A View of Lens Protocol Web3 Social Tech Stack Practice

特邀专栏作者

2023-08-02 09:30

This article is about 2739 words, reading the full article takes about 4 minutes

In addition to Lens Protocol, what other decentralized technology stacks are available?

Web2 is an era of platformization, where the code, databases that host user profiles, and user communication information are all hosted under the same entity. Web3, on the other hand, fundamentally differs in its underlying architecture from Web2. All of these functionalities are decoupled, and user profiles, data storage, and DM are supported by different protocols. Additionally, its permissionless openness and composability support third-party developers to build any usable applications and create new user experiences, making significant contributions to the ecosystem.

Lens Protocol is a Web3 social graph protocol built on Polygon. As one of the significant alternatives to Web2 social media platforms, it has quickly formed a thriving ecosystem by adopting an open and decentralized underlying architecture. In addition to the applications developed by the project itself, numerous third-party applications and compatible decentralized social technology stacks have emerged.

Ultimately, this is attributed to the inherent "permissionless openness and composability" of blockchain. This means developers can build any usable application without requiring permission from core developers alone. All social media technology stacks, including Lens Protocol, can be used by developers to build decentralized applications without permission.

So, besides Lens Protocol, what other usable decentralized technology stacks are there? This article lists a series of technology stacks that can be used to build Web3 social applications. BlockBeats believes that as a leading Web3 protocol, Lens Protocol founder Stani's decentralized technology stack mentioned in this tweet is highly representative. It is worth noting that considering the rapid development progress of Web3, this article does not exhaustively cover all decentralized social-related technology stacks.

Huddle 01

One-click meeting. Use Web3 login to create token-supported spaces, support using NFT avatars and decentralized storage.

Livepeer

Livepeer is a decentralized video transcoding service that connects applications that require video transcoding services with nodes (coordinators) that perform the transcoding.

Livepeer provides decentralized video encoding services. For example, in the Lenstube app on Lens, when users upload videos to their own channels, these videos can be watched as streaming videos supported by Livepeer and permanently stored on the Arweave blockchain.

XMTP

XMTP is a universal Web3 communication protocol and network that supports end-to-end encrypted communication between on-chain addresses. Developers can integrate the XMTP SDK into dApps without permission to enable in-app direct messaging (DM) and notification features. By integrating the XMTP protocol, Lens provides users with a portable DM tool and enables communication with other decentralized applications that have joined the XMTP protocol, facilitating cross-app chats.

For example, Lens users can chat and send assets within their respective applications with Coinbase Wallet users who have also integrated the XMTP protocol. They can even search for Lens handles directly in the Coinbase wallet and send messages and encrypted assets to each other.

Sismo

Sismo is a modular proof protocol deployed on Polygon that focuses on decentralization, privacy, and utility. It issues proofs in the form of badges (non-transferable tokens/SBT) and users can mint badges on their applications.

Lit Protocol

Enabling "restricted access content while maintaining composability" on an open social graph is a major challenge.

Using the Lit Protocol, we can encrypt the content published on the Lens Protocol and enable token-controlled access. This means that encrypted content can be decrypted and viewed in any application as long as the user has access (which can be achieved through NFT gating).

This enables various functionalities, including but not limited to: - Private profiles - Private posts - Paid unlocked posts - Token-controlled access posts - Token-controlled file download permissions.

Applications can store all encrypted information in the metadata of each published post, and these contents can be decoded in any Lens application that has deployed the Lit SDK.

Gelato Network

Gelato Network is a web3 decentralized backend solution that supports builders in creating automated, gas-free applications. Their multi-chain transaction API, Gelato Relay, provides services such as gasless transactions, custom bots, cross-chain bridges, and cross-chain messaging protocols. It helps web3 app and infrastructure developers quickly perform any transaction using a simple API, supporting their users or protocols.

The Koru DAO account on Lens is a decentralized autonomous organization controlled by multiple people built on Gelato Network's customized execution API, Gelato Relay. All 282 Koru NFT holders can represent this Koru DAO on Lenster and interact without paying any gas fees.

