Upcoming airdrop? Taking a look at the development of the Lens ecosystem from a data perspective.

Yesterday, the social application Damus, developed based on the social protocol Nostr, was launched on the App Store and Google Store, quickly generating a viral spread effect and causing a community frenzy. Just one day after Damus was launched, on February 2nd, Stani Kulechov, the founder of Aave and Web3 social platform Lens Protocol, also posted a tweet with the content "16460695" on his social platform, sparking community discussion and speculation that this is the block height for a potential airdrop snapshot by Lens Protocol.

Lens Protocol was publicly launched in May last year and has remained popular since its launch. After nearly a year of development, there are now hundreds of application projects being developed or already completed in the Lens ecosystem. How many users are there in the Lens ecosystem? How is user interaction? Which ecosystem projects are worth paying attention to? We have found some answers from a data analysis perspective.

BlockBeats Note: This article is excerpted from the "Web3.0 Creator Economy Report: The Development Status and Imagination Space of CreatorFi".

Lens Protocol Technical Architecture

Currently, the design of most Web3.0 content application interaction logic is relatively independent. To achieve composability, long-term development cooperation is needed between them, which not only has low efficiency but also incurs high costs. So, what can be done to reduce this kind of interaction friction between applications? One solution is to go down from the application layer and build a set of common protocol standards for applications.

Many people think of social graph applications when it comes to this. With the rise of the concept of "ownership of social data", social graphs have become the most popular application type in the SocialFi track. These protocol-level applications can summarize and organize users' on-chain behavior and relationships, and serve as a "user data bridge" between applications, thereby achieving composability between applications. However, in reality, the composability built using social graphs is very limited because applications have vastly different interaction logics.

Therefore, by designing a set of interaction modules at the application's underlying level, allowing top-level applications to customize and improve the modules according to their own needs, not only can the application development cycle be shortened and development costs reduced, but it can also enable applications to have inherent and deeper composability. Currently, the most representative application in this field is the Lens Protocol created by Aave founder Stani Kulechov.

Many people consider Lens Protocol as a social graph protocol, but this is actually a misconception. The technical structure of Lens is indeed based on personal social graphs, but its main body is a set of interaction logic designed for social and content applications. This logic provides a series of unified technical standards for applications at the protocol level, and top-level applications can develop custom functions based on different needs and use cases on this basis. Because these functions are mutually compatible at the protocol level, applications built on Lens can easily achieve composability. Therefore, Lens Protocol is not a social graph, but the social network itself.

Lens Protocol is centered around NFTs, with users holding their own profile NFTs through their wallets to publish content and establish ownership. In addition to simple text and image content, users can also publish audio and video content with specific metadata structures, which are stored on decentralized storage infrastructures such as Arweave and IPFS. The content links are then updated to the user's profile NFT. All social behaviors and relationships of the users are saved in the form of NFTs on the Polygon chain. Different profile NFTs can interact and connect through a series of fixed modules. Currently, Lens has designed three interactive modules for the application.

1. Follow Module is a module that is triggered when a user follows another NFT on the platform. It runs an application that executes custom commands set by the module (such as token payment), and then mints a Follow NFT as proof on the blockchain for the follower.

2.收藏模组（Collet Module）, this module will be triggered when users like or collect content, and after executing specific instructions, it will mint a collection NFT (Collet NFT) as proof.

3. Reference Module, this module will be triggered when users comment and share content. This module will not mint NFTs for users, but will store it as published content in the user's graph NFT.

The three types of NFT modules mentioned above all comply with the ERC-721 standard and are compatible with OpenSea's interface. Applications built on the Lens protocol can customize development for these three modules to achieve interactive behaviors such as tipping, subscription, and community governance, and users can independently transfer and sell map NFTs. Compared to independent content applications, Lens Protocol and its ecological protocols have stronger social attributes and composability, but currently Lens Protocol is not fully open to all users, and most ordinary users who want to experience its ecological applications need to purchase existing map NFTs in the secondary market.

