The staff behind Lens, a Web3 social media protocol, has introduced the launch of a brand new “layer 3” community to scale blockchain social media apps. Referred to as “Bonzai,” the brand new community processes and shops posts, feedback and shares, taking this knowledge off the Polygon community and thereby rising scalability for Lens, in response to an April 26 announcement seen by Cointelegraph.
Introducing Bonsai, an Optimistic L3 scaling resolution, that can course of transactions at hyperscale, and is designed to help the subsequent technology of web3 social customers.
Accessible for Lens devs in closed beta at present. pic.twitter.com/AaqfikZWxT
— Lens Protocol (@LensProtocol) April 26, 2023
Lens is a blockchain protocol that enables customers to kind a conveyable “social graph,” or digital set of connections, between themselves and others. When customers kind a reference to one other particular person on one Lens app, they will switch these connections to every other app constructed on the protocol. There are 17 totally different Lens-based social media apps listed on the protocol’s official web site, together with Buttrfly, DumplingTV, Lenster, Lenstube and others.
Lens runs on the Polygon community, a layer 2 of Ethereum.
In a technical doc linked to within the announcement, the Lens staff said that the Polygon community can’t deal with the transaction quantity or data-storage wants of large-scale social media apps, making it essential for a brand new “optimistic L3 hyperscaling knowledge resolution” to be launched. In keeping with the doc, shared blockchain networks can solely deal with as much as 200 transactions per second (TPS), whereas the earlier incarnation of Lens might solely deal with 40 to 50 TPS. In contrast, it said that Twitter usually does 25,000 TPS throughout peak durations.
Associated: Meta working on text-based decentralized social network codenamed P92
The staff anticipated this limitation might forestall the protocol from scaling as its person base grew. To unravel this drawback, Bonzai launched as a layer 2 of Polygon itself, or an “L3” of the Ethereum community. Bonzai makes use of Bundlr, a decentralized storage platform constructed on Arweave, to retailer giant information whereas storing verification knowledge about them.
In keeping with the technical paper, the Bonzai community consists of three sorts of nodes: submitters, verifiers and timestamps. Submitters validate transactions, construct metadata and submit them to Bundlr. Verifiers monitor the info submitted by submitters and ensure that it’s legitimate. And timestamps decide the right block quantity and timestamp for a selected piece of knowledge.
The paper states that this technique ought to “[provide] shoppers the expertise (on the spot posts, and so forth.) they’ve come to count on from social networks.”
Stani Kulechov, the founding father of Lens Protocol, believes Bonzai can be an necessary step towards spurring mass adoption of Web3 social apps:
“To be aggressive with web2, decentralized social should scale. With the flexibility to help mass shopper adoption, we’ll see continued web3 innovation – new, thrilling and compelling options and enterprise fashions that can spur web3 adoption.”
A number of firms in recent times have created decentralized social media protocols, together with Lens, Subsocial, DeSo and others. Builders hope these apps will assist broaden the attraction of blockchain networks past the monetary world. Whereas none of them have attained the success of Fb, Twitter, YouTube and different Web2 social apps, some blockchain specialists imagine decentralized social media will be the next big thing in crypto.
