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

Avara, the company behind Aave, Lens and Family, is announcing a $31 million funding round led by Lightspeed Faction. With Lens, Avara is building a decentralized protocol that could serve as the infrastructure for social and consumer apps.

This funding announcement comes a few weeks after Lens unveiled a completely overhauled version of its protocol, Lens v3. Originally built on the Polygon blockchain, consumer apps that are using Lens v2 include NFT creation and sharing app Zora, Twitter-like platforms Hey and Kaira, and subcommunity-focused app Orb.

Why are crypto developers still trying to create the next big social network? It comes down to decentralization and focusing on users.

Users interacting with a Lens-powered app own their identity and content. Apps built on top of the Lens network are interfaces to interact with the blockchain. The Lens team even call these apps clients. If users want to migrate to a new social platform because they’re unhappy with some changes, they can just sign in to another Lens-powered app.

Similarly, while consumer social apps incentivize creators with rewards programs and subscription systems, the companies behind those social networks dictate the rules.

“I think social networks are very financial as of today, but most of that financial value goes from advertisers to the platform and very little for the user,” Avara founder Stani Kulechov (pictured above) told TechCrunch. In addition to that, he feels like users are “locked into a specific database.”

With a decentralized social app, “that basically turns the model upside down where the users are more important, and they have more power than the platform itself,” Kulechov added. It could potentially lead to more transparent revenue-sharing contracts with better rewards for creators.

With Lens v3, the company is tackling one of the biggest issues with web3 social experiments — the cost of transactions. Writing a post on a web3 platform means signing a transaction on an underlying blockchain. While layer-2 networks have contributed to driving transaction costs down over the past few years, it remains a barrier to entry for large-scale consumer apps.

“We launched it on Polygon, but the network doesn’t scale to mainstream usage … where one transaction might cost a fraction of a cent. And that’s basically why we chose a stack where we wanted to have the benefits of Ethereum. All these transactions that happen on Lens Network, we take them, we package them with ZK proofs and then put these transitions into Ethereum,” Kulechov said.

Image Credits:Lens

The Lens network is now using zkSync as the base technology along with validiums. Unlike Base or Arbitrum, validiums are an off-chain transaction technique — they make transactions much cheaper.

“So this allows us to create transactions that are much more affordable than existing rollups. And that creates a new design space for more consumer applications,” Kulechov said.

The idea is that interactions with the Lens network should cost more or less as much as cloud server costs. Developers should be able to absorb those costs for their users. “Our aim here is to say that blockchains should be free to use for users, the same way as the internet is,” Kulechov said.

Lens is defining a handful of “social primitives” as the core characteristics of the protocol, namely accounts, usernames, graphs, feeds, and groups. Each user account can create multiple usernames (across multiple apps) and start following other users to build multiple graphs. They can also join groups.

The most interesting feature is that developers can create a set of rules to allow or restrict access to feeds (and individual posts within feeds). For instance, you could organize an event and give an NFT to every event goer. An online community could be restricted to people who hold this NFT.

You could also restrict content to people who pay a certain amount. Token gating could be used to create subscriber-only feeds or posts (a “web3 Substack”).

Image Credits:Lens

As for content moderation, Kulechov believes “a protocol should be as unopinionated as possible. And then, at the application level, the application should manage the moderation.”

Lens plans to launch the mainnet of Lens v3 at some point during the first quarter of 2025. It’s going to be interesting to see if this protocol upgrade moves the needle when it comes to decentralized social networks — the existing ones remain niche networks for now.

In addition to Lightspeed Faction, participants in the round include Alchemy, Avail, Circle, Consensys, DFG, Fabric Ventures, Foresight Ventures, Stellarcore, Superscript, Re7, and Wintermute Ventures, as well as angel investors Anurag Arjun, Anton Bukov, Rune Christensen, Alex Gluchowski, Aleksander Leonard Larsen, Loi Luu, Spencer Noon, and Duncan Robinson.