introduction
introduction
Lens Protocol is a Web3 social protocol for developers created by the leading DeFi project Aave team.
Lens Protocol itself is not a front-end product, but a middle-end and back-end protocol service layer. Based on the API provided by it, developers can build social products on it at low cost, which is why the logo of Lens Protocol is a bouquet of flowers. They hope to create an open source "developer garden", hoping to become the soil and fertilizer in this social garden, and developers can plant bunches of flowers on it.
We are already familiar with the narrative of Web3 social interaction: denouncing the centralized storage of social giants in the old world such as Facebook and Twitter in Web2, monopolizing user data, creating data islands, and because of data centralization, every social product is competing with each other The user's attention, and ultimately the entire social ecology is a zero-sum game.
Therefore, we have also seen a large number of Web3 social products based on the narrative of "data openness and data rights confirmation", but in the end there are few killer products that come out. The important reason is that most Web3 social products still haven't got rid of the dilemma of Web2 data islands, and are still making data islands one after another.
You may be wondering: isn’t the feature of the blockchain the data transparency? Isn't its natural advantage just breaking down data islands? But we need to understand that there are three steps to break the data island:
data transparency
Data confirmation
data exchange
After most Web3 social products put user data and behavior on the chain, they solve the first two steps of data transparency and data confirmation, but they still do not solve the third step of data interoperability, and the obstacle that needs to be cleared for data interoperability is the consistency of data format sex.
Blockchain-based social products can indeed first allow users to become the owners of their data, and secondly, the data can be shared publicly on the chain. But the boundary of Web2 data is the server, and the boundary of Web3 data is the contract. If a user uses 10 dapps, his data will be scattered in 10 independent contracts. Although the data of each contract is transparent, the data formats and standards inside are different, for example:
The username field in A Dapp is called username, but it is called nickname in B Dapp. Although the meanings are the same, the names are different;
Or there are a total of 10 user information in A Dapp, but there are 15 in B Dapp
The inconsistency of the data format makes the data between the two products still not interoperable. If you must use it, you need to invest a separate cost for the escape and compatibility of the data format. So the data island still exists, but the data island of Web2 is a cement wall, a complete black box-invisible and unusable, and the data island of Web3 is a glass wall, although it seems transparent, it is still out of reach.
Therefore, we believe that if the understanding of Lens Protocol still stays at "users own their own data", it is not deep enough. In addition to the often-mentioned data right confirmation, its significance to the industry is more important: as a soft standard for the protocol layer on the premise of being sufficiently open. This is also the real meaning of Protocol and the value it should bear.
Secondly, it can be seen that in the process of restricting Collect and Follow conditions and capitalizing NFT, Lens Protocol is deriving the direction of creator economy and DAO governance, not just as simple as a social protocol, which will be explained in detail below arrive.
So to sum up the value of Lens lies in 4 points:
Users own their own data, which is the basic value of Web3
Constructed a set of developer agreements to reduce the difficulty of developing social Dapp
Developed soft standards for data formats, completing the last mile of breaking down data islands
Derived from social protocol to creator economy and DAO governance direction in support scenarios
Based on the above 4 points, for developers, Lens Protocol enables any app to be easily accessed and transformed into a Dapp, thus joining the Lens Protocol ecological family, combined with unified user identity and user data, to share the entire ecological users.
Developers are no longer trapped in the zero-sum game of competing for users like the traditional Web2, but can cooperate with each other to make the cake bigger. Every application that uses Lens Protocol is beneficial to the entire ecosystem. At the same time, as a user in the ecosystem, you can roam freely in various products, and creators no longer need to worry about losing their own data due to algorithms, policies or competitive strategies of individual platforms.
01 Lens Protocol data analysis
Lens Protocol Data Fundamentals
Active and transaction overall data
Since the Lens Hub contract was deployed and launched on May 16, 2022, a large number of users have been accumulated in just half a year. As of December 31, 2022, the accumulative amount has been:
Used by more than 160,000 unique users
The peak number of single-day users exceeds 12,000, and the average daily active users exceed 1,100
The number of related txns is close to 8 million
The average number of daily transactions exceeds 37,000
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The total number of Lens users, the total number of transactions, and daily changes
Personal data follow and collect NFT data
Lens is a social protocol with NFT as the basic unit. There are 3 types of NFT in the protocol:
Profile NFT (Profile NFT)
Follow NFT (Follow NFT)
Collect NFT (Collect NFT)
Ordinary users (those who do not hold Profile NFT) can follow creators and bookmark their favorite posts. Only users with Profile can become creators to publish content. In the relevant operation steps, 3 different types of NFTs are respectively minted and sent to the corresponding user addresses.
Typical usage scenarios on Lens include:
Creators register to create Profiles and mint their exclusive Profile NFTs. You can set a personalized name (Profile Handle Name, the purpose can be simply compared to "Lens domain name");
Creators publish content (Publication), including posting (Post), reposting (Mirror), commenting (Comment), etc.
A total of 107,904 Profile NFTs currently representing Lens identities have been minted by 99,176 people. Since Lens suspended the free minting of Profiles and only whitelisted minting, new additions to Profile NFTs have slowed down sharply since November 2022.
