Avara, the organization behind Aave, Lens, and Family, has declared a $31 million funding round, spearheaded by Lightspeed Faction. Using Lens, Avara aims to construct a decentralized Layer 2 network that could act as the foundational framework for social and consumer applications.
This announcement of funding follows Lens’s recent introduction of its newly revised protocol, Lens v3. Initially developed on the Polygon blockchain, user applications currently employing Lens v2 include the NFT creation and sharing app Zora, Twitter-like platforms Hey and Kaira, alongside subcommunity-centric app Orb.
What drives crypto developers to pursue the creation of the next significant social network? The answer lies in the principles of decentralization and a user-centric approach.
When users engage with an application powered by Lens, they maintain ownership of their identity and content. The apps developed on the Lens network function as interfaces to interact with the blockchain, with the Lens team referring to them as clients. Should users wish to switch to a different social platform due to dissatisfaction with changes, they can easily log into another Lens-enabled app.
Furthermore, while consumer social applications offer incentives for creators through reward programs and subscription models, the underlying companies dictate the guidelines.
“I believe that current social networks are very monetarily driven, yet most of that financial benefit flows from advertisers to the platform, leaving little for the users,” stated Avara’s founder Stani Kulechov (shown above) in an interview with TechCrunch. He also expressed concerns over users being “locked into a specific database.”
With decentralized social applications, “this essentially inverts the model, placing greater importance and power in the hands of the users compared to the platform itself,” Kulechov elaborated. This shift could potentially usher in more transparent revenue-sharing agreements, resulting in improved rewards for creators.
Core Social Features
With the rollout of Lens v3, the company aims to address one of the predominant challenges facing web3 social endeavors — transaction costs. Posting on a web3 platform necessitates the signing of a transaction on a foundational blockchain. Although Layer 2 networks have helped to reduce transactional costs over recent years, these expenses still pose a barrier for widespread consumer applications.
“We initially deployed on Polygon, but the network is not equipped for mainstream usage … where one transaction might only cost a fraction of a cent. That is fundamentally why we opted for a stack that would allow us to leverage the advantages of Ethereum. For all transactions on the Lens Network, we encapsulate them with ZK proofs and subsequently process these transactions on Ethereum,” commented Kulechov.
The Lens network now utilizes ZKsync as its foundational technology, supplemented with validiums. In contrast to Base or Arbitrum, validiums utilize an off-chain transaction approach, significantly reducing transaction costs.
“This allows us to facilitate transactions at a far lower cost than current rollups, thus opening up a novel design space for additional consumer applications,” Kulechov remarked.
The goal is for interactions within the Lens network to be priced similarly to cloud server expenses, enabling developers to manage these costs on behalf of their users. “Our vision is that participation in blockchains should be as free for users as using the internet is,” Kulechov emphasized.
Lens is defining certain “social primitives” that characterize the protocol’s core attributes, including accounts, usernames, graphs, feeds, and groups. Each user account is capable of generating multiple usernames (across various applications) and can follow others to create diverse graphs, along with the ability to join groups.
A particularly intriguing feature is that developers can establish rules to control access to feeds (and individual posts within those feeds). For example, an event organizer could distribute NFTs to all participants. An online community might then limit access to individuals who possess that NFT.
Content could also be limited to users who contribute a certain payment. Token gating could pave the way for subscriber-only feeds or posts (a “web3 Substack”).
Regarding content moderation, Kulechov asserts, “a protocol should maintain as much neutrality as possible. Then, moderation should be managed at the application level.”
Lens intends to launch the mainnet for Lens v3 sometime during the first quarter of 2025. It will be fascinating to see whether this protocol enhancement will impact decentralized social networks, which currently exist as niche platforms.
In addition to Lightspeed Faction, the funding round also includes participants such as Alchemy, Avail, Circle, Consensys, DFG, Fabric Ventures, Foresight Ventures, Stellarcore, Superscript, Re7, and Wintermute Ventures, along with several angel investors like Anurag Arjun, Anton Bukov, Rune Christensen, Alex Gluchowski, Aleksander Leonard Larsen, Loi Luu, Spencer Noon, and Duncan Robinson.
Compiled by Techarena.au.
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