🌱 Lens Chain is here

“Social media on the blockchain” is a decade-old promise. Remember Steem? That vision is littered with a graveyard of failed attempts, but that isn’t stopping new efforts. Today, Lens launches the mainnet of its L2 deployment, officially marking a new era of SocialFi.

Fluid dex volume:

Fluid is quickly becoming one of Ethereum’s most efficient trading venues — and the volume breakdown shows it. According to the new Blockworks Research dashboard, over 80% of Fluid’s DEX activity is concentrated in just two categories: stablecoin swaps and ETH-USD pairs. Unlike many retail-heavy DEXs, there is virtually no volume from memecoin trading. This highlights Fluid’s positioning as an institutional-grade trading layer, where bots, market makers and large LPs dominate flows.

The chart reveals a notable uptick in total volume from early February through mid-March, peaking above $800M in daily activity. ETH-USD pairs consistently form the largest share of daily trades, followed by stablecoins like USDC and USDT. A smaller but steady portion of volume comes from LST swaps and project tokens.

With ~$1.4B in active deposits, mostly on Ethereum, Fluid appears to be establishing itself as a deep and efficient liquidity layer for serious onchain traders.

Blockworks now has a public dashboard as well as the more in-depth one for Blockworks Research subscribers.

— Macauley

Ship Fast. Show Up. Build Loud.

Permissionless IV is for the ones building quietly, releasing early, and moving fast.
Not “thought leaders.” Not influencers.

Founders with product. Devs with commits. Teams with traction.

🎤 Speaker apps are open. Show what you’re building.
💻 Hackathon = $100K+ in bounties.
👀 We cover your ticket if you're shipping.

📅 June 22–26 | Brooklyn, NY

Lens Chain mainnet is here

About 11 months after its initial announcement, the mainnet of Lens Chain goes live today with its V3 deployment.

Lens Protocol launched in February 2022 on the Polygon sidechain. 

In May 2024, Lens announced that it was migrating off Polygon to its own L2 chain built within the zkSync Elastic Network, a deal that Lens was reportedly paid 0.5% of the total ZK token supply for (worth about $6.5M today).

The shift to its own L2, however, was motivated primarily by costs and scalability. 

Building Lens on the Polygon sidechain made sense in 2021, but once L2s were available, they provided a better cost basis for transactions, Lens founder Stani Kulechov told me last September at Token2049 Singapore.

“The costs on Polygon don't scale to mainstream usage for social transactions. Compared to a rollup, the cost savings looks 30 to 50 times lower,” Kulechov said.

Rather than posting data to the Ethereum L1, Lens Chain is using Avail as its data availability (DA) layer. That makes Lens Chain technically a validium rollup that also enjoys the security of Ethereum’s settlement.

Lens’ migration to its own chain is purportedly one of the largest. According to an official blog, the entire social graph to be migrated comes out to about 125GB of historical data and 12M+ content posts.

Users on Lens Chain will enjoy near-zero gas fees and can pay in Aave’s GHO stablecoin.

All content will also be stored onchain. This is thanks to Grove, Lens’ new storage infrastructure. Grove allows developers on Lens to have customizable access and control over user data. Platform data can be either permanent or deleted.

This makes all Lens’ social data fully onchain and decentralized, in contrast to competing Web3 social platforms like Farcaster where only user profiles are onchain.

This at its core is what forms the foundation of Lens V3, what the team has termed a modular social protocol.

In addition, Grove also promises to deliver the “speed and cost-efficiency of leading Web2 solutions like AWS S3 and Cloudflare R2”, its blog says.

The state of Lens

Today, Lens boasts about 650K user profiles and 28M social connections.

That is still a far cry from being a serious challenge to traditional social media platforms, but consider how far the promise of “social media on the blockchain” has come.

As far back as 2016, companies like Steem, a social project that was bought by the Tron Foundation in 2020 and subsequently hardforked by its original community into what is known today as the HIVE blockchain.

What does Lens do differently?

Recall that Lens is not a social media platform per se, but a protocol where apps can be built on top of it.

Lens’ is decidedly taking a builder-centric growth strategy. Lens wants to target app builders, in particular Web2 developers who have historically been deterred by the clunky UX and complexity of Web3.

“Our strategy focuses on social plus finance apps: projects where people connect, create, and earn. Just like YouTube unlocked a new class of creators, Lens is unlocking a new class of SocialFi apps,” the Lens team told Blockworks.

In other words, the freedom to monetize on a permissionless infrastructure without gatekeepers.

Signature Lens apps since day one are migrating to Lens chains. These include the Twitter-like apps such as Orb and Hey, the AI launchpad Bonsai, Tape, a Tiktok-like short-form app, and more.

It’s hard to imagine Web3 socials ever toppling the incumbent Big Tech platforms today. But take heart in the fact that the mainstream media and experts of the 2000s felt just the same about MySpace.

— Donovan

Pectra to mainnet in May

Ethereum's next major upgrade, Pectra, is now expected to go live on May 7, pending confirmation on next week’s All-Core Devs call.

A revised timeline was confirmed during yesterday’s Ethereum Consensus Layer call, after developers weighed outstanding bugs, validator onboarding friction observed on the Hoodi testnet, and ongoing attestation performance analysis across clients.

One worry was the discovery of a queueing delay tied to top-up deposits — deposits made to restore the balance of existing validators whose effective balance has fallen below the 32 ETH maximum. These are used to recover from slashing, inactivity penalties, or missed duties. A protocol-level cap of 16 deposits per epoch significantly slowed processing of both top-ups and new validator entries, because they share the same queue. 

This raised two key concerns. First, it revealed that recovery from validator underperformance could take much longer than expected in live conditions. Second, it highlighted a potential griefing vector: an attacker could spam the system with top-up deposits, monopolizing the queue without actually creating new validators.

In parallel, client teams continued refining attestation packing logic, optimizing which attestations to include in proposed blocks. Minor performance discrepancies between clients prompted additional testing and coordination before locking in a mainnet release.

The Holesky testnet is now reportedly in stable shape, and its problems proved to be an opportunity to stress test the network.

Client teams are expected to cut their final releases by April 21, allowing for a two-week community upgrade window ahead of the May 7 fork.

— Macauley