Although Lens allows an address to have multiple Profile NFTs, however:
97% of addresses only hold 1 Profile
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Lens Profile NFT minting
Participation, Interaction and Follower Data
Lens Protocol has deep user engagement:
A total of 44,744,778 Follow NFTs were minted by 15,3394 users, with an average of 29 accounts per person
Among all Profiles accounts, the number of Profiles with fans reached 100,419, accounting for 93% of the total Profiles
The powder content of the Lens account is very high, which shows two points:
The vast majority of users interact with other users;
Tracking the number of fans in the account shows that 52% of users have less than 10 fans
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Lens Profile Fan Profile
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Lens official account is the account with the most fans
58,720 Profile accounts have published 891,434 posts, creators accounted for 55%; of all posted content, 44% have been commented by users, a total of 328,562 comments, indicating the quality of the posted content It is relatively high and can trigger discussions; 95,781 posts have been forwarded 403,799 times in total.
Analyze Lens user behavior. The figure below shows the number of addresses and operands classified by behavior. You can find:
More than half of Profile addresses have posted
1/4 retweeted, 1/5 commented
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Distribution of Lens user operations
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Distribution of Lens user operations
Interpretation of Lens Protocol data
The market has a high desire to participate in Lens Protocol
Lens Profile is the key to in-depth experience of Lens. Since the free casting was closed in November 2022, and only white order casting was allowed, the transaction price of Lens Profile has continued to rise in the secondary market.
Take OpenSea as an example: the price of Profile is maintained at around 40 u, and the transaction volume has risen sharply. NFT is also one of the prerequisites for in-depth participation in the Lens protocol. After the restriction is cast, it can only be purchased through the secondary market. The strong willingness to buy expresses expectations and optimism for the Lens protocol.
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The market has a high desire to participate in Lens Protocol
Lens Protocol User Participation Less Hype
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Lens The amount of accounts that have been traded
Regarding the Lens domain name, that is, the name set when casting the Profile NFT, there is no such thing as an ENS-like hype of a purely numeric domain name. Only 15% of the Lens domain names are composed of pure numbers. It is with the mentality of using rather than hyping.
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Lens The amount of accounts that have been traded
Lens Protocol daily active users and user retention are good
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Lens daily activity
Lens Protocol Technical Design Paradigm
Technical Advantages of Lens Protocol
The technical design of Lens Protocol has two advantages:
Sufficient modularity enables developers to have a high degree of freedom
A certain degree of standardization allows operations and data to maintain interoperability
These two advantages strictly implement the high cohesion and low coupling concept of software development and design, which requires developers to have extremely high requirements for the understanding ability of the underlying software development and the ability to predict the upper layer industry applications.
This is also where its excellent expressive power as a protocol layer lies: the value of the protocol lies in providing the upper layer with the ability to apply Lego building blocks, and an infinite phenomenon space can be assembled with limited parts.
The main entity and logical dismantling of Lens Protocol
Entity and Contract Overview
Lens Protocol has a total of 8 entities and 21 contract addresses, which cover all business logic and data assets in the Lens Protocol ecosystem.
Among them, LensHub Proxy is the main interactive contract of entities such as Comment and Follow. It can be seen that 7,925,203 transaction records have been generated so far.
Profile NFT
Profile NFT is the main object of Lens Portocol. It can be understood as the primary key of the User table of traditional social products. Each Profile NFT is an independent user account, which contains the Publication, Comment, Mirror, Collect generated by the user These contents are linked to Profile NFT in the form of secondary NFT or on-chain data. Through contract records, all the data generated by a Profile NFT in the Lens Portocol ecosystem can be indexed down layer by layer.
Profile NFT is an ERC 721 standard NFT, which is presented in the form of a domain name with a suffix of .lems on the presentation layer. Up to now, more than 100,000 have been generated.
The process of Profile NFT Mint is completed in the LensHub Implementation contract. At present, the Profile NFT is not open for registration. First, verify whether the wallet address of the current Mint user is in the whitelist through _profileCreatorWhitelisted. After the check is passed, add the profileId of the Profile NFT, and then call the regular _mint function of ERC 721 to pass in two parameters: Mint address, profileId, thus completing the mint of NFT.
The essence of NFT is just a token, so the completion of Mint can only indicate that a certain address holds a certain number of tokens, which has no business meaning, so the createProfile function in PublishingLogic.sol is called and 5 parameters are passed in: vars, profileId, _profileIdByHandleHash, _profileById, _followModuleWhitelisted.
vars: is an object array, which is the data structure when creating a Profile NFT, including 5 parameters
to: the wallet address pointed to by the Profile NFT, that is, the actual owner of the Profile NFT
handle: the content of the .lens domain name of the Profile NFT, which needs to be unique and non-empty
imageURI: the image address of the Profile NFT presentation layer
In the logic of createProfile, _validateHandle is first called to verify whether the domain name is legal. The following will match word by word to remove some illegal content such as special characters.
Because the domain name is unique, a uniqueness check is required after the legal check. The method is that all domain names will be hashed by keccak 256, and then stored in _profileIdBy HandleHash in the mapping data format. When a domain name is registered next time, the content of the domain name will be hashed to check whether it already exists in _profileIdByHandleHash. If it exists, it means that the domain name has already been registered.
After the domain name content has passed the legal and unique verification, it enters the registration process:
First store the profileId and corresponding hash content of the Profile NFT into _profileIdByHandleHash, then store the domain name content, imageURI and followNFTURI in the vars object into _profileById and hang it under profileId, _profileById is also a configuration file in mapping format , the user records the content data of each Profile NFT itself.
Finally, initialize the followModule
Publication
The importance of Publication
Publication is the lifeblood of Lens Protocol, which is the original content, comments and forwarding (called Mirror in Lens Protocol) generated by users.
