Weightlessthe company back Aave, Lensand Familyannounces a $31 million funding round led by Lightspeed Faction. With Lens, Avara is building a decentralized L2 network that could serve as an infrastructure for social and consumer applications.
This funding announcement comes just weeks after Lens was revealed a completely revamped version of its protocol, Lens v3. Originally built on the Polygon blockchain, consumer applications using Lens v2 include an NFT creation and sharing application It’s timeTwitter-like platforms Hello and Kairaand implementation that focuses on the subcommunity Sphere.
Why are crypto developers still trying to build the next big social network? It’s about decentralization and user focus.
Users who interact with a Lens-enabled app own their identity and content. Applications built on top of the Lens network are interfaces for interacting with the blockchain. The Lens team even calls these apps customers. If users want to migrate to a new social media platform because they’re not happy with some changes, they can simply sign in to another Lens-powered app.
Similarly, while consumer social networking apps incentivize creators with rewards programs and subscription systems, the companies behind these social networks dictate the rules.
“I think social networks are very economic as of today, but most of that economic value goes from advertisers to the platform and very little to the user,” Avara founder Stani Kulechov (pictured above) told TechCrunch. In addition, it feels that users are “locked into a particular database”.
With a decentralized social networking app, “that basically overturns the model where users are more important and have more power than the platform itself,” Kulechov added. It could potentially lead to more transparent revenue sharing contracts with better rewards for creators.
Social primitives
With Lens v3, the company tackles one of the biggest problems with web3 social experiments — the cost of transactions. Writing a post on a web3 platform means signing a transaction on an underlying blockchain. While Layer 2 networks have helped reduce transaction costs in recent years, it remains a barrier to entry for large-scale consumer applications.
“We released it on Polygon, but the network doesn’t scale to mainstream use… where a transaction can cost a fraction of a cent. And that’s essentially why we chose a stack where we wanted to have the benefits of Ethereum. All these transactions that happen on the Lens Network, we take them, package them with ZK receipts and then put these transitions on Ethereum,” Kulechov said.
The lens network now uses ZKsync as a core technology along with valid. Unlike Base or Arbitrum, validiums are one off chain trading technique — make trading much cheaper.
“So this allows us to create transactions that are much more affordable than existing aggregations. And this creates a new design space for more consumer applications,” Kulechov said.
The idea is that interactions with the Lens network should cost more or less than the cost of the cloud server. Developers should be able to absorb this cost for their users. “Our goal here is to say that blockchains should be free to use for users, the same way the internet is,” Kulechov said.
Lens defines a handful of “social primitives” as the core features of the protocol, namely accounts, usernames, graphs, streams, and groups. Each user account can create multiple usernames (in multiple apps) and start following other users to create multiple charts. They can also join groups.
The most interesting feature is that developers can create a set of rules to allow or restrict access to data streams (and individual posts within streams). For example, you could organize an event and give an NFT to each spectator. An online community could be limited to people who own that NFT.
You could also limit content to people who pay a certain amount. Token gating could be used to create subscriber-only streams or posts (a “web3 substack”).
When it comes to content containment, Kulechov believes that “a protocol should be as opinion-free as possible. And then at the application level, the application should manage the supervision.”
Lens plans to release the Lens v3 mainnet sometime in the first quarter of 2025. It will be interesting to see if this protocol upgrade moves the needle when it comes to decentralized social networks — the existing ones remain niche networks for now.
In addition to Lightspeed Faction, participants in the round include Alchemy, Avail, Circle, Consensys, DFG, Fabric Ventures, Foresight Ventures, Stellarcore, Superscript, Re7 and Wintermute Ventures, as well as angel investors Anurag Arjun, Anton Bukov, Rune Christensen, Alex Gluchowski, Aleksander Leonard Larsen, Loi Luu, Spencer Noon, and Duncan Robinson.
