Lens Protocol is a decentralized, composable social media infrastructure built on Polygon, created by the team behind Aave. It aims to reshape how we interact online by enabling users to own their identities, content, and social connections on-chain.
User identity is anchored in Profile NFTs, which encapsulate a user’s posts, comments, mirrors, and follows. When someone follows a profile, they receive a Follow NFT—supporting monetization, rarity, and trading possibilities. Creators can mint their content as NFTs via the Collect feature, allowing followers to pay to collect posts, thereby opening new streams for direct monetization.
Lens’s architecture is built on modular “Social Primitives” — such as Accounts, Usernames, Graphs, Feeds, Groups, Rules, and Actions. These plug-and-play components enable developers to build tailored social and SocialFi applications without reinventing the wheel. Community rules can restrict actions like posting, following, or joining groups based on NFT ownership or token balances.
Operating as a Layer 2 on a ZK-powered stack with ZKsync and Avail, Lens achieves fast, low-cost transactions secured by Ethereum. It supports frictionless onboarding, allowing users to verify via email or phone and pay using USD-native gas in GHO. Once onboarded, identities and content are portable across Lens-compatible apps—no vendor lock-in.
Lens Protocol operates permissionlessly and faces no central point of censorship. Profile, content, and connections are immutable, owned by users, and transferrable—even between applications. V2 introduces enhanced safety with Profile Managers, on-chain blocking, quoted publications, and improved multisig/hardware wallet support for governance and control.
