Lens, the highly anticipated social networking graph from Aave, announced it will begin onboarding a wider base of users.
On Oct. 10, Stani Kulechov, the founder of Aave and Lens, encouraged interested users to sign up for the protocol’s waitlist. “We’re going to start opening up Lens Protocol (slowly) to a more wider audience,” Kulechov tweeted.
The news comes as Lens is preparing to complete its v2 migration next month, with Lens reminding developers to upgrade their code to ensure a smooth transition.
“We will prioritize Lens v2 migration assistance over the coming weeks,” Lens tweeted.
Lens v2
Lens announced v2 in July, describing the upgrade as bolstering Lens composability with third-party protocols and apps to enable “two-way [interactions] between any type of web application and Lens.”
Users will be able to execute external smart contracts from within Lens, including NFT minting, ERC-20 trading, and cross-chain interactions between Ethereum and Layer 2. Kulechov flagged that any developer can build a “module” for Lens v2-based apps to support.
Lens v2 went live on testnet on Sept. 19. Lens also launched Momoka, a bespoke Layer 3 appchain exclusively supporting Lens, in April. Lens v1 slowly began onboarding users in February 2022.
SocialFi Competitors
Lens is also looking to open its doors amid the rise of the nascent SocialFi sector, pioneered by Friend Tech.
Friend Tech allows users to mint and trade “keys” associated with public Twitter personas, with keys granting their holders access to gated chatrooms. The protocol has raked in millions in fees and hundreds of millions in trading volume, and currently boasts a total value locked of almost $44M.
However, Friend Tech influencers have recently been targeted by SIM-swap attacks, resulting in rug-pulls at the expense of their key-holding communities. One researcher estimated that 40% of Friend Tech’s TVL could be vulnerable to SIM-swappers.
