Donovan Choy

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About 11 months after its initial <a href="https://x.com/StaniKulechov/status/1790458663926219212">announcement</a>, the mainnet of Lens Chain goes live today with its V3 deployment.



Lens Protocol launched in February 2022 on the Polygon sidechain.&nbsp;



In May 2024, Lens announced that it was migrating off Polygon to its own L2 chain built within the zkSync Elastic Network. For the deal, Lens was <a href="https://www.dlnews.com/articles/defi/lens-promised-possibly-tens-of-millions-to-go-to-zksync/">reportedly</a> paid 0.5% of the total ZK token supply (worth about $6.5M today).



The shift to its own L2, however, was motivated primarily by costs and scalability.&nbsp;



Building Lens on the Polygon sidechain made sense in 2021, but once L2s were available, they provided a better cost basis for transactions, Lens founder Stani Kulechov told me last September at Token2049 Singapore.



“The costs on Polygon don&#8217;t scale to mainstream usage for social transactions. Compared to a rollup, the cost savings looks 30 to 50 times lower,” Kulechov said.



Rather than posting data to the Ethereum L1, Lens Chain is using <a href="https://blockworks.co/podcast/0xresearch/e91db748-d67d-11ee-8d92-8b61dd33eafb">Avail</a> as its data availability (DA) layer. That makes Lens Chain technically a <a href="https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/scaling/validium/">validium</a> rollup that also enjoys the security of Ethereum’s settlement.



Lens’ migration to its own chain is purportedly one of the largest. According to an official blog, the entire social graph to be migrated comes out to about 125GB of historical data and 12M+ content posts.



Users on Lens Chain will enjoy near-zero gas fees and can pay in Aave’s GHO stablecoin.



All content will also be stored onchain. This is thanks to <a href="https://lens.xyz/news/introducing-grove-onchain-controlled-storage">Grove</a>, Lens’ new storage infrastructure. Grove allows developers on Lens to have customizable access and control over user data. Platform data can be either permanent or deleted.



This makes all Lens’ social data fully onchain and decentralized, in contrast to competing Web3 social platforms like Farcaster, where only user profiles are onchain.



This, at its core, is what forms the foundation of Lens V3, what the team has termed a modular social protocol.



In addition, Grove also promises to deliver the “speed and cost-efficiency of leading Web2 solutions like AWS S3 and Cloudflare R2,” its blog says.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">The state of Lens</h2>



Today, Lens boasts about 650,000 user profiles and 28 million social connections.



That is still a far cry from being a serious challenge to traditional social media platforms, but consider how far the promise of “social media on the blockchain” has come.



As far back as 2016, companies like Steem, a social project that was bought by the Tron Foundation in 2020 and subsequently hardforked by its original community into what is known today as the HIVE blockchain.



What does Lens do differently?



Recall that Lens is not a social media platform per se, but a protocol where apps can be built on top of it.



Lens&#8217; protocol is decidedly taking a builder-centric growth strategy. Lens wants to target app builders, in particular Web2 developers who have historically been deterred by the clunky UX and complexity of Web3.



“Our strategy focuses on social plus finance apps: projects where people connect, create and earn. Just like YouTube unlocked a new class of creators, Lens is unlocking a new class of SocialFi apps,” the Lens team told Blockworks.



In other words, the freedom to monetize on a permissionless infrastructure without gatekeepers.



Signature Lens apps since day one are migrating to Lens chains. These include the Twitter-like apps such as Orb and Hey, the AI launchpad Bonsai, Tape, a Tiktok-like short-form app, and more.



It’s hard to imagine Web3 socials ever toppling the incumbent Big Tech platforms today. But take heart in the fact that the mainstream media and experts of the 2000s felt just the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/feb/08/business.comment">same</a> about competitors to MySpace.



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0xResearch Newsletter

Lens launches mainnet today, bringing a potential new era to SocialFi

Macauley Peterson

Ethereum’s roadmap for scaling employs a combination of specialized infrastructure components for disparate steps in the life of a blockchain transaction: execution, transaction ordering, data availability, settlement and consensus, as opposed to an all-in-one solution.



In short, modular vs. integrated.



A chief impediment is the potential degradation of the user experience in the process, as applications run across multiple chains that don’t necessarily talk to each other in anything like real-time.



