Lens is an open social network that enables users and creators to own their social graph, content and connections. Developers can leverage its powerful social features, community, distribution channels and infrastructure to build resilient social networks.
We are excited to announce that Lens is integrating with Avail DA to provide end users with fast, inexpensive, reliable and publicly verifiable transaction data, powering seamless social and financial experiences on Lens.
Unlocking Web3 Features at Web2 Scale
Social networks produce enormous quantities of data, and building social networks on a decentralized substrate presents a number of challenges. Users have grown accustomed to a certain User Experience (UX) when it comes to existing social media apps, and while early adopters of web3 are willing to put up with a bit of friction in the UX, most web2 users are not.
When decentralizing social networks, an obvious challenge is managing the sheer quantity of data they generate. For apps built on the Lens ecosystem, this means having access to large quantities of decentralized data on demand. Another is having composability and interoperability with other applications within and outside the social network’s ecosystem. For social media ecosystems such as Lens, it is critical to design for network effects so that user growth and engagement increase exponentially as more users join the network.
To enable such network effects, the underlying technology, tools and tokens need to all work together seamlessly, and not within fragments and silos. That means apps and tools need to be able to interoperate with apps and services built on Ethereum and the rest of web3. Moreover, the entire application stack must be secure, with cryptographic and crypto-economic assurances throughout the stack.
Since its inception, Lens has grown to support more than half a million Lens profiles and has received close to 10 million posts across social apps like Hey, Orb and Kaira. The next phase of growth for Lens will require scalable infrastructure that’s future-proof, resilient and secure so that everyone can join the open social network, without security, scalability or speed compromises.
Avail DA’s Ability To Handle High Data Throughput
A key challenge for the mainstream adoption of web3 social media, is to ensure that increasing usage doesn’t degrade performance. As the network becomes more popular, it must withstand the demands of multiple, concurrent users without negatively impacting other users.
Avail DA’s ability to handle high transaction volumes, currently 2MB/block, is a key component of this. However this is only the minimal throughput capacity as Avail supports expandable blockspace, and can increase block size up to 128MB/block, representing a 64X increase in throughput.
Handling such a volume of data requires an architecture designed for scalability with quick and easy access. Avail provides the fastest DA verification time out of any DA layer, providing data availability guarantees in two block times, which is around 40 seconds. With such high data throughput, the expected transaction costs are so low they can be absorbed into the operational costs for application developers, similar to web hosting costs in Web2. This enables developers to finally build blockchain apps that are free to use for the end user.
All of this is built into Avail’s public blockchain, which anyone can permissionlessly access and verify. Avail’s use of KZG Commitments and Light Clients with Data Availability Sampling (DAS), makes end-user verification straightforward. Any Lens user can sample directly from the Avail network to verify data availability guarantees for themselves without reliance on full nodes. Moreover, Avail light clients are efficient enough to run on a user’s phone, laptop or even within the browser.
Crypto-economic Guarantees & Secure Verification
Strong cryptographic and crypto-economic security are fundamental to any blockchain. Avail’s design incorporates both, providing strong crypto-economic and cryptographic guarantees for all chains and users. With these guarantees, Lens users and developers can enjoy an open social network embedded with web3’s core values, making it secure, resilient to outside control and community owned.
Developers inherit the crypto-economic security enabled by Avail’s native AVAIL token. They will also inherit additional crypto-economic security via Avail Fusion. Fusion adds security to the network by encouraging holders of well established cryptocurrencies like BTC, ETH and others to stake their tokens in return for staking rewards. This re-staked security is then inherited by every Avail user, including Lens.
The Avail blockchain supports up to 1,000 validators, and the Phragmén election algorithm irons out stake across active validators so that a few validators with large stake cannot control the network. Avail’s blockchain adopts a hybrid consensus model similar to Ethereum. The block production engine BABE produces blocks and maintains liveness, while GRANDPA finalizes blocks to guarantee safety.
DA proofs are verifiable on Ethereum via VectorX, a zero knowledge bridge which sends a data root to Ethereum. This can be used to verify on Ethereum that Avail validators have reached consensus on the data blobs submitted. This helps Lens keep costs down, which is important for use cases that are sensitive to pricing, like social media.
Lens Architecture
Lens combines the ZKstack (powered by ZKsync), Avail and Ethereum in a scaling infrastructure that supports two different transaction policies and is capable of supporting mainstream decentralized social networks.
The integration with Avail plays a key role in the public Validium for Lens, as part of its early phase architecture. The benefits of this are two-fold. By making public data such as posts available for verification on Avail’s decentralized infrastructure, Lens can offer users a more resilient network than what’s available with today’s centralized platforms. This is because the data is distributed across multiple computers, it’s publicly verifiable and difficult for a single entity to censor or control. The public Validium can achieve these decentralization guarantees while supporting a high number of daily active users and keeping costs down.
A future phase of the Lens architecture will further boost security and user control with the introduction of a ZK rollup alongside the Validium in an eventual Volition construct.
Avail’s Architecture
Avail’s modular blockchain guarantees data availability for blockchain networks like Lens. Any network can submit transaction data to Avail which it secures through validity proofs and erasure coding while light clients verify the data through DAS. Light clients connect, forming a p2p network which enables Avail to scale with demand and support thousands of con-current rollup networks without degrading performance.
As part of Avail’s roadmap, Nexus will help facilitate cross-chain communication between networks. For partners like Lens, this could mean providing users with seamless cross-chain experiences, allowing them to tap into functionality and tokens from multiple networks. Avail Fusion will provide the network with added crypto-economic security with additional tokens like ETH, BTC and others contributing to the Avail consensus along with the native AVAIL token.
Networks on Avail such as Lens use the AVAIL token to pay for DA fees and AVAIL token holders can secure the network through staking, receiving staking rewards in AVAIL.
With Avail, Lens can effectively support its expanding user base while ensuring that applications built on Lens are accessible to users wherever they are. Avail’s architecture and roadmap are designed to address the user experience challenges present in today’s cross-chain environment. Additionally, the implementation of re-staking will enhance the crypto-economic security of all applications powered by Avail. As the social media landscape evolves these capabilities will play an important role in helping more resilient social networks bloom.
How to build on Avail Today
Avail’s modular DA layer went live on mainnet in July, and it’s easy to get started building with Avail today. You can follow Avail on X to stay up to date with future releases of Nexus and Fusion.
Having announced significant partnerships including five major rollup stacks (Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon, Starknet and ZKSync) as well application ecosystems like Lens building on Avail, you will join a mission driven community of builders working at the bleeding edge of ZK tech and expanding web3 into new categories.
Avail is led by former Polygon co-founder Anurag Arjun, and earlier raised $75 million in funding, from high profile investors like Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Dragonfly Capital and Cyber Capital to unify web3.
Join the developer community on Discord and Telegram. Say hi to @robin and @naruto, who can help guide you through your development journey and connect you with the rest of the development team.
For a broader overview of Avail, check out the awesome-avail page on our GitHub.