The content of Publication is stored in ContentURI, similar to the metadata of NFT, which points to text, image, video and other content in the form of links.
The Lens Protocol does not limit the storage method of content, that is, developers can use decentralized storage such as IPFS and Arweave, or store them in centralized storage institutions such as AWS.
Publication's standard data format
The biggest advantage of Lens Protocol mentioned above is that it breaks the last mile of data islands and realizes data interoperability. The way to achieve this is to formulate a standard format for data.
Lens Protocol has formulated a set of metadata data standards for Publication. This standard is based on ERC 721 metadata, so it can be compatible with platforms such as Opensea. Next, I will introduce the metadata data standards of Lens Protocol in detail.
The following is a standard data format of Publication, which means that all the content generated by the project in the Lens Protocol follows this standard, thus realizing the intercommunication of content between different products.
PublicationMetadataVersions：The standard will also be iterated, so PublicationMetadataVersions defines the version number of the current standard. It can be seen that there are already two versions. The official requires developers to use the V2 version, but the old V1 will still be compatible;
mainContentFocus：It is an enumerated type field, which identifies the content type, including: video, image, article, text, audio, link.
metadata_id：A string-type content number is required, because the content itself indexes an external ContentURI link, so multiple contents may index the same link, so the uniqueness of each content can be identified by metadata_id
description：A description of the content, but not the content itself. It may be relatively difficult to understand here. For example, the content of BAYC's NFT is a picture of a monkey, but at the same time, each NFT will have a description describing the NFT instead of its content.
metadata_id：A string-type content number is required, because the content itself indexes an external ContentURI link, so multiple contents may index the same link, so the uniqueness of each content can be identified by metadata_id
description：A description of the content, but not the content itself. It may be relatively difficult to understand here. For example, the content of BAYC's NFT is a picture of a monkey, but at the same time, each NFT will have a description describing the NFT instead of its content.
locale：Used to identify the language type of this content, such as "en-US" for English
content：The text of this content, such as a post saying "Hello World" with a picture attached, then "Hello World" will be saved in content
external_url：An optional field to store the extension link related to this content
imag e：An image of the content, pointing to an external url link
imageMimeType：Identify the format type of the image, such as gif, png, etc.
name：The name of the content corresponds to the name field in the metadata of Opensea
attributes：Everyone should be familiar with it, it corresponds to the attributes of NFT
tags：Indicates the label of this content, each content cannot exceed 5 labels, and each label cannot exceed 50 characters, so users can label the published content and apply it to screening and other scenarios.
The above is the standard data format for Publication. The assembled combination of only 13 fields can basically cover the content format of most social products.
The process of publishing a Post
The data structure required to create a post includes six fields: profileId, contentURI, collectModule, collectModuleInitData, referenceModule, and referenceModuleInitData.
profileId: the tokenid of the Profile NFT corresponding to this post
contentURI: The content of the post, which is the standard data format of the Publication we mentioned above, which is a link to the outside, and can be stored anywhere in IPFS, AWS, etc.;
Then use the call interface lensHub.connect(user).post(inputStruct) to pass in the publisher and post content, and then the post can be published.
Note that the Lens Protocol itself does not mint the published content into an NFT. The following picture shows a Post record. There is no NFT generated on the chain, but the NFT is generated when the content is collected and mirrored.
The absence of NFT does not mean that the data is not on the chain, NFT is just a form of data assetization. In Input Data, we can see the on-chain data of a Post.
After passing in parameters such as the ID of the Profile NFT when creating a Post:
First, add 1 to the record of the user's published quantity pubCount
Then call the createPost function to pass in all relevant parameters to execute the creation
Comment
Users' comments on other Publications are also a kind of Publication, which is also hung under the Profile NFT.
Let's first look at the data structure of comments:
vars is an object array that stores a data structure of a comment, which itself is actually a kind of Publication, because comments are also a kind of content produced by users, so the data structure covers Post
But compared with it, there are two more fields: profileIdPointed and pubIdPointed, which correspond to the author ID of the commented content and the ID of the commented content respectively, so as to establish an index relationship between the content and personnel between the comment and the commented content
The picture below shows the on-chain data of a comment that has been generated, which can be interpreted as a Profile NFT with ID 33431 commenting on a piece of content with ID 28 published by Profile NFT with ID 71587.
The content of the comment is stored in arweave and linked to the contentURI. Let's open the content in arweave to see the content of the specific comment. Its format also follows the standard data format mentioned above. We can see that the content of the name field is "Comment by @momodao.lens", that is, the The domain address of the originator of the comment.
The code logic of _createComment is almost the same as that of _createPost, after all, it is essentially Publication. So we can also see that the pubCount of the user's post count record will be increased by 1, that is, comments and posts are treated equally in nature.
Mirror
Mirror can be understood as reposting, but Lens Protocol defines it as reposting or reamplifying, that is, the nature of the action of Mirror is to republish the existing content, or to amplify the influence of the existing content again, especially The second point is that reamplifying needs to be detailed, so although it is a forwarding action in the concrete, the scope of Mirror is wider and more abstract in concept. It is not just regarded as a simple function, but to the creator Understanding and thinking from the perspective of content distribution.
Because Mirror refers to other existing Publications, it will be limited by the references of the original Publication. For example, if the author restricts the Mirror of his content to follow me, set the followerOnlyReferenceModule in the reference configuration to true After that, non-followers, that is, people who do not hold the creator's Follow NFT, cannot mirror the content.
