April 04, 2025—Lens Chain has officially launched, marking a new era for SocialFi. The Lens mainnet launch brings scalability, cost-efficiency, and true user ownership to Web3 social applications.
At the core of this transformation is Avail’s foundational data availability (DA) layer, ensuring that Lens Chain remains verifiable, scalable, and decentralized from day one.
Lens Chain is designed for mass adoption. With gasless transactions, a modular social protocol (Lens V3) with pre-built social primitives, on-chain content storage (Grove), built-in distribution through the Lens Social Graph and flourishing DeFi integration and dApps ecosystem; Lens brings together the right catalysts for the growth of SocialFi.
“To fuel next-generation SocialFi applications, we made it possible for all types of web builders, regardless of their experience with blockchain and smart contracts, to rapidly deploy on Lens Chain,” said Lens Founder Stani Kulechov. “Built on the latest future-proof technology and deep learnings, Lens Chain drives rapid development and delivers speed, scalability, and low cost. This enables builders of all backgrounds to provide an exceptional onchain experience for mainstream users and monetize in a variety of ways quickly to achieve profitability.”
Here’s everything on why this launch is powerful and how Avail is paving the way forward.
Lens Chain: A SocialFi Powerhouse L2 Built For Scale
Traditional social media is plagued by centralization with platform-favored monetization and a lack of user ownership. Lens solves this. The Lens Protocol, first launched in February 2022, introduced a decentralized social graph integrated with blockchain technology. Lens aimed to empower creators and developers to build and monetize decentralized social media applications. However, as user activity and data volume grew, Lens required a more scalable and cost-efficient solution tailored to high-volume onchain social interactions.
For this, Lens created a purpose-built layer 2 and migrated data from Lens V2 on Polygon to the new chain on mainnet. Lens’ data migration is one of the largest in blockchain history, transferring 125GB of storage logs from the Genesis block onward:
- 650K user profiles migrated, preserving user identities and social graphs
- 28M social connections, ensuring seamless transition of network links
- 12M+ posts and content pieces moved without loss or disruption
- 125GB of historical data, including past interactions, on Avail DA
Handling a migration of this scale requires a high-performance execution and data availability stack that is modular, scalable, secure and decentralized—and that’s exactly what ZKsync and Avail DA deliver together.
Lens Chain is now live; it is purpose-built for SocialFi at scale, and supported by leading Web3 technologies:
- ZKsync Integration: Bringing rollup scalability and low-cost transactions with the high-performance ZK Stack and Elastic Network.
- Avail’s DA: Ensures secure, cost-effective, and censorship-resistant data publishing and verification, optimized for the ZK Stack.
- GHO Stablecoin as the Lens gas token: Users can pay transaction fees in Aave’s GHO stablecoin, making fees predictable and stable.
Stani Kulechov, founder of both Aave and Lens, brings deep expertise in building open, user-owned financial infrastructure. Aave has become the DeFi market leader with over $34 billion in total value locked (TVL) across 11 blockchains and 13 markets. In December 2024, Aave held a 45% market share in DeFi lending, per a Bankless Times report. Lens secured $31 million in funding (Dec 2024), led by Lightspeed Faction, demonstrating support for Lens Chain and its focus on SocialFi.
Let’s dive into how Avail adds value to SocialFi's next-gen infrastructure needs.
Avail: The Backbone of Lens Chain’s Data Availability
Scaling decentralized social apps means handling millions of posts, interactions, and media files without clogging the blockchain. It’s about processing massive volumes of data quickly and verifiably—without sacrificing decentralization, security, or cost-efficiency. Avail delivers fast finality (~40 seconds) and enables instant data confirmation. That’s exactly why Avail was the natural choice for Lens Chain.
Why is Avail built for SocialFi at Scale?
- Modular by Design: Avail’s DA layer is stack-agnostic, meaning it can support various execution layers like ZK-rollups, Validiums, Sovereign chains and Optimistic rollups. For Lens, Avail DA supports the ZK stack.
- Expandable Blockspace: Avail supports 4MB/block today, but can scale up to 128MB/block, a 64x throughput increase, ensuring Lens Chain can grow without bottlenecks.
- Ultra-Fast Data Verification: Avail provides the fastest DA verification in Web3, making data verifiable within ~40 seconds and down to 250ms with Avail Turbo DA.