Lens protocol ecosystem and interaction module data analysis

From the perspective of user distribution, as of the end of 2022, the geographical distribution of Lens Protocol users is relatively balanced. Among them, North American users accounted for a relatively large proportion throughout the year, but in November last year, the number of users in Southeast Asian regions such as Vietnam and India surged, due to a large number of Southeast Asian users who hoped to receive airdrops interacting frequently with Lens ecosystem applications during this period.

From the user data, as of the end of 2022, Lens Protocol has over 147,000 users, with a total of over 7.29 million transactions and an average of 47,000 daily transactions. As a social protocol that is not yet fully open, user activity is relatively high. Among them, the number of users saw a significant increase in September and November last year, while the number of transactions remained high after a surge in November and showed a downward trend. The high-frequency trading of "airdrop army" is also reflected in the gas consumption of Lens. In November last year, the average daily gas consumption of Lens was close to 5,000 MATIC, which is 16 times the usual consumption.

The NFT map is the core of Lens Protocol, equivalent to a user account. As of the end of 2022, the Lens team has issued a total of 106,000 NFT maps, of which only about 3% of addresses hold more than one NFT map, and speculation is relatively low. In terms of time, the overall growth of NFT maps is staged, because the Lens team will allocate a certain number of NFT map quotas for new ecological applications and airdrop them to users.

From the perspective of content quantity, as of the end of 2022, Lens Graph NFT holders have collectively published over 780,000 posts, with an average of 7.3 posts per person in the past six months. Among them, a total of 57,000 Lens Graph NFTs have published posts, accounting for 53.7% of the total. The top 1,000 users (ranked by the number of posts published) have collectively published 300,000 posts, accounting for 38.61% of the total number of posts. On the one hand, this indicates that Lens is still relatively lacking in content, and on the other hand, it also indicates that there are fewer active users on Lens, and most of the production of posts is concentrated in the top creator group. Among the top 1,000 creators, the distribution of content production is relatively even, and it basically shows a linear decline.

From the perspective of user interaction data, in the past six months, users who interacted less than 10 times accounted for 67.1%, and those who interacted less than 50 times accounted for 92.3%, indicating that most users are in an inactive state. However, from the perspective of the duration of continuous interaction (the time between the user's most recent interaction and their first interaction), users with an interaction duration of less than one week accounted for 30.7%, including new users of Lens, and 61.7% of users had a continuous interaction duration of more than three weeks. Among them, users with an interaction duration of more than three months accounted for 32.4% of the total, indicating that most users have sustained interest in the Lens ecosystem.

From the perspective of interaction categories, posting updates is the main user interaction behavior, with a consistently high proportion. Comment behavior was on par with posting updates for a period of time after the launch of Lens Protocol in May, each accounting for about 50%. However, after the initial excitement faded, comment behavior quickly declined and remained low. Reposting behavior has always been at a relatively low level, but its proportion has steadily increased. By the end of 2022, reposting behavior accounted for about 25% of interactions.

Among the three interactive behaviors of posting updates, commenting, and reposting, commenting is the behavior that best represents users' deep interaction. It indicates that users have taken a step further in interacting with the specific content and the publisher. Reposting behavior, on the other hand, is not as strong in terms of interaction emotion as commenting behavior. Therefore, the quantity of commenting behavior can also reflect to a certain extent whether a content platform has enough high-quality content to improve the interaction depth and retention rate of platform users. Therefore, this section will further analyze the user interaction of the Lens ecosystem from the three interaction modules of quoting, following, and bookmarking.

