Yesterday, Damus, a social application developed based on the social protocol Nostr, was launched on the App Store and the Google Play Store, and quickly produced a viral effect, triggering the community's pursuit and heated discussions. Just one day after Damus was put on the shelves, on February 2, Stani Kulechov, the founder of AAVE and Web3 social platform Lens Protocol , also posted a tweet with the content "16460695" on his social platform, which aroused discussions in the community. The block height at which Lens Protocol takes snapshots for potential AirDrop.
The Lens Protocol was publicly used in May last year, and has remained popular since its launch. After nearly a year of development, the Lens ecosystem has hundreds of application projects under development or completed. How many users are there in the Lens ecosystem now? What about user interaction? Those ecological projects worthy of attention? We found some answers from the perspective of data analysis.
Technical Structure of Lens Protocol
At present, the design of interaction logic of most Web3.0 content applications is relatively independent. To achieve composability requires long-term development cooperation between each other, which is not only inefficient, but also very costly. So is there any way to reduce this interaction friction between applications? One solution is to go down from the application layer and build a set of common protocol standards for applications.
At this point, many people think of social graph applications. After the rise of the concept of "ownership of social data", social graphs have become the most concerned type of application on the SocialFi track. These protocol-level applications can summarize the behavior and relationship of users on the chain, and serve as a "user data bridge" between applications, and then realize the composability between applications. But in fact, the composability built by using social graphs is very limited, because there are completely different interaction logics between applications.
Therefore, designing a set of interactive modules at the bottom layer of the application, allowing the top-level application to customize and improve the modules according to its own needs, can not only shorten the application development cycle and reduce development costs, but also allow the application to obtain inherent and Deeper composability. Currently in this field, the most representative application is the Lens Protocol created by AAVE founder Stani Kulechov.
Many people will regard Lens Protocol as a social graph protocol, which is actually a wrong concept. The technical structure of Lens is indeed based on personal social graphs, but its technical body is a set of interaction logic designed for social and content applications. This set of logic provides a series of unified technical standards for the application at the protocol layer, and the top-level application develops customized functions according to different requirements and use cases on this basis. And because these functions are compatible with each other at the protocol layer, applications built on Lens can easily achieve composability. So, Lens Protocol is not a social graph, but a social network itself.
Lens Protocol takes NFT as the core element. Users hold their own profile NFT (Profile NFT) through their wallets to publish content and realize rights confirmation. In addition to simple graphic content, users can also publish audio and video content with a specific metadata structure , these contents will be stored on Arweave, IPFS and other decentralized storage infrastructures, and the content link will be updated to the user's graph NFT. At the same time, all social behaviors and relationships of users are stored on the Polygon chain in the form of NFT, and different graph NFTs interact and connect through a series of fixed modules. Currently, Lens has designed three interactive modules for the application:
1. Follow Module (Follow Module) , which will be triggered when the user follows the other graph NFT, and run the custom instructions (such as payment Token) set by the application for this module, and then mint for followers Follow NFT (Follow NFT) as on-chain proof.
2. Collet Module (Collet Module) , which will be triggered when the user likes or collects content. After executing a specific command, a Collet NFT (Collet NFT) will be minted as a proof.
3. Reference Module , which will be triggered when users comment on and repost content. This module will not mint NFT for users, but store it in the user's graph NFT as published content.
The three NFT modules mentioned above all conform to the ERC-721 standard and are compatible with the OpenSea interface. Applications based on the Lens Protocol can customize the development of these three to achieve interactive behaviors such as rewards, subscriptions, and community governance. Users can independently transfer and sell graph NFTs. Compared with independent content applications, Lens Protocol and its ecological protocol have stronger social attributes and composability, but Lens Protocol is not yet fully open to all users, and most ordinary users who want to experience its ecological applications need to use The secondary market purchases existing graph NFTs.
Lens Protocol ecology and interactive module data analysis
From the perspective of user distribution, as of the end of 2022, the geographical distribution of Lens Protocol users is relatively balanced. Among them, North American users accounted for a relatively large proportion of users throughout the year, but in November last year, the number of users in Southeast Asia such as Vietnam and India surged. frequent interactions.
From the perspective of user data, as of the end of 2022, Lens Protocol has a total of over 147,000 users, a total of over 7.29 million transactions, and an average daily transaction of 47,000. As a social protocol that has not yet been fully opened, user activity is already relatively high. Among them, the number of users increased significantly in September and November last year, and the number of transactions remained high after the surge in November and showed a downward trend. The high-frequency trading of the "AirDrop Army" is also clearly reflected in the Gas consumption of Lens. In November last year, the average daily Gas consumption of Lens was close to 5,000 Matic, which was 16 times the usual consumption.
Graph NFT is the core of Lens Protocol , which is equivalent to user account. As of the end of 2022, the Lens team has issued a total of 106,000 graph NFTs, of which only about 3% of the addresses hold more than 1 graph NFT, and there is less speculation. In terms of time, the graph NFT as a whole is growing in stages. This is because the Lens team will issue a certain amount of graph NFT quotas for new ecological applications, and distribute them to users along with the application.
