Blockchain
The team behind Lens, a Web3 social media protocol, has announced the launch of a new “layer 3” network to scale social media blockchain apps. Dubbed “Bonzai,” the new network processes and stores messages, comments and shares, pulling this data from the Polygon network and thereby increasing scalability for Lens, according to an April 26 announcement viewed by Cointelegraph.
Introducing Bonsai, an optimistic L3 scaling solution, which will process transactions at hyperscale and is designed to support the next generation of social web3 users.
Available today to Lens developers in closed beta. pic.twitter.com/AaqfikZWxT
— Lens Protocol (@LensProtocol) Apr 26, 2023
Lens is a blockchain protocol that allows users to form a portable “social graph” or digital set of connections between themselves and others. When a user establishes a connection with another person on a Lens app, they can transfer those connections to any other app built on the protocol. There are 17 different Lens-based social media apps listed on the protocol’s official website, including Buttrfly, DumplingTV, Lenster, Lenstube, and others.
Lens runs on the Polygon network, a layer 2 of Ethereum.
In a technical paper referenced in the announcement, the Lens team stated that the Polygon network cannot handle the transaction volume or data storage needs of large-scale social media apps, necessitating a new “optimistic L3 hyperscaling data solution ” is being developed. launched. According to the document, shared blockchain networks can handle up to 200 transactions per second (TPS), while the previous incarnation of Lens could only handle 40 to 50 TPS. In contrast, it stated that Twitter often does 25,000 TPS during peak periods.
Related: Meta is working on a text-based decentralized social network codenamed P92
The team expected that this limitation could prevent the protocol from scaling as the user base grows. To solve this problem, Bonzai has been launched as a layer 2 of Polygon itself, or an “L3” of the Ethereum network. Bonzai uses Bundlr, a decentralized storage platform built on Arweave, to store large files while also storing authentication information about them.
According to the technical paper, the Bonzai network consists of three types of nodes: submitters, verifiers, and timestamps. Submitters validate transactions, build metadata, and submit to Bundler. Verifiers check the data submitted by submitters and confirm that it is valid. And timestamps determine the correct block number and timestamp for a given piece of data.
The newspaper states that this system “[provide] consumers the experience (instant posts, etc.) they are used to from social networks.”
Stani Kulechov, the founder of Lens Protocol, believes Bonzai will be an important step towards mass adoption of Web3 social apps:
“To be competitive with web2, decentralized social media must be scalable. With the ability to support mass consumer adoption, we will see continued web3 innovation – new, exciting and compelling features and business models that will drive web3 adoption.”
Several companies have created decentralized social media protocols in recent years, including Lens, Subsocial, DeSo, and others. Developers hope that these apps will increase the appeal of blockchain networks beyond the financial world. While none of them have reached the success of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other Web2 social apps, some blockchain experts believe that decentralized social media will become the next big thing in crypto.