Quick take:
The funding announcement comes just weeks after the Aave developer unveiled an overhauled new version of Lens protocol.
The company has also moved the base technology powering its decentralised social media infrastructure to zkSync from Polygon, citing the ability to scale at lower costs as the reason.
Lens protocol v3 is scheduled for launch during the first quarter of 2025.
Avara, the developers of Lens, Aave and Family has completed a $31 million funding round led by Lightspeed Faction. The fundraising also attracted participation from Alchemy, Avail, Circle, Consensys, DFG, Fabric Ventures, Foresight Ventures, Stellarcore, Superscript, Re7, and Wintermute Ventures.
Anurag Arjun, Anton Bukov, Rune Christensen, Alex Gluchowski, Aleksander Leonard Larsen, Loi Luu, Spencer Noon, and Duncan Robinson joined as angel investors.
The funds will go towards developing Lens, Avara’s decentralised protocol focused on powering social media and consumer-facing apps. Lens is scheduled to go live on mainnet sometime in the first quarter of 2025.
The platform allows users to send messages on the blockchain, where they are registered as transactions, at reasonable costs. According to the report by TechCrunch, Lens wants to lower transaction costs to a fraction of a cent, thus making it more feasible to scale decentralised apps to a wide user base.
Essentially, Lens wants to enable developers to absorb all costs associated with executing transactions on the blockchain. “Our aim here is to say that blockchains should be free to use for users, the same way as the internet is,” Avara founder Stani Kulechov told TechCrunch.
According to Kulechov, Lens seeks to empower social media users by giving them full control of their identities online and allowing them to participate in the economic models of various platforms.
“I think social networks are very financial as of today, but most of that financial value goes from advertisers to the platform and very little for the user,” said Kulechov, adding Lens “basically turns the model upside down where the users are more important and they have more power than the platform itself,” which could lead to more transparent revenue sharing contracts with better rewards for creators.
This announcement also comes just weeks after Lens adopted zkSynch as its base technology, migrating from Polygon.
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