Web3 Social Protocol Lens Protocol Raises $15 Million: Analysis of Early Participation Opportunities

The Web3 social graph protocol Lens Protocol recently completed a $15 million financing round, attracting attention in the industry. Let's take a look back at this highly promising Web3 social protocol and the early participation opportunities.

According to reports, the Web3 social protocol Lens Protocol has received investment from a well-known investment institution, but the specific amount has not been disclosed. A spokesperson for the development teams behind Aave Protocol and Lens Protocol confirmed that Lens Protocol is in the process of fundraising, but did not confirm the specific details of this round of financing.

Recently, Lens Protocol has once again become a hot topic, with its handle NFT floor price rising from 0.003 ETH to 0.018 ETH, an increase of 600%. The Lens official team also announced that they will deploy on a certain testnet to support developers in building scalable Web3 social applications.

A blockchain engineer praised the Lens Protocol developer portal on social media as the best he has ever seen. For developer-centric projects, Lens Protocol clearly defines its target users, which brings great inspiration to the market.

Currently, the Lens official has distributed 93,900 Profiles to the community, with 86,422 unique addresses, resulting in a unique holding rate of 92%, while the listing rate is only 3%. According to data analysis, 76.8% of users in the Lens ecosystem interact with the protocol 1-10 times, 18.2% interact 10-50 times, and 5% interact more than 50 times. In the past six months, the monthly active users have been around 10,000 to 20,000.

Lens Protocol is a composable decentralized social graph based on the Polygon chain, officially launched by the decentralized lending protocol Aave in February 2022. Similar to traditional social media, it has features such as follow, edit profile, publish, comment, and repost.

The difference is that all user actions on the Lens Protocol are stored on-chain in the form of NFTs, and users own the rights to their created content. The protocol supports modularity, allowing new features to be added and fixes to be made, while ensuring that the content and social relationships owned by users are immutable.

The Lens protocol aims to address the issues of existing social media. By allowing users to create profiles and interact with each other, it enables creators to have ownership of their community connections, forming a decentralized social graph. All actions taken by users on Lens-based products are owned by themselves and can be carried over to any application built on Lens.

Profile NFT is the core of the Lens protocol, and owning this NFT means you can control your own content. A single wallet can hold multiple Profile NFTs. Users can perform actions such as following, posting, reposting, commenting, and collecting based on profiles, and it also supports governance and multi-signature.

Lens confirms rights on three levels through ERC721 NFTs: LensHub contract, FollowNFT contract, and CollectNFT contract. This tokenization and modular design allow users to truly own their social assets and creative content.

As the true owner of the content, creators do not have to worry about losing content, users, and business models due to changes in platform policies. Applications using Lens can benefit from the entire ecosystem, transforming the zero-sum game of Web2 into collaboration. Developers can focus on designing meaningful social experiences without overly worrying about user retention.

The CEO of the decentralized lending protocol Aave believes that social will be the next killer application with network effects. The reason is that the number of social media users is large and continually growing, and there is a demand for people to connect, create, and have a sense of belonging, which generates social capital.

However, many current social platforms do not protect users' social capital well, making it difficult for users to express themselves freely. Online social interaction is still a zero-sum game, where users cannot transfer their social assets and are locked into specific platforms.

In contrast, Web3 social platforms allow users to have ownership of content distribution, enabling them to decide how to distribute content to their followers, without being locked into a specific platform and without needing a specific identity to freely choose the best services.

From an individual perspective, users create profiles and social graphs on Web3 platforms, generating social capital. From an organizational perspective, users gain social validation, and communities can freely build new algorithms to maintain consensus. From a creator's perspective, having their own distribution channels allows them to monetize content and create unique monetization methods.

For new users, there are currently three ways to obtain Lens Profiles: first, sign the open letter on the official website and wait for issuance; second, purchase on the secondary market; third, follow official events and participate in cooperative projects for distribution.

Regarding whether the application for Profiles will be opened in the future, there are two viewpoints in the community: one believes it may never be opened to prevent malicious users and reduce zombie accounts; the other believes it will be opened, as not opening may prevent cheating but will raise the threshold for ordinary users and hinder protocol development.

The Lens ecosystem has seen the emergence of multiple application products, such as the social media platform Lenster, the video platform Lenstube, the professional networking service ORB, the Share-to-Earn application Phaver, the meme generator Rememe, and the NFT marketplace LensPort. These applications provide users with a rich social experience and channels for content creation and sharing.

Although the Lens protocol is relatively restrained in user growth, as it does not implement content aggregation and algorithmic recommendations, user historical behavior data is stored as NFTs in personal wallets, eliminating concerns about account bans and the need to expend energy across multiple fragmented platforms. For individuals, now may be the best time to enter the Lens ecosystem and enrich their historical behavior data on the protocol.