Aave team launches L2 Lens Chain for social Web3 applications

What’s new? The team behind the decentralized social graph protocol Lens has launched a mainnet of its own Layer 2 (L2) network, Lens Chain. It provides the infrastructure for the Lens protocol, which allows users to control their data and interactions. The network will enable the launch of a number of social platforms with built-in cryptocurrency tools.

Material by The Block

What else is known? As Stani Kulechov, the founder of Lens and the Aave lending protocol, noted, to stimulate the creation of next-generation SocialFi applications, the team has made it possible for all web developers, regardless of their experience with blockchain and smart contracts, to quickly deploy projects on the Lens Chain.

Several social Web3 applications have already started migrating to Lens Chain, including Bonsai, Fountain, and Orb.

Kuleshov launched Lens as an on-chain social network on Polygon, an L2 network based on the Ethereum blockchain, in May 2022. This decentralized social-financial platform provides an environment for user data where individuals and organizations have full control over publishing and monetization.

Two years later, Lens announced the launch of a network using zero-knowledge proof (ZK) technology. It was originally planned for Q4 last year, but was delayed so that developers could migrate the dataset from Lens V2 on Polygon to Lens V3 on Lens Chain.

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Last December, Lens raised $31 million in a funding round led by Lightspeed Faction. Avail, Circle, Consensys, and Wintermute Ventures also participated. In total, the project has raised about $46 million in multiple funding rounds and has attracted over 650 000 users.

Lens Chain is an Ethereum scaling solution called Validium. This means it does not use Ethereum to store its underlying data.

Instead, it relies on Avail. This is a tool optimized for the zkSync stack and built to provide accessible, censorship-resistant data publishing.

It uses Data Availability Sampling (DAS), which allows data availability to be checked without each blockchain node having to download and store all the information. DAS reduces data handling costs and increases scalability.

Lens Chain was developed using the ZKsync stack, which uses zero-knowledge proofs to verify information while preserving privacy.

Lens Chain also integrated Aave’s GHO stablecoin as a token to pay transaction fees.