On July 17th at 16:55, at the Web3 Crypto Feast in Paris, on the main stage of the Ethereum EthCC venue, Stani Kulechov, founder of the social head protocol Lens Protocol, shared his views on social protocols and once again shared the joy of personal news and becoming a father.
At the same time, more importantly for users, Stani announced the launch of Lens Protocol V2 and shared a detailed introduction to V2 at the event.
The warm-up for the Lens Protocol V2 version started a few days ago, with Lens officials releasing related content one after another.
Although the floor price of the Lens Protocol Profiles, an NFT ecosystem in the Lens Protocol, has dropped due to the launch of a small-scale new invitation system test, it does not affect community discussions.
The reason why this Lens V2 version has received so much attention from the community is not only because of the strong airdrop expectations and user trial of Lens itself, but also because the community once asked the question, "What is Lens missing in order to start public testing?"
Stani's concise and direct answer was "V2".
Although Stani did not mention the issue of public registration when V2 was launched, it does not affect the explosiveness of this V2 version. Let's take a look at the new features worth looking forward to.
What new features are available on Lens V2?
Based on the content announced by Stani at the Paris Ethereum EthCC venue, we can discover some new features of Lens V2: V2 brings more control to builders, integrators, and people exploring web3-driven experiences. With a focus on "open and composable, value-sharing, trust, and security," users can now directly perform external smart contract operations in Lens publications, while also being able to interact with smart contracts within social media within Lens V2. Lens V2 retains its unique open design space, providing options for developers and integrators.
Introducing ERC-6551
In the Lens V2 version, the value is accumulated into the profile NFT instead of the wallet address, expanding the applicability of the ERC-721 non-fungible barrier. Enable new features such as new "follow" relationships. Support access to multiple communities and create unique operations for handles and NFTs.
V2 demonstrates the powerful functionality of composability by providing support between profiles and ERC-6551. It provides its own social relationships, discourse power, and monetization opportunities for NFTs. For example, CryptoKitties can have Lens profiles, follow other CryptoKitties, and publish content, thus creating their own value chain.
The configuration file is the core identifier for all operations. In V2, the "follow" relationship has changed from a relationship between the configuration file and the wallet to a relationship between configuration files. This change means that all social operations occur between configuration files. This improves developers' experience with Lens operations by excluding wallet-based operations.
V2 introduces a new follow architecture. In V2, the "follow" relationship has changed from a relationship between the configuration file and the wallet to a relationship between configuration files. This change means that all social operations occur between configuration files.
NFT tokenization is now optional. All "follow" relationships are attached to profiles instead of followers. If you move your profile from one address to another, your social network will also move with your profile.
Open namespaces. With Lens V2, the handling of configuration files is different from handles, and people can transfer their handles without transferring their profiles, both of which are marked as NFTs.
Configuration files can be minted without a handle, changed to another available handle, or attached to multiple handles, which can be the canonical.lens namespace or any other namespace. In the future, open namespaces will be accompanied by namespace modules to create community interaction based on handles.
Open operations
In Lens V2, users can now enable and perform any external smart contract operations directly in Lens. This functionality can even extend to cross-chain operations with oracle support, such as operations on Ethereum and L2s. This includes joining whitelists, releasing music, building music, minting NFTs, buying and selling ERC-20 or NFTs, joining a DAO, contributing to Gitcoin, voting on proposals, etc.
Open Action: "Open Action" is designed to allow Lens applications to perform external actions directly on the Lens, creating a more native user experience. Through open actions, users and developers can "bring smart contracts" to enable any external smart contract operation on Lens publications - this can even be extended to cross-chain operations with Oracle support (such as operations on Ethereum and L2s).
For example, through the OpenSea "Mint" open action, users can simply click on "Mint" on the Lens post, and it will directly mint the NFT through the OpenSea contract on Lens. Applications can integrate with various third-party markets and protocols to be executed as open actions in user-created posts.
All actions can be inserted into the Lens collective value sharing chain to share value between individuals, applications, algorithms, or other services that add distribution, amplification, curation, or other types of value. By integrating any web3 social application and supporting bidirectional integration, Lens open actions expand the composability and modularity of Lens itself. Therefore, various types of innovative Internet projects and monetization models can be developed, where social network collaboration increases the total value of its audience and content and rewards each other.
