Aave Founder's SocialFi Protocol Lens Launches Mainnet with 650K Users

Moving from Polygon required migrating 12 million posts and 28 million social connections to Lens Chain.

By: Leo Jakobson • April 04, 2025

SocialFi ecosystem Lens launched its mainnet Lens Chain, today, April 4, according to a press release shared with The Defiant. The ecosystem is migrating from Polygon to its own Ethereum Layer 2 (L2).

To reach this point, developers led by Aave founder and CEO Stani Kulechov had to migrate more than 125 GB of data, including 12 million posts and 28 million social connections of more than 650,000 users.

Launched in 2022, Lens protocol was designed to overcome the centralization and platform-favored monetization of traditional social media by providing a platform for decentralized social media DApps. But as the project grew, the release explains, “Lens needed a more scalable and cost-efficient solution tailored to its onchain social interactions.”

In December, Lens closed a $31 million fundraising round led by Faction, a joint venture with Lightspeed. Other investors in the round include Circle, Consensys, DFG, Foresight Ventures, and Wintermute Ventures.

Kulechov is the founder of Avara — the parent company of both Aave and Lens. Aave is currently the third largest DeFi protocol by total value locked (TVL), with almost $16 billion in TVL at press time.

Commenting on the tech behind Lens Chain, Kulechov said:

“This enables builders of all backgrounds to provide an exceptional onchain experience for mainstream users and monetize in a variety of ways quickly to achieve profitability."

Stani Kulechov

With ZKsync integration bringing rollup scalability and low-cost transactions, and Avail’s data availability (DA) layer for “secure, cost-effective, and censorship-resistant data publishing and verification,” Lens claims that it has built “a high-performance execution and data availability stack that is modular, scalable, secure and decentralized.”

Lens Chain uses Aave’s GHO stablecoin for transaction fees, making them stable, predictable and “near-zero,” the project said in the release. In February, Lens Chain became one of the first Layer 2s to use the new GHO gas token framework.

According to the announcement, web3 social apps migrating to or expanding on the Lens Chain include Orb, a decentralized alternative to X and Instagram; Hey, an open social networking DApp with onchain identity; and Socially, which calls itself “the LinkedIn of Web3 professional networking.”