The success of competitors is often the most chilling.

As a crypto social platform that Vitalik has long favored, Lens seems to always be compared with Farcaster by the community and users. Today, Farcaster has rapidly grown into a phenomenal crypto social platform in the short term.

Starting in January this year, Degen quickly became popular in the Farcaster community, and community members rewarded high-quality content they appreciated by adding the "DEGEN" tag to their comments. The Degen system determines the daily reward amount based on the user's activity and participation on Farcaster. Encourage users to post valuable content on Farcaster. Many active users even give thousands of dollars in daily rewards.

Related reading: "US$1 billion in three months, reviewing the growth path of "Golden Dog" Degen"

As of April 8, according to Dune data, the total revenue of the decentralized social protocol Farcaster has exceeded US$1 million, and the number of users is about to exceed 300,000. In the past 30 days, users have posted an average of more than 407,000 casts per day. Vitalik Buterin's main social platform, which he frequently uses, has also shifted from Twitter to Farcaster.

On the other hand, although Lens's data has reached new highs since it officially entered the permissionless stage, it is still far behind Farcaster in terms of discussion and community popularity. The anxious Lens seems to be unable to sit still.

Lens is also going to create its own DEGEN?

On March 6, active users of the Lens platform were pleasantly surprised to find that a new token called BONSAI was airdropped into their wallets. The airdrop price at that time was about US$50. This BONSAI token based on the Polygon network is a model of the DN404 token, marking the launch of the first 404 project on Polygon, which is similar to the Pandora_ERC404 project. Of these, 100,000 BONSAI tokens can be exchanged for one Bonsai NFT

The "divisible NFT" standard (DN404) followed by BONSAI attempts to combine the characteristics of ERC20 and ERC721 tokens to create a new hybrid token standard. Although ERC404 has quickly gained attention in the crypto community, it has caused some controversy due to its non-compliance with existing standards and inefficiency, and may even fail in certain situations, which BONSAI seems to be able to solve.

A month has passed, and the performance of the BONSAI token has been impressive, and the price continues to rise. Although the price of BONSAI has recently fallen from its peak due to the continued airdrop activities of the orb platform, the value of the airdrop received by early users has still grown to $3,000.

This significant growth is partly due to the active promotion of Lens platform founder Stani on social media. Stani not only promoted BONSAI's popularity through traditional publicity methods, but also used his influence in the crypto community to shape BONSAI into the main economic carrier of the creator economy on the Lens platform.

Today, when users reward and incentivize creators on the Lens platform, most people have defaulted to using BONSAI as a means of payment. This change in behavior pattern has not only strengthened BONSAI's use cases within the platform, but also caused BONSAI to attract widespread attention and discussion, and it has become popular in a small circle.

MadFi, the development team behind BONSAI, is a crypto social platform that aims to encourage users to join social clubs for specific content and subscribe to favorite creators through social media reward mechanisms. Recently, MadFi successfully completed a $1 million angel round of financing, led by Palm Tree Crew Crypto, Avara Ventures and Social Graph Ventures, and supported by several angel investors including Robert Leshner, Spencer Noon and Sandeep Nailwal.

The MadFi team said that the BONSAI token is experiencing organic growth, and creators have earned more than $240,000 in tokens through the platform, making it the preferred currency after wMATIC. On the Lens platform, Bonsai's market share of monetized publications exceeded 75% in March and peaked at 90% last week.

According to the team, BONSAI has been growing organically, with creators earning over $240,000 in tokens, surpassing wMATIC as the currency of choice for monetizable content.

In March, Bonsai’s market share of monetized publications on Lens exceeded 75%, peaking at 90%. At the time of writing, it currently sits at 73.8%.

Carlos Beltran, Co-Founder and CEO of MadFi, shared his excitement about BONSAI becoming the default currency on the Lens platform. "BONSAI's success demonstrates the huge potential of on-chain networks combined with high-quality content."

Recently, orb.club announced that it will airdrop a total of 2.2 million BONSAI tokens, worth approximately $230,000, which eligible orb users can now claim in-app, providing a 72-hour claim window.

With multiple parties building it, BONSAI has become Farcaster's Degen. As of the time of writing, Degen's fully diluted valuation (FDV) is as high as $1.3 billion, while BONSAI's FDV is $63.1 million. This comparison shows that the Lens platform and BONSAI itself still have huge growth potential and room compared to other tokens on the market.

On April 27 last year, Lens Protocol announced the launch of an Optimistic L3 expansion solution called Bonsai, which is specially designed to handle large-scale transactions and support the needs of the next generation of Web3 social users. This solution is technically similar to Degen's L3 chain expansion solution, but on the second day of its launch, Bonsai was renamed Momoka to continue its mission of ultra-large-scale transaction processing.