Interactive module data analysis

除了发布动态、评论、转发三种交互行为外，关注也是大部分社交应用都有配置的交互功能，表明用户愿意与创作者生产的内容或创作者本人进行更深度的互动，是用户转变为创作者真实粉丝的前提。一个平台的关注数量越多，网络效应就越高。Lens Protocol 的关注者 NFT 与 NFT Pass 有着相似的逻辑，其元数据会直接指向被关注图谱 NFT，同时在被铸造时会附带关注者的序列号，创作者可以根据关注者 NFT 及其序列号为社区设定权益凭证的交互逻辑，为社区多样、深度的互动提供了基础。

In addition to the three interactive behaviors of posting updates, commenting, and reposting, following is also an interactive function that is configured in most social applications, indicating that users are willing to interact more deeply with the content or the creator themselves, and is a prerequisite for users to become true fans of the creator. The more followers a platform has, the higher the network effect. The followers of Lens Protocol's NFT and NFT Pass have a similar logic, and their metadata directly points to the NFT of the followed graph. At the same time, when it is minted, it will be accompanied by the follower's serial number. The creator can use the follower's NFT and serial number to set up the interaction logic of the community's equity certificate, providing a foundation for diverse and in-depth interactions within the community.

For example, creators can define payment logic for their followers' NFTs to unlock subscription-based content, while the top 100 can unlock more paid content or higher governance voting weights. In addition, creators can set up a whitelist where users must first follow specific graph NFTs on the list before following the creator. Of course, creators can also choose not to set any logic and attract more users to follow them, which is most common in the early stages of a creator's lifecycle when they need to expand their audience.

As of the end of 2022, there are over 98,000 graph NFTs with fans (i.e. followers) on Lens, and nearly 4.2 million follower NFTs have been minted. Among them, 53.5% of users have less than 10 followers, and 85.9% of users have less than 50 followers. These users include ordinary users who are not creators and creators who are in the early stages of their lifecycle, which to some extent confirms the scarcity of content in the Lens ecosystem. In terms of time distribution, users' following behavior is mainly concentrated in the early stages of protocol launch and the influx of users from Southeast Asia in November, which is strongly correlated with project popularity, indicating that the following behavior in the Lens ecosystem is mainly a "by-product" of users' curiosity.

From the perspective of the attention data of the top creators, the top 1000 creators (ranked by number of followers) on Lens have a total of over 1.8 million followers, accounting for 43.7% of the total attention. The head effect is still obvious, which is not ideal for Web3.0 social networks that focus on diversity and small-scale communities. However, among the top 1000 creators, the distribution of followers is relatively even, showing a linear downward trend similar to the behavior of publishing dynamic content. This indicates that the quality of content from top creators on Lens is high, and user attention is natural. It can be seen that the Lens ecosystem is still in the early stage of content production, because most content applications have not yet been developed, and the number of creators who accumulate audiences through content creation is limited by the number and types of applications. Therefore, currently, most of the highly followed users on Lens are those who have bridged their influence accumulated on other traditional social media platforms.

Compared to the act of following, the act of reposting and commenting carries a stronger sense of interaction and is the main basis for judging user activity. The Lens Protocol has two derivative behaviors in its reference module, namely reposting (Mirror) and commenting (Comment). Applications can develop use cases similar to content promotion based on the reposting module, and users can receive promotion fees from content publishers (brands or advertisers) through reposting behavior. The Mad Finance of the Lens ecosystem adopts this logic.

And the comment module can realize the use case of content co-creation. For example, users can start a story by publishing a dynamic, and other users can continue to create by commenting, creating different branches and endings for the story and turning it into NFTs, such as Writer Together in the Lens ecosystem. From the forwarding data, as of 2022, there have been nearly 370,000 forwards on Lens, with a total of 18,000 map NFTs and 8 dynamics being forwarded. Among them, the top 1000 users with the most forwards have a total of 136,000 forwards, accounting for 37% of the total forwards, while the top 500 map NFTs have a total of 131,000 forwards, accounting for 35.5%, showing a more obvious exponential decline trend than publishing dynamics and following behaviors.

Compared with forwarding behavior, the commenting behavior with stronger interactive emotions is even more extreme. As of the end of 2022, there were over 300,000 comments on Lens, totaling 14,700 NFTs and 87,000 dynamics were commented, slightly decreasing compared to forwarding behavior. Among them, the top 1,000 users (ranked by the number of comments) have commented a total of 143,000 times, accounting for 46.23% of the total number of comments, and the top 500 users have commented a total of 113,000 times, accounting for 36.7%. It can be seen that there are not many real active users on Lens, and most of the deep interactions are concentrated in a few users, which also indicates that Lens currently does not have enough high-quality content to improve user activity and retention.

