, Lens announced that it was migrating off Polygon to its own L2 chain built within the zkSync Elastic Network. For the deal, Lens was <a href="https://www.dlnews.com/articles/defi/lens-promised-possibly-tens-of-millions-to-go-to-zksync/">reportedly</a> paid 0.5% of the total ZK token supply (worth about $6.5M today).



The shift to its own L2, however, was motivated primarily by costs and scalability.&nbsp;



Building Lens on the Polygon sidechain made sense in 2021, but once L2s were available, they provided a better cost basis for transactions, Lens founder Stani Kulechov told me last September at Token2049 Singapore.



“The costs on Polygon don&#8217;t scale to mainstream usage for social transactions. Compared to a rollup, the cost savings looks 30 to 50 times lower,” Kulechov said.



Rather than posting data to the Ethereum L1, Lens Chain is using <a href="https://blockworks.co/podcast/0xresearch/e91db748-d67d-11ee-8d92-8b61dd33eafb">Avail</a> as its data availability (DA) layer. That makes Lens Chain technically a <a href="https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/scaling/validium/">validium</a> rollup that also enjoys the security of Ethereum’s settlement.



Lens’ migration to its own chain is purportedly one of the largest. According to an official blog, the entire social graph to be migrated comes out to about 125GB of historical data and 12M+ content posts.



Users on Lens Chain will enjoy near-zero gas fees and can pay in Aave’s GHO stablecoin.



All content will also be stored onchain. This is thanks to <a href="https://lens.xyz/news/introducing-grove-onchain-controlled-storage">Grove</a>, Lens’ new storage infrastructure. Grove allows developers on Lens to have customizable access and control over user data. Platform data can be either permanent or deleted.



This makes all Lens’ social data fully onchain and decentralized, in contrast to competing Web3 social platforms like Farcaster, where only user profiles are onchain.



This, at its core, is what forms the foundation of Lens V3, what the team has termed a modular social protocol.



In addition, Grove also promises to deliver the “speed and cost-efficiency of leading Web2 solutions like AWS S3 and Cloudflare R2,” its blog says.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">The state of Lens</h2>



Today, Lens boasts about 650,000 user profiles and 28 million social connections.



That is still a far cry from being a serious challenge to traditional social media platforms, but consider how far the promise of “social media on the blockchain” has come.



As far back as 2016, companies like Steem, a social project that was bought by the Tron Foundation in 2020 and subsequently hardforked by its original community into what is known today as the HIVE blockchain.



What does Lens do differently?



Recall that Lens is not a social media platform per se, but a protocol where apps can be built on top of it.



Lens&#8217; protocol is decidedly taking a builder-centric growth strategy. Lens wants to target app builders, in particular Web2 developers who have historically been deterred by the clunky UX and complexity of Web3.



“Our strategy focuses on social plus finance apps: projects where people connect, create and earn. Just like YouTube unlocked a new class of creators, Lens is unlocking a new class of SocialFi apps,” the Lens team told Blockworks.



In other words, the freedom to monetize on a permissionless infrastructure without gatekeepers.



Signature Lens apps since day one are migrating to Lens chains. These include the Twitter-like apps such as Orb and Hey, the AI launchpad Bonsai, Tape, a Tiktok-like short-form app, and more.



It’s hard to imagine Web3 socials ever toppling the incumbent Big Tech platforms today. But take heart in the fact that the mainstream media and experts of the 2000s felt just the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/feb/08/business.comment">same</a> about competitors to MySpace.



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Lens launches mainnet today, bringing a potential new era to SocialFi

Macauley Peterson

Polygon spin-off Avail unveiled its data attestation bridge to Ethereum, Friday, as it seeks to carve out a niche in Ethereum’s rollup-centric scaling roadmap.



Layer-2 rollups currently use Ethereum mainnet for posting their transaction data, which represents the majority of the transaction cost to users. These costs are expected to come down significantly following the <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/ethereum-cancun-upgrade-blobs">next Ethereum upgrade “Dencun”</a> later this year, which will implement EIP-4844.



Further scaling gains should be found higher up the stack, on layer-3 networks envisioned such as <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/arbitrum-arb-token-airdrop">Arbitrum Orbit</a>, or <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/zksync-launches-op-stack-rival">zkSync’s hyperchains</a>. That’s where Avail’s solution will likely come in, Anurag Arjun, Avail’s co-founder, told Blockworks in an interview.



“With computation with something like [zero-knowledge proofs], you are able to compress proofs, you&#8217;re able to do recursive proofs and make it small, but with data, you cannot do it,” Arjun said.



Right now, some early attempts make use of what are known as data availability committees (DACs), but in the future Avail or <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/blockchain-goes-modular">Celestia</a> could provide a better alternative because they use a technique known as <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/sovereign-rollups-blockchain-scaling">data availability sampling</a> (DAS). Ethereum’s own implementation of DAS is still likely years away.



&#8220;By enabling rollup constructions to run in validium, optimistic chains, and volition modes, we are not only reducing costs but also paving the way for a more inclusive and efficient layer-2 and layer-3 ecosystem,” Arjun said in a statement.



There are some <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/layer-2-secured-by-ethereum">trade-offs in terms of security</a>, but for the kinds of use cases that are most likely to require layer-3s, the cost, performance, and privacy concerns will make off-chain data availability options worth it, according to zkSync co-founder Alex Gluchowski.



“It&#8217;s very cheap, but you only have a partial inheritance of Ethereum security,” Gluchowski said.&nbsp;&nbsp;



Avail opted to become an independent company outside of the Polygon product suite so that it could service all kinds of rollups, not only those from Polygon.



“We wanted it to be more credibly neutral in that aspect because Avail is a general purpose base layer,” Arjun told Blockworks.



The transition, completed about three months ago, saw Arjun leave his operational role at Polygon, which will now be one customer of many for the new firm.



Polygon’s PoS chain, which <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/polygon-pos-to-validium">Polygon recently announced</a> would morph into a zkEVM validium,&nbsp; will initially make use of its own validator set to provide data availability, but it could also use Avail in the future, Arjun said.



Avail is built using Polkadot’s <a href="https://app.blockworksresearch.com/glossary#substrate-polkadot-development-framework" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Substrate</a> technology due to its use of nominated proof-of-stake (nPOS) and tendency to facilitate wide distribution of stake.



Arjun observed from his experience with <a href="https://app.blockworksresearch.com/glossary#tendermint-core-byzantine-fault-tolerance-bft-consensus" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Tendermint</a> consensus used by the Polygon PoS chain that there is a concentration of stake with a majority controlled by eight to 10 validators.



A new staking token, AVAIL, will facilitate a permissionless validator set of up to 1,000 validators.



Other than that, there is no connection to the Polkadot ecosystem. They may be able to help Polkadot build zk rollups on a Polkadot parachain using Avail, Arjun said, but this idea is very new and will require a lot of further development.



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