Avail, known primarily as a provider of data availability (DA) — as the name suggests — has been quietly working on a more holistic suite of solutions to this burgeoning interoperability problem.



Read more: <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/ethereum-rollup-data-availability-alternatives">For Ethereum rollups, dealing with data remains a bottleneck</a>



The project announced a $27 million seed funding round on Monday, led by prominent investors Founders Fund and Dragonfly, alongside SevenX, Figment, Nomad Capital and various angel investors.



The funding will help Avail move beyond DA to encompass two other primary products that it calls Nexus and Fusion.&nbsp;



Together, this “Avail Trinity” is intended to address issues of fragmentation and pave the way for a more integrated experience across <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/modular-blockchains">modular</a> ecosystems.



Founded by Anurag Arjun and Prabal Banerjee —&nbsp;both formerly part of <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/polygon">Polygon</a> — Avail’s Nexus is a conceptual cousin of Polygon’s aggregation layer (or AggLayer), zkSync’s Hyperchains and Starknet’s layer-3s, all of which are aimed at providing cross-chain interoperability.



Read more: <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/polygon-zkevm-type-1-prover">Polygon zkEVM prover reaches Type 1 status</a>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Cross-rollup proofs</h2>



Nexus serves as a hub for proof aggregation — to provide verification of various <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/rollups">rollups</a> through a zero-knowledge proof-based coordination mechanism.



“There will be a lot of rollups that use their respective stacks but are connected to each other in some way or the other,” Arjun told Blockworks.


<div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="alignright size-large is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="2560" height="1707" src="https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Anurag-and-Prabal_1-scaled.jpg?w=1024&amp;h=1024" alt="" class="wp-image-81004" style="width:433px;height:auto" srcset="https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Anurag-and-Prabal_1-scaled.jpg?w=2560 2560w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Anurag-and-Prabal_1-scaled.jpg?w=300 300w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Anurag-and-Prabal_1-scaled.jpg?w=1024 1024w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Anurag-and-Prabal_1-scaled.jpg?w=768 768w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Anurag-and-Prabal_1-scaled.jpg?w=1536 1536w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Anurag-and-Prabal_1-scaled.jpg?w=2048 2048w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Anurag-and-Prabal_1-scaled.jpg?w=386 386w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Anurag-and-Prabal_1-scaled.jpg?w=392 392w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Anurag-and-Prabal_1-scaled.jpg?w=329 329w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Anurag-and-Prabal_1-scaled.jpg?w=80 80w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Anurag Arjun and Prabal Banerjee. Source: Avail</figcaption></figure></div>


Right now, the hypothetical user experience within an ecosystem like zkEVM chains <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/polygon-validum-zk-tech-future">using Polygon’s CDK</a> is generally considered good. But according to Arjun, “once the user falls outside of the ecosystem, then they&#8217;ve got a very subpar experience.”



Arjun argued that while all the major zk rollup teams are talented and well funded, they are also extremely competitive, which may make it difficult to sit down together and focus on the interoperability pain points between their various ecosystems — or what Polygon co-founder Jordi Baylina calls “constellations.”



Nexus can orchestrate such a solution as an independent third party.



“It doesn’t matter that they use Avail,” Arjun said. “This is not like a standard that we are imposing on these stacks, it&#8217;s essentially more like a permissionless play.”



Avail doesn’t compete with these teams on the execution front; it’s a rollup service provider, not a rollup builder.



And it’s not limited to <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/evm">EVM</a>-based rollups either. Avail plans to support other execution layers rollups as they gain traction.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Differentiating DA solutions</h2>



Avail runs its own consensus protocol to provide data availability with some novel properties. For instance, it is <a href="https://blog.availproject.org/avails-core-features-explained/">designed</a> with data availability sampling (DAS) based on validity proofs.



In contrast, EigenDA will not offer DAS, making it more challenging to <a href="https://celestia.org/glossary/data-withholding-attack/">detect</a> a data withholding attack, Arjun said.



Celestia’s DAS implementation uses fraud proofs, so that even once its <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/celestia-airdrop-oct-17">light client verification solution is live</a>, reaching true finality can take hours as the network must accommodate a fraud proof challenge window.



Avail’s proofs are generated almost as soon as a block is finalized, giving overall finality in about 40 seconds, Arjun explained.



Avail’s testing shows the computing resources for proof generation are not a bottleneck: A block storing even 300 times the data that Ethereum mainnet will <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/ethereum-dencun-upgrade-live">after the Dencun upgrade</a> takes just three seconds to generate a proof.