The following picture shows a mirror record on the chain. Compared with Post, it does not have the ContentURI field and Collect configuration. The reason is that Mirror forwards existing content and does not generate new content itself, so it is different from Post. Unlike Comment, there is no ContentURI field for storing published content, and because it forwards other people's content, it does not have the Collect ability itself, but it still has a reference configuration, so Mirror content can still be used Continue to be mirrored by others.
The logic of creating a Mirror is similar to that of Post and Comment. What needs to be noted is that although Mirror is not a user-created content, it still adds 1 to the number of published records, because it is also a special Publication, so Lens Protocol The definition of Publication is "produce content" rather than "create content".
In createMirror, we can see that there is a special logic: get the root user and root content. Because Mirror can also be Mirrored, that is, when the content sent by A is mirrored by B, C will mirror the content of B Mirror A again, and this continues. It is necessary to know who the original creator of the content is, so use getPointedIfMirror to Get the original content rootPubIdPointed and original creator rootProfileIdPointed, so that you can index layer by layer, track the propagation link of a content in the Lens Protocol ecosystem, understand who created the content, who spread the content, and the size of these propagation nodes However, this also fully reflects Lens Protocol's emphasis on and understanding of the creator economy, such as the ability to share creators' revenue through this capability.
Collect
Collect literally means collection, but it is essentially a "purchase" behavior. It is consistent with the logic of Collect launched in www.mirror.xyz. It is the process of casting content into NFT, and it is also an important way for creators to generate income. The creator can set the conditions for the content to be Collected, including: whether to pay, whether the quantity is limited, etc. The main configuration items include three parameters: whether to charge, the amount that can be Collected, and the time, so that after combination, there are five types in total. model:
Free Collect Module: Free Collect, unlimited quantity;
Fee Collect Module: You need to pay a certain fee to collect, and the quantity is not limited;
Limited Fee Collect Module: You need to pay a certain fee to collect, and the quantity is limited;
Timed Fee Collect Module: You need to pay a certain fee before you can collect, and you can only collect within a certain period of time;
Limited Timed Fee Collect Module: You need to pay a certain fee to collect, and the quantity is limited, and you can only collect within a certain period of time. It is essentially a combination of Limited Fee and Timed Fee.
Let's take the configuration file of Fee Collect as an example. You can see the currency contract address and amount that set the content, and set conditions such as whether only those who follow me can collect.
In the actual on-chain case shown in the figure below, after the user executes Collect, Mint will issue an NFT with a tokenID of 2380, and pay the creator 0.1 WMATIC worth 0.08 USD.
Compared with Comment and Post, the incoming data on the chain is also very simple, with only 3 fields, namely the Creation ID and Content ID of the Collected content.
The parameters passed in to the collect function include information such as the wallet address collector for the collect, and because the collected content may be mirrored, the original creator ID and content ID information of the content is obtained through the getPointedIfMirror method.
Each user will have an independent collectNFT contract, so if it is recognized that the current contract address is 0 address, it will call _deployCollectNFT to create one, and then execute mint to generate an NFT.
Follow
When a user follows someone, a Follow NFT will be generated, which is also part of the creator economy. Users can set the conditions for being followed, such as paid attention.
There are two conditions for following. The white list restricts the Approval Follow Module and pays to follow the Fee Follow Module. The Approval Follow Module is the white list address set by the creator to allow following him. Only those in the list can follow.
The Fee Follow Module is for creators to pay a certain fee before they can follow him. It is necessary to set the currency address, quantity and receiving address.
On the one hand, paid attention is to generate income for creators, and on the other hand, it is similar to a Pass card, so that the Follow action can be derived in the direction of DAO governance. For example, creators can regard users holding their Follow NFT as their own fans, thereby building a fan community After turning it into a DAO, NFT holders can have governance capabilities such as voting, and can judge who is the first to pay attention to the creator through the size of the tokenID, and give them certain incentives as early contributors such as promotion Voting rights, etc. It can also be seen from here that the ambition of Lens Protocol is not just as simple as a social agreement.
Through the data on the chain, we can see that like Collect, when the user completes the Follow operation, an NFT will be mint out.
Through the code, we can see that it is allowed to follow multiple people in batches, because the incoming profileId of the followed person is an array type, and more than one can be passed in, and then traverse the array through a for loop to follow one by one.
Like Collect, Follow also needs to have an independent contract. When it detects that the followNFT address is 0, it will call _deployFollowNFT to create the contract, and then execute mint to generate NFT.
When the user unfollows, the Follow NFT will be burned and destroyed.
The above is to start with the entities of Lens Protocol to explain their data structure and implementation logic.
It can be deeply felt as mentioned above:
Lens Protocol's high cohesion and low coupling modularization and data structure standardization in the technical design paradigm;
And through the paid configuration of Collect and Follow, we can see Lens Protocol's thinking on the economic empowerment of creators after NFT capitalization, and the derivation of Follow to the DAO governance level is a stroke of genius.
Lens Protocol Ecological Analysis
Lens Protocol Mapping
Lens Protocol ecological level
Although the Lens protocol was launched less than a year ago, hundreds of products have been built based on Lens.
On the one hand, this is inseparable from the attractiveness of Web3's unique openness and composability to developers. On the other hand, it is also closely related to the promotion and easy-to-use API of the Aave team.
