A brief analysis of the web3 social protocol LensProtocol created by the Aave team

Original source: Jason, founder of BuilderDao

< b>BlockBeats Note: The LensProtocol social protocol created by Aave is not a social product, but a protocol service layer that helps developers build various social products on it. Although Web3 social products currently give user data ownership, it still does not solve the problem of interoperability of user data in different web3 social products. In this regard, BuidlerDAO founder Jason Chen made a brief analysis of the LensProtocol social protocol on Twitter,   BlockBeats sorted it out as follows:

A little research LensProtocol, a web3 social protocol created by the Aave team, it is not a front-end itself social products, but a middle and back-end protocol service layer, on which developers can build social products at low cost based on the API it provides. This should be the reason why the logo of lens is a bouquet of flowers. It hopes to Be the roots and soil of this social garden on which developers can grow flowers.

I believe that the main narrative of most people for web3 is to denounce web2 companies such as facebook and twitter for monopolizing user data rights, creating data islands, and users having their own social networks Data and relationship chains are also important narratives of web3, so many products called web3 twitter have emerged, but so far there is still no killer application for web3 social products.

The Web3 social killer app is not here yet

The Web3 social killer application has not yet appeared. I think there are two main reasons for the maturity of the industry aside:

First, here Most of the previous web3 social products are still following the old path of creating data islands. How to understand? Blockchain-based social products can indeed make a user the owner of his data, but the boundary of product data is still a contract. If a user uses 10 products, the user's data will be scattered in 10 independent contracts, and each The data formats and standards of product contracts are different. Although they are transparent, isolated islands still exist.

As a result, the user's social data still cannot be connected. Although the data generated by the user in each product belongs to itself, because of independent contracts and inconsistent The data format still cannot be "taken away". Assuming that a product hangs up, the social data generated before that will be difficult to use, unless other products devote resources to data synchronization, so currently web3 social products only Solve the problem of owning, not connecting.

Second, the cost of developing a social product is also very high. In fact, this cost is mainly in the middle and back-end, but the functions of the middle and back-end can indeed be exhaustive and standardized, nothing more than like, follow, post, bookmark and other functions, while the front-end business layer seems complicated It is just a combination and assembly based on the standard functions of the middle and back-end.

So I think lens is also based on these two points and thinks that if they make another social product, the 10 products on the market will become 11, and continue to increase isolated islands, so they hide themselves one layer down , First of all, the standard was formulated to standardize what kind of behavior needs to be cast into NFT, what data format the published content needs to use, etc., so as to ensure that the products developed based on its standards do not have island problems.

LensProtocol builds continents, not islands

Secondly, by reading its developer documentation, you will find that the modular design of lens is very sufficient, and the granularity of splitting capabilities is very fine, and decoupling is done as much as possible, so that developers can flexibly expand business logic on it.  

As shown in the figure below, this is the main contract of lens. It can be seen that 5.4 million pieces of social data have been generated on it, including actions such as publishing, collecting, and following. Therefore, lens has created a continent, not an island.  

< img src="https://image.blockbeats.cn/upload/2022-11-21/bd5635580d151b4594bf9f0566a4cc63864650d6.png?x-oss-process=image/quality,q_50/format,webp">

Regarding standards, they are divided into interface standards and data standards. First, let’s talk about interface standards. As shown in Figure 1 below, this is all the first-level APIs provided by lens. Basically, the main capabilities of social relationships are included. Figure 2 is a single focus on this one. The second-level APIs separated by capabilities can be seen to be very fine-grained, and developers can freely assemble and combine them based on these APIs.

The data standard is subdivided into NFT and non-NFT. The core data of lens is developed around NFT. First, each user needs a .lens domain name to have a personal homepage, and other data are Hanging under this domain name, the domain name itself is a 721-type NFT, which can be regarded as a DID category from this perspective.

In addition to the domain name, the user's attention, collection and other actions will also be cast as NFT, as shown in Figure 1. When the user pays attention, the follow function of the contract is triggered. From the generated data on the chain, it can be seen that mint has created an NFT, as shown in the figure 2 The NFT will be destroyed when it is canceled.

In fact, social data has a very complicated index relationship, and the interface of lens is also very convenient for developers. The upper layer of data package does not require developers to analyze the data themselves, but the following figure is an example. If you need to query someone’s followers, you can directly obtain the data to the merged layer in the form of a very clear pull list through the interface. Layer drill down.

In addition, for the release of post content, first of all, it is not presented as an NFT. Before that, I thought that the content posted by the user would be cast into an NFT. As shown in Figure 1, it is the normal process of writing data on the chain. I have not understood it here It is clear why lens does not make them into NFT. As shown in Figure 2, this is the written data of the post. The included data includes who is mounted, what is the content of the mount, and the content of the post is indexed by an external link of contentURI.

< br>

The specific content is stored under the chain, and the contentURI will point to a storage address, but the lens also has a set of standard specifications for the storage format of the data. In this way, the interoperability effect of the products mentioned above can be achieved after being built based on the lens. Figure 1 shows a parsed data format, including name, content, type, etc. Figure 2 shows the enumerated data format, including graphics, text, audio, video, etc., so as to structure the content data.

< br>

The above is a brief study of lens, as expected from Aave, it is indeed very thorough about the native web3, and the possibility of web3 native twitter being born based on lens is still very high. Maybe the research is not deep enough, and there are still some doubts, such as The personal homepage is a .lens nft domain name, and all data and relationship chains are linked to it, but the nft can be bought and sold. I think it is quite strange that social relationships can be bought and sold.     

Original link

欢迎加入律动 BlockBeats 官方社群：

Telegram 订阅群：https://t.me/theblockbeats

Telegram 交流群：https://t.me/BlockBeats_App

Twitter 官方账号：https://twitter.com/BlockBeatsAsia