Bonsai (later renamed Momoka) is different from traditional L2 solutions. It does not compress transactions back to the L1 layer, but optimizes a new way to send and store these transactions on a dedicated data availability layer. This unique processing method enables Momoka to effectively expand processing capabilities without sacrificing speed and cost.

To ensure the scalability of this expansion solution, Lens Protocol collaborated with the Bundlr Network and Arweave Ecosystem teams to provide data availability (DA) guarantees. This collaboration enables wallets based on Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) support to preserve DA logic and facilitate fast and reliable data release.

Momoka has begun testing in several key applications in the Lens ecosystem, including Lenster, Lenstube, orb, Buttrfly, and Phaver. The testing of these applications not only verifies the effectiveness of Momoka as an innovative expansion solution, but also demonstrates the Lens protocol's commitment to promoting the development of Web3 social platforms.

Through Momoka, Lens Protocol aims to build a strong foundation to support the needs of future Web3 social networks, capable of handling ultra-large-scale transactions while reducing operating costs and promoting the development of the entire ecosystem.

Resurrecting "Zombie Users"

In July 2021, Jack Dorsey hinted that Square would create a new business to build a platform for "non-custodial, permissionless and decentralized financial services." Stani Kulechov thought this statement was very close to what Aave was doing, so he quoted Jack Dorsey's tweet and joked: "Since Jack Dorsey will build Aave on Bitcoin, Aave should also build Twitter on Ethereum." This hinted at the birth of the Lens protocol, and Stani again previewed this social graph project at the subsequent LisCon conference.

In February 2022, Stani publicly released the Lens protocol on Twitter in the form of a signed open letter, and it was officially launched on the Polygon mainnet after testing in May of the same year.

Lens A paragraph to users on the official website summarizes the characteristics of Lens very well, "With Lens Protocol, everything is under your control. You own your personal data, where you use it, how you use it, and even how you profit from it. This means that you have control over your content, and it is in your wallet as an NFT. This is not only easy. This is what digital identity should do: everything is yours. "

Because they own their own data, users can bring it to any application built on Lens Protocol. As the true owners of their content, creators no longer have to worry about losing content, audiences, and livelihoods due to the whims of individual platform algorithms and policies. In addition, every application that uses Lens Protocol benefits the entire ecosystem, turning a zero-sum game into a collaborative game.

After two years of testing and development, the Lens protocol announced on February 27 that it has officially entered the permissionless phase. Anyone can create a Lens profile to access the protocol, and developers can create new use cases by leveraging the network's already budding community.

After the release, it can be seen that Lens daily on-chain operations are on the rise (excluding application-specific use, such as opening applications, scrolling, viewing, reacting, etc.). It is worth mentioning that Lens does not have a direct application, and all uses are carried out through third-party applications built on Lens.

Although the daily on-chain operation data is on the rise, there is still an order of magnitude gap between the Lens protocol and Farcaster in terms of scale and user data.

Left: Lens daily active data; Right: Farcaster data

According to Dune data, the recent number of active users of the Lens protocol is about 15,000, while its daily active users are only 1,200. In contrast, Farcaster's performance is particularly outstanding. Since 2024, its daily active users have achieved more than tenfold growth, reaching between 20,000 and 40,000 daily active users. A symbolic proof of this growth is that even Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has chosen to publish multiple exclusive articles on Farcaster.

Farcaster's success in attracting users and heavyweights highlights that Lens needs to invest more efforts in increasing user activity and expanding the community size. As a platform dedicated to building a decentralized social network, Lens Protocol has unique value propositions and technical advantages, such as providing decentralized identity authentication, supporting content creators, and rewarding community contributions. However, compared with Farcaster, Lens still has a long way to go in increasing daily active users and attracting public attention.

In order to narrow the gap with Farcaster, Stani's strategy for Lens is particularly critical. By launching the airdrop token Bonsai, Lens can enable users who joined last year due to the wool-pulling activities and the expectation of economic benefits such as "coin airdrops" to return to Lens, allowing more early users to return.

In this process, Bonsai has played an important role, continuously increasing the circulation of value on the protocol. Its continued "siphoning" effect - that is, continuously attracting interest and resources within the community and ecosystem - is the key for Lens to narrow the gap with its competitors and even take the lead. Through Bonsai, Lens' economic incentives can further strengthen the cohesion of the community and promote interaction and cooperation within the ecosystem.

In the short term, Bonsai does stimulate the resurrection of more "zombie users", but in the long run, Lens still faces many challenges to create a community culture comparable to Farcaster and degen.

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