"Perhaps relying on the relationship between the Aave team and Ethereum, more high-quality agreements will be settled in Lens. The more high-quality projects, the more so-called 'orthodoxy' Lens will have."

In Chinese "CT circle", this is a mainstream view on the current celebrity social agreement Lens Protocol. Indeed, recently, high-quality protocols such as Uniswap, Gitcoin, Nexus Mutual, and Aave have all chosen to settle in Lens as a backup social media. In terms of data, the indicators of Lens are gaining momentum. On March 26, the average floor price of Lens protocol profiles NFT reached an all-time high of 0.14 eth and remained near $250. The number of holders also exceeded 110,000, reaching a record high.

While the floor price of Lens protocol profiles NFT has continued to rise, Lenster, the top app in the ecosystem, has also announced a substantial increase in active data in the past month: 4.5 million pageviews between February 22 and March 24, 20,000 per Daily active users, 71,000 weekly active users, 210,000 monthly active users, 445,000 new posts published, 294,000 comments and 880,000 mirror actions.

The community has congratulated Lens and Lenster for their huge growth and outstanding participation in just 30 days. Compared with the Nostr protocol and its application Damus, which caused a lot of users to share public keys 2 months ago, there seems to be not so many people mentioning it. up.

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"A protocol is like electricity, and an application is like a machine plugged into a wire"

In August 2019, MIKE MASNICK published a paper "Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technical Approach to Free Speech", at the end of which he wrote: "Moving to protocols, not platforms, is a key to free speech in the 21st century. approach. Instead of relying on a 'marketplace of ideas' within a single platform (which could be hijacked by malicious hijackers), the protocol could lead to an ideal market where competition occurs to provide better services, minimizing malicious users without completely cutting off their ability to speak."

The main purpose and spirit of this article have influenced many people, and even become the basis of many agreements today."Bible": Protocols are like electricity, and applications are like machines plugged into wires. Now our accounts and information are controlled by the application, but if we can"electricity"On this more basic level, our individual rights are protected, so it is more possible to protect human rights. Developing more decentralized protocols is an effective means of protecting individual rights.

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Nostr with no financing and no Token

On November 20, 2019, fiatjaf began to develop the Nostr protocol, hoping to create a simple, open, global, decentralized, and censorship-resistant social protocol. He wrote in his blog that day: "Nostr is the simplest open protocol, based on encryption keys and signatures, does not depend on any trusted central server, does not depend on P2P technology, and can once and for all create a censorship-resistant global social network."

fiatjaf is a person with a strong humane concern and wants to help every person's rights be respected and protected to make people human. As a technical expert, on his personal website, the hundreds of book lists recommended are all about sociology and philosophy.

A year later, in November 2020, the first batch of participants gradually expanded, "Nostr's group changed from a basic group to a super group in Telegram, and began to discuss the possibility of a decentralized social network, for The possibility of funding such projects, the possibility of Nostr supporting smart contracts, and the name of the Nostr protocol.

Nostr is not a product and protocol of Web3. It can even be said that Nostr has nothing to do with Web3. This is something that is misunderstood by many users. Compared with Web3, it may be more inclined to Web5 proposed by Jack Dorsey in 2022. At that time, Jack Dorsey sneered at Web3, thinking that Web3 was just Web2 monopolized by VC from equity to token, and thus proposed Web5.

Indeed, because the social network is essentially a public good, it is called a public square. Today's excessive capital intervention, including direct tokenization, is the main cause of power intervention, content, and user relationship alienation. We have seen this phenomenon in the DeFi field, because of the oligopoly caused by the control of various upper-level proxy coins on the underlying protocol, such as CVX and CRV, and the VC monopoly on DeFi voting rights seen from the recent Uniswap voting event.

DeFi is a financial service, so this is not a fatal problem, but the situation is different for social networks, which is about the public square of free speech and is a core problem.

Jack Dorsey believes that the essence of Web3 does not escape the monopoly of capital. If this problem is to be solved at the economic level, institutional financing must be abandoned, whether it is in the form of equity or tokens. And Nostr is in line with his expectations, no institutional financing, no token model, which is why Jack Dorsey donated 14 BTC to Nostr and made the platform public.

