Avail DA and Lens officially announced their cooperation to unlock a new era of decentralized social networks

Original source: Avail enthusiasts

Lens, a social network graph protocol, announced that it will use Avail DA to build a scalable and resilient decentralized social network. Lens said, Avail DA ensures instant data verifiability and accessibility, and through KZG commitment and data availability sampling (DAS), it can support the expansion of millions of users.

Lens is a user-centric social application protocol, just like hey and orb. Lens aims to empower millions of users to enjoy an open and fair online social space. Its openness ensures that anyone can connect and participate at the protocol level, and its fairness ensures that anyone can participate freely and have the opportunity to distribute tokens more fairly.

Lens chose Avail because of its powerful and future-proof DA solution, which is optimized for the ZK technology stack. Lens and Avail share a common vision to provide users with a unified blockchain experience. With the support of Avail, Lens is expected to unlock a new world in which blockchain-based social applications can seamlessly interact with various blockchain services. Through the integration, Lens and Avail are laying the foundation for a scalable, user-centric, and resilient future for open social networks.

Why is it so difficult to scale social networks on blockchain?

Social networks generate a lot of data. Posts, likes, comments, and connections are all data-intensive activities, and todays social networks are built on a centralized architecture that trades dynamic user experiences for control at almost every level of the stack. This has resulted in almost all of our online social interactions being controlled by a few companies.

Historically, on-chain networks have struggled to support the high transaction throughput required for mainstream consumer applications. By leveraging ZKsync’s ZK stack, Lens is able to scale execution to support social applications and settle transactions on Ethereum. However, the remaining question is what to do with all the transaction data. Even with the implementation of EIP-4844, publishing transaction data to Ethereum is not a commercially viable option for social networks. This is where Avail DA comes in.

Introducing Lens on Avail DA

By connecting Avail DA, ZKsync, and Ethereum, Lens is able to build a modular blockchain that exponentially increases throughput at a very low cost.

Lens can empower users and developers to create and enjoy user-owned, fair, and resilient online social networks. By opening up social networks at the protocol level, users can take advantage of different social applications while retaining all of their social connections and social capital. If Instagram stops showing posts to your followers and requires you to pay to access them, you can quickly switch to an application that provides you with the ability to interact freely with your users, which represents a major paradigm shift from the status quo. This is also a more urgent need for the millions of content creators who invest hours in producing content on centralized social platforms because they get very little in return.

“Our goal at Lens is to create a fully resilient network on Ethereum that guarantees participation and transparency at every level, supports ownership and control, and unlocks new and interesting use cases,” said Stani Kulechov, founder of Lens. “With a scalable and resilient foundation, the next generation of modular Lens leverages Avail DA to enable the most advanced and future-proof data availability solutions.”

Building a future-proof blockchain network optimized for ZK technology

Lens believes that ZK technology is the best long-term solution for expanding blockchain applications. Its profound expansion advantages and rapid performance improvements far exceed any alternatives. It is based on this insight that the Lens team began to plan and implement Lens modular architecture.

The Lens team began integrating with ZKstack to incorporate ZK rollup technology into its execution layer. Knowing that it was not feasible to publish all data to Ethereum, the Lens team began looking for the most optimized DA solution. This led them to Avail, the only on-chain neutral DA layer that combines KZG commitments and data availability sampling (DAS).

With Avail DA, the Lens architecture is able to leverage proofs of validity for execution and data availability. This enables Lens to achieve scalability and data compression far beyond what is possible with optimistic solutions.

In addition to leveraging Avails data availability layer, the ability to interoperate with a large number of blockchain services through Avail Nexus also fits in with Lens long-term goals. By choosing to integrate with Avail DA, Lens can provide a Web2-like user experience to mainstream audiences, built on a unified Web3 foundation with optimized interoperability. This is a complete game changer for decentralized social technology.

Protecting open social data on Avail DA

Lens is now live and currently has about 500,000 users and over 40 million transactions. The next generation of Lens will be launched in the fourth quarter of 2024, marking an important step forward for decentralized social networks.

Developers can leverage Avail’s scalable technology to unlock mainstream use cases for blockchain technology and begin preparing to build the next generation of resilient social networks using Lens.

Image source: https://dune.com/sixdegree/lens-protocol-ecosystem-analysis