RedStone Oracles

RedStone generates user credit scores for individual accounts on the Lens Protocol. Each Lens Protocol will have a corresponding credit score called LensScore.

LensScore is calculated by retrieving statistical information from the GraphQL API for Lens Protocol users, based on the following six indicators:

Comments * 0.25

Posts * 0.5

Publications * 0.5

Followers * 0.75

Bookmarks * 1

Mirrors * 1

It is worth noting that the weights of each indicator are different, with the highest weight given to "collections" and "mirrors".

The goal of LensScore is to quantify the activity and engagement of Lens users on social platforms, in order to distinguish between bots and genuine human interactions. This credit score can also be applied to future undercollateralized lending scenarios. Lastly, LensScore can be used for "lazy" KYC verification in "airdrop/whitelist" situations, allowing users to remain anonymous while proving that they are not bots.

Karma 3 and Airstack

The power of Web3 social protocols like Lens lies in the fact that all data and interaction history is public. Therefore, developers and teams can build their own custom recommendation and ranking algorithms based on on-chain data.

In addition to the Lens GraphQL API provided by the team itself, Lens also supports developers to call other API recommendation algorithms, including Karma 3 and Airstack.

Karma 3 is an open protocol that enables developers to plan rankings and recommendation systems for their applications based on on-chain data. This provides personalized search, discovery, and recommendations for applications on the Lens protocol. All profiles in the Lens ecosystem are scored and ranked every hour. These scores and rankings are provided through different APIs, which clients can call on demand. These APIs are based on four different scoring strategies: "followers", "engagement", "influencers", and "creators".

Airstack supports users in accessing general on-chain transactions, specific dapp events, and NFT market data, as well as querying and combining both on-chain and off-chain data simultaneously. Airstack utilizes GraphQL, allowing users to only retrieve the data they need in a single query, instead of predefined datasets returned by traditional REST endpoints.

Airstack provides a universal resolver that allows users to resolve or reverse resolve Lens Profiles into other Web3 identities (such as Farcaster, ENS, and Ethereum addresses). For example, users can retrieve Lens profiles from specific users, or retrieve Ethereum addresses, Farcaster, and ENS from Lens profiles.

The Identity API provided by Airstack allows users to query, aggregate, and transact with on-chain data using Lens profiles.

Snapshot

Snapshot is a decentralized voting system. It provides users with an efficient, low-cost, decentralized voting tool. Lens SDK version 1.2 integrates the Snapshot voting system, allowing Lens app developers to integrate Snapshot voting into their own applications.

Arweave and Bundlr Network: Content Data Availability and Fast DA Upload

The Data Availability (DA) layer is mainly used to avoid storing data on-chain by redirecting on-chain resources to existing data availability locations (storage), thereby reducing costs. In practice, the data availability layer is a convenient way to extend information to on-chain properties, such as NFTs.

The content data availability (DA) on the Lens Protocol is provided by Arweave.

Considering the possibility of social media reaching peak traffic of 25,000 TPS, the Lens Protocol introduced the blockchain social media application scalability solution Momoka in April of this year, which uses Bundlr as the infrastructure to store large files, along with associated validation data.

As an Optimistic L3 scalability solution, Momoka can process Polygon transactions off-chain to achieve large-scale transactions and reduce transaction costs.

Unlike most L2 solutions, Momoka does not compress multiple L2 transactions into L1. Instead, it sends several transactions to the data availability layer to optimize costs and achieve higher scalability required by social media networks, thus avoiding limitations imposed by block space or block time configurations.

For Lens users, personal profiles require a higher level of security, while a more lightweight DA infrastructure layer may be a more feasible solution for social comments and other network data. Momoka is a network used to process and store social media posts, comments, and shares as second-layer storage data on the Polygon network, improving Lens scalability.

However, using Momoka is still optional. Developers can continue to store all content on Polygon, or an alternative approach is for submitters to pay the storage fees for Arweave's DA metadata through Bundlr, reducing costs by a factor of 1000 compared to executing EVM transactions.

Data shows that since its launch in April, Momoka has significantly reduced transaction costs for Lens and improved Lens stability, with a nearly 90% decrease in transaction failure rates in May.