It seems that before Lens went online, it was doomed to be compared with Nostr. As mentioned earlier, Jack Dorsey has always been critical of Web3, and it seems that to ridicule the concept of Web3, he even skipped Web 4 and proposed to build Web5.

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"Since Jack Dorsey built Aave on Bitcoin, Aave should build Twitter on Ethereum"

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 expression 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. At the subsequent LisCon meeting, Stani again previewed the social graph project.

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

The positioning of Lens is quite different from that of Nostr. Its positioning and explanation are: Lens Protocol is a composable and decentralized social graph and protocol, on which developers can easily build social media platforms and design meaningful social experiences. Instead of resorting to feedback mechanisms to lock the user's attention. The Lens protocol uses NFT technology to ensure that users fully own their own data in the process of using the Lens protocol, and creators can also open up new ways to profit.

LensA passage to users on the official website sums up the characteristics of Lens very well, "Using Lens Protocol, everything is under your control. You own your own personal data, where you use it, how you use it, and even how you Monetize it. It means you have control over your content and it’s in your wallet as an NFT. Not only is it easy. That’s what digital identity should be: everything is yours.”

Since they own their data, users can bring it to any application built on top of the Lens Protocol. As the true owners of content, creators no longer need to worry about losing content, audiences, and livelihoods to the whims of individual platforms’ algorithms and policies. Additionally, every application that uses the Lens Protocol benefits the entire ecosystem, turning a zero-sum game into a collaborative one.

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How Nostr and Lens Guarantee Creators' Revenue

Going back to the news hotspots of Web2 in recent days, many UP masters who have followed for a long time on station B have released videos that have temporarily stopped updating, indicating that they will not upload new content in the short term. In terms of reasons for stopping the update, most UP owners said that the main reason for stopping the update was the decrease in platform revenue and difficulty in balancing revenue and expenditure. How to ensure creators' income and support creators' economy has gradually become a social issue.

During an interview with BlockBeats, aLE, an early participant in the Nostr Chinese community, said: "Creators can realize monetization in many ways, but if they use a platform, they will face a problem that the platform will prevent you from monetizing. Or perform a kind of pumping on you."

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Nostr's "Zap Culture"

On the Nostr protocol, a function that can develop an economic system is Zap. When anyone expresses their likes, they use "Zap" instead of "Like" to send a certain amount of SAT to support your favorite content. The creator economy will gain the possibility of growth. When more people naturally Zap the content they appreciate, Zap culture will spread in the Nostr network, creators will be motivated to output higher-quality content, and the commercial flywheel will turn.

A Jian, a contributor to BTCStudy, believes that when discussing the value of Nostr, it is necessary to mention the Lightning Network, otherwise it will be a waste of money. Access to Lightning Network payment is also Jack Dorsey's long-standing idea. He has always hoped to replace Like with Repost and Zap, because these two operations are value exchanges, with reputation and money costs.

BlockBeats often see a sentence "Please give me your invoice" when experiencing the Nostr protocol. In fact, the meaning of this sentence is exactly, please give me your lightning network payment address, you can directly give the other party your payment address, It is also possible to set a collection amount and then give the address to TA. The Nostr protocol integrates the Lightning Network to make it very simple for creators to monetize their content.

aLE said: "On Nostr, creators receive BTC. In fact, in many countries, BTC can be used to directly purchase any service without going through the exchange process. Anyone caught between creator A and payer B , tokens, platforms, or protocols are all barriers to economic detours for creators.”

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The value flowing through the Lens protocol

In an episode of the Decrypt "gm" podcast, Lens founder Stani elaborated on using the Lens protocol and comparing it to Bitcoin: "When using Bitcoin, the user basically owns their own money and their own store of value. .With the Lens protocol, users can have their own social capital and their own social presence." Stani believes that financial capital is something that most people have, but social capital is something that everyone in the world has.

