It’s been an incredible few weeks in the garden since the launch of Lens on mainnet. With the devs leveraging Lens’ composability and open-source code, we’ve seen so many great apps and experiences being built across the ecosystem with users flowing between both, taking their graph and content with them all over. Let’s see what the community buildoors have been working on👇🌿

Lenster 🌸

First up in the spotlight is Lenster, a build by @yoginth.lens. Lenster is well known in the community as Lens’ first Web3 social experience that acts as the most full-featured way to use Lens Protocol to interact with your social graph. Leveraging many of the exciting features built on Lens, Lenster allows your frens to not only follow you and mirror your content but also to collect it per the module you choose to have them collect by.

With additional super features available such as superfollow and monetization of your posts and memes, Lenster provides users with a Web3 native social experience in line with what they're used to in Web2. On Lens, your content and your data are both yours. It is up to you to choose what you do with it and if other people can own it.

The purple-haired buildoor that stormed the ecosystem

Featuring next under today’s spotlight is a community buildoor who, over the past few weeks, has planted a seed full of exciting tools and apps. @m1guelpf.lens came in like a storm, building various projects in less than a couple of days at a time and left the most beautiful garden for the bloomers to explore!

“Lens protocol is such an amazing source of inspiration. They've basically created the perfect decentralized social storage, indexed by default and with stellar APIs for devs. Wanna recreate Twitter, Reddit or Mirror? You just need to make a frontend!” - Miguel Piedrafita

On Miguel’s first visit to the garden, he planted the all-exciting Lens Leaderboard which works by leveraging Lens’ open-source code to display profiles via a ranking that was decided as those most popular and active in the ecosystem. Now well used within the community, the Lens leaderboard is ever-changing as bloomers’ interactions are constantly being stored and updated to reflect a real-time leaderboard.

Miguel’s next seed of creation was Refract, an OG news site full of news and interesting links for hackers just like Hacker News, but according to Miguel, more crypto friendly. Each morning, we now grab our cup of coffee, give it a scroll and see what’s new!

After growing tired of only being able to access the current version of the app on safari, Miguel then wrapped Lenster up all into one mobile app. Now you can access it anywhere on the go! 📲

Providing users with a way to seamlessly cross-post on Lens and Twitter, Miguel’s next build was this magical tool, Reflect! 🪄

We’re so impressed with Miguel’s talent and dedication to building out the ecosystem to provide great apps and experiences for us all. We can’t wait to see what this buildoor cooks up for us next 👀🌿

The Cultivator

The next community buildoor in today’s spotlight is Maui, the creator of Cultivator, an app planted directly in the centre of the Lensverse. You can access Cultivator to visualize your network and connections within the broader Lens social graph. Discover the mutual followers you hold with others and see how interconnected you are ✨

Iris

Now, this next app has been growing in the ecosystem since the beginning of the LFGrow Hackathon in collaboration with ETHGlobal 👀 Introducing Iris, the platform that welcomes a new age of social media! By taking all of their favorite social platforms and combining them into one cohesive decentralized application, Iris gives you – the user – control over who views your content.

Designed to encourage a more organic reach while still being able to create posts for only those who follow you, users of Iris pay a subscription price to follow their favorite creators to access exclusive content with the price being set wholly by the creators themselves. See what your favourite creators are up to on Iris and don’t forget to follow them if you want to see everything that they’re posting! 👀

Phaver

Built to reward its users, Phaver is another Lens-powered app that blossomed during the LFGrow Hackathon. Phaver allows users to curate the most interesting content both on and offline, and get rewarded for it! So, how does it work? Well Phaver DAO will share a majority of the platform ownership with the users they consider to create the most value. If you enjoy curating and sharing content online, then why not dive in and give it a go?

Zilly

Built during the LFGrow Hackathon also, Zilly is another project that has bloomed over the past few months. With a belief that in Web3 the community is everything, Zilly works to ensure that all of its members feel as if they belong. They do this by empowering and coordinating their users to encourage them to later become contributors. What a great way to build a community 🤝

Clipto

Similar to Cameo but more inclusive and flexible, Clipto offers users the opportunity to request personalized videos from their favorite crypto stars! Users can access the app to create a connection between themselves and their favorite creators by requesting personalized videos from anyone. Who will you be requesting your first video from? 🧐

TeaParty 🍵🌿

Powering the Social-&-Earn (S&E) economy, TeaParty was a grant recipient in the first round of the Lens Grants Program. Built to reward socializing through a P2P and B2C incentivized network, TeaParty helps users deliver their content to the right audience by reaching directly to those who already organically interact and share their content. Now you can reach audiences who you know are genuinely interested in you for you 🙌

Lens Booster

Connecting advertisers and users together, Lens booster works to reward bloomers with fees when they post or mirror promotional content. By paying users according to the activity generated on the advertisers’ websites, dapps, and on-chain events, users can monetize their audience by sharing promotional materials with them. See how they tested it themselves below 👀👇

”We tested the concept with Orbit, a DeFi protocol built by us, with an incentivized Lens post that received great feedback in terms of absolute and relative metrics , doubling the community overnight.” - Vincenzo Manzon, co-founder Lens Booster

Developer DAO

Building a Lens subgraph, @nazeeh.lens and @pdog355.lens from Developer Dao have been making great progress since they began their build last month. Check out their work on GitHub and see what they’ve been up to!

Stats.lens.xyz 👀

Want to see how the ecosystem is performing? Head to stats.lens.xyz where you can see all the latest stats on the garden including the total no. of profiles, posts, follows, collects, and even the total user-earned revenue 👀 it’s a great place to get a feel for how the garden is growing as the buildoors continue to build out the ecosystem👷🌿

Content collection campaigns

To date, creators have earned $37,576.17 on Lens Protocol through content collection campaigns using the Collect module. Most notably, @LensProtocol raised 50K MATIC across three posts for @shefi.lens and the Lens grant fund. @yoginth.lens also raised 5K+ MATIC in a single post to keep @lenster.lens a gas-covered user experience.

These new monetization tools will continue to make a big difference for many creators and developers out there. We can’t wait to see more fundraising experiments with this module!

Build with us 💚

Feeling inspired by all this building, then why not check out the Lens grants program? With $200K in grants already being given to buildoors over the past three months and $50K still remaining, stay tuned as we announce more funding for grants soon!

Not looking to apply for a grant but instead, want to join the team? Check out our open roles! There’s plenty of room to become a part of the fam 🤝

We can’t wait to continue this journey with you all! 🌿💚