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Our vision is to make social spaces more open and fair. Openness means that there are no restrictions at the protocol level – everyone can connect to the network and participate. Fairness means everyone can benefit from social spaces, without concerns of censorship, and through more evenly distributed monetization opportunities.

To lay a scalable foundation for the future of social spaces, we chose to develop the next generation of Lens on what we believe is the most robust and future-proof technology — zkSync’s ZK Stack.

Once we succeed, digital social spaces will no longer be fragile and prone to centralization by social media giants; the user-centric internet will become the new norm.

Onchain Networks

Social media networks today trap users in walled gardens controlled by corporate giants. These companies hoard user data on private servers, limiting user control and ownership. Switching platforms in web2 means starting over, requiring a massive time investment to rebuild your social capital. This lack of data ownership and control not only creates a high switching cost for users and hinders competition and innovation, but is unfair.

Onchain networks disrupt this model. Data is distributed across a network of computers, making it difficult for one entity to control it. This empowers users with ownership of their social media identity and connections. With onchain social networks, users can freely move their data and connections across social media applications. This decentralized approach fosters an environment with less censorship and more freedom of expression at the network level.

We’ve seen the effectiveness of decentralization in securing financial value. Blockchain creates a public, transparent, and tamper-proof record. Each entry is linked to the previous entry and verified. Within this network, economic incentives ensure data remain reliable, readily available, and resistant to censorship. These incentives and networking design ensure that instead of trusting social media giants with the empty promise, “don’t be evil,” well-designed onchain networks simply can’t be evil by their design.

Scaling a Decentralized Social Network