Quick take:

• Lens Protocol is a composable and decentralized social graph. With Lens, users will be in control of their own social graph

• Lens ecosystem is growing at such an amazing speed

• There are opportunities for users when joining Lens ecosystem now

What is Lens Protocol?

Lens Protocol is a composable and decentralized social graph, ready for you to build on so you can focus on creating a great experience, not scaling your users.

Lens Protocol consists of 2 main components:

• The Soil: A user-owned open social graph that any application can plug into.

• The roots: Mint a profile, follow others, create and collect any publications, completely on-chain.

The components combined will create a Web3 native social media with features to serve the web 3 community where users can own their content, their social graph and their own data.

The founder of Lens Protocol is Stani Kulechov (also the founder of Aave Protocol).

What is Lens Protocol trying to solve?

To understand what Lens Protocol is trying to solve, we must first understand what social graph & why it matters.

What is a social graph, and the state of the social graph?

The social graph is the connections between people participating in a social networking service. When users join a social network, their account is not something that is valuable, it is information about their relationships (friends, family, loved ones,...), the content they make to earn followers and the things they do or follow online. Users feel lost when they lose their social media accounts because they must rebuild the social graph from the start.

Social media usage is one of the most popular online activities. According to Statista, in 2021, over 4.26 billion people were using social media worldwide, a number projected to increase to almost six billion in 2027

People increasingly depend on social networks for news and content. However, "giants" such as Facebook, Tiktok and Twitter ... which account for most of the market share, are constantly facing accusations such as data theft, addictive algorithms, and other ways to get maximum profit from users regardless of ethical principles. Large companies can do this because they control users' social graphs.

“If you're getting something for free, you are the product”

In traditional social networks, companies focus on one or a few unique products. For example, the company Meta (formerly known as Facebook) only focused on Facebook; after buying Instagram, they devoted a part of their resources to developing Instagram. Twitter only focuses on developing Twitter, Tiktok focuses on Tiktok…

This requires users to create multiple accounts in different social networks and rebuild the social graph from scratch for each social network. Even if users have a network of friends on Facebook, when switching to Twitter, they still have to search for those friends to make friends again.

For some people, the above factor may not be important because, with each different social network, users may have other usages. But the important thing is that users' social graph is not owned by them but is in the hands of centralized companies. They can take the user's social graph to study behavior or sell it to other parties to reap the greatest value.

Every social graph on social networks helps to outline who you are. The more social graph a centralized company has, the better they understand who you are and your behaviors.

The decentralized social network and Lens protocol

The decentralized social network is expected to help overcome the current problems of centralized social networks and bring the user experience to the next level. With a decentralized social network, users will be in control of their own social graph. The social graph is now an asset class instead of a commodity big companies own.

Once users own social graphs, they can use them on different platforms. Imagine how much time and effort a user could save if their YouTube followers automatically followed them on Instagram when that user created a new account.

This is the interesting point when separating the social graph from the application layer above, the information in the social graph is preserved when the application can be used flexibly. Features like customization to filter followers can be easily integrated to meet user needs.

Besides, the protection of users will also be much more effective. If a user's content is not accepted on one platform, then with a social graph, they can easily switch to another social network with the same number of followers.

This creates flexibility as apps can moderate content accordingly without causing a major loss to the user. That is why when describing a decentralized social network, the important thing is not to decide the roadmap of the project but for the users to own their social graph.

Lens protocol values the concept of decentralized social media and is building a composable and decentralized social graph. Users are now in control of their social graph. This can generate massive value and open new doors of possibilities when using social media.

The breakthrough idea, the strong network effects inherit from Aave and the support from the projects and the community have helped the Lens Protocol ecosystem grow at such an amazing speed.

Finding opportunities with Lens Protocol

Disclaimer: This part is based entirely on writer speculation views. I do not guarantee that every opportunity will make 10, 100x. But in my opinion, every potential niche should create the first markup to attract builders, as we see in DeFi, GameFi, NFT,...

The key difference between web 2 and web 3 social media is that users own their social graph. Lens ecosystem leverages this idea with NFT. Your profile and content (post, image, music, video,...) are now in the form of NFTs.

Below is the list of opportunities I see with Lens Protocol:

1/ Make quality content
With Lens and platforms built on Lens, any UGC (Users generated content) can be an asset (post, video, music,..). But to make income from these assets is quite difficult because most users are not paid for the content they provide on social networks.

Based on the greenpill episode featuring Stani with Bankless. Lens does not focus on monetizing every content the users post. But when every content is NFT and can be collected by the users, content creators can connect to their community directly. Collecting NFT to support content creators rather than trying to sell the content they create is the more suitable way.

With every content is now NFT, there are numerous ways to monetize as we can seen from NFT communities today. But to effectively monetize your content, you need to grow your social graph. People might collect a “GM” post from famous people but will not bother to collect it from a handle with no followers.

So if you are the guy with no or few followers and want to monetize your content, you need to make content that is valuable to others. Lens ecosystem is still in the early stages, and there will be less competition if you start early.

2/ Speculation with Lens handle
Right now, according to Opensea, there are only more than 70K Lens handles available compared to more than 2.3 million ENS handles. This is not an actual number of available handles but will give you a nice comparison context.

The key thing to mention is that you can’t create a Lens handle unless you qualify, and it is harder and harder to be qualified. As I’m seeing right now, there are only a few ways to become qualified, like using products from Lens ecosystem or joining offline events.

This creates a very limited supply of Lens handles. So with an entire speculation view, some ways to make a profit are:

• Buying Lens handles: $8 floor on Opensea.

• Using products from Lens ecosystem to be qualified: If you are qualified, you can choose the handle that represents you or a famous and valuable handle.

What’s next with Lens protocol?

ICYMI, applications built on lens use optimistic UI, so commenting, posting, and sharing are almost instantaneous. Users don’t need to sign transactions, no need to pay gas. Lens also has applications that are building mobile apps.

For me, Lens ecosystem is still early to attract a decent amount of users to join, but not as far as many people think. In the greenpill episode Lens’s target is to allow users without an Ethereum address to use apps built on the lens. After users join the ecosystem, they can start to do other things and become more and more familiar with crypto. Team Lens is very open. Lenster’s front end is built by the communities. Others can completely contribute to that front end or fork and make something better.

In the long term, if users can truly own their social graph, many problems can be solved. From the credit market inside crypto (undercollateralized lending) to outside crypto (cross-border credit score). Lens vision to be a part of that future.

“With DeFi, we can create a global liquidity market, with web3 social, we can create a global data market.”

Of course, there is a long way to go, but builders are building and the communities are expanding. The power of crypto is to connect people from all over the world.

Conclusion

These are a few things about Lens Protocol. I’m amazed by how fast this ecosystem is growing and its vision. Will love to learn and discuss more about Lens protocol If anyone is interested.

Followed me at @0xDeidara and deidara.lens to read more content and alphas.