- Seamless Cost Absorption: With Avail’s high data throughput, transaction costs become up to 90% cheaper than Ethereum—so low that developers can seamlessly absorb them into their operational expenses, much like hosting fees in traditional Web2 applications.
- Permissionless Verification: Avail is unique as it provides tamper-proof DA using KZG Commitments while ensuring data availability through Data Availability Sampling (DAS). This aligns perfectly well with Ethereum’s danksharding roadmap, which intends to support both.
By utilizing Avail DA, Lens Chain ensures its SocialFi ecosystem can scale near-infinitely, remain cost-effective, and offer a Web2-like experience—all while providing cryptographic decentralization.
“For open social to become mainstream, it must be scalable, cost-effective, and user-friendly. Lens Chain’s launch is a critical step in making that happen,” said Anurag Arjun, co-founder of Avail. “Avail DA ensures that Lens Chain can scale verifiably and cost-efficiently, providing a foundation for high-throughput blockchain applications that demand data at scale.”
What This Means for Developers and Users Today
For developers, Lens Chain with Avail unlocks new possibilities for building SocialFi applications. Lens Chain is designed with a focus on usability and scale. Built-in account abstraction and sign-in with Family wallet (via e-mail or phone—no seed phrase necessary), make it easier than ever to bring users onchain.
Here’s how it helps developers:
- Frictionless Development: Lens V3 offers modular building blocks—such as accounts, usernames, feeds, and graphs—that can be mixed and matched to create social features quickly.
- Built-in Monetization: Developers can easily integrate onchain Rules like token-gated content, NFT memberships, micro-subscriptions, and social tokens to power new engagement and revenue models.
- Fast & Scalable User Experiences: ZKsync rollups compress and batch transactions for lower gas costs and faster execution, while Avail DA ensures data is always available and verifiable—enabling seamless UX at scale.
For users, this means: :
- Full Ownership: Users have complete control of their content and identity—no more relying on centralized social platforms.
- Lower Fees: With GHO and Avail powering the backend, users benefit from near-zero transaction costs.
- Next-Gen SocialFi: A new kind of experience where users can interact, earn, and engage in a decentralized, user-owned economy.
Ecosystem Spotlight: Who’s Migrating to Lens Chain?
Top-tier Web3 social apps are migrating or expanding on Lens Chain, leveraging Avail’s DA:
- Orb: A new frontier for Web3 social engagement.
- Hey: Open social networking with on-chain identity.
- Bonsai: Launching an AI-powered launchpad for SocialFi & AI-driven interactions.
- Tape: Revolutionizing content creation & monetization.
- Soclly: The LinkedIn of Web3 for professional networking.
What’s Next on Avail? The future is on Nexus and Fusion
While Avail DA is for scalable, verifiable data availability, the future holds even greater possibilities. Avail’s roadmap innovations with the Avail Unification Stack (coming soon) —Nexus and Fusion—could unlock new frontiers for Web3 social networks, gaming, payments, DeFi and more.
- Avail Nexus: A permissionless interoperability layer enabling seamless cross-rollup and sovereign chain communication. Avail Nexus unlocks liquidity access across multiple ecosystems, enabling a true cross-chain economy.
- Avail Fusion: A shared security layer leveraging multi-asset re-staking to provide security for modular blockchains. This mechanism increases Avail security by allowing multiple assets, including BTC, ETH, SOL, and ERC-20 tokens, to be staked, creating a diverse security model where developers gain access to shared crypto-economic security while users unlock new earning opportunities.
Nuff Said….
Lens Chain isn’t just another Layer 2—it’s a platform built from the ground up for SocialFi at scale. With ZKsync (from Matter Labs), Avail DA, and Lens fueling the ecosystem, this is the alpha drop Web3 has been waiting for.
SocialFi is ready. Builders start building. Creators start creating today!!
Are you building?
If you plan to build a rollup, or appchain or want to be part of the future of the verifiable interconnected Web3, find out more on Avail Stack (comprising of Nexus, Fusion and DA). Contact Kyle Rojas (kyle@availproject.org) on our Partnerships team for an insightful conversation. Don’t miss a beat: join Avail on Discord and X for the latest updates.