Lens, the blockchain network with embedded onchain social features, unveiled the Lens V3 Developer Preview. Lens V3 is a suite of powerful onchain modular social features, such as customizable feeds, flexible user accounts that cannot be revoked and are portable across Lens, and robust community and monetization tools enforced by smart contracts. With these features embedded into Lens’ high performance, low-cost blockchain, developers are empowered to create user-centric social networks that scale for mass adoption.
The innovative Lens new Social Features, such as Accounts, Usernames, Graphs, Feeds and Groups, can be individually plugged into any application. Unlike web2 social networks who control monetization, content, and make all the governance decisions, Lens is fully customizable, enabling developers to establish their own monetization models, determine access control over content and groups, and distribute governance to individuals or groups. These flexible and modular Features are underpinned by the Lens network, a custom architecture designed for high-volume, high-speed data processing, enabling Lens to be used for a wide range of consumer use cases. To enable a familiar experience for users, Lens supports gasless and signless transactions, easy onboarding, seamless interactions, and payments in USD.
“We’re really excited to share the Lens Developer Preview and migrate existing data and apps on Lens. Lens is loaded with modular and highly flexible features that are like “Social Legos” developers can select to build unique user experiences, applying custom rules and monetization models,” said Lens Founder Stani Kulechov. “For example, Feeds is a powerful tool for content curation and moderation. Feeds allow different rules such as who can post, comment, or curate – all enforced onchain – as well as pay-to-view, free, or token-gated content. With Feeds, you can create personal blogs, interest feeds, newspaper-style collaborative initiatives, and more.”
Throughout the past years, the Lens team has been building alongside a community of dozens of application teams and over 550,000 users, understanding their challenges and fielding their requests. Taking feedback is part of our culture and has been incorporated into Lens Features. When Lens is deployed on mainnet in January, developers will be able to leverage Lens’ intuitively designed developer toolkit and already integrated premier infrastructure, including Across Protocol, Alchemy, Chainlink, Dune, Safe, Tenderly, The Graph, and ThirdWeb. With these established technology partners, Lens makes it easy for developers to build scalable applications.
Each Social Feature on Lens is newly conceived to give developers maximum flexibility as well as enable monetization capabilities. The new Features include:
- Accounts: User-owned identities based on EVM addresses and leveraging account abstraction to offer gasless, signless transactions. Users benefit from seamless single account log in for all Lens apps and features.
- Usernames: Usernames are unique identifiers linked to accounts. Users can create multiple usernames across namespaces but only use one per namespace at a time. This flexibility supports distinct digital identities for various apps. Developers can use a global namespace or create custom ones, managing distribution and monetization options, including secondary market sales.
- Graphs: A new social feature on Lens, mapping follow connections between accounts. Graphs can have custom connection rules, like free, pay-to-connect, or token-gated connections. Developers can create their own app-specific graphs or leverage Lens’s global graph, connecting with an existing user network.
- Feeds: A flagship feature on Lens, Feeds can be used to build a variety of social experiences, including blogs, news feeds, and community forums. Developers can set rules for posting, monetisation and governance.
- Posts: Posts are created through a Feed and come with Post Rules that can be set by the post’s author, enabling them to add conditions such as requiring payment to comment or quotes only by followers.
- Groups: Groups, a highly requested feature, enable onchain communities with custom membership rules around access to content and governance rights, including specifying who can join, removing members, or delegating moderation rights.
- Actions: Actions introduce customizable interactions on Lens, categorized as global, account-based, or post-based. Developers can tailor these actions to perform tasks like tipping, collecting, or engaging with external contracts, creating flexible rules for interactions across accounts and posts.
In addition to Features, Lens introduces a new approach to content storage. Custom-designed, Lens Content Nodes set a new standard for managing content storage within social networks, prioritizing integrity and streamlined content management for users. Built on top of IPFS and EVM-compatible chains, this process authenticates using EVM signatures and then uploads the data to the Storage Nodes, which securely store it. Lens has implemented a flexible, multi-chain access control mechanism by linking user-defined contracts on any EVM-compatible chain, Any data modification on Storage Nodes is permitted only after a specified contract function call is confirmed onchain. This decentralized content layer lets developers store user content in a decentralized system, where users can upload, retrieve, edit, and delete content. Smart contracts validate each action, enforcing access permissions to upload data integrity and user control.
Built on ZKsync, which provides horizontal scaling secured by Ethereum and stores chain state on Avail, Lens network is low-cost for developers, similar to cloud server costs. This allows them to absorb transaction fees. Ahead of its launch, Lens has already secured integrations from top-tier ecosystems such as Circle (USDC), Consensys (Metamask), Uniswap, as well as new social applications that will be joining the 20+ applications that already exist on Lens v2.
For more detail, the Lens blog post can be found here.
About Lens
Lens, first launched in 2022, provides resilient infrastructure and a set of powerful, onchain modular features that empower developers to create innovative and user-centric social experiences or integrate Lens’ onchain features into any application. Lens is founded on Web3 technologies that preserve user ownership, control, and portability. With its open design, built-in social features, and monetization capabilities, Lens can be integrated into any application to power web3 capabilities. Stay up to date with Lens at Lens.xyz.
About Avara
Avara is a leading software technology company, building products based on blockchain technologies that serve users, creatives, and developers. Founded by Stani Kulechov, the company developed the Aave Protocol — one of the largest and most popular DeFi protocols in the world — as well as the Aave-native stablecoin GHO, and social networking protocol Lens. In 2023, the company acquired the crypto mobile wallet Family. Avara’s vision is a people-powered internet that benefits all. Visit Avara for more information.