Lens Protocol launches hybrid network Lens Network to enhance efficiency while maintaining decentralized social interactions

The Ethereum social protocol Lens Protocol announced the launch of the new network Lens Network with a hybrid architecture called Volition, combining the designs of Rollup and Validium to enhance overall scalability while maintaining decentralization. The aim is to provide users with a better Web3 product experience.

Why is Lens Network Needed?

Lens Protocol was originally built on the Polygon network, so why the need for Lens Network? Is it just a product of the current "application chain" trend?

Is technology no longer important? Products oriented towards users will be more important than infrastructure in the future.

According to the team, Lens Protocol needs to be prepared for mass adoption in the future, which requires maximizing scalability to improve service efficiency while maintaining the decentralized social attributes to ensure user experience and rights.

Therefore, the team ultimately chose to build their own network and optimize performance and decentralization balance using the Volition hybrid architecture.

Introduction to Lens Network Architecture

Adopting Volition Hybrid Architecture: Rollup + Validium

First and foremost, the most important aspect of scalability is reducing the cost of data storage. To maintain the decentralization of the protocol, the team needs to choose the most cost-effective option in a decentralized network.

The team mentioned that although Rollups have significantly reduced costs through EIP-4844, they are still insufficient for future mass adoption. Therefore, the focus will be on the lower-cost Validium technology.

Since Validium outsources the data availability layer (DA) to other infrastructure, such as external servers or data availability networks like Celestia, the community previously criticized Validium for its lack of security. However, recent community acceptance has increased, leading Lens Protocol to adopt it.

Recommended Reading: Upgrade in Cancun: V God agrees that some products should use Validiums instead of Rollups
Reason for recommendation: This article discusses the increasing acceptance of Validiums by the Ethereum community and Vitalik, emphasizing that while security may be lower compared to Rollups, Validiums can be used for lower-security data as needed, which may be suitable for content generated by social protocols.

However, data from social protocols varies in importance. For example, user identity and namespace data have high importance and security requirements, while user social history and post content are relatively lower. It is evident that relying solely on Validium technology would pose challenges for Lens Protocol. As a result, the team chose to use both by implementing a hybrid architecture: Volition.

Recommended Reading: Differences in Layer2 transaction record storage locations: Introduction to off-chain data availability DA development
Reason for recommendation: This article explains the current mainstream off-chain storage solutions and operational methods, including Plasma, Validium, DAC, Volition, etc., which can be read in conjunction with this article for a comprehensive understanding of Volition's practical examples.

Lens Network adopts the hybrid architecture Volition, allowing users or applications to freely choose to store data on Rollup or Validium. Important data such as identity and financial transactions use Rollup, while user chat records use Validium, which can choose to store complete data in an external data availability layer to reduce costs.

Therefore, Lens Network will be a hybrid network, coexisting with Rollup and Validium.

Rollup Architecture Using ZK Stack

The Rollup part of Lens Network will utilize the ZK Stack framework from the zkSync ecosystem. The team is attracted to the fragmented ZK Chains ecosystem, where all decentralized networks designed based on ZK Stack can create their own Hyperchain according to their needs and communicate quickly with other networks in the ecosystem.

Each Hyperchain in this ecosystem has cross-chain bridges to the Ethereum mainnet without the need for trust, enabling rapid liquidity exchange between Hyperchains. This maximizes user convenience in transferring assets to Lens Network and enhances security.

Lens Protocol to Support Multiple Chains

For users who do not want to migrate assets to the new network, they can stay on Polygon or other supported networks in the future. In addition to Lens Network, Lens Protocol will support multiple chains, offering users more diverse choices, with communication between different chains facilitated by the CCIP protocol.

Recommended Reading: Chainlink launches cross-chain bridge Transporter based on CCIP protocol
Reason for recommendation: This article provides a simple explanation of the CCIP concept and principles, helping understand how Aave may use this technology to build a more secure liquidity layer network in the future.

Rise in Popularity of Hybrid Architecture

Unlike Lens Protocol, which originally stored most social records on the Polygon network and stored post content and images on IPFS or Arweave, the addition of Lens Network's hybrid design can further reduce costs and prepare for more users. However, whether it can attract a large number of users is another consideration.

Such hybrid architectures are becoming increasingly common in Web3 products. Leading decentralized social protocol Farcaster also adopts an on-chain/off-chain hybrid structure, storing only user identities and assets on-chain to reduce service costs.

What is Vitalik's favorite decentralized social protocol? Farcaster Product Experience Introduction

In the future, more services will be seen not only in community protocols but also in other applications, leveraging hybrid architectures to enhance the user experience of decentralized products. Many cases are gradually moving in this direction, and the day we see truly usable Web3 products may not be far off.

Recommended Reading: It's not just blockchain! How stateless infrastructure brings efficient decentralized networks
Reason for recommendation: Hybrid architecture will be a future trend, where not all information of Web3 products needs to be on-chain. There are many decentralized infrastructure and tools to explore, and reading this article can provide a better understanding of the future development trends of decentralized products.