Lens Lab, the team behind Aave’s decentralized social media protocol, Lens, is launching a Layer 2 network designed to support web3 social applications.

Announced on May 14, Lens Network leverages Matter Labs’ modular ZK Stack infrastructure, with Lens planning to build a hybrid validium and volition Layer 2.

Lens said this design can support the high transaction throughput required by mainstream consumer applications while maintaining cheap fees. Lens Network will also leverage account abstraction to provide gasless and signless transactions to streamline user onboarding.

“Lens Network overcomes the scaling limitations of blockchain and can support mass adoption,” said Matter Labs, the team behind ZkSync. “This breakthrough in scalability delivers a user experience on par with traditional social networks while maintaining the benefits of web3: user ownership, portability, choice, and secure transactions.”

“Lens Network creates a hybrid architecture that combines validium and volition with the ZK Stack on Ethereum,” said Stani Kulechov, founder of Avara — the parent company of Lens and Aave. “This not only scales but will make the internet more open and fair.”

Lens celebrated its permissionless launch in late February, allowing anybody to create a profile or develop applications on top of the protocol.

Daily activity jumped up from less than 10,000 transactions per day to around 40,000 following its permissionless launch, while Lens’ active user count has steadily trended between 800 and 1,500 since November, according to Dune Analytics.

Lens Network rollout

The Lens Network will also host a new version of the Lens Protocol intended to serve as a central hub for Lens users. The new protocol will facilitate integrations with both Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and non-EVM compatible blockchains, allowing developers to build Lens-based social applications across multiple networks.

Avara will deploy Lens Network’s permissionless rollout over three phases, beginning with the launch of a validium using ZK compression techniques to ensure data accessibility. Validiums differ from rollups, the most prevalent Layer 2 scaling mechanism, by publishing data off-chain to reduce transaction costs and bolster throughput.

Later launch phases will introduce multiple synchronous validium chains enabling social use cases involving both public and private interactions to protect users’ privacy, followed by adopting volition to combine both a zero-knowledge rollup and validium architecture for Lens Network.

“Users will be able to decide what they wish to share, and how they interact with applications,” Matter Labs said.

Lens’ previous deployment on Momoka, a Polygon-based Layer 3, will continue to operate. Applications will be able to migrate over to Lens Network as Lens plans to deprecate Momoka.

Using web3 to decentralize social capital

Lens argued that web2 social media platforms “trap” their users within walled gardens under the control of corporate giants. Users are unable to transfer their social capital between networks, creating siloed platforms facilitating the capture users’ data for profit.

Avara argues that on-chain networks enable social media to take a form that benefits users by making it hard for a single entity to monopolistically control network and user data.

“This empowers users with ownership of their social media identity and connections,” Lens said. “With on-chain social networks, users can freely move their data and connections across social media applications.”