Lens Protocol: On-Chain Social Graph

Overview of Lens

Lens Protocol is an open, composable social graph that exists entirely on-chain. It was launched in early 2022 by the team behind Aave, a well-known decentralized finance platform. From its inception, Lens was designed to provide creators, communities, and developers with an alternative to centralized social platforms by making identity, content, and relationships portable across an open network of applications. In February 2025, the team announced a migration path to “Lens Chain” to improve performance and sovereignty while preserving the open, composable graph.

Unlike hybrid models that store identity on-chain but content off-chain, Lens keeps its entire social graph on the blockchain. Every profile, connection, and post is represented as an on-chain object. This structure ensures that all social data is persistent, verifiable, and owned by the user rather than the platform they interact with. The choice to operate fully on-chain reflects a strong commitment to decentralization, but it also necessitates design choices that make this approach scalable and cost-effective. Practically, publications and relationships are modeled on-chain, while large content payloads are referenced via off-chain data-availability layers (e.g., Momoka/IPFS) for scale.

Built on Polygon, Lens benefits from low transaction costs and fast finality, which are essential for frequent, small-scale actions such as posting, commenting, or following. Polygon’s compatibility with Ethereum tooling means developers can integrate Lens without learning an entirely new ecosystem. At the same time, Lens embraces modularity, allowing developers to extend functionality by creating and deploying their own custom interaction modules.

Architecture and On-Chain Data Model

Lens organizes its social graph around a series of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that represent user profiles. Each profile NFT contains the complete record of a user’s activity and connections. Because this NFT resides in the user’s wallet, the profile is portable across any Lens-compatible application. If a user stops using one app, they can take their profile, followers, and content history to another without losing any relationships or data.

Interactions within the protocol, such as following another profile, posting content, commenting, or sharing a post are implemented through smart contract modules. These modules define the rules of each action, and because they are open and composable, developers can design new modules to support different business models or community structures. For example, a developer could create a follow module that requires holding a specific token, or a collect module that mints an NFT each time a post is saved.

To address the scalability challenges of storing all interactions on-chain, Lens introduced Momoka, an optimistic Layer 3 system that processes actions off-chain while retaining verifiability through cryptographic proofs. Momoka allows most user actions to occur without incurring blockchain transaction costs, while still maintaining the trust guarantees necessary for a decentralized protocol. This hybrid approach to scalability enables Lens to keep the core social graph fully on-chain while avoiding the bottlenecks that would occur if every interaction required a direct blockchain transaction. Momoka acts as a data-availability and verification layer: actions are proven and referenced on-chain without writing every payload to the base chain.

Core Features

Lens offers a set of primitives that define its social experience. The profile NFT is the foundation, linking a user’s identity to their activity. Posts, comments, and mirrors (analogous to retweets or shares) are all on-chain actions that reference profile NFTs. Following another user creates a follow NFT, a tokenized representation of that connection.

One of Lens’s most distinctive features is the collect module. Collecting a post creates a transferable NFT that represents a saved piece of content. This mechanism introduces direct monetization opportunities for creators, as collects can be sold or traded. It also establishes a transparent, on-chain record of who engaged with a piece of content, enabling verifiable proof of audience.

The modular design of Lens means that functionality is not fixed. Developers can build new follow modules that integrate with token-gated communities, create collect modules that split revenue among multiple parties, or design entirely new interaction types. This adaptability allows the protocol to serve a wide range of use cases, from creator monetization to DAO governance and community engagement.

Ecosystem and Applications

Since launch, Lens has cultivated a growing ecosystem of applications that tap into its social graph. Hey.xyz is the most widely used Lens client, offering a familiar social media interface with the benefits of portability and ownership. Orb targets professional networking, while Phaver blends social content with curated tokenized incentives. Each of these clients accesses the same underlying graph, meaning that a connection made on one app is visible across all others.

Beyond social apps, developers have begun integrating Lens into other types of Web3 platforms. NFT marketplaces, decentralized publishing tools, and DAO dashboards have experimented with embedding Lens profiles and content to enhance community interaction. The composability of the Lens data model allows these integrations without negotiating access rights or building separate identity systems.

Governance of the protocol is managed through Lens Improvement Proposals (LIPs), which allow the community and core developers to suggest and evaluate changes. While the Aave team remains a leading force in development, the governance structure is intended to shift more authority to the broader ecosystem over time, aligning with the protocol’s decentralized philosophy.

Why Lens Stands Out

Lens distinguishes itself through its decision to keep the entire social graph on-chain and its commitment to modularity. This ensures that identity and content are genuinely user-owned and immune to platform-specific restrictions. By building on Polygon and introducing scalability enhancements like Momoka, Lens addresses the performance limitations that might otherwise hinder a fully on-chain approach. With the Lens Chain migration, these guarantees extend to a dedicated chain optimized for social workloads.

The protocol’s monetization mechanisms, particularly the collect module, create new economic models for creators and communities. Instead of relying on advertising, creators can sell or distribute tokenized content directly to their audience, with revenue split automatically via smart contracts. This opens pathways for niche, community-supported media and for fan-driven funding models that are transparent and automated.

Lens’s architecture also facilitates interoperability across applications in a way that is rare in both Web2 and Web3. A single profile can be the basis for a user’s activity across dozens of applications, each offering different features but all contributing to the same open, verifiable record. This not only reduces onboarding friction but also encourages competition at the application layer, since no one app controls the underlying data.