"Lens is a social network consisting of more than a dozen smart contracts running on the chain. For example, when a user pays for collect, the cash flow will flow through the Lens protocol. We also proposed a new concept for this, the protocol Da Shuo, the founder of the Lens Chinese community, is also very optimistic about the value system of Lens. According to publicly available data, the number of Lens Profiles NFTs held by Dashuo's single address has reached 61, ranking second among the Owners TOP 100.

Lens is a modular social network, a fact that many people ignore, and one of Lens' great strengths. Lens will also add some new modules on a regular basis, such as the two modules added recently, one is that creators can directly transfer income tokens to the Aave deposit pool for low-risk or risk-free financial management, and the other is that they can split profits and income module, the income after the user collect will be split among several co-creators.

Dashuo believes that owning something in Web3 should mean owning it within the agreement, not that I have linked Bitcoin or Ethereum, and the linked things cannot form a value effect. For example, I bought some meaningful posts through an independent agreement before, but this matter did not form a value effect, because it is a separate product, and it cannot form a social network. For example, Nostar or Farcaster have no way to allow value to flow in. The value Internet and value Web3 we are talking about now will not have any meaning if their value does not flow through this protocol.

"The benefits of Lens allowing value to flow through the protocol also guarantee security. Most of our consumption behaviors use ERC 20, which requires authorization and permission. If you add infinitely more currencies, if it is due to its multi-terminal strategy , then we will have dozens or hundreds of clients, and each client requires you to apply for approval of various permissions. Suppose a website that applies for token permissions appears at this time is forged, and the user does not have You have no way to control it, so he is an official to formulate a whitelist in this way to ensure safety." Dashuo said.

According to the data displayed by Six Dgree Labs on dune, the total economic volume of the Lens protocol has reached 5.32 million US dollars. Although most of the income comes from NFT trade, the income generated by support for creators such as subscription collection is still The proportion is less.

At the same time, judging from the attention data of top creators, the top 1,000 creators of Lens have more than 1.8 million fans, accounting for 43.7% of the total number of followers. Although the head effect is still obvious, among the top 1,000 top creators, the number of fans is relatively evenly distributed, indicating that the content quality of the top creators is high.

Looking at the collection data, there are more than 1.13 million collections on Lens, far exceeding the number of comments and reposts, but only 25,000 graph NFTs and 76,700 dynamics are collected, which is almost the same as the number of reposts and comments. It can be seen that although there are a large number of collections on Lens, there are not many contents with collection or payment value. Most users do not participate in the collection behavior, and ordinary creators are still unable to obtain economic benefits. (BlockBeats note: For more information about the Lens creator economy, please go to "Web3.0 Creator Economy Report: CreatorFi's Development Status and Imagination Space")

It is not difficult to see that the Lens ecosystem is still in the early stage of content production, and most content applications have not yet been developed. The number of creators who rely on content creation to accumulate audiences is limited by the number and types of applications. So for now, most of the high-profile users on Lens are bridging their accumulated influence on other traditional social application platforms.

There are also some communities who say that from the perspective of business model, the design of Lens seems to create an AMM for social or content monetization. prospect.

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Does a decentralized social protocol necessarily need a blockchain?

In addition to how to guarantee creators’ income and support the creator economy, the Nostr and Lens communities also had disagreements on the issue of “whether a decentralized social protocol needs a blockchain”.

As a social graph based on an EVM-compatible public chain, Lens' answer is yes. Moreover, Lens is not only based on the blockchain, but also built on NFT. For example, if you follow someone on Lens, you will get an NFT of someone's fans.

Dashuo’s view on this issue is: “No one can decide whether something should be on the chain or not. Now all the assumptions are based on the current social network cognition. Suppose we have someone else’s post on Lens, this After 10 years, the post has become a celebrity quote. What does it mean that I have this post? We have no way to determine the possibility of determining the future, so we should put everything on the chain, Because we don’t know which piece of content will generate huge value in the future.”

In fact, the specific content of the posts on Lens is still not on the chain. It does not put all the bloated data, such as images and videos, on the chain. Instead, it puts the behaviors posted or collected by users at the moment on the chain. To put it simply, the logic of social behavior and social relationships are on the chain, and the specific content is not on the chain.