In addition to attracting developers to build the ecology, Lens has also established partnerships with many other products, such as XMTP, POAP, Push Protocol, etc., trying to gather the power of everyone to lay the underlying infrastructure of the ecology as complete as possible.
Lens Protocol Ecological Mapping
Lens Protocol Ecological Mapping
Lens Protocol Project Statistics
In the version we counted (143 products), dApps accounted for the majority (119, accounting for 86%), that is, most of the products are based on the Lens protocol to develop application scenarios. Some developers have further expanded the functions of existing Modules (7, accounting for 5%), and some middleware products (17, accounting for 9%).
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dApp classification statistics
It can be seen that the application-oriented products in the ecology basically cover most categories.
Among them, tool-type products with relatively simple development and clear ideas ranked first (34, accounting for 28%), followed by content (23, accounting for 19%), social platforms (15, accounting for 12%) and music (9 , accounting for 7%) and so on. At the same time, there are also a small number of trading platforms (2, accounting for 2%) and social trading (2, accounting for 2%) and other types of products.
Among them, most of the products are still in a relatively early stage, and the functional experience is relatively simple.
Some hackathon participating products are still in the demo stage and have not been officially launched. A small number of products have already reached milestones. For example, Phaver (a product that makes money by sharing content and staking) has reached 100,000 active users. Officials say it is currently the largest product on Lens. We have counted the number of Twitter fans of each product by the end of 2022, ranging from tens to tens of thousands of fans, which can also partially reflect that the current development of the ecology has slowly begun to appear uneven.
In terms of product ideas, the initial stage is still based on the mapping of Web2 products.
A few products are trying to explore whether they can create Web3-specific functional experiences based on the characteristics of the Lens protocol (especially the built-in commercial modules). Since developers can develop based on the Lens protocol completely without permission, that is, there is no so-called holistic roadmap. We can see that the functions of some products are relatively overlapping.
An open system may waste resources to a certain extent, but on the other hand, this also means that after the development cost and difficulty are greatly reduced, developers may make "numerous" attempts, and Web3 symbols may emerge Sexual product features. How to cleverly conceive and use the functions of the basic modules of Lens requires inspiration and luck in many attempts. To some extent, redundancy is also a feature of ecological health.
At the client level, most of the products are on the web side, and some products are beginning to explore the experience of the mobile side. It is expected that more and more follow-up development products will take this step from PC to mobile.
Brief analysis of some categories
In addition to the differences in the development stage between products, the degree of flourishing between different categories is also different. Let’s briefly analyze the ideas and development of several major categories in different sections.
communication tools
At the level of basic communication functions, Lens integrates protocols such as XMTP, Lit, etc. Currently, DM functions can already be experienced on products such as Lenster.
Different from the chat function of existing social networks, Lens' DM has the following characteristics:
Privacy protection: end-to-end encryption by default
Portable: Can be viewed on any compatible Lens-based product or product using XMTP
Binding with the user: when the Lens Handle is transferred, the new owner cannot view the previous chat records; only the key of the wallet has control
Security: XMTP does not use keys in any scenario to ensure chat and asset isolation.
In addition, there are also specialized chat products with more detailed functions. For example, Hashchat, which combines NFT, Safes, PoAP, etc., is also studying how to use the new functions of Web3 to solve the "old" problems in communication such as spam.
social media
social media
Social media is one of the cores of the Lens ecosystem. Lens officially developed Lenster itself, which is currently a very popular project in the ecosystem.
If we want to make Web3 social products, we still need to answer some basic social questions first:
Where is the value of its differentiation
Does it improve social efficiency
How to get your first users
How to design the path from seed users to the public
Because of the following characteristics of Web2's social products, the successful ones often end up with seemingly "unbreakable" moats:
strong network effects
Centralized algorithm, closed data system
Proven business model that relies primarily on advertising
Opportunities in the past often came from intergenerational change (the so-called not wanting to use the same social network as my mother), or the rise of a new media form (text—>picture—>video).
The Lens team may not have a complete answer, but the team revealed a lot of their social thoughts in interviews, and we can also get a glimpse of some product iterations. Some product experiences currently provided by Lens are as follows.
The unity of identity within the ecology
Identity is one of the most important identifiers for users when socializing.
In the entire Lens ecosystem, users only have one username, which is combined with PoAP for real-person verification. At this level, the team did not choose more decentralization (different account systems for different dApps), it should be that the benefits of a unified identity are more.
Review Web1 and Web2:
User identity in Web1 is reflected in account and password
In Web2, most users choose to log in with Google/Facebook account
In the Web3 ecosystem, wallets are currently the most popular representation of identity. However, for general public users, wallets may not be a good enough login option for social products. Connecting wallets is easy for people to associate it with asset consumption, resulting in high psychological barriers. In addition, when conducting an immersive social experience, it is also necessary to avoid repeatedly confirming the wallet to cause fragmentation of the experience. That is, there is still room for optimization in the experience of the identity system.
own data
Data self-ownership means that users are out of the control of the platform to a certain extent, and they can fully own the right to use and process their own data.
There is an argument that the average user probably doesn't care if they own their data. However, if we temporarily jump out of the user's perspective and look at it from the developer's perspective, the self-owned user data means that developers can apply to users to use their data more flexibly, and can freely combine the data accumulated by users in different scenarios. Collaborative relationships can also be formed between different developers. This will open up some new social possibilities.
