Social media platform Lens enters ‘unlicensed’ phase
Social Graph Lens has moved to a “permissionless” phase, allowing any user to now participate in the network by creating an on-chain NFT for their profile.
This change will allow anyone to easily enter the platform by creating a profile for a fee of 10matic tokens (currently worth $10.30) or paying a similar amount with a credit card. Lens debuted on the Polygon blockchain in May 2022.
Lens is described as a social graph that represents a distributed, user-owned map of connections and relationships between individuals and organizations. NFTs, which serve as user profiles, allow users to interact with decentralized applications (dapps) within the ecosystem.
Any user can now create a Lens profile and access the protocol, whereas previously profile creation was limited to selected users.
This comes amidst increasing competition in decentralized social media, where multiple platforms compete for user engagement. Lens, in particular, faces stiff competition from Farcaster, another key player in the decentralized social media space.
Despite Farcaster’s move to an unlicensed model in October 2023 following the introduction of Optimism, Lens’ move toward a similar approach has been more gradual, especially considering its first launch in 2022.
Lens founder Stani Kulechov emphasized the platform’s development approach, saying, “We decided to keep it in beta for the first few years, while strengthening security and scalability and fostering a vibrant developer ecosystem.”
lens version 2
Lens is currently in version 2, focusing on Open Actions, a feature that allows you to execute external smart contract actions directly on content posts in Lens.
Open Actions provides a way for developers to build custom actions that can be executed through posts. For example, this feature will allow users to mint non-fungible tokens (NFTs) for OpenSea contracts directly from content published by Lens.
Lens also operates a data scaling solution called Momoka, which aims to store social media transaction data off-chain for efficiency while ensuring on-chain verification for security. The project closed a $15 million funding round last year led by IDEO CoLab Ventures.
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