Avara’s lens for social fi-focused L2 blockchain 31M

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

Plug-and-play social features

Lens is designed for social use cases. It has plug-and-play features that can be customized, including accounts, usernames, graphs, feeds and groups, as well as monetization capabilities, according to the version 3 developer preview specification.

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

“Existing L2s are still too expensive for mainstream adoption. We're building the fastest, cheapest and most secure L2 to bring Web3 SocialFi to the mainstream. […] Lens offers the simplicity of Web2, with unparalleled benefits that only blockchain can offer.

“For participants, Lens offers the best UX and many monetization opportunities,” Kulekov added. It also provides users with data ownership, control and portability.

Lens is developed by ZKsync and uses the data availability protocol Avail. It has already partnered with development platform Alchemy, oracle network Chainlink, decentralized index The Graph, stablecoin USD Coin (USDC), Consensys' MetaMask wallet and decentralized exchange Uniswap.

Other investors in this funding round include Avail, Circle, Accord, Visionary Ventures and Wintermuth Ventures, as well as angel investors such as Rune Christensen, Anurag Arjun, Anton Bukov, Spencer Noon and Ilya Polosukin.

Related: Avara founder backs Aave's proposal to outsource Polygon Markets

Nod from Trump

Kulekov, Avara's CEO, launched Lens in May 2022. Ave Companies, the developer of the Aave Liquid Protocol, which was renamed Avara in November 2023, offered a $250,000 grant program to developers working on the platform. Aave announced the acquisition of the companies behind the family crypto mobile wallet at the same time they changed the name of the company.

On December 13, AaveDAO approved a proposal from the Donald Trump-backed World Financial Freedom Forum to launch an instance of Aave on Ethereum in exchange for 20% of the generated fees and 7% of WMFI (WLFI) governance tokens.

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