What's New with Lens?

In Ethereum's onchain social scene, two social network projects currently reign supreme: Farcaster and Lens.

Currently, Farcaster is seeing roughly x4 the number of daily active wallets (DAW) via ~1 million Farcaster IDs (FID) compared to ~640,000 Lens handles.

Yet consider how these stats stem from the old Lens V2 system.

In other words, the project has fostered considerable activity even in a transitional state ahead of the rollout of the remodeled Lens V3 protocol, which will launch on the new Lens Chain later this year.

And similar to how Snapchain and Frames V2 are catalysts for Farcaster, the arrival of Lens V3 will bring a spate of new innovations and opportunities to the Lens scene.

All that said, if you've been out of the loop here, lets catch you up on the latest Lens developments—mainnet is coming.

The New Lens

In November 2024, Lens introduced Lens V3.

This upgrade sets out for a major leap from the previous V2 on Polygon by restructuring Lens's onchain social interactions to be supported by more flexible and modular infra.

Part of this restructuring? The protocol will launch on the new bespoke Lens Chain, a ZKsync-based Layer 2 (L2) network with Avail for data availability that the Lens team has custom built for low-cost social transactions.

Another major shift in V3 is the introduction of Social Features, which function as onchain building blocks that developers can mix and match. These features include:

• 🪪 Accounts — Smart contract-based IDs that replace tokenized profiles, offering greater user control and portability.
• 📇 Usernames — Fully transferable NFTs that let users maintain multiple identities across different apps.
• 📊 Graphs — A redesigned following system where developers can set custom rules, e.g. requiring an NFT to follow someone, etc.
• 📱 Feeds — Onchain content hubs with rules for who can post, monetize, or curate content.
• 🤝 Groups — Membership-based communities with governance tools for entry, moderation, and exclusive content access.

GHO as Gas

In February 2025, Lens announced that it would be using GHO, Aave's decentralized stablecoin, as the native gas token for Lens Chain.

The big idea? Bring more predictability and accessibility to transaction fees.

Of course, most chains rely on volatile assets for paying gas fees. Lens V2 relied on Polygon's MATIC (now POL), for instance. By using a stablecoin like GHO instead, Lens V3 aims to keep transaction costs stable and simple.

Technically, GHO will be integrated via ZKsync’s Shared Bridge, which will make this the primary liquidity pool here for Lens Chain users.

Lens Chain Migration

In February 2025, Lens took another major step toward mainnet by migrating its V2 data from Polygon to its V3 smart contracts on the Lens Chain testnet.

As part of the transition, Lens successfully moved over more than 125GB of data including existing profiles, 28 million follower connections, 16 million posts, and 360 Lens apps.

Accordingly, users won’t need to take any manual steps to prepare once the Lens Chain mainnet drops—their social graphs will be entirely intact, and popular Lens apps like Hey and Orb will be available from day one.

In the meantime, the Lens team has begun the process of sunsetting the Lens V2 protocol and Momoka, their prior custom data solution that Avail is replacing in the V3.

ZIP-7 Proposed

Lastly, the Lens team just proposed ZIP-7: Lens Chain Inclusion on Elastic Network to ZKsync community governance.

The proposal, which has now moved to an official onchain vote, would see Lens Chain integrated with the Elastic Network, ZKsync's interoperable ecosystem of L2s.

Ordinarily governance wouldn't be required to launch here, but it's needed in this case since Lens Chain is aiming to migrate in with its custom genesis state, which requires a special vote.

The voting period concludes on March 10, 2025, so we’ll have the results soon. Stay tuned—a "For" outcome would clear the path for Lens V3 to launch shortly after, and with it the next major chapter for the Lens community.