Aave protocol developer secures $31 million for Lens, a high-performance blockchain for social apps

Avara, the corporate behind Aave, Lens and Household, is saying a $31 million funding spherical led by Lightspeed Faction. With Lens, Avara is constructing a decentralized protocol that would function the infrastructure for social and shopper apps.

This funding announcement comes a number of weeks after Lens unveiled a totally overhauled model of its protocol, Lens v3. Initially constructed on the Polygon blockchain, shopper apps which might be utilizing Lens v2 embody NFT creation and sharing app Zora, Twitter-like platforms Hey and Kaira, and subcommunity-focused app Orb.

Why are crypto builders nonetheless attempting to create the following massive social community? It comes all the way down to decentralization and specializing in customers.

Customers interacting with a Lens-powered app personal their id and content material. Apps constructed on high of the Lens community are interfaces to work together with the blockchain. The Lens crew even name these apps shoppers. If customers wish to migrate to a brand new social platform as a result of they’re sad with some adjustments, they will simply check in to a different Lens-powered app.

Equally, whereas shopper social apps incentivize creators with rewards applications and subscription methods, the businesses behind these social networks dictate the foundations.

“I feel social networks are very monetary as of as we speak, however most of that monetary worth goes from advertisers to the platform and little or no for the consumer,” Avara founder Stani Kulechov (pictured above) instructed TechCrunch. Along with that, he appears like customers are “locked into a particular database.”

With a decentralized social app, “that mainly turns the mannequin the wrong way up the place the customers are extra necessary, they usually have extra energy than the platform itself,” Kulechov added. It may probably result in extra clear revenue-sharing contracts with higher rewards for creators.

Social primitives

With Lens v3, the corporate is tackling one of many greatest points with web3 social experiments — the price of transactions. Writing a publish on a web3 platform means signing a transaction on an underlying blockchain. Whereas layer-2 networks have contributed to driving transaction prices down over the previous few years, it stays a barrier to entry for large-scale shopper apps.

“We launched it on Polygon, however the community doesn’t scale to mainstream utilization … the place one transaction may cost a fraction of a cent. And that’s mainly why we selected a stack the place we wished to have the advantages of Ethereum. All these transactions that occur on Lens Community, we take them, we package deal them with ZK proofs after which put these transitions into Ethereum,” Kulechov mentioned.

The Lens community is now utilizing zkSync as the bottom know-how together with validiums. Not like Base or Arbitrum, validiums are an off-chain transaction approach — they make transactions less expensive.

“So this enables us to create transactions which might be far more inexpensive than present rollups. And that creates a brand new design house for extra shopper functions,” Kulechov mentioned.

The concept is that interactions with the Lens community ought to price kind of as a lot as cloud server prices. Builders ought to have the ability to soak up these prices for his or her customers. “Our goal right here is to say that blockchains must be free to make use of for customers, the identical manner because the web is,” Kulechov mentioned.

Lens is defining a handful of “social primitives” because the core traits of the protocol, specifically accounts, usernames, graphs, feeds, and teams. Every consumer account can create a number of usernames (throughout a number of apps) and begin following different customers to construct a number of graphs. They’ll additionally be part of teams.

Essentially the most fascinating function is that builders can create a algorithm to permit or prohibit entry to feeds (and particular person posts inside feeds). For example, you could possibly arrange an occasion and provides an NFT to each occasion goer. An internet group might be restricted to individuals who maintain this NFT.

You may additionally prohibit content material to individuals who pay a specific amount. Token gating might be used to create subscriber-only feeds or posts (a “web3 Substack”).

As for content material moderation, Kulechov believes “a protocol must be as unopinionated as doable. After which, on the software degree, the appliance ought to handle the moderation.”

Lens plans to launch the mainnet of Lens v3 sooner or later throughout the first quarter of 2025. It’s going to be fascinating to see if this protocol improve strikes the needle on the subject of decentralized social networks — the prevailing ones stay area of interest networks for now.

Along with Lightspeed Faction, individuals within the spherical embody Alchemy, Avail, Circle, Consensys, DFG, Cloth Ventures, Foresight Ventures, Stellarcore, Superscript, Re7, and Wintermute Ventures, in addition to angel traders Anurag Arjun, Anton Bukov, Rune Christensen, Alex Gluchowski, Aleksander Leonard Larsen, Loi Luu, Spencer Midday, and Duncan Robinson.