Lens Levels Up

Sponsor: Mantle — Mantle is building the largest sustainable hub for onchain finance

Farcaster’s been on a tear lately with Mini Apps, but Lens just made a major move of its own: the launch of Lens Chain, its new L2 built from the ground up for social apps.

Powered by ZKsync and Avail, the chain notably uses the GHO stablecoin for gas and comes in-built with modular Social Primitives—onchain building blocks like accounts, feeds, and groups.

There's also Grove for user-owned content and a new Developer Dashboard that makes it way easier to ship and scale up apps.

All together, this turns Lens into a full-stack social platform with its own chain, protocol, and storage layer. It’s a big unlock, and the onchain social scene just got that much more interesting accordingly.

If you're keen to dive in here yourself, use the onboarding portal to update your old Lens account or create a new one, then check out Lens ecoystem apps like Hey and Bonsai. My former colleague María Paula also just posted some app recommendations that you can dig into!

Plus, other news this week...

📰 General news

• Juicebox launched its v4 onchain funding protocol
• Optimism announced its latest round of retro funding for onchain builders
  

🎨 Cryptoart

• co-tone launched on UFO, an onchain radio network
• Haus of Nouns is running its next pop-up in Brooklyn, May 1-2, featuring a live artist residency and an open call for creators and devs to come celebrate open-source creativity
• JrCasas unveiled the Wheelbits mint
• Manifold announced its latest roadmap
• Shape is airdropping $SHAPE to artists who previously minted NFTs on Manifold

🏆 Digital collectibles

• ApeCoin is migrating its NFT staking to ApeChain via Shadow NFTs
• Claynosaurz was nominated for the 29th Annual Webby Awards
• Pob Studio is adding support for Bitcoin Ordinals mints

🎮 Decentralized gaming

• BlobArena opened registrations for its April 2025 early access launch
• Infected is migrating from Base to Solana
• Nifty Island launched its Global Game Browser
• Parallel kicked off its Season 14 gameplay
• The Beacon is leaving Treasure's ecosystem
• Treasure is scaling back and restructuring

📱 Onchain social

• Bonsai published its Smart Media Protocol whitepaper
• Crowdmuse released its v2 social platform
• Farcaster rebranded Frames to Mini Apps and introduced minimized Mini Apps
• fountain.ink, a new self-hostable Substack alternative, launched on Lens Chain
• Paragraph redesigned its publishing platform
• Zora released its Coins SDK

🪙 Memes & NFTfi 

• Flaunch made Fast Flaunches 100% fee-free
• GONDI launched buy offers for any NFT

🌐 Virtual worlds

• Decentraland is hosting its latest Metaverse Fashion Week on April 9-12
• Hyperfy released its biggest engine update yet

Experience the next generation of onchain finance with Mantle—where blockchain meets everyday banking. Powered by a $4B treasury, Mantle Network, and mETH Protocol, Mantle is launching three innovation pillars:

• Enhanced Index Fund for optimized crypto exposure
• Mantle Banking for blockchain-powered banking
• MantleX for AI-driven innovation

• 🧊 The CryptoCubes Story — Han Saglam
• 🤳 Being Early to Onchain Media — boona
• 🎨 Institutions in the Age of NFTs — Michalis
• 🌐 The Paradox of Open Innovation — Andrey Didovskiy
• 🔮 My Hope for the Future of Arbitrum — A. J. Warner