Farcaster has been a huge success, can Lens find a way to break through?

Original author: Jaleel

The success of our competitors is often the most disheartening.

As a crypto social platform that Vitalik has long favored, Lens seems to always be compared with Farcaster by the community and users. Today, Farcaster has rapidly grown into a phenomenal crypto social platform in a short period of time.

Since January this year, Degen has quickly become popular in the Farcaster community. Community members reward high-quality content they appreciate by adding the “DEGEN” tag in their comments. The Degen system determines the daily reward amount based on the user’s activity and participation on Farcaster. It encourages users to post valuable content on Farcaster. Many active users even reward thousands of dollars a day.

Related reading: “US$1 billion in three months, review of the growth path of “Golden Dog” Degen”

As of April 8, according to Dune data, the total revenue of the decentralized social protocol Farcaster has exceeded US$1 million, and the number of users is about to exceed 300,000. In the past 30 days, users have posted an average of more than 407,000 casts per day. Vitalik Buterin, the main social platform frequently used, has also switched from Twitter to Farcaster.

On the other hand, although Lens’ data has reached new highs since it officially entered the permission-free stage, it is still far behind Farcaster in terms of discussion and community popularity. The anxious Lens seems to be unable to sit still.

Lens also wants to create his own DEGEN?

On March 6, active users of the Lens platform were pleasantly surprised to find a new token called BONSAI airdropped into their wallets at a price of about $50. This Polygon-based BONSAI token is a model of the DN 404 token, marking the launch of the first 404 project on Polygon, similar to the Pandora_ERC 404 project. Among them, 100,000 BONSAI tokens can be exchanged for one Bonsai NFT

The “divisible NFT” standard (DN 404) followed by BONSAI attempts to merge the characteristics of ERC 20 and ERC 721 tokens to create a new hybrid token standard. Although ERC 404 has quickly gained attention in the crypto community, it has caused some controversy due to its non-compliance with existing standards and inefficiency, and may even fail in certain situations. BONSAI seems to be able to solve this problem.

One month later, the performance of BONSAI tokens has been impressive, and the price continues to rise. Although the price of BONSAI has fallen from its peak recently due to the continued airdrop activities of the orb platform, the value of the airdrop received by early users has still grown to $3,000.

This significant growth is partly due to the active promotion of Lens platform founder Stani on social media. Stani not only promoted BONSAI’s popularity through traditional publicity methods, but also used its influence in the encryption community to shape BONSAI into the main economic carrier of the creator economy on the Lens platform.

Today, when users reward and incentivize creators on the Lens platform, most people have defaulted to using BONSAI as a means of payment. This change in behavior not only strengthens BONSAI’s use cases within the platform, but also makes BONSAI a widely-watched topic and a topic of discussion, making it a popular topic in a small circle.

MadFi, the development team behind BONSAI, is a crypto social platform that aims to encourage users to join social clubs of specific content and subscribe to their favorite creators through social media reward mechanisms. Recently, MadFi successfully completed a $1 million angel round of financing, led by Palm Tree Crew Crypto, Avara Ventures and Social Graph Ventures, as well as support from several angel investors including Robert Leshner, Spencer Noon and Sandeep Nailwal.

The MadFi team says that the BONSAI token is experiencing organic growth, with creators having earned over $240,000 in tokens through the platform, making it the currency of choice after wMATIC. On the Lens platform, Bonsai’s market share of monetized publications exceeded 75% in March, peaking at 90% last week.

According to the team, BONSAI has been growing organically, with creators earning over $240,000 in tokens, surpassing wMATIC as the currency of choice for monetizable content.

In March, Bonsai’s market share of monetized publications on Lens exceeded 75%, with a peak of 90%. As of the time of writing, it currently accounts for 73.8%.

Carlos Beltran, Co-founder and CEO of MadFi, shared his excitement about BONSAI becoming the default currency on the Lens platform. “The success of BONSAI demonstrates the huge potential of combining on-chain networks with high-quality content.”

Recently, orb.club announced that it will airdrop a total of 2.2 million BONSAI tokens, worth approximately $230,000. Eligible orb users can now claim this airdrop in-app, providing a 72-hour claim window.

With the efforts of many parties, BONSAI has become the Degen of Farcaster. As of the time of writing, the fully diluted valuation (FDV) of Degen is as high as $1.3 billion, while the FDV of BONSAI is $63.1 million. This comparison shows that compared with other tokens in the market, the Lens platform and BONSAI itself still have huge growth potential and space.