Take AI matching as an example. It has always been a topic of interest to many social entrepreneurs. The problem encountered before is where the basic data collection comes from. There are not enough high-quality data sources, and matching is a meal without rice. And Lens's method of unified identity + data in the ecosystem provides new possibilities for accumulating data. These data are native enough and "non-standard" enough (compared to absolutely standardized factors such as age and region), and can reflect the user's characteristics, hobbies and existing social relationships to a certain extent.
On the basis of the Lens protocol, it may also be possible to build middleware such as interest graphs. These have laid a good foundation for improving matching efficiency.
Another problem here is how to make a better match without exposing user privacy. It may be necessary to learn from some zk practices.
Identity and data portability
Portability means that users can leave a certain sub-network at a relatively low cost at any time and join another new network that is more interesting.
Just as Defi created a liquidity pool, Lens also created a liquid user pool in the social field:
On the one hand, the fact that users can flow at any time means that developers are more challenged, and user loyalty has truly become a scarce resource. In addition to providing utility value to users, the product may also need to provide additional community value and continuously improve the utility experience to truly retain users;
On the other hand, each independent product in the ecosystem is contributing traffic to the large user pool of Lens, and each new product may bring new users into the Lens ecosystem, and the source of the user pool is opened up in multiple dimensions.
In addition, the social capital accumulated by users in a certain sub-network may be reused in another sub-network or non-social scenarios, that is, social identity and data will have cross-value. This might also open up interesting application scenarios.
The question that follows is whether Lens can handle the potentially large user pool. Regarding scalability, founder Stani revealed on Twitter that their current new technology has been able to achieve 50,000 TPS in tests (Twitter's peak is 20k).
Freedom to customize the curation algorithm
One of the most criticized consequences of the Web2 algorithm is the cocoon effect, but on the other hand, this is also the point that makes users (at least in the short term) addicted.
In Lens, users are expected to be able to choose a variety of algorithms to customize the content of the feeds they see, which greatly improves the degree of freedom and may provide a new experience of discovery. Different from the current algorithm black box, the algorithm rules of the open platform are open and transparent. At the same time, users can also manage the part of personal data that is willing to be used for algorithm recommendations. This kind of algorithm that starts from different optimization goals and adapts to different values is also an interesting development opportunity in the Lens ecosystem.
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Feed Through function
However, despite this, it may still be difficult for us to imagine whether the super social application that eventually grows out of the Lens ecology is a product similar to Twitter like Lenster. Maybe it is a functional product that combines Defi, maybe it originated from some kind of fissile game interaction, maybe it started from a Meme community that outsiders cannot understand, or it is a certain usage scenario of NFT + tokens. But anyway, composability may surprise us.
Content, Music and the Creator Economy
In the Lens ecosystem, one of the biggest variables in the creator economy is NFT (such as paying attention to NFT, etc.), which provides creators of different categories (music, writing, comics, Meme, sports, brands, etc.) new way.
Stani once revealed in an interview that the inspiration for Lens was that when an engineer was studying the NFT auction protocol, an engineer realized that based on the current NFT standard, he could actually do a lot of cool things, such as dynamic content NFT. The dynamic NFT goes beyond the collection value itself, and begins to have benefits and practicality, such as Token gated content access rights, royalties for creators, fan grading rights, etc.
However, in addition to PFP, what kind of content is worthy of being NFTized? Take meme culture as an example
It carries the common values and laughs and tears of a small group, and has considerable memory value. This can be extended to, in addition to users expressing their desire for expression, is UGC itself an asset class? If it is an asset, it should be tradable and cashable. NFTization is a good way to capitalize.
Music is also an emerging piece of the Lens platform.
Such as Ooh La La, wavwrld, spinamp, amnisiac and so on. Music NFT provides a new monetization method, and users can pay for listening through collection behavior. Based on the carrier of NFT, music is no longer just a commodity, but carries more interactive and social functions. Listening, collecting, and trading happen on the same platform, which can create a music-first experience, that is, music itself can drive subsequent transactions.
Different from the previous copyright separatism between major music platforms, since NFT is bound to users, users can enjoy the music NFT they purchased no matter what kind of Web3 player they use, and it is expected to obtain a more integrated experience. In addition, considering that many musicians have a huge fan base, the Web3 music integration community may become one of the entrances for the public to enter the Web3 world.
Another point worth emphasizing is that true D2C (Direct to Consumer) can only be formed when fans and data are actually owned by creators rather than platforms. The interaction between creators and fans can be more direct, including giving fans special gifts, random rewards, etc. The interaction between the two parties can be gathered in one stop instead of scattered across various platforms. Creators are also more free to define fans and manage communities. Correspondingly, a new benefit distribution value chain will also be formed, thereby driving different behavior patterns and deepening interaction and stickiness.
Taking content products as an example, in the past, when a creator published a piece of work, the most popular place for discussion was not directly in the comment area, but in major social media platforms, such as Twitter for short articles, Youtube for videos, etc. . For creators, it can be difficult to see the full picture of feedback on their work due to the fragmented nature of interactions. For fans, they often need to spend more effort to dig deeper. Ideally, the reposting and sharing of comments on various social platforms can be unified to the original work, that is, all sources will be gathered in the end, and creators should have this right. Open, permissionless social platforms will make this possible.
