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

Avara, the corporate behind Aave, Lens and Family, 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 are 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 identification and content material. Apps constructed on prime of the Lens community are interfaces to work together with the blockchain. The Lens group even name these apps clients. If customers wish to migrate to a brand new social platform as a result of they’re sad with some adjustments, they’ll simply check in to a different Lens-powered app.

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

“I feel social networks are very monetary as of in the present day, 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 selected database.”

With a decentralized social app, “that principally 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 put up 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 principally why we selected a stack the place we needed 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 expertise together with validiums. Not like Base or Arbitrum, validiums are an off-chain transaction method — they make transactions less expensive.

“So this enables us to create transactions which are far more reasonably priced than current 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 value roughly as a lot as cloud server prices. Builders ought to be capable to take in these prices for his or her customers. “Our intention 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, particularly 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 will additionally be a part of teams.

Probably the most attention-grabbing characteristic is that builders can create a algorithm to permit or prohibit entry to feeds (and particular person posts inside feeds). As an example, you might manage an occasion and provides an NFT to each occasion goer. An internet neighborhood could possibly be restricted to individuals who maintain this NFT.

You would additionally prohibit content material to individuals who pay a certain quantity. Token gating could possibly 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 utility stage, the applying ought to handle the moderation.”

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

Along with Lightspeed Faction, individuals within the spherical embody Alchemy, Avail, Circle, Consensys, DFG, Material 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.