On April 27 last year, Lens Protocol announced the launch of an Optimistic L3 expansion solution called Bonsai, which is specially designed to handle large-scale transactions and support the needs of the next generation of Web3 social users. This solution is technically similar to Degen’s L3 chain expansion solution, but on the second day of its launch, Bonsai was renamed Momoka to continue its mission of ultra-large-scale transaction processing.

Bonsai (later renamed Momoka) is different from traditional L2 solutions. It does not compress transactions back to the L1 layer, but optimizes a new way to send and store these transactions on a dedicated data availability layer. This unique processing method enables Momoka to effectively expand processing capabilities without sacrificing speed and cost.

To ensure the scalability of this expansion solution, Lens Protocol has collaborated with Bundlr Network and Arweave Eco teams to provide data availability (DA) guarantees. This collaboration enables wallets based on Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) support to preserve DA logic and facilitate fast and reliable data release.

Momoka has begun testing in several key applications in the Lens ecosystem, including Lenster, Lenstube, orb, Buttrfly, and Phaver. The testing of these applications not only verifies the effectiveness of Momoka as an innovative expansion solution, but also demonstrates the Lens protocol’s commitment to promoting the development of Web3 social platforms.

Through Momoka, Lens Protocol aims to build a strong foundation to support the needs of future Web3 social networks, capable of handling ultra-large-scale transactions while reducing operating costs and driving the development of the entire ecosystem.

Resurrecting “Zombie Users”

In July 2021, Jack Dorsey hinted that Square would create a new business to build a platform for “non-custodial, permissionless, and decentralized financial services.” Stani Kulechov thought this statement was very close to what Aave was doing, so he quoted Jack Dorsey’s tweet and joked: “Since Jack Dorsey will build Aave on Bitcoin, Aave should also build Twitter on Ethereum.” This hinted at the birth of the Lens protocol, and at the subsequent LisCon conference, Stani once again previewed this social graph project.

In February 2022, Stani publicly released the Lens protocol on Twitter in the form of a signed open letter, and it was officially launched on the Polygon mainnet after testing in May of the same year.

A passage to users on the Lens official website summarizes the features of Lens very well: “With Lens Protocol, everything is under your control. You own your personal data, where you use it, how you use it, and even how you monetize it. This means you have control over your content, and it’s in your wallet as an NFT. It’s not just easy. This is what digital identity should be: everything is yours.”

Since they own their data, users can bring it to any application built on top of Lens Protocol. As the true owners of their content, creators no longer have to worry about losing their content, audience, and livelihood to the whims of individual platforms’ algorithms and policies. In addition, every application that uses Lens Protocol benefits the entire ecosystem, turning a zero-sum game into a collaborative one.

After two years of testing and development, the Lens protocol announced on February 27 that it has officially entered the permissionless phase. Anyone can create a Lens profile to access the protocol, and developers can create new use cases by leveraging the network’s budding community.

After the release, we can see that Lens daily on-chain operations are on the rise (excluding application-specific usage, such as opening applications, scrolling, viewing, reacting, etc.). It is worth mentioning that Lens does not have a direct application, and all usage is carried out through third-party applications built on Lens.

Although the daily on-chain operation data shows an upward trend, there is still an order of magnitude gap between the Lens Protocol and Farcaster in terms of scale and user data.

Left: Lens daily activity data; Right: Farcaster data

According to Dune data, the recent number of active users of the Lens protocol is about 15,000, and its daily active users are only 1,200. In contrast, Farcaster has performed particularly well, with its daily active users increasing more than tenfold since 2024, reaching between 20,000 and 40,000 daily active users. A symbol of this growth is that even Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has chosen to publish multiple exclusive articles on Farcaster.

Farcaster’s success in attracting users and heavyweights highlights that Lens needs to invest more efforts in increasing user activity and expanding the community. As a platform dedicated to building a decentralized social network, Lens Protocol has unique value propositions and technical advantages, such as providing decentralized identity authentication, supporting content creators, and rewarding community contributions. However, compared with Farcaster, Lens still has a long way to go in increasing daily active users and attracting public attention.

In order to narrow the gap with Farcaster, the strategy Stani developed for Lens is particularly critical. By launching the airdrop token Bonsai, Lens can bring back users who joined last year due to the “coin airdrop” and other economic benefits, and bring back more early users.

In this process, Bonsai plays an important role in continuously increasing the circulation of value on the protocol. Its continuous “siphoning” effect - that is, continuously attracting interest and resources within the community and ecosystem - is the key for Lens to narrow the gap with its competitors and even take the lead. Through Bonsai, Lens’ economic incentives can further strengthen the cohesion of the community and promote interaction and cooperation within the ecosystem.

In the short term, Bonsai does stimulate the resurrection of more “zombie users”, but in the long term, Lens still faces many challenges in creating a community culture comparable to Farcaster and degen.

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