Lens vs. Farcaster: The Battle of Web3 Social Media Platforms

Retweeted the original title: Farcaster’s Meme Marketing, Lens absorbs it directly

The success of competitors is often the most chilling.

As a crypto social platform that Vitalik has been optimistic about for a long time, Lens always seems to be compared with Farcaster by the community and users. Today, Farcaster has rapidly grown into a phenomenon-level crypto social platform in a short period of time.

Beginning in January this year, Degen quickly became popular in the Farcaster community. Community members reward high-quality content they appreciate by adding the “DEGEN” tag in comments. The Degen system determines the daily reward amount based on the user’s activity and participation on Farcaster, encouraging users to publish valuable content on Farcaster. Many active users even reach a daily reward amount of thousands of dollars.

As of April 8, according to Dune data, the total revenue of the decentralized social protocol Farcaster has exceeded 1 million dollars, and the number of users is about to exceed 300,000. Over the past 30 days, users have posted an average of more than 407,000 casts every day. Vitalik Buterin has shifted his frequently used social platform from Twitter to Farcaster.

On the other hand, although Lens has reached new heights in data since it officially entered the permissionless stage, in terms of discussion degree and community heat, it is still far behind Farcaster. It appears that Lens is restless due to anxiety.

Is Lens creating its own DEGEN?

On March 6, active users on the Lens platform were pleasantly surprised to find a new token named BONSAI airdropped into their wallets, with an initial airdrop price of about $50. This BONSAI token, based on the Polygon network, is an example of a DN404 token, marking the launch of the first 404 project on Polygon, similar to the Pandora_ERC404 project. Among them, 100,000 BONSAI tokens can be exchanged for a Bonsai NFT.

The “Divisible NFT” standard (DN404) followed by BONSAI attempts to merge the characteristics of ERC20 and ERC721 tokens to create a new hybrid token standard. Although ERC404 rapidly gained attention in the crypto world, it aroused some controversy as it did not comply with existing standards and was inefficient, potentially failing under certain circumstances. BONSAI seems to be a solution to this problem.

A month has passed, and the performance of the BONSAI token is eye-catching, with the price continuously rising. Although recent airdrop activities on the orb platform caused the price of BONSAI to fall from its peak, the value of the airdrop for early users has still grown to $3000.

This significant growth is partly due to the active promotion of Lens platform founder Stani on social media. Stani not only promoted BONSAI’s popularity through traditional promotional measures, but also used his influence in the crypto community to shape BONSAI into the main economic carrier of the creator economy on the Lens platform.

Today, when users tip and incentivize creators on the Lens platform, most people have defaulted to using BONSAI as the payment method. This shift in behavior model has not only strengthened the use cases of BONSAI within the platform, but also triggered widespread attention and discussion, making it popular in a small circle.

MadFi, the development team behind BONSAI, is a crypto social platform aimed at incentivizing users to join specific content social clubs and subscribe to their favorite creators through social media reward mechanisms. Recently, MadFi successfully completed a $1 million Angel round of financing, led by Palm Tree Crew Crypto, Avara Ventures, and Social Graph Ventures, and supported by several angel investors including Robert Leshner, Spencer Noon, and Sandeep Nailwal..

The MadFi team stated the BONSAI token is experiencing organic growth, with creators already earning over $240,000 in tokens through the platform, making it the currency of choice after wMATIC. On the Lens platform, Bonsai’s monetized publication market share exceeded 75% in March and peaked at 90% last week.

In March, Bonsai’s share of the monetized publication market on Lens exceeded 75%, and it once reached 90%. As of the time of writing, the current proportion is 73.8%.

Carlos Beltran, co-founder and CEO of MadFi, shared his excitement about BONSAI becoming the default currency on the Lens platform. “The success of BONSAI demonstrates the great potential of combining on-chain networks with high-quality content.”

Recently, orb.club announced that it will airdrop a total of 2.2 million BONSAI tokens, worth approximately $230,000. Eligible orb users can now claim this airdrop within the app, providing a 72-hour claim window.

With efforts from various parties, BONSAI has become Farcaster’s Degen. As of the time of writing, Degen’s fully diluted valuation (FDV) is up to $1.3 billion, while BONSAI’s FDV is $63.1 million. This comparison shows that, compared to other tokens on the market, the Lens platform and BONSAI itself still have great growth potential and space.

On April 27 last year, Lens Protocol announced the launch of an Optimistic L3 extension solution called Bonsai, specifically designed to handle large-scale transactions and support the needs of next-generation Web3 social users. Technically, this solution is similar to Degen’s L3 chain extension scheme, but the day after its launch, Bonsai was renamed Momoka, continuing its mission to handle ultra-large-scale transactions.