However, there have been many fan token products and token gated tools before. What is the difference between being a creator economy in Lens? I tend to think that the interaction between creators and fans is a comprehensive atmosphere and field, not just the link of realization. The two parties are in a large network, from discovery to interaction to the establishment of deep connections, and transform into paying users. At the same time, deep fans enjoy special rights and even interest binding. This is a gradual process, which may require multiple products to cooperate to achieve the purpose of deepening, such as creator recommendation based on similar graphs + interactive games + chat communities + tiered rights + transactions, etc.
One of the interesting points is that by commenting and forwarding NFT, the creator neither completes 100% of the creation alone, nor is it a completely distributed collective creation, but in the middle, a kind that is still dominated by the creator, but Fans can also participate in a lightweight way and enjoy a certain form of content ownership.
The feeling of ownership will deepen fans’ support, which will greatly enhance fans’ participation and interaction enthusiasm, so that this co-created content will be forwarded and discussed more, and a wider consensus will be accumulated, and the value of Ontology NFT will be realized. promote. And users who participate in the interaction, because their behavior is also NFTized, can also enjoy the dividends brought about by this appreciation. The NFT formed by the interaction itself may also add valuable parts to the original NFT, that is, the two can also be regarded as an expanded large NFT. The threshold for interaction is relatively lower, allowing more users to participate in creation. Creation, re-creation, as if entering an infinite fission game, will provide an excellent interactive experience.
In addition, the forwarding and commenting functions can be combined with the payment function, that is, creators can share part of the forwarding and commenting fees with users who participate in forwarding and commenting, so as to achieve flexible distribution. The object of distribution may be content, merchandise, or other objects that we have not yet imagined. If it is done in reverse, that is, the creators will fully pay the users who repost comments, it is a reward model similar to Qutoutiao. There is a lot of room for debugging here.
Generally speaking, in this form, creators and fans are no longer a one-way relationship, but form a community to some extent, and both parties have the motivation to make their own contributions to the continuous growth of this community .
There are many product ideas derived from here, such as:
tool type
Help creators better understand their fan portraits (Bello), or find other creators with similar fan portraits to cooperate with;
light interactive type
For example, Lens Raffle will randomly distribute Matic rewards to followers;
special rights status
Equity can be classified based on attention time, so that early attention can also become a social asset; or based on other diversified ranking criteria.
trading platform
trading platform
For example, LensPort is a trading platform that focuses on Lens collection NFT, helping to fully release the liquidity of collection NFT.
On the one hand, with liquidity outlets, users may be encouraged to do more collection actions, which will help creators increase their income;
On the other hand, there may also be users who spend a lot of time doing collection screening, improving the efficiency of high-quality content discovery on the platform, and at the same time creating benefits for themselves
Combining social networking and trading, there should be many new ways to play in this area;
Credit sub-system
In the Web2 community, there is often the crowding out effect of high-end users that is difficult to solve, that is, with the generalization of the community, the introduction of novice users, the concentration of the community is diluted too much, the original core users leave, and the community becomes full-faced. No. This is also one of the curses of community scale. At the same time, if the core circle is too tight, the experience of new users will not be good, because the stronger the cohesion of the original group in the community, the greater the repulsion to the outside world (new users).
In the process of community expansion, how to expand the user scale while ensuring the experience of different users seems to be an unsolvable topic. Reputation mechanisms may be one of the methods. Aura Reputation establishes a user scoring system, and only users with qualified reputation scores can post comments (the threshold is determined by the creator), thus avoiding malicious comments from damaging the community atmosphere to a certain extent, and protecting the experience of creators and loyal fans.
The use of credit points is not limited to comments, but can also be used to qualify for membership in the community. If the threshold is set high, it will be a very precise small circle. If the threshold is relatively low, it will target a generalized group. Communities for different purposes can be well separated, and user expectations will be adjusted accordingly. It's a bit similar to the BBS era. If you just want to post some complaints, you can go to the irrigation area. If you want to discuss an in-depth topic of a certain hobby, you can enter a special sub-channel.
tool
tool
In our classification, tools are the largest category, partly because it covers more secondary categories, such as: authoring tools, search tools, data analysis tools, marketing tools, etc. Behind it is tools like water, a powerful tool library can make the experience of building products in the ecosystem smoother.
One of these categories, we call bridges. It includes migrating Twitter identity to Lens, finding Twitter friends on Lens, synchronizing Lens and Twitter posts, etc. It can be seen that Lens is still in the stage of diverting traffic from the huge Web2 user pool in various ways. The function of finding friends in Web2 social network can also help the cold start in the early stage and improve the initial retention of users.
Among other tools, data analysis tools are just what creators need. In addition, there are: notification tools, posting tools, airdrop tools, etc. The common tool requirements of such vertical scenarios can be refined and developed in a unified manner.
Let’s focus on marketing tools, including Tide (marketing interaction reward tool platform), Screen (advertising recommendation sharing system), Connect (one-stop communication for bloggers), etc. Traditional marketing tools have limited understanding of users and the marketing methods they can provide. Many brands are looking for new solutions. And when a brand chooses to enter Web3, it needs a complete set of solutions to lower the threshold of communicating with users in new ways, while obtaining output as timely as possible. A good set of marketing tools should be able to improve the efficiency of interaction between brands and users without infringing on user privacy, and create a variety of interactive gameplay (such as combining light games, dynamic NFT, rewards, etc.), thereby helping brands enhance user loyalty .
