As of today, Lens is permissionless.
Since we launched the protocol, our guiding mission has been to enable human connection, through new forms of ownership—owning our data, our social graph, and the relationships and content we create.
In our first few years, we chose to remain in beta while we enhanced security and scalability and nurtured a vibrant developer ecosystem. We took a protocol-first approach and supported over 400 community-built applications. Some of these were fully open source with as many as 100 contributors.
Lens quickly built a thriving community, especially among cryptonatives hungry for an onchain alternative to the ever-shifting whims of web2 social. Just six months after launching in beta, over 100,000 users were engaging with apps across Lens. The community created over 37M onchain social transactions, including 5M posts, 4.5M mirrors, 2.2M comments, and 11M follows.
Still, as we built out Lens’s functionality over the past 18 months, we heard ongoing feedback that made one thing clear: the community wanted to go permissionless.
A community-first protocol
We’ve taken careful steps to gear up for this moment. We built a data scaling infrastructure —Momoka, made Lens more modular with Open Actions, and provided ways to create higher-quality graphs in the Lens API. We also gradually decentralized governance by introducing the Lens Improvement Protocol (LIP) process. During this time, curiosity and demand for onchain social has continued to grow. People want social networks that serve them —not a tech giant’s balance sheet.
When a community-driven LIP quickly garnered consensus, we took steps to bring decentralization onchain. Moving forward, the core Lens team and the greater community will work together to push the protocol forward. We face new interesting challenges.
First, scaling the network for continued onboarding of new users; and second, building a new and improved social network that gives users more control over their ownership.
Into the dark forest.
With the move to a permissionless protocol, Lens removes all barriers to development. Developers—the people who have brought the Lens vision to life—who can now build whatever they can imagine.
This level of freedom is key as we move forward. And eventually, a fully decentralized Lens, founded on user ownership and control, will facilitate innovation because great ideas will come from the community and will be brought to life through devs. We expect this to unlock better user experiences, new use cases, and monetization models that create collective and individual value for all participants.
It’s never been a more exciting time for onchain social. And we’re just getting started. Mint your Lens profile today on lens.xyz.
-Stani Kulechov