The advantage of going to the chain is that other developers can always index this information from the chain. Even if the Lens protocol stops, developers can still restore most of the data from the chain. Web3 actually hopes to build an open platform, and it is the best state to open up all aspects. The larger open platform of Web3 can make all information open, transparent, and public, which is reflected in most social behaviors on the chain.

Many people in the community also believe that the Aave team will be able to make Lens multi-chain or have its own chain in the future. The throughput will become larger and larger, and the cost of using Lens will only become lower and lower, or even low to no cost. Such rumors are not groundless. In a recent Twitter Space, the Aave team also talked about chain-related issues and revealed that there will be progress in this regard in the near future.

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Social Chaining: A Game Between Conservatives and Radicals

Nostr believes that the solution to returning the ownership and control of user information to users themselves is not just the blockchain. Therefore, Nostr is not built on any chain, nor is it built on Bitcoin and Lightning Network. Although it integrates Lightning Network, it has nothing to do with blockchain and Web3 in essence.

In order to better understand Nostr, aLE from the Nostr text community is doing some Web1-related work recently, such as setting up a website by himself. He found that, as the author of Nostr said at the beginning, Nostr is a compromise between Web1 and Web2 Instead of realizing this agreement through a more circuitous way such as blockchain and smart contracts.

Nostr is based on some basic protocols of the Internet, such as information protocol, domain name protocol and DNS. Everyone can set up a repeater by themselves, so that everyone in Web2 can upload information and data ownership in Web3 The problem.

aLE is opposed to putting content on the chain other than transactions. Not all information needs or needs to be built on the chain. It is possible to use the blockchain as a ledger for transactions, but use it to store data and some social information It's not necessary at all, it's kind of redundant. The transfer of the cost on the chain is still borne by the users. The cost of setting up a repeater on Nostr is only 200 yuan a year, which is much lower than the cost of social information on the chain, and your own data will not leave. He believes that Nostr solves this problem from another angle, it does not need the help of blockchain, nor does it require global consensus.

Liu guo also believes that from this perspective, Nostr is in the right direction. The blockchain is essentially a decentralized ledger, and the ledger should do what the ledger needs to do. What the ledger can do is very limited. Automated asset transactions and some disguised assets (domain names), these should be on the chain, and everything else should not be on the chain, otherwise it is an extreme redundancy. realistic system.

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Is the current social agreement the final answer?

Generally speaking, if one thing can replace another, it usually needs to be more than 10 times better before people want to switch, because all switching has migration costs and frictions. If it is not better than it, it will be better than it. If it is bad, no one will be willing to use this thing. Almost all existing decentralized social protocols are very criticized for user experience.

Now Lens, Nostr and many decentralized social protocols, when referring to their own advantages over traditional social platforms, often mention one point: the registration of applications does not require mobile phone numbers or email addresses, but wallets and assistants. Memorize words, which is faster and more convenient.

However, according to the actual feelings of many users, they did not feel faster and more convenient. For example, to log in and register the Lens mobile client application, you must first download the wallet on the mobile client, log in to the wallet, and then sign. This process takes no more time than some Web2 products. The same is true for Damus who registered Nostr. Find a notebook, paper and pen, and copy down the private key. The time is not faster, and many users who don’t know much will even copy the private key as a public key, which may be lost or stolen. risks of.

Liu guo's answer to this is "the user's body and feedback are always the most honest", so in the registration design of his social product Matters Lab, you can choose to only log in with an email address, but email information is also a must when logging in to the wallet. For users, controlling public and private keys is much more difficult than using mobile phones and mailboxes. Therefore, he is also looking forward to the future social recovery wallet applications, which will be one of the directions for the development of decentralized social protocols in the future.

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"To put it bluntly, everyone is here for the airdropped Lens"

Going back to the recent increase in the various data indicators of Lens, many people think that this is because after the space id and arb airdrops, a large part of the capital value chooses to flow into Lens, so as to gain the value and effect of the next wave of airdrops. At this time, some gossip said that the valuation of Lens was only 80 million to 120 million US dollars, and the token price was only 1 US dollar. Some kols also came out to shout that it is a bull market for airdrops. At this time, the floor value of Lens may be overestimated compared with the value of airdrops, reminding everyone to pay attention to risks.

