Lens Protocol Releases Open Governance Framework

Lens Protocol, the decentralized social media protocol from the team behind Aave, opened up to governance proposals from the public on Thursday.

The Lens Improvement Proposal (LIP) process borrows heavily from Ethereum’s EIPs, allowing developers, creators, and protocol users to publish proposed changes and upgrades to the protocol.

“As the Lens ecosystem grows, it is important to enable the ability to participate in the future development of Lens Protocol and set foundations for open governance and path towards decentralization,” Lens said.

Lens is building an open and decentralized social graph protocol, enabling third-party developers to build out applications, content delivery algorithms, and other features on top of it. Lens said proposals that attract widespread community support may be incorporated into its developmental roadmap.

The move is a major milestone for Lens, which launched its closed beta in October 2022 and raised $15M in seed funding just last week.

Data from Dune Analytics shows Lens’ average daily user count has steadily increased since its alpha launch in May 2022. Daily users fluctuated between 3,000 and 8,000 in July, up from roughly 400 in January.

However, daily transactions have dropped to around 20,000 since May after trending above 100,000 in February.

Live Proposals

LIPs authored by Josh Stevens, a senior principal engineer at Aave and Lens contributor, are already live on GitHub.

While LIP-0 advocated for establishing the formal LIP process, subsequent LIPs propose developing open technical standards to accelerate development and enable interoperability across the Lens ecosystem.

“This uniformity will enable developers and researchers to work more effectively together, reducing the time and effort spent on understanding and adapting to different proprietary systems,” Stevens wrote.

“We want to be a community-ran project with standards shaped by everyone.”

LIP-1 recommends standards for building Lens-based algorithms to promote interoperability and collaboration.

LIP-2 proposes expanding on the “flat” metadata structure currently used by the protocol with multiple standards. The proposal would allow community members to develop new standards on top of those that currently exist.

LIP-3 proposes standards for sharing Lens-based profiles and publications within the Lens ecosystem. The proposal spans a Lens App registry, a format for sharing Lens links, and a user interface to handle links. LIP-3 notes users have experienced dead links as a result of how links are formatted by mobile or web-only applications on Lens.

Lens also began beta-testing Momoka, its bespoke Layer 3 scaling solution, in May. Momoka enables Lens content to be stored off-chain to significantly reduce transaction fees.