Avara, the company behind Aave, Lens, and Family, announced a $31 million funding round led by Lightspeed Faction. Avara uses Lens to build a decentralized protocol that serves as the infrastructure for social and consumer apps.
This funding announcement comes a few weeks after Lens announced Lens v3, a completely overhauled version of the protocol. Originally built on the Polygon blockchain, consumer apps using Lens v2 include NFT creation and sharing app Zora, Twitter-like platforms Hey and Kaira, and sub-community focused Contains orbs for apps that have been created.
Why are cryptocurrency developers still trying to create the next big social network? It comes down to decentralization and a focus on users.
Users who interact with Lens-powered apps own their identities and content. Apps built on the Lens network are interfaces for interacting with the blockchain. The Lens team also refers to these apps as clients. If users aren't happy with some of the changes and want to migrate to a new social platform, they can simply sign in to another Lens-powered app.
Similarly, consumer social apps incentivize creators with rewards programs and subscription systems, but the companies behind those social networks decide the rules.
“I think social networks today are very economical, but most of their economic value goes from advertisers to the platform and very little goes to the users,” said Avara founder Stani Kulechov (above). (Photo) told TechCrunch. On top of that, users feel like they're “locked into a particular database.”
For decentralized social apps, “this basically flips the model on its head, where the user is more important and the user has more power than the platform itself,” Kulechov added. This could lead to more transparent revenue-sharing agreements that reward creators better.
social primitives
With Lens v3, the company is tackling one of the biggest problems in the Web3 social experiment: transaction costs. Writing a post on the Web3 platform means signing a transaction on the underlying blockchain. Layer 2 networks have helped reduce transaction costs over the past few years, but they remain a barrier to entry for large-scale consumer apps.
“We launched it with Polygon, but the network is not scalable to mainstream use, and the cost of a single transaction can reach a few cents. And that essentially undermines the benefits of Ethereum. That's why we chose the stack that we want to enjoy. We take all these transactions that occur on the Lens Network, package them with ZK proof, and put these transitions into Ethereum,” Kulechov said.
Image credit: Lens
The Lens network currently uses zkSync along with validium as its underlying technology. Unlike Base and Arbitrum, validium is an off-chain transaction method, making transactions much cheaper.
“So this allows us to create transactions that are much more affordable than existing rollups. And it creates a new design space for more consumer-facing applications,” Kulechov he said.
The idea is that interacting with the Lens network should cost more or less the same as the cost of a cloud server. Developers need to be able to absorb those costs for users. “Our aim here is to say that just like the internet, blockchain should be freely available to users,” Kulechov said.
Lens defines several “social primitives” as core properties of the protocol: accounts, usernames, graphs, feeds, and groups. Each user account can create multiple usernames (across multiple apps), follow other users, and create multiple charts. You can also join groups.
The most interesting feature is that developers can create a set of rules that allow or restrict access to feeds (and individual posts within feeds). For example, you can organize an event and give NFTs to everyone who attends the event. The online community may be limited to those holding this NFT.
You can also restrict content to people who have paid a certain amount. Token gating can be used to create subscriber-only feeds or posts (“web3 substacks”).
Image credit: Lens
Regarding content moderation, Kulechov believes: “Protocols should be as arbitrary as possible, and applications should manage moderation at the application level.”
Lens plans to launch mainnet for Lens v3 sometime during the first quarter of 2025. It will be interesting to see whether this protocol upgrade will bring significant changes to decentralized social networks. For now, the existing one remains a niche network.
In addition to Lightspeed Faction, participants in this round include Alchemy, Avail, Circle, Consensys, DFG, Fabric Ventures, Foresight Ventures, Stellarcore, Superscript, Re7, Wintermute Ventures, and angel investors Anurag Arjun and Anton Bukov. Includes Rune Christensen. , Alex Glukowski, Alexander Leonard Larsen, Roy Lu, Spencer Noone, Duncan Robinson.