Lens Doubles Down On Developer-First Focus With v2 Iteration

Lens Doubles Down On Developer-First Focus With v2 Iteration
Lens v2 features advanced smart contract execution and NFT features.

Lens, the highly-anticipated social media protocol from Aave, announced its v2 iteration on July 15.

Lens said it designed v2 to bolster Lens’ composability with external protocols and apps, with the end goal of enabling “two-way [interactions] between any type of web application and Lens.”

Lens’s new Open Actions feature allows users and developers to execute external smart contracts from within, including minting external NFTs on Lens, trading ERC-20 tokens, and cross-chain interactions between Ethereum and Layer 2 networks.

“The entire Lens V2 codebase was rewritten, refactored, and optimized for readability, open source contributions, and developer experience,” Lens said in a blog post. “We hope Lens Protocol V2 gives applications and integrators maximum flexibility to create whatever use case and consumer experience they envision.”

Lens is an Ethereum-based open-source social graph offering permissionless and composable infrastructure for developers to build applications on. The protocol aims to disrupt the centralized social media landscape with an alternative web3-native solution offering the benefits of decentralization and permissionlessness.

Lens said it deliberately launched v1 without a user interface to encourage developers to imagine new consumer apps of any form. Builders have since created multiple social media applications allowing Lens profiles to interact, post, and monetize content, including Lenster, Orb, and Buttrfly.

Lens v2

Lens’s v2 iteration comes more than a year after the protocol first opened its doors to early-access users in February 2022.

The revamped protocol supports composability between profiles and the ERC-6551 nonfungible token standard, allowing NFTs to own an associated Lens profile. Lens said the feature affords NFTs “their own social relationships, voice, and monetization opportunity.”

The upgrade also introduces new profile security and management features, including allowing users to store profiles on hardware wallets. Lens also launched its optional “Profile Guardian” feature last month to protect against phishing attacks by automatically disabling certain token approvals unless the function is manually deactivated.

V2 also Introduced a standard for “Quoted Publications,” which resembles Twitter’s quote-tweet feature.

Lens raised $15M in a seed funding round last month, and launched Momoka, a Layer 3 appchain network exclusively supporting the Lens ecosystem, in April. Momoka stores data off-chain to ensure low transaction costs.

Aave also launched its GHO stablecoin on Saturday. Aave users can mint the stablecoin against collateral assets deposited into the protocol, allowing users to both generate yield and mint stablecoins against their assets.