Therefore, it won’t get in the way of building <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/dapps">dapps</a> that are composable across rollups.



“You take proofs from various rollups and then aggregate them into one proof on an intermediate settlement layer,” he said.



That could be a specialized chain like Dymension, but Avail Nexus will also post to <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/ethereum">Ethereum</a>.



Another proposed solution, coincidentally also called “Nexus” but unrelated to Avail, would use Ethereum as a go-between.



Read more: <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/nexus-liquidity-fragmentation">zkLink’s Nexus wants to solve liquidity fragmentation between ZK ecosystems</a>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Securing chains with Fusion</h2>



Avail necessarily will have its own token — its <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/avail-bridge-data-availability-ethereum-rollups">nominated proof-of-stake</a> consensus mechanism depends on it. But the security of chains using Avail may not be limited to the economic stake of its native asset.



That’s where Fusion comes in. In theory, Avail Fusion looks to borrow security from existing crypto assets like bitcoin and ether, inspired by EigenLayer, and the concept of Mesh security from Osmosis, Arjun said.



This is likely to become a trend, with <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/bitcoin-staking-protocol-babylon">teams like Babylon focused on employing</a> the economic weight of BTC to help secure proof-of-stake chains and let bitcoin holders earn a yield in the process.



Taken together, components of the modular Ethereum stack aim to provide a scalable, secure and interoperable foundation for future Web3 dapps in the multi-chain world. And ideally, users won’t have to worry about any of it.



“This is more inspired from how apps on the internet really evolved over the years,” Arjun said. “It&#8217;s going to follow that paradigm in the sense that there are going to be a lot of rollups asynchronously communing with each other whenever required.”



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Avail

Avail raises $27M, readies entrance into modular narrative

Bessie Liu

When it comes to scaling Ethereum, rollups are the name of the game. But as rollups increase transaction throughput, they face a challenge in where to store their data.



The obvious option is on Ethereum itself. Some argue that doing so is even core to the claim that rollups “inherit” Ethereum security. Ethereum’s execution layer nodes store a complete copy of the blockchains ledger and history, allowing clients to independently verify the accuracy of its transaction history.



While great for security and resilience, this comes at the cost of scalability. This is one of the main reasons why the Ethereum mainnet maxes out at around 15 transactions per second (TPS), and can be expensive during times of high demand.



Read more: <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/layer-2-secured-by-ethereum">So your layer-2 is ‘secured by Ethereum’ — what does that mean?</a>



Increasingly, blockchain developers are looking <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/sovereign-rollups-blockchain-scaling">at alternatives for “data availability”</a> to resolve Ethereum’s shortcomings. Some developers are <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/avail-bridge-data-availability-ethereum-rollups">turning towards modular blockchain solutions</a> such as Celestia and Avail.



Modular blockchains often refer to networks that disaggregate specific blockchain functionalities. Dedicated data availability layers are designed to increase the efficiency of a blockchain, improve its transaction speeds and minimize costs.&nbsp;



Read More: <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/data-availability-ethereum">Why data availability sampling matters for blockchain scaling</a>



Celestia was one of the first data availability layers to <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/data-availability-transaction-costs-blockchain">launch its mainnet beta</a>. Since October, it has seen over 900,000 <a href="https://celenium.io/">transactions</a> and around 278,000 accounts on its network, according to <a href="https://celenium.io/">Celenium</a>, Celestia’s block explorer. The explorer does not break down the network’s data volume or number of submissions.



The network has also been working on integrations with other layer-2 solutions, most recently with the Polygon CDK, enabling interested developers to choose Celestia for data availability&nbsp; alongside other options.&nbsp;



For developers using Optimism’s OP Stack, Celestia also introduced <a href="https://docs.celestia.org/developers/ethereum-fallback">Ethereum fallbacks</a> — a backup solution for data availability. That means that if the Celestia network is temporarily unavailable, layer-2s can post their transaction batches back onto Ethereum mainnet. This avoids the risk that end-user funds remain stranded.&nbsp;



Avail recently launched its <a href="https://blog.availproject.org/introducing-avails-clash-of-nodes-incentivized-testnet/">testnet</a>, dubbed “Clash of Nodes,” which uses gamification to incentivize validators and light client operators with points and rewards, Anurag Arjun, Avail’s co-founder, told Blockworks.