Lens V2 has created an open action that allows creators to directly mint NFT collections on Lens to demonstrate the benefits that builders bring to web3, where they can benefit from the shared network. Lens V2 allows users to create an open action that can be used throughout the Lens network within applications and make your innovation visible. Open actions can be proposed and built together as LIPs.
Value Sharing
Collective value sharing realizes new network effects that grow with each interaction. It rewards the value chain contributed by individuals, applications, algorithms, and networks. Contributors and the ecosystem share benefits. Lens believes that the value chain can reward the positive contributions of individuals, applications, algorithms, and networks.
With Lens V2, Lens has increased opportunities for value sharing among users, algorithms, curators, and applications. Anyone can share revenue and reward collaborative actions. For example, someone can make a post on Orb; another user can leave a comment, and yet another user can collect it—perhaps on another application like Buttrfly, where algorithms present the content to curators who bring in more viewers. In this case, the original publisher may want to share revenue to incentivize users, applications, and algorithms that contribute to every step of the value chain, thereby strengthening the value chain and enhancing the collaboration among ecosystem partners and their business models.
This new programmable monetization layer can be expanded to reward any user or application that adds value to actions. It enables people to choose to implement monetization models that reward beneficial and altruistic behaviors, which in turn supports collaboration between networks and sustainable ecosystem growth on shared networks.
Access to asset management
In Lens V2, users can delegate operations to any wallet, following the relationship between profiles and wallets. Alternatively, profiles can be stored directly on hardware wallets and used with another wallet. When using one or multiple addresses, DAOs or community profiles will be able to be stored on multiple signatures. The improved profile manager provides greater security.
Open name space
In Lens V2, the new profile manager feature allows Lens profiles to delegate social operations to different wallets. The profile manager enhances the security layer of Lens profiles, allowing users to store their profiles directly on a hardware wallet and use it with any other wallet. This feature also enables DAOs or community profiles to be stored in smart contracts and used from one or multiple other addresses. Social operations can be delegated to applications to improve the user experience of gasless and signatureless transactions. Users can also set an address following the account abstraction standard as the profile manager, unlocking exciting new use cases for profile management.
Some security-related features (such as burning profile and profile transfer requiring asset management) are excluded from the profile manager to include an extra layer of security. The profile manager allows you to build different configuration presets, provide rules for different use cases, and switch between them. These rules can be adjusted through LIP proposals.
In addition, the new features of Lens V2 include:
Improved configuration file security. LIP-4 introduces the profile guardian, which enhances configuration file security and minimizes phishing profile takeovers. V2 also adds native reference publications, facilitating greater participation and creating a streamlined standard for the entire protocol. It is similar to referencing tweets. V2 adds on-chain blocking. Blocked profiles cannot follow, comment, mirror, quote, collect or perform any open actions on the profile's content. It is enforced within the Lens application and, by default, they will comply with the on-chain blocking standard.
Lens V2 will also host a public Code 4 rena smart contract security competition, inviting the community to discover vulnerabilities and improvements in the protocol and share their findings directly on Lens. For more information about the Lens protocol V2 architecture, please visit the documentation.
Lens aims to bring back social capital to users
Since Elon Musk launched the limited flow policy, Twitter users have been temporarily restricted from reading tweets, following which Mark Zuckerberg immediately launched Threads, a new application similar to Twitter. Lens seems to be anxious and active.
From announcing the launch of the Optimistic L3 extension solution Bonsai, which will handle large-scale transactions, to securing a new round of $15 million financing with Tencent Global participating, to releasing the LIP-4 proposal, which aims to introduce the "Profile Guardian" to help Lens users prevent phishing and initiating testing of the new invitation system, and the most recent important news - the release of Lens V2. Lens has made rapid progress in recent times.
In a guest appearance on Decrypt's podcast, Stani detailed the use of the Lens protocol and compared it to Bitcoin, stating, "With Bitcoin, users basically own their own money and value storage. With the Lens protocol, users can own their social capital and social presence." Stani believes that financial capital is something most people have, but social capital is something that everyone in the world has.
Today, Stani continues to practice bringing social capital back to users on Lens. The details of the released Lens Protocol V2 seem to bring Lens closer to their original vision of establishing an open and decentralized social layer for the internet, benefiting all social media stakeholders (builders, users, creators, and brands).
Reference Document: "Introducing Lens V2"
