Lens Protocol: A New Chapter in Web3 Social

The Web3 social graph protocol Lens Protocol recently completed a $15 million funding round, attracting widespread attention in the industry. As a highly promising Web3 social protocol, Lens is providing users with unprecedented content ownership and social autonomy.

Lens Protocol is a composable decentralized social graph based on the Polygon chain, launched by the decentralized lending platform Aave team in February 2022. Unlike traditional social media, Lens stores all user social interactions on-chain in the form of NFTs, ensuring that users fully own the content they create.

The core of the protocol is the Profile NFT, which represents the user's digital identity and social assets. Users can engage in social interactions such as following, posting, commenting, and sharing through the Profile NFT, and these actions will be recorded on the chain in NFT form. This design allows users to freely bring their social assets to any application built on the Lens protocol, no longer being locked into a single platform.

The modular architecture of Lens supports developers to continually innovate and expand functionalities. Currently, there are core modules such as Follow, Collect, Reference, and more functional modules can be added in the future based on community needs. This openness allows the entire ecosystem to develop collaboratively, avoiding the zero-sum game between Web2 social platforms.

For creators, Lens offers a more flexible way to monetize content. Creators can set up mechanisms such as paid subscriptions and paid collections, and can even earn revenue sharing from the secondary distribution of their content. This provides creators with more sources of income.

Although the Lens ecosystem is still in its early stages, it has attracted the attention of numerous developers and users. As of now, Lens has issued nearly 94,000 Profiles, with over 86,000 holding addresses, and a unique holding rate as high as 92%. This indicates a high level of user recognition for the protocol.

Currently, new users mainly obtain Lens Profiles through three ways: signing the open letter and waiting for the official release, purchasing on the secondary market, or participating in official collaborative activities. Although the entry threshold is relatively high, this also ensures the quality of the ecosystem to some extent.

In the Lens ecosystem, a number of distinctive applications have emerged, such as the social media platform Lenster, the video platform Lenstube, and the professional networking platform ORB. These applications are exploring various possibilities of Web3 social, providing users with a rich and diverse social experience.

Lens Protocol represents the direction of development for Web3 social - returning data ownership to users, breaking down platform barriers, and achieving true open interconnectivity. Although the current user scale and activity level still lag behind Web2 giants, its philosophy and technical route are worthy of attention. With the continuous improvement of the ecosystem, Lens is expected to become an important infrastructure for decentralized social in the future.

For individual users, now is a great opportunity to understand and enter the Lens ecosystem. By accumulating social data and interactions on the protocol, users can gradually build their own on-chain social assets, preparing for the large-scale application of Web3 social in the future.