According to Avail’s <a href="https://leaderboard.availproject.org/?ref=blog.availproject.org">blockchain explorer</a>, there are 56,000 accounts on its testnet, which has processed over 1.2 million transactions since it began. Its mainnet is expected to launch in the first half of 2024.



The two networks serve a similar purpose, but there are some key differences.



For one, Arjun notes that Avail uses <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/addresses-helping-ethereum-scale">KZG polynomial commitments</a> — a type of validity proof used to sample random parts of a block to verify it, without needing to access the full data.&nbsp;



These KZG commitments “are ideal for zero-knowledge-based blockchains, where efficiency, privacy and scalability are essential,” Arjun said.



Celestia instead uses secure hash functions, which Arjun notes “introduces potential delays in ensuring data availability guarantees.”&nbsp;



“The tradeoff here is that they have to rely on fraud proofs to confirm the accuracy of erasure coding,” Arjun said.



The choice between these two depends on the specific requirements and priorities of a blockchain system.



Read more: <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/sovereign-rollups-blockchain-scaling">Sovereign rollups carve a path for blockchain scaling</a>



Aside from Celestia and Avail, re-staking protocol EigenLayer has also recently revealed its plans to launch <a href="https://www.blog.eigenlayer.xyz/intro-to-eigenda-hyperscale-data-availability-for-rollups/">EigenDA</a>.



Ethereum core developers are also not standing still; the core piece of <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/ethereum-cancun-upgrade-blobs">Ethereum’s next major upgrade Dencun</a> will introduce “proto-danksharding,” or EIP-4844, a process where costs of transactions are reduced by storing them in temporary data blobs.



Data availability and storage remains a significant cost driver on Ethereum. Solutions under development are still in their early stages. While its roadmap calls for an eventual transition to “<a href="https://dankradfeist.de/ethereum/2021/02/14/why-stateless.html">stateless</a>” Ethereum, the current data bloat puts the full Ethereum chain at nearly 1.4 <a href="https://ycharts.com/indicators/ethereum_chain_full_sync_data_size">terabytes</a>.



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For Ethereum rollups, dealing with data remains a bottleneck

On-chain data availability has become an increasingly common topic as Ethereum continues to scale.



Today, Ethereum developers are looking at where and how data should be stored on blockchain networks as they work towards resolving the so-called blockchain trilemma, referring to the tradeoffs between security, scalability and decentralization.&nbsp;



In crypto, data availability refers to the concept that data that is stored on a network is accessible and retrievable by all network participants.&nbsp;



On Ethereum layer-1, the network’s nodes download all the data in each block, making it difficult for invalid transactions to be executed.&nbsp;



Although this can guarantee security, this process can be relatively inefficient — asking a network node to verify and store all data in a block can drastically <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/consensus-mechanisms-guide">reduce throughput and hinder blockchain scalability.</a>



Ethereum layer-2 scaling solutions are designed to resolve this problem.&nbsp;



One popular solution today is the optimistic rollup, such as <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/arbitrum">Arbitrum</a> and <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/optimism">Optimism</a>. Optimistic rollups are “optimistic” in nature as they assume transactions are valid until proven otherwise.&nbsp;



Most rollups today only have one single sequencer, meaning there is a centralization risk, Anurag Arjun, co-founder of modular blockchain Avail, told Blockworks.&nbsp;



This is not a major problem at present, as rollup solutions must put the raw transaction data on Ethereum using something called calldata — the cheapest form of storage on Ethereum today, as Arjun notes.



Once a calldata is submitted to <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/ethereum">Ethereum</a> mainnet, anyone can challenge whether or not it is accurate within a set period of time, according to Neel Somani, the founder of blockchain scaling solution Eclipse.



If no one challenges the validity of the rollup, it will be accepted on Ethereum once the period of time is up.



The problem, Somani notes, is how someone can then prove that a transaction was executed inaccurately if they don’t have the data.



“If I don’t tell you what I executed, there’s no way for you to possibly prove that it is wrong, so you need to know exactly what I executed in order to fix that,” Somani said. “So all blockchains must prove data availability in some way, shape or form.”



Data availability sampling



As all blockchains must prove data availability, it can be inefficient to download a full block onto a network, which again invokes the initial data availability problem.