The room for expansion here is that marketing tools are not necessarily purely online, but can connect offline, truly connect Web3 with the physical world, and combine PoAP and other certifications to create some more flexible and interesting marketing methods. This will also help invisibly bring more users into the Web3 world. When users enter the Lens ecology through the brand portal, they will get a complete community and discovery experience, not just a single interaction of a single event, that is, the huge social ecology behind Lens can better undertake this, This is the difference from a single marketing tool. Ideally, the public domain and the private domain can help each other.
False data/fake volume is also one of the pain points in traditional marketing. In Tide, it screens the wallet qualifications of interactive users, and eliminates the existence of false activities such as multiple wallets or robots as much as possible. This kind of screening can also be combined with the credit scoring system we mentioned earlier, so that the brand side can obtain real data on marketing interactions and pay for real people.
In addition, in the traditional advertising ecosystem, it is difficult to accurately attribute due to the isolation of Apps. The data on the chain is relatively transparent, and the identities in the Lens ecosystem are completely connected, and the attribution system for advertisements in the ecosystem can theoretically be more perfect. At the same time, we can mark users more accurately, so as to do better ad matching and improve customer acquisition efficiency. On the user side, how to protect their privacy as much as possible while receiving better advertising recommendations is another topic. That is, there is still room for development of more advertising tools. With these tool matrices, marketing efficiency can be expected to improve, with a corresponding increase in ROI.
It is conceivable that as the Lens ecosystem becomes more and more prosperous, more and more tools will emerge as the times require. Tool products will always have demands, and it is expected that they will always be an important development category. With the different stages of ecological development, the specific needs will also change. For example, when a considerable number of users become heavy users of the ecology and use multiple Lens products, data rights management tools may appear to classify the data rights that different products can obtain, so as to achieve better user privacy protection. On the other hand, it is expected that new tools combined with Lens' social ecology can provide some new solutions for traditional industries and improve industry efficiency. See the marketing market we just analyzed.
DAO
A special feature of Lens' focus on NFT is the built-in governance mechanism.
That is to say, the operation threshold for the community to establish a DAO is very low, and the governance plan can be set in combination with the characteristics of paying attention to NFT, such as only the first 1,000 followers can participate in voting. At present, some governance tools and community management tools have appeared or integrated in the ecology, such as Zilly, Daoscourse, JokenDAO, Guild, etc. However, for the time being, we have not seen a governance function that is well combined with attention to NFT.
Imagine that after the Lens ecology develops to a certain stage, the Lens protocol itself has a DAO, and each social media product in its ecology will also build its own subDAO. The subDAO has its own independent governance rules, which fully reflect their respective values and community orientation. , while not conflicting with the DAO rules of Lens. These DAOs operate in an open and transparent manner.
The three layers of "governance layer-protocol layer-middleware and application layer" together constitute the ecology of Lens. The construction of the governance layer is very important to the community. It is the source of motivation to lead the development of the protocol and applications above. It will formulate rewards and operating rules under the orientation of community values, decide what kind of people to gather at the beginning, and in which direction to go Do expand and build. Since the community is not fully owned by any one subject, there is a great need for high-quality dialogue and a new generation of community building capabilities, so that individuals can work together well and contribute to the healthy development of the Lens ecosystem.
middleware
Middleware (Lens API, etc.) is an integral part of the normal operation of the Lens ecosystem.
As the connecting part between protocols and applications, comprehensive middleware can improve developers' development experience.
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Cultivator's Visual Social Graph
Here we will focus on Cultivator, which is essentially a social DAO. In addition to graphs, it also plans to use a decentralized method for content review. Developers/users can choose to enable its function to solve problems such as spam and robots. It can also be forked at the request of community members to support specific review needs. In the decentralized and censorship-resistant Web3 social ecology, how to combine the power of the community to build an adaptive content review system is the only way to maintain a safe and reliable community atmosphere. On the basis of other content review middleware such as Cultivator, developers can concentrate on developing their front-end UGC experience instead of repeatedly building their own content review system.
The diverse distribution algorithms we discuss in social media are also an important part of making data better available. The interesting point here is that the optimization goal of the Web2 product recommendation algorithm is usually to achieve a higher click-through rate for the entire user group. When the algorithm layer is separated from the application layer, and the choice of algorithm is in the hands of users, that is, the algorithm and the commercialization goals of application products are decoupled, then the optimization goal of the algorithm may be truly adjusted to focus on user satisfaction, or even through customized algorithms to suit local user preferences.
Identity and reputation systems are also part of the middleware. Lens is not yet fully open, and only whitelist users can get Handle, which involves real person confirmation. At present, Lens Human, which cooperates with WorldCoin, and Verify Me!, a social verification product based on PoAP, have already been launched on Lens. The reputation system involves a set of scoring rules. You can freely design the participation threshold or issue badges (Sismo) to users based on the scores. There are also many terminal application scenarios.
In addition, for example, the user privacy issues we mentioned in the tool (application layer) can also be solved in the middleware layer or protocol layer. Which layer is the best to solve the problem depends on the specific judgment of the developer.
Building a middleware ecosystem in a decentralized way is more challenging than a centralized way. However, the advantage is that users can have ownership of their content and social relationships, and at the same time, the reliability of these content is guaranteed, and the community atmosphere is relatively friendly.
Social Graph project comparison
GTM policy differences
Let's take Lens and Farcaster as examples, and look at the differences in the construction ideas of different social graph products from the perspective of GTM.
The underlying technical solutions may be similar or reproducible, but the community atmosphere and brand are unique, and who can really acquire C-end users on a large scale. The difference in GTM approach can just reflect the solutions of different teams.
The first is Lens, which adopts
