Lens by Avara secures $31M for SocialFi-focused L2 blockchain

Lens, a layer-2 blockchain developed by Avara, has raised $31 million in a funding round led by Lightspeed Faction. The funds will go to scaling the network infrastructure ahead of its mainnet launch early next year.

Plug-and-play social features

Lens is designed for SocialFi use cases. According to a description of its Version 3 developer preview, it has customizable plug-and-play features like Accounts, Usernames, Graphs, Feeds and Groups, as well as monetization capabilities, that developers can add to any app on the chain.

The Lens mainnet is expected to launch on Ethereum in early 2025. Lens founder Stani Kulechov said:

“Existing L2s are still too costly for mainstream adoption. To bring web3 SocialFi to the mainstream, we’re building the fastest, cheapest and safest L2. […] Lens delivers the ease of web2, while providing the unparalleled benefits that only blockchain can deliver.”

“For participants, Lens will offer the best UX and multiple monetization opportunities to build their own financial rails,” Kulechov added. It will also provide users ownership, control and portability of their data.

Lens was built with ZKsync and uses data availability protocol Avail. Lens has already partnered with development platform Alchemy, oracle network Chainlink, decentralized indexer The Graph, stablecoin Circle (USDC), Consensys’ MetaMask wallet and decentralized exchange Uniswap.

Among other investors in this funding round were Avail, Circle, Consensys, Foresight Ventures and Wintermute Ventures, and angel investors such as Rune Christensen, Anurag Arjun, Anton Bukov, Spencer Noon and Illia Polosukhin.

Related: Avara founder backs proposal to offboard Polygon markets from Aave

A nod from Trump

Kulechov, who is also Avara’s CEO, launched Lens in May 2022. Aave Companies, the developer of the Aave (AAVE) liquidity protocol that was rebranded as Avara in November 2023, endowed a $250,000 grant program for developers working on the platform. Aave Companies announced the acquisition of the company behind the Family crypto mobile wallet at the same time as the name change.

On Dec. 13, AaveDAO approved a proposal from the Donald Trump-backed World Liberty Financial platform to launch an instance of Aave on Ethereum in exchange for 20% of the fees it generates and 7% of its WLFI governance tokens.

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