Avail DA will power Lens, a protocol for user-centric social apps like Hey and Orb. Lens aims to empower millions of users to enjoy open and fair social spaces online. Openness ensures that anyone can connect and participate at the protocol level, while fairness maintains that anyone can participate freely, with monetization opportunities that are more evenly distributed.
Lens selected Avail because of its robust and future-proof DA solution that is optimized for the ZK tech stack. Lens and Avail both share a vision to provide a unified blockchain experience for users. With Avail, Lens stands to unlock a world where blockchain based social apps can seamlessly interact with a variety of blockchain enabled services. Through the initial integration, Lens and Avail are laying a foundation for a scalable, user-centric and resilient future for open social networks.
Why it’s so hard to scale social networks on blockchains
Social networks generate lots and lots of data. Posts, likes, comments and connections are all data intensive activities. Today’s social networks are built on centralized architectures, which enable dynamic user experiences in exchange for control at almost every level of the stack. This has led to a point where just about the entirety of our online social interactions take place within the grasp of a handful of companies.
Historically, onchain networks have struggled to support the high transaction throughput required to empower users of mainstream consumer applications. By leveraging ZKsync’s ZK stack, Lens is able to scale execution to support social apps and settle transactions on Ethereum. The remaining problem however is what to do with all of the transaction data. Even with EIP-4844 implemented, posting 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 for a fraction of the cost.
Lens can empower both users and developers to create and enjoy online social networks that are user-owned, fair and resilient. By opening social networks at the protocol level, users can take advantage of different social apps while retaining all of their social connections and social capital. If Instagram were to stop showing posts to your followers and asked you to pay to access them, you could quickly switch to an app which provides both you and your users the ability to interact freely. This represents a profound paradigm shift from the status quo. It’s also a much-needed shift for millions of content creators who invest hours in producing content for centralized social platforms, often receiving very little in return.
“Our goal at Lens is to create a fully resilient network on Ethereum where participation and transparency are safeguarded at every level, supporting ownership and control and unlocking new and interesting use cases,” said Lens Founder Stani Kulechov. “With a scalable and resilient foundation, the next-generation modular Lens utilizes Avail DA for the most advanced and future-proof data availability solution.”
Building a future-proof blockchain network optimized for ZK tech
Lens believes that ZK technology is the best long-term solution for scaling blockchain applications. The profound scaling benefits and rapid performance gains far outweigh any of the alternatives. It was upon this insight that the Lens team began planning and implementing the modular architecture for Lens.
The Lens team began integrating with the ZK stack from ZKsync, incorporating ZK rollup technology into its execution layer. Knowing that posting all the data to Ethereum wouldn’t be viable, the Lens team started to look for the most optimal DA solution for its needs. This led them to Avail which is the only chain-agnostic DA layer combining KZG commitments with data availability sampling (DAS).
With Avail DA, the Lens architecture now leverages validity proofs for execution and data availability. This enables Lens to achieve scalability and data compression far beyond what’s possible with Optimistic solutions.
In addition to leveraging Avail’s Data Availability layer, the ability to interoperate with a host of blockchain services through Avail Nexus aligns with Lens’ long-term goals too. By choosing to integrate with Avail DA, Lens can provide web2-like user experiences to mainstream audiences on a unified web3 foundation, optimized for interoperability. It’s a total game changer for decentralized social technology.
Securing Open Social Data on Avail DA
Lens is already operational today, with roughly half a million users and over 40 million transactions. In Q4, 2024 Lens will begin posting data to Avail DA and continuing to integrate new functionality like Avail Nexus as it becomes available.
Developers can leverage Avail’s scalable foundation to unlock mainstream use cases on blockchain technology, and begin preparing to build the next generation of resilient social networks with Lens.