“So as someone who doesn’t want to download the full block, I still want the confidence that the information on the block is not being withheld,” Somani said.



The solution, according to Somani, is the use of data availability sampling to gain confidence that the block is actually there.



Data availability sampling involves sampling random parts of the block to obtain arbitrarily high confidence that the block is there, Somani explains.&nbsp;



This technology utilizes polynomials — a mathematical expression comprising variables, coefficients and exponentiation — to model relationships between variables in a block.&nbsp;



A common misinterpretation of data availability sampling is that if you sample half the block, you only gain 50% confidence that the information in the block is accurate, Somani said. This isn’t true, he explains, because as with data availability sampling, users must make sure that they have enough points to recover the original polynomial.



Projects like Celestia and Avail are currently building out data availability sampling solutions.



“What we sincerely believe is that every base layer is going to be a data availability layer,” Arjun told Blockworks. “The main directional fight that we are having is wanting to scale data availability at the base layer, and have execution and roll up on the second layer.”



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Why data availability sampling matters for blockchain scaling

Polygon spin-off Avail unveiled its data attestation bridge to Ethereum, Friday, as it seeks to carve out a niche in Ethereum’s rollup-centric scaling roadmap.



Layer-2 rollups currently use Ethereum mainnet for posting their transaction data, which represents the majority of the transaction cost to users. These costs are expected to come down significantly following the <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/ethereum-cancun-upgrade-blobs">next Ethereum upgrade “Dencun”</a> later this year, which will implement EIP-4844.



Further scaling gains should be found higher up the stack, on layer-3 networks envisioned such as <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/arbitrum-arb-token-airdrop">Arbitrum Orbit</a>, or <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/zksync-launches-op-stack-rival">zkSync’s hyperchains</a>. That’s where Avail’s solution will likely come in, Anurag Arjun, Avail’s co-founder, told Blockworks in an interview.



“With computation with something like [zero-knowledge proofs], you are able to compress proofs, you&#8217;re able to do recursive proofs and make it small, but with data, you cannot do it,” Arjun said.



Right now, some early attempts make use of what are known as data availability committees (DACs), but in the future Avail or <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/blockchain-goes-modular">Celestia</a> could provide a better alternative because they use a technique known as <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/sovereign-rollups-blockchain-scaling">data availability sampling</a> (DAS). Ethereum’s own implementation of DAS is still likely years away.



&#8220;By enabling rollup constructions to run in validium, optimistic chains, and volition modes, we are not only reducing costs but also paving the way for a more inclusive and efficient layer-2 and layer-3 ecosystem,” Arjun said in a statement.



There are some <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/layer-2-secured-by-ethereum">trade-offs in terms of security</a>, but for the kinds of use cases that are most likely to require layer-3s, the cost, performance, and privacy concerns will make off-chain data availability options worth it, according to zkSync co-founder Alex Gluchowski.



“It&#8217;s very cheap, but you only have a partial inheritance of Ethereum security,” Gluchowski said.&nbsp;&nbsp;



Avail opted to become an independent company outside of the Polygon product suite so that it could service all kinds of rollups, not only those from Polygon.



“We wanted it to be more credibly neutral in that aspect because Avail is a general purpose base layer,” Arjun told Blockworks.



The transition, completed about three months ago, saw Arjun leave his operational role at Polygon, which will now be one customer of many for the new firm.



Polygon’s PoS chain, which <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/polygon-pos-to-validium">Polygon recently announced</a> would morph into a zkEVM validium,&nbsp; will initially make use of its own validator set to provide data availability, but it could also use Avail in the future, Arjun said.



Avail is built using Polkadot’s <a href="https://app.blockworksresearch.com/glossary#substrate-polkadot-development-framework" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Substrate</a> technology due to its use of nominated proof-of-stake (nPOS) and tendency to facilitate wide distribution of stake.



Arjun observed from his experience with <a href="https://app.blockworksresearch.com/glossary#tendermint-core-byzantine-fault-tolerance-bft-consensus" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Tendermint</a> consensus used by the Polygon PoS chain that there is a concentration of stake with a majority controlled by eight to 10 validators.



A new staking token, AVAIL, will facilitate a permissionless validator set of up to 1,000 validators.



Other than that, there is no connection to the Polkadot ecosystem. They may be able to help Polkadot build zk rollups on a Polkadot parachain using Avail, Arjun said, but this idea is very new and will require a lot of further development.



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