Lens Protocol Goes Permissionless

After two years of running in beta, the NFT-powered social media platform Lens Protocol has officially gone permissionless.

Anyone can now mint a Lens profile to access the protocol, and developers can create new use cases by tapping into the network’s already budding community.

“We’ve taken careful steps to gear up for this moment,” said Stani Kulechov, the founder of Aave, in a press release shared with The Defiant. Kulechov explained how the Lens project – which lives under the Aave umbrella – began decentralizing its governance model through the Lens Improvement Protocol (LIP) framework and built data scaling infrastructure to strengthen the network’s expansion.

The move to become permissionless seeks to reverse Lens’ downtrend in terms of network usage.

According to a Dune dashboard, the network has over 376,000 total users, but its daily user count hovers around the 1,000 mark. Daily transactions are also down significantly to barely 10,000 after peaking in Feb. 2023 at over 160,000 transactions.

Another step towards decentralization

Going permissionless ultimately means that the team has removed all barriers to development. The goal is to attract skilled developers to build out Lens’ social graph and individual identity profiles.

Lens had already moved towards further decentralization when it opened up to governance proposals from the community back in June 2023.

Mirroring Ethereum’s governance structure, Lens launched the Lens Improvement Proposal (LIP) process, allowing users to propose and publish changes to the protocol. Today’s move also furthers the network’s move to v2, which began in October last year.

According to Kulechov, as the network built itself out, “the ongoing feedback” made one thing clear – the community wanted to go permissionless.

He added that “this level of freedom is key,” with the team remaining active in governance. Lens’ roadmap calls for full decentralization – but it hasn’t yet published a timeline to fulfill that promise.

Lens is built on Polygon and is geared towards creating decentralized social media platforms that use NFTs to tokenize social data. Users can claim ownership of posts and their communities, transferring them to any social media platform leveraging the Lens Protocol.

Created by the team behind Aave, Lens raised $15 million in early June 2023.