The Aave team has launched the L2 network Lens Chain for social Web3 applications.

What happened? The team behind the decentralized social graph protocol Lens launched the mainnet of its own second layer network (L2) Lens Chain. It provides infrastructure for the Lens protocol, which allows users to control their data and interactions. The network will enable the launch of a number of social platforms with integrated cryptocurrency tools.

What else is known? As noted by the founder of Lens and the lending protocol Aave, Stani Kulechov, to stimulate the creation of next-generation SocialFi applications, the team has provided the opportunity for rapid deployment of projects on Lens Chain for all web developers, regardless of their experience with blockchain and smart contracts.

Some social Web3 applications have already started migrating to Lens Chain, including Bonsai, Fountain, and Orb.

Kuleshov launched Lens as an on-chain social network on Polygon, an L2 network based on the Ethereum blockchain, in May 2022. This decentralized socio-financial platform provides an environment for user data, where individuals and organizations have full control over publication and monetization.

Two years later, Lens announced the launch of a network using zero-knowledge proof (ZK) technology. It was originally planned for the fourth quarter of last year, however, it was postponed so that the developer could migrate the dataset from Lens V2 to Polygon to Lens V3 on Lens Chain.

In December of last year, Lens raised $31 million in a funding round led by Lightspeed Faction. It also included participation from Avail, Circle, Consensys, and Wintermute Ventures. Overall, the project has raised about $46 million in several funding rounds and attracted over 650,000 users.

Lens Chain is a scaling solution for Ethereum called Validium. This means that it does not use Ethereum to store its core data.

Instead, it relies on Avail. This is a tool optimized for the zkSync stack and designed to provide censorship-resistant and affordable data publishing.

He uses the Data Availability Sampling method (DAS), which allows checking data availability without the need for each blockchain node to download and store all the information. DAS reduces the cost of working with data and increases scalability.

Lens Chain was developed using the ZKsync stack, which uses zero-knowledge proofs to verify information while maintaining privacy.

Lens Chain has also integrated the GHO stablecoin from Aave as a token for paying transaction fees.