Lens launches Lens Network, an infrastructure to support mass adoption of decentralized social networks

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Compiled by Nan Zhi from Odaily Planet Daily

Lens announced the launch of Lens Network, designed to support mass adoption of decentralized social networks .

Lens vision is to make the social space more open and fair . Open means there are no restrictions at the protocol level – everyone can connect to the network and participate. Fair means everyone can benefit from the social space without worrying about censorship and profit through more balanced monetization opportunities.

In order to lay a scalable foundation for future social spaces, Lens chose zkSyncs ZK Stack, a technology that Lens believes to be sound and forward-looking, to develop a new generation of Lens .

Lens hopes that the digital social space will no longer be fragile and controlled by social media giants; a user-centric Internet will become the new normal.

On-chain network

Today’s social media networks trap users within walls controlled by corporate giants. These companies hoard user data on private servers, limiting user control and ownership. Changing platforms in Web2 means starting from scratch and requiring significant time to rebuild your social capital. This lack of data ownership and control not only creates high switching costs for users, but also hinders competition and innovation, which is unfair.

On-chain networks flip this model on its head, enabling users to own their social media identities and connections. In on-chain social networks, users can freely move their data and connections between social media applications, creating an environment with less censorship and more freedom of speech.

Scaling decentralized social networks

In the past, on-chain networks have had difficulty supporting the high throughput required for mainstream applications. Building decentralized, secure, and scalable systems is a challenge. To achieve all three, trade-offs are often required . In order to artificially increase scalability, on-chain networks are forced to make compromises that weaken security or decentralization. This is what Vitalik Buterin calls the blockchain trilemma.

Networks typically charge the same security cost for all transactions, which is why social networks have been unable to leverage on-chain security at scale.

Developers therefore make a choice between scalability, security, and cost. For social networks, we need to ask ourselves whether social network transactions require the same security and data integrity as financial transactions.

While social transactions may not require the same degree of security as financial transactions, a fair and open social space does need to ensure that users are protected from data monopolies and walls. On-chain security shifts power from corporate networks to users. When users own their social capital, they become mobile citizens able to take their social capital (identity, content, and relationships) to any social space of their choice.

Solving the blockchain trilemma in the social space

Ethereum provides basic security for DApps, supporting a high degree of composability and programmability, which are features derived from EVM. Recently, Optimism Rollups and ZK Rollups have expanded the Ethereum network. Compared with Optimism Rollup, ZK Rollup has multiple advantages, including more advanced data compression technology, which will be published and verified on L1.

While Rollup offers significant transaction cost advantages, especially after the EIP-4844 update, scaling social interactions remains challenging. When using Optimism Rollup, data must remain relevant and accessible over a period of time to check fraud proofs. This is expensive on L1. Rollups excel in financial applications such as DeFi precisely because they inherit the strong security of L1, ensuring the final transaction record. Even if a Rollup is compromised, L1 data can reveal fraudulent transactions and initiate the process of recovering funds from the Ethereum network. While social use cases do not require the full Rollup state security provided by Ethereum , some degree of security inherited from Ethereum is critical to ensuring data integrity.

Further horizontal scalability is possible through solutions such as zkSync’s hyperchains , which use ZK proofs to communicate seamlessly while independently processing each other’s state and transactions. They connect to a public bridge on Ethereum, achieving security while maintaining decentralization and low costs, reaching a scale of millions of secure transactions per second . This breakthrough paves the way for mass adoption of on-chain social networks, solving the “blockchain trilemma.”

Validiums and Volitions

Validium is a scaling solution that uses ZK compression technology to calculate and publish state transitions to Ethereum after compression and batching, while publishing the state itself to a separate DA. By reducing costs, Validium is well suited for price-sensitive social networks.

Validium’s modular approach, which separates security and data availability, combined with ZK compression technology, ensures that social transactions maintain data integrity with appropriate security while remaining scalable.

Financial transactions are also critical to everyday social networks, and the benefit of being on-chain is that it provides programmable financial pathways that can support a more equitable redistribution of economic benefits and create a better on-chain economic engine for creators, users, and developers.

Volition is a scaling setup that makes it possible to implement two different trading strategies on the same scaling infrastructure. Validium is used to publish state transitions to Ethereum while storing the state on DA providers, while Rollup completes financial transaction settlement on Ethereum while maintaining synchronous interoperability.

Lens Network based on hybrid architecture

Lens officially announced the Lens Network expansion infrastructure, which aims to support the mass adoption of decentralized social networks. Based on the ZK Stack, the Lens Network will be able to handle concurrent instant transactions while ensuring data integrity. The Lens Network will initially launch as an EVM-compatible Validium chain protected by Ethereum, and will transform into the Volition network based on the ZK Stack of zkSync in the third phase.

Phase 1: Seed – Validium on Ethereum

Phase 1: Build the initial infrastructure to achieve scalability. Lens Network uses Validium to ensure that users social activities are always verifiable. It also enables various features necessary for social networks, including private interactions (such as emails) and public social interactions (such as posts), as well as public financial transactions.

Validium batches all transactions and generates a ZK proof that all state changes are valid. This proof is then submitted to Ethereum to ensure the integrity of the network.

Phase 2: Growth – Introducing DA Providers

In Phase 2, Lens Network will create independent and synchronized public and private Validium chains to support various social network use cases with different levels of private and public interactions. The public Validium chain uses a DA provider to guarantee the security of public state data. Private transactions rely on a self-protection system within the private Validium, which are submitted to the Ethereum blockchain for verification by preparing batch proofs, but without publicly disclosing the data.

Phase 3: Bloom – Full Volition

Phase 3 improves transaction security and user control by combining ZK Rollup and Validium technologies. The main change is that Ethereum will protect financial transactions within the public Rollup component. Users can choose to use Ethereum DA to more securely protect financial transactions, while choosing Validium to protect social transactions and settle them to a separate DA. Private transactions for private use cases are processed in a separate instance.

Next Generation Lens Protocol: Cross-Chain Hub

The new version of the Lens protocol will be developed and launched on the Lens Network as a social networking hub for the entire Lens user base. The new version of the Lens protocol will not only be a shared social network, but will also operate as a cross-chain protocol with its main hub on the Lens Network and zkSync. The new version of the Lens protocol can also be deployed on other EVM and non-EVM networks. Our goal is to allow developers to build their social applications on any supported network and connect to the Lens user base through technologies such as CCIP.

User experience improvements

Lens Network aims to provide a smooth user experience comparable to Web2, while providing next-generation ownership and monetization capabilities. Lens will use account abstraction to achieve transactions without paying Gas and signatures, and support embedded wallets. Cross-chain between networks will also become easier, and plans to achieve sub-second transaction times. In order to create a more open and fair social space for everyone to participate and enjoy.

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