Under the Web3.0 creator economy model, forwarding and commenting are not the most intense interactive behaviors because they do not directly involve economic issues in most cases. The collection module of Lens Protocol is specifically designed for this level of interactive behavior. After the holder of a graph NFT publishes a dynamic, users who like it can collect it and mint a collector NFT as on-chain proof, and its metadata also directly points to the graph NFT and content link. The development based on the collection module can be rewarding creators, collecting specific rights proofs (such as membership qualifications) for free or for a limited time and quantity. The collection behavior, as the most intense interactive behavior of Lens, is the main basis for judging the quality of platform content.

From the perspective of collected data, as of the end of 2022, there were over 1.13 million collections on Lens, far exceeding the number of comments and reposts. However, there were only 25,000 graph NFTs and 76,700 dynamic posts that were collected, which is almost the same as the number of reposts and comments. The top 1,000 collectors (ranked by the number of collections) had a total of 978,000 collections, accounting for 86.43% of the total, while the top 500 had a total of 684,000 collections, accounting for 60%. Among them, the top collector alone had 300,000 collections, accounting for 26.5%, while the collectors with lower rankings only had dozens of collections, showing the most extreme exponential decline. Therefore, although there are a large number of collections on Lens, there are not many contents that have collection or payment value, and most users have not participated in the collection behavior. Ordinary creators currently cannot obtain economic benefits.

Of course, the current lack of high-quality content in the Lens ecosystem is not due to poor underlying design and interaction logic. As a social protocol that has only been online for six months and has not yet been fully opened, there are still many applications on Lens that focus on producing rich media content that have not been developed, which greatly limits the production of high-quality content in the Lens ecosystem. However, this also indirectly reflects the importance of content production to the creator economy. The Lens Protocol brings good social attributes and composability to applications through underlying design, but high-quality content is the prerequisite for driving users to engage deeply and become true fans of creators, and it is the cornerstone and foundation of the creator economy. We believe that as more content applications are opened to users over time, the quality of content and economic benefits in the Lens ecosystem will be greatly improved.

Lens Protocol Ecosystem Applications

Currently, the Lens ecosystem has hundreds of projects that build various types of applications on its underlying technology, involving social, curation, and audio-visual content, among others. Most of the applications that have been launched are social applications, with relatively few audio-visual content applications. The mainstream applications include Lenster, Lenstube, Lensport, and Iris. This section selects representative applications of the Lens ecosystem in social, content, and curation areas for display.

Lenster, Lenster is currently the main application in the Lens ecosystem, and most user interactions with the Lens protocol are completed within this application. Lenster's user interface is similar to Twitter, and it is a decentralized and permissionless social media application. Users can connect other users' graph NFTs on Lenster, or join various communities for commenting, co-creation, governance and other interactions. Ordinary users can freely browse the content on Lenster, but to interact with it, they need to hold graph NFTs.

Iris, Iris is a creator social platform. Users can share original and reposted content on Iris, and develop their own community. Users pay subscription fees to follow creators. In addition, creators can set the visibility of their content when publishing updates, and set restrictions such as "visible only to followers".

LensTube, LensTube is a decentralized video sharing platform, aiming to become the Youtube of Web3.0. The video content of LensTube is stored on the decentralized video storage facility Livepeer. Users can share and enjoy videos with their fans based on the graph NFT, and receive rewards and benefits from the community through tipping, collecting, and other methods.

Teaparty, TeaParty is a community curation application designed to help creators promote their creative content. Its features are divided into TeaParty Hosts and TeaParty Guest. TeaParty Hosts mainly target creators and advertisers, and only need to pay the user when their forwarding has received likes and favorites. TeaParty Guest is for ordinary users, who can earn rewards by forwarding high-quality content. This way, the cost-effectiveness of the promotion and the content quality on the platform can be improved. The "community curator" concept adopted by Teaparty is also the most promising economic model for Web3.0 creators, which will be further elaborated in the following text.

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