How Web3 Social Protocol Lens is Empowering Creators

Over the next several weeks, Coinage is coming to a consensus on which Web3 endeavor shall be crowned Crypto Project of the Year — and it’s truly up to you. Vote to crown the winner from 16 crypto hopefuls!

Social media protocol Lens has been reimagining what the power of online community can mean in the era of Web3 — and it’s attracting money, creators, and users for doing so.    

This summer, Lens Protocol raised $15 million in funding, with the participation of angel investors like Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal and OpenSea co-founder Alex Atallah. It recently launched a second version of its social protocol to empower creators, help monetize their content, and create more relationships with other users.

As other social media platforms, including Elon Musk’s X, continue to run into issues of their own, Web3 competitors like Lens have stepped up to enable entirely new experiences. Among other projects vying for traction in the decentralized social media space, Lens is competing alongside other platforms like Bluesky and Nostr for Web3 users’ attention — and clicks.

“Many of these social media platforms, they kind of are like games,” Lens founder Stani Kulechov told Coinage. “But maybe there’s a better way of actually interacting together with peers online.”

That's the promise of Web3 social media. By creating decentralized and transparent social graphs (basically the equivalent of a social media site's private database of your posts and connections) these Web3 social projects can be used to create an open equivalent of the privately owned Web2 social media sites we're familiar with.

This means no one can take your data away from you, and targeted advertising is opt-in — possibly even rewarding you for interacting with the ad. These sites also aim to solve the "cold-start problem" by rewarding early users of their platforms.

As Coinage previously highlighted, Phaver is one leading project built on top of the Lens social graph. The project raised $7 million to help onboard users into a Web3-native social media experience. 

Around 70,000 digital wallets have connected to Phaver, Phaver CEO Joonatan Lintala said, noting those wallets contain close to 36 million NFTs. (Coinage NFT holders can now pair their NFTs to unlock perks as well.) Users are rewarded for the content they post and share on the platform and will be able to unlock rewards as Phaver rolls out its token in 2024, according to Lintala.

Describing it as a “big feature,” Lintala said Phaver users will soon be able to plug into their favorite holder communities with a designated feature. Like social groups on Facebook, he said, “It's going to be a lot easier for people to come together” on a larger scale.

The combined team of Lens/Phaver advanced past Pudgy Penguins in Round 1 voting among our community of NFT holders, while Solana topped Optimism.

Which project deserves to progress in Coinage’s Crypto Project of the Year? Coinage Membership Pass holders can watch the full video above and vote on which projects advance in our celebration of crypto’s top projects. Don’t have a Membership Pass? Mint one now!