In terms of the amount of content, as of the end of 2022, Lens map NFT holders have published a total of more than 780,000 posts (Posts), with an average of 7.3 posts per capita in the past six months. Among them, there are a total of 57,000 graph NFTs that have posted dynamics, accounting for 53.7% of the total. The top 1,000 users (ranked by the number of posted dynamics) have published a total of 300,000 dynamics, accounting for 38.61% of the total dynamics. On the one hand, it shows that the current Lens The content is still relatively scarce. On the other hand, it also shows that there are few active users of Lens, and most of the dynamic production is concentrated in the head creator group. Among the top 1,000 creators, the distribution of content output is relatively even, basically showing a linear decline.
From the perspective of user interaction data, users who interacted less than 10 times in the past six months accounted for 67.1%, and users who interacted less than 50 times accounted for 92.3%, which again shows that most users are inactive. However, from the perspective of continuous interaction time (the time between the user's latest interaction and the first interaction), 30.7% of the users whose interaction time is less than 1 week, this part includes the newly increased users of Lens, and 61.7% of the users' continuous interaction time exceeds 3 32.4% of the total users interacted for more than 3 months, indicating that most users continue to pay attention to the Lens ecosystem.
From the perspective of interaction categories, posting dynamics is the main behavior of user interaction, and the proportion has always remained high, while the behavior of comments (Comment) has been on par with posting dynamics for a period of time after the launch of Lens Protocol in May, each accounting for about 50%. However, after the popularity of "early adopters" passed, it declined rapidly and continued to slump. Forwarding (Mirror) behavior has been at a low level, but its proportion has continued to rise steadily. By the end of 2022, the proportion of forwarding behavior will increase to about 25%.
Among the above three interactive behaviors of posting, commenting, and forwarding, commenting is the behavior that best represents the deep interaction of users. It shows that users have further interacted with the publisher on specific content, while forwarding behavior has no interaction emotion. Comments act strongly. Therefore, the amount of comment behavior can also reflect to a certain extent whether a content platform has enough high-quality content to improve the interaction depth and retention of platform users. Therefore, this section will further analyze the user interaction of the Lens ecosystem from the three interactive modules of reference, attention, and collection.
Interactive module data analysis
In addition to the three interactive behaviors of posting news, commenting, and reposting, attention is also an interactive function that is configured in most social applications, indicating that users are willing to have more in-depth interactions with the content produced by the creator or the creator himself. The premise of a real fan. The higher the number of followers on a platform, the higher the network effect. Lens Protocol 's follower NFT has a similar logic to NFT Pass. Its metadata will directly point to the followed map NFT. At the same time, it will be minted with the follower's serial number. The creator can use the follower's NFT and its serial number as The interaction logic of community-set equity certificates provides a basis for diverse and in-depth interactions in the community.
For example, creators can define payment logic for their followers NFT to unlock subscription paid content, and the top 100 can unlock more paid content, or higher governance voting weight, etc. In addition, creators can also set a whitelists. Users need to follow a specific graph NFT in the list before they can follow the creator. Of course, creators can also not make logical settings for it, so as to attract more users to pay attention to it. This is most common in the early stages of the creator's life cycle when it is necessary to expand the audience.
As of the end of 2022, a total of more than 98,000 graph NFTs on Lens have fans (that is, followers), and nearly 4.2 million follower NFTs have been minted. Among them, 53.5% of users have fewer than 10 fans, and 85.9% of users have fewer than 50 fans. This part of users includes ordinary users who are not creators and creators who are in the early stages of the creator’s life cycle, which proves to a certain extent that the Lens ecosystem is currently Lack of content. From the time distribution point of view, the user’s attention behavior is mainly concentrated in the initial stage of the agreement’s launch and the influx of users from Southeast Asia in November, which has a strong correlation with the popularity of the project, indicating that the current attention behavior of the Lens ecosystem is mainly due to users’ early adopters "By-products".
Judging from the attention data of head creators, the top 1,000 creators of Lens (ranked by the number of fans) have a total of over 1.8 million fans, accounting for 43.7% of the total number of followers. The head effect is still obvious, which is important for focusing on diversification, It is not ideal for the Web3.0 social network of a small-scale community, but among the top 1000 top creators, the number of fans is relatively evenly distributed, showing the same linear downward trend as the posting dynamic behavior, indicating that top creators The quality of the content is high, and the user's attention behavior is natural. It can be seen that the Lens ecosystem is still in the early stage of content production, because most content applications have not yet been developed, and 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.
Compared with following behaviors, forwarding and commenting behaviors have stronger interactive emotions, which are the main basis for judging user activity. The reference module of Lens Protocol has two derivative behaviors, namely forwarding (Mirror) and commenting (Comment). Applications can develop use cases similar to content promotion based on the forwarding module. Users can obtain promotion fees from content publishers (brands or advertisers) through forwarding behaviors. Mad Finance of the Lens ecosystem adopts this logic.
