Author: William M. Peaster, Bankless; Translated by: Tao Zhu, Golden Finance

In the on-chain social field of Ethereum, two social network projects currently dominate: Farcaster and Lens.

Currently, Farcaster sees about four times the number of daily active wallets (DAWs) through about 1 million Farcaster IDs (FIDs), and Lens has about 640,000 accounts.

However, consider how this data originated from the old Lens V2 system.

In other words, the project has already promoted quite a bit of activity even in a transitional state before the revamped Lens V3 protocol, which will be launched on the new Lens Chain later this year.

Similar to Snapchain and Frames V2, which are the catalysts for Farcaster, the arrival of Lens V3 will bring a range of new innovations and opportunities to the Lens space.

With that being said, if you haven't gotten aware of the situation yet, let's take a look at the latest Lens development – ​​the mainnet is coming soon.

In November 2024, Lens launched the Lens V3.

This upgrade has made a significant leap from previous V2s on Polygon Polygon, which reorganizes Lens’ on-chain social interactions, which enables it to be powered by a more flexible and modular infrastructure.

Part of the reorganization? The protocol will be launched on the new custom Lens Chain, a ZKsync-based layer 2 (L2) network with Avail data availability, which the Lens team has customized for low-cost social transactions.

Another major shift in V3 is the introduction of social features, which acts as on-chain building blocks that developers can mix and match. These features include:

Account - a smart contract-based ID that replaces tokenized profiles, providing greater user control and portability.

Username - Fully transferable NFT, allowing users to maintain multiple identities in different applications.

Graphics - Redesigned attention system, where developers can set custom rules such as requiring NFTs to follow someone, etc.

Information flow—on-chain content center, which stipulates who can publish, monetize or plan content.

Groups – Membership-based community with governance tools for entry, review and exclusive content access.

In February 2025, Lens announced that it would use Aave’s decentralized stablecoin GHO as its native gas token for Lens Chain.

Big creativity? Bring more predictability and accessibility to transaction fees.

Of course, most chains rely on volatile assets to pay gas fees. For example, Lens V2 relies on Polygon's MATIC (now POL). By using stablecoins like GHO, Lens V3 is designed to keep transaction costs stable and simple.

Technically, GHO will be integrated through ZKsync’s shared bridge, which will make it the primary liquidity pool for Lens Chain users.

In February 2025, Lens migrated its V2 data from Polygon to V3 smart contracts on the Lens Chain test network, taking another big step towards the mainnet.

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

So once the Lens Chain mainnet goes offline, users don’t need to take any manual steps to prepare – their social graph will be completely intact and popular Lens apps like Hey and Orb will be available from day one.

At the same time, the Lens team has begun to phase out the Lens V2 protocol and Momoka (their previous custom data solution, which Avail will replace in V3).

Lastly, the Lens team just proposed ZIP-7: Lens Chain to be included in the Elastic Network for ZKsync Community Governance.

The proposal is now in the formal on-chain voting phase and will integrate Lens Chain with Elastic Network, ZKsync’s L2 interoperable ecosystem.

Governance is usually not required to start here, but in this case governance is required because Lens Chain is designed to migrate with its custom creation state, which requires a special vote.

The voting period ends on March 10, 2025, so we will know the results soon. Stay tuned – the “OK” result will clear the way for the launch of Lens V3 and open the next important chapter for the Lens community.