Unlike traditional L2 solutions, Bonsai (later renamed Momoka) does not compress transactions back to the L1 layer. Instead, it optimizes a new pathway, sending these transactions to and storing them on a dedicated data availability layer. This unique processing method allows Momoka to effectively expand processing capability without sacrificing speed and cost.

To ensure the scalability of this scaling solution, Lens Protocol has partnered with the Bundlr Network and Arweave Ecosystem teams to provide Data Availability (DA) guarantees. This collaboration enables EVM-powered wallets to store DA logic and facilitate the fast and reliable data publication.

Momoka has begun testing in several key applications within the Lens ecosystem, including Lenster, Lenstube, orb, Buttrfly, and Phaver. The testing of these applications not only verifies the effectiveness of Momoka as an innovative extension scheme, but also demonstrates Lens Protocol’s commitment to promoting the development of Web3 social platforms.

Through Momoka, Lens Protocol aims to build a robust foundation that supports future Web3 social network needs, capable of handling large-scale transactions while reducing operating costs, and promoting the development of the entire ecosystem.

Reviving of “zombie users”

In July 2021, Jack Dorsey hinted that Square would create a new business to build a platform for “non-custodial, permissionless and decentralized financial services.” Stani Kulechov believed that this statement was very close to what Aave was doing, so he quoted Jack Dorsey’s tweet and joked: “Since Jack Dorsey is going to build Aave on Bitcoin, Aave should build Twitter on Ethereum.” This hinted at the birth of the Lens protocol. At the subsequent LisCon conference, Stani once again previewed this social graph project.

In February 2022, Stani publicly announced the Lens protocol on Twitter in the form of a signed open letter and officially launched it on the Polygon mainnet after testing in May of the same year.

A message to users on the Lens official website sums up the features of Lens very well, “With Lens Protocol, you are in control. You own your profile, where you use it, how you use it, and even how you monetize it. That means you have the power over your content, and it’s all right there, as an NFT, in your wallet. It’s not just easy. It’s how digital identity should be: yours.”

Since they own their data, users can bring it to any application built on Lens Protocol. As the true owners of their content, creators no longer need to worry about losing content, audiences, and livelihoods to the whims of individual platforms’ algorithms and policies. Additionally, every application that uses Lens Protocol benefits the entire ecosystem, transforming a zero-sum game into a collaborative one.

After two years of testing and development, Lens Protocol announced on February 27 that it has officially entered the permissionless stage, where anyone can create a Lens profile to access the protocol, and developers can create new use cases by leveraging the budding community on the network.

And later, we can see an upward trend in daily Lens on-chain operations (excluding application-specific usage, such as opening applications, scrolling, viewing, reacting, etc.). It is worth mentioning that there is no direct application for Lens, and all usage is performed through third-party applications built on Lens.

Although the daily on-chain operation data is on the rise, there is still an order of magnitude gap between the Lens protocol and Farcaster in terms of scale and user data.

Daily Activity User Data. Left: Lens; Right: Farcaster

According to Dune data, the number of recent active users of the Lens protocol is approximately 15,000, while its daily active users are only 1,200. In contrast, Farcaster has performed particularly well, growing its daily active users more than tenfold since 2024 to between 20,000 and 40,000 daily active users. An iconic testament to this growth is that even Ethereum’s founder, Vitalik Buterin, has chosen to publish multiple exclusive articles on Farcaster.

Farcaster’s success in attracting users and heavyweights highlights the need for Lens to put more effort into increasing user activity and growing the community. As a platform dedicated to building a decentralized social network, the Lens Protocol has unique value propositions and technical advantages, such as providing decentralized identity verification, supporting content creators, and rewarding community contributions. However, compared to Farcaster, Lens still has a long way to go in terms of growing daily active users and attracting public attention.

To narrow the gap with Farcaster, Stani’s strategy for Lens is particularly crucial. By launching the Bonsai airdrop token, Lens can bring back users who joined last year due to airdrop activities and economic expectations such as “token airdrops”, and bring back more early users.

Bonsai plays a crucial role in this process, constantly driving value circulation within the protocol. Its ongoing “siphoning” effect, which consistently attracts interest and resources from the community and ecosystem, is vital for Lens to close the gap with its competitors or even take the lead. By utilizing Bonsai, Lens can enhance economic incentives within the community, fostering cohesion and encouraging interaction and cooperation within the ecosystem.

In the short term, Bonsai indeed stimulates the revival of more “zombie users”, but in the long term, to create a community culture that can rival Farcaster and Degen, Lens still faces many challenges.

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