The comment module can realize the use cases of content co-creation. For example, users can start a story by posting dynamics, and other users can continue to create through comments, create different branches and endings for the story and cast them into NFTs, such as Lens Ecological Writer Together. From the forwarding data, as of 2022, there will be nearly 370,000 forwardings on Lens, with a total of 18,000 graph NFTs and 8 dynamics being forwarded. Among them, the top 1,000 users with the most reposts had a total of 136,000 reposts, accounting for 37% of the total reposts, while the top 500 graph NFTs had a total of 131,000 reposts, accounting for 35.5%. A clear exponential downward trend.
Compared with forwarding behavior, comment behavior with stronger interaction emotion is more extreme. As of the end of 2022, there will be more than 300,000 comments on Lens, a total of 14,700 graph NFTs, and 87,000 dynamic comments, which is slightly lower than the forwarding behavior. Among them, the top 1,000 users (ranked by the number of comments) commented a total of 143,000 times , accounting for 46.23% of the total number of comments, the top 500 commented a total of 113,000 times, accounting for 36.7%. It can be seen that there are not many real active users on Lens, and most of the in-depth interactions are concentrated on a small number of users. It also shows that Lens currently does not have enough high-quality content to improve user activity and retention.
Under the Web3.0 creator economic model, forwarding and commenting are not the behaviors with the strongest interaction emotions, because most of them do not directly involve economic issues, and the collection module of Lens Protocol is specially designed for this level of interactive behavior design. After the graph NFT holder publishes the news, users who like it can collect it and cast a collector NFT as a proof on the chain, and its metadata also directly points to the graph NFT and content links. The development of collection-based modules can be rewarding creators, free or limited collection of Proof-of-stake(such as membership), etc. Collection behavior, as the behavior with the strongest interaction emotion on Lens, is the main basis for judging the quality of platform content.
From the perspective of collection data, as of the end of 2022, there will be over 1.13 million collections on Lens, far exceeding the number of comments and reposts, but only 25,000 graph NFTs and 76,700 updates have been collected, which is almost the same as the number of reposts and comments. same. The top 1,000 collectors (ranked by the number of collections) have a total of 978,000 collections, accounting for 86.43% of the total, and the top 500 total 684,000 collections, accounting for 60%. Among them, only the first collector has 300,000 collections, accounting for 26.5%, and the collectors who rank slightly lower have only dozens of collections, showing the most extreme exponential decline. 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.
Of course, the lack of high-quality content in the Lens ecosystem is not due to the lack of good underlying design and interaction logic. As a social protocol that has just been launched for half a year and is not fully open, there are still a large number of applications focused on the production of rich media content on Lens that have not yet been developed. It greatly limits the production of high-quality content in the Lens ecosystem. But this also reflects the importance of content production to the creator economy from the side. Lens Protocol brings good social attributes and composability to the application through the underlying design, but high-quality content is what drives users to interact in depth and become The premise of a creator’s true fans is the cornerstone and foundation of the creator’s economy. We believe that as time goes by, after more content applications are opened to users, the content quality and economic benefits of the Lens ecosystem will be greatly improved.
Lens Protocol ecological application
At present, there are hundreds of projects in the Lens ecosystem that build various applications based on the underlying technology, involving social networking, curation, and audio and video content. Most of the applications that have been launched are social applications, and there are relatively few audio and video content applications. The mainstream applications include Lenster, Lenstube, Lensport, and Iris. This section selects representatives of the Lens ecosystem in terms of social interaction, content, and curation. Sexual application for demonstration.
Lenster , Lenster is currently the most important application in the Lens ecosystem, and most of the interaction between users and the Lens protocol is completed in this application. Lenster's user interface is similar to Twitter. It is a decentralized and permissionless social media application. Users can connect to other users' graph NFTs on Lenster, or join various communities for comments, co-creation, governance and other interactions. Ordinary users can browse content dynamics on Lenster at will, but to interact with it, they need to hold a graph NFT.
Iris , Iris is a social platform for creators. Users can share original and reproduced content on Iris and develop their own communities, and users follow creators by paying subscription fees. In addition, creators can set the visibility range of content when posting dynamics, and set restrictive logic such as "only followers can see" for it.
LensTube , LensTube is a decentralized video sharing platform aiming to be the Youtube of Web3.0. LensTube's video content is stored on Livepeer, a decentralized video storage facility. Users can share and enjoy videos with their fans based on the graph NFT, and obtain rewards from the community through rewards, collections, etc.
Teaparty , TeaParty is a community curation application designed to help creators promote their own creative content, and its functions are divided into TeaParty Hosts and TeaParty Guest. Among them, TeaParty Hosts is mainly aimed at creators and advertisers. Only when the user's forwarding gets likes and favorites does the user need to pay the fee. TeaParty Guest is aimed at ordinary users and earns rewards by reposting high-quality content. In this way, the cost-effectiveness of promoters and the quality of content on the platform can be improved. The "community curator" concept adopted by Teaparty is also the most promising economic model of the Web3.0 creator economy, which will be further expanded below.