According to data from dune, from the perspective of time distribution, users’ attention and content release behaviors are mainly concentrated in May 2022, November 2022 and February 2023. The first two time nodes are the initial stage of the agreement and Southeast Asia. User influx period.

Let's take a look at the most interesting time node. The latest February, when the data soared significantly, stemmed from Stani's intentional or unintentional creation of a beautiful misunderstanding. He posted a block height very suddenly on social media, and the community immediately exploded. Almost everyone thought it was a block height snapshot of Lens, and the airdrop was coming soon, no matter whether there were Lens protocol profiles or not. The NFT people got excited and started a wave of extremely enthusiastic interactions.

However, under the heat, some people returned to rationality and raised questions. Why is the block height issued by Stani based on Ethereum? Isn’t the Lens protocol built on polygon?

Sure enough, a few days later, Stani posted that this was good news about himself. The Ethereum block was when his wife was pregnant, which indirectly clarified that it had nothing to do with the airdrop. It can be seen that every increase in Lens data has a strong correlation with the popularity of the project. At present, the focus of Lens ecology is mainly on user early adopters and airdrop expectations.

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The Celebrity Jack Dorsey Brings to Nostr

As an early participant and promoter of Nostr's Chinese community, the opportunity for aLE to formally study Nostr was precisely because Jack Dorsey crazily promoted Nostr on social media. topics and entries, which attracted his attention.

Since Nostr's official website does not provide much explanatory text, and Github's information is placed in a very prominent position on the official website, most of the outbound traffic goes to Github, so this answer is from GitHub.Nostr protocolThe soaring number of stars can also be seen.

According to the star-history data, we can see that the two time points when the data soared happened to be the time when Jack Dorsey used his own communication effect to promote Nostr on social media. In December 2022, Jack Dorsey donated 14 bitcoins to Nostr, and added the public key of his Nostr account to his Twitter profile; in February 2023, Jack Dorsey posted a message celebrating the official launch of Damus. Due to the celebrity effect of Jack Dorsey, Nostr, which had been growing steadily, took off directly, and many people who had waited or never heard of it began to take it seriously.

The release of Damus on February 1 immediately caught the attention of many Web3 users. More and more users shared their account public keys and followed each other on major Internet communities, and even formed a wave of dissemination in the Web2 circle. Effect, rushed to the top of the App Store social free list in just two days.

However, after 10 days, Nostr's DAU dropped from 93,000 on February 2 to 37,000 on February 9, a drop of 60% from the peak. Some users immediately came forward to ridicule Nostr's short-lived, fleeting. Cos Yusine, the founder of SlowMist, thinks: Nostr is very cypherpunk, even if the popularity will come down, it is expected. But what no one expected was that Nostr's data hit another record high on February 16, and stabilized at the growth follow-up after the volatility ended.

According to data from nostr.band and nostr.io, the number of Nostr's daily releases reached 484,000 on February 16. At present, the total daily activity volume including publishing, private messages, forwarding, etc. has basically remained at more than 500,000, and the daily activities of high-quality users have remained at around 8,000 to 10,000. As of April 1, the Nostr public key address It has reached 533,000, and the number of repeaters is 458.

Many people have also raised the question, can airdrop incentives and celebrity effects allow users to migrate from the original social platform?

On this issue, Liu guo, co-founder of Matters-lab, also from the social field, gave his opinion in an interview with BlockBeats: only in the early bubble period, ideas, airdrop incentives or other factors are useful Yes, this kind of thing is a bit like herbicides or chemical air raw materials. It must be effective in the short term, but it will not bring vitality to the design in the long run. The user stickiness obtained by this is very, very low and unsustainable. . For users to migrate to a new platform or protocol, the most important thing is to provide a better user experience or an irreplaceable requirement.

aLE believes that Nostr does have a lot of room for growth in terms of user experience, but in fact it has met the irreplaceable needs of some users: "The emergence of Nostr has reunited the Bitcoin community." Before Nostr, all Bitcoin holders were very lonely, and they urgently needed a decentralized public protocol and application to exchange ideas with more people who have the same ideas and consensus.

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Apart from Lens and Nostr, is there any other way out for decentralized social networking?

When faced with this problem, the encryption community tends to be different from each other. Dashuo obviously prefers Lens. He believes that Lens will have localized clients in various language communities in the future. "Lens is very innovative. If developers can develop something interesting, users will want an account to experience it. , and the decentralized social protocol that can occupy the market in the future must be the one that can attract many developers.”

The answer given by aLE, who positions himself as a Nostr marketing member, is also obvious. In his opinion, the magnitude of the Nostr protocol can even be compared with public chain projects such as Ethereum, rather than with the Ethereum chain. Farcaster or Lens on the Polygon chain for comparison. Of course, there will be many protocols in the future, but it is difficult to predict whether Nostr will be replaced. The biggest challenge for the protocol is whether it can integrate this other emerging protocol into its own protocol, so that it can be used for a longer period of time. survive.

Liu guo thinks that neither Lens nor Nostr is the ultimate solution to the decentralized social protocol, but if you have to choose between Lens and Nostr, Nostr may be in the right direction: "Leave aside the labels and narratives on the Web, there are Only products or scenarios that have a market fit will gain a foothold. Now, when people flee Twitter, most people will not choose Nostr, but secure scuttlebutt, Mastodon and the activtypub protocol behind them, which have already developed more robustly It’s just that they are not in the narrow Web3 circle, and they are generally not involved when discussing these topics in this circle, but they are actually an alternative Social Network now.”

Based on this recognition, Liu guo and his team createdMatters.NewsI am also trying a more social direction of the scene. Matters.News is established based on the decentralized ecology, a writing community with open source code and creator autonomy. Creators can write, publish, read, and discuss here, and at the same time, establish the rules of "living together and making decisions together" for the community, which will be further applied to other communities in the decentralized ecology in the future. At the same time, the creator's works will be uploaded to the nodes of the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) to realize the distributed storage of the content of the works and cannot be deleted.

From the perspective of vocabulary, for example, Nostr does not conform to the current consensus of "fat protocol, thin application". It focuses on high simplicity, but the other side of high simplicity is that it cannot describe complex operation, and a mature protocol may be more general and can describe more things, and the application layer can do more things on top of it.

The maturity of user experience is a topic that can never be avoided. The series of infrastructures owned by Mastodon around the activtypub protocol are relatively complete. According to the feedback from many users after personal experience, they believe that it has reached a state that is not inferior to Twitter. In this respect, it is much more mature than Lens and Nostr, and the application layer or protocol tools are more complete.

The Mastodon app was founded in 2016. Before Musk acquired Twitter last year, Mastodon had accumulated about 500,000 active users. When Musk laid off a large number of employees and modified Twitter's verification policy to cause a lot of confusion, Mastodon poured in a large number of users. At the peak, more than 130,000 new users were added every day. The number of active users reached 2.5 million in early December last year. After January this year, the number of active users dropped to 1.8 million, but it was still an order of magnitude higher than Lens and Nostr, which are protocols.

Compared with Nostr in 2019 and Lens in 2022, the accumulated users and reputation are fuller. It will take a long time for Nostr and Lens to continuously discover and solve problems before they reach maturity. Higher and higher.

Both Lens and Nostr became popular "in the name of Web3", but all the protocols and applications in the circle naturally have a ceiling of 100,000 curses, which began to fall after quickly reaching the order of 100,000. Compared with Defi protocols, the application scenarios of decentralized social protocols seem to be more difficult. How to define application scenarios and let users get out of the original social walls is a question worthy of everyone's consideration.

After all, in the decentralized social protocol, there are not only the well-known Lens, Nostr and Farcaster in the circle, but also many mature protocols such as Activtypub, Bulesky, DeSo and Secure Scuttlebutt.