Participated · Equity · Dec 2024

Lens is a decentralized protocol designed to serve as infrastructure for social and consumer apps; users own their identity and content and apps act as clients to the blockchain. It defines social primitives — accounts, usernames, graphs, feeds, and groups — and supports developer-created rules for access control, token gating, and subscriber-only feeds. Lens v3 is a complete protocol overhaul that moves the stack from Polygon to zkSync and validiums to dramatically lower transaction costs and enable consumer-scale usage. The project powers apps on Lens v2 including Zora, Hey, Kaira, and Orb, and the team aims for interactions to cost roughly as much as cloud server costs so developers can absorb them. Avara announced a $31 million funding round for Lens, and the Lens team plans to launch the Lens v3 mainnet in the first quarter of 2025. Avara founder Stani Kulechov frames the effort around decentralization that gives users more power and enables new revenue-sharing models for creators. Lens Protocol is a decentralized social networking protocol developed by Aave aimed at creating an open, neutral layer for social apps. The protocol focuses on giving users more control over their data and enabling developers to build varied use cases from gaming to social media. Lens has been in beta since May 2022 and so far has granted access to a limited set of users while additional desktop and mobile applications are being built (Orb, Riff, Enso Collective). The team says the roadmap will remain in beta until infrastructure and the ecosystem grow sufficiently to open protocol access more broadly. Lens aims to be a flexible, neutral protocol that shares monetization across contributors rather than being owned by a single incumbent. The protocol raised $15M to expand its ecosystem and continue development; there is no valuation available.