Lens Protocol Rolls Out Bonsai, A Blockchain Scaling Solution For Social Media

The creators of Lens Protocol have introduced a beta version of Bonsai, a blockchain scaling solution, as the blockchain-based social media project gears up to handle an increased volume of transactions for users of Lens-based decentralized apps.

Aave Companies AAVE/USD, the development firm responsible for Lens Protocol, announced that Bonsai was specifically engineered to facilitate the scaling of decentralized social media applications, enabling the processing of numerous transactions with minimal associated costs.

Scalability is a significant issue for decentralized social media, as such products are both data-intensive and involve a high throughput of transactions. Blockchains typically struggle with both of these issues. The team built Bonsai in response.

"To be competitive with web2, decentralized social platforms must scale. With the ability to support mass consumer adoption, we'll see continued web3 innovation — new, exciting and compelling features and business models that will spur web3 adoption," said Stani Kulechov, CEO of Aave and founder of Lens Protocol. "Bonsai provides hyper scalability that supports blockchain's core values and guarantees, delivering secure, fast and cost-effective scalability."

Lens Protocol is a social graph that offers a software stack to build decentralized competitors to social media giants like Twitter and Facebook. Launched on Polygon in May 2022, there are over 110,000 social media profiles and hundreds of applications on Lens.

Lens' new scaling solution relies on data availability

Lens Protocol aims to achieