Social media decentralization underway: the progress of Lens protocol

Social media is becoming an increasingly big part of our lives, both personal and professional. However, even as its importance grows, its structure stays untouched: our social profiles, together with all their connections, followers, and posts, are still stored and managed by one company, be it Meta or X. This gives the said companies the power to dispose of anyone’s account as they wish, effectively silencing a person or ruining their business.

Web3 was born to provide an alternative to centrally managed services, and social media is arguably the Holy Grail of web3 applications – poised to improve censorship resistance, as well as transparency and monetization practices.

So far, the Grail remains unclaimed, with projects like Steemit or Ecency that could not create enough traction. However, a new generation of decentralized social media (sometimes called DeSoc) is emerging, and Lens protocol is at its forefront.

What is Lens protocol?

Lens protocol is not one DApp (decentralized application), but rather an infrastructure. It offers a decentralized composable and portable social graph, which could be used to build all types of social networks. The graph records user profiles, their connections, posts, and interactions, which are stored in a decentralized way and can be carried from one Dapp to another.

User profiles are created as NFTs pointing at data storage, ensuring that users own their data and can move it from DApp to DApp, or even sell if necessary (the current floor price of a Lens profile NFT set at 0.1 ETH).

This approach has the potential to address the primary challenges that the industry faces:

• Data ownership: the NFT profile owner is the one who controls its data,
• Authentication: the blockchain recording all user activity makes it easier to identify and deal with fake accounts,
• Monetization: creators can choose to enable a "Collect" option when they post content to their profile NFT, allowing their followers to purchase the content as an NFT.

Created by Aave Companies – the firm behind the famous DeFi service Aave – Lens protocol is praised for its modular structure, allowing easy upgrades and a high degree of customization.

Scalability is another strong focus, and launching Lens on Polygon, Ethereum’s layer-2, was an important step in ensuring that its DApps can scale. However, even Polygon might not be able to sustain the activity of a successful social media platform, which is why last week Lens protocol announced the launch of Momoka, a layer-3 “hyperscalability” solution. Momoka will process most transactions off-chain, while ensuring that data remains accessible and verifiable when needed for on-chain settlement, dispute resolution, or audits.

DApps already built on Lens

Lens protocol was released just a year ago, and despite still being closed to the general public (only whitelisted addresses can claim an NFT profile), it has already shown signs of success: 116,911 NFT profiles registered, an average of 100,000 daily transactions, and an increasing user engagement with an average of 76’000 of posts, reposts and comments since February (source: Dune).

Among the DApps built on Lens, the most popular is Lenster, a decentralized version of Facebook with 44% of the overall Lens active users. The presence of popular crypto information resources such as Bankless or Messari, which now post regularly on Lenster, is driving adoption within the crypto community.

The second most popular Lens DApp is Phaver, a decentralized version of Instagram, available only on mobile and gathering 23% of all Lens active users. Phaver incentivizes users to vote (“stake”) on the content, remunerating those who voted early for a popular post.

Other social Dapps on Lens include Lenstube (a decentralized YouTube), Kaira (a decentralized version of Quora), and Collectz (an NFT marketplace), with more DApps in different stages of development and testing.

While Lens Protocol is gaining popularity among crypto enthusiasts, attracting non-crypto communities will be its main challenge when it finally opens to the public.

Additionally, alternative decentralized social media can become competition. Nostr, a decentralized platform leveraging the Bitcoin blockchain to allow users to exchange signed messages, has been rapidly gaining traction since Jack Dorsey endorsed it last December. It now counts over 780’000 daily active users, mostly Bitcoin enthusiasts able to navigate its somewhat difficult interface.

Jack Dorsey's own initiative Bluesky, which also promises to fix social media via decentralization, has recently launched its mobile apps, and the number of users (so far invitation-only) keeps growing.

This competition, as well as the different technological approaches to disrupt social media, send a positive message about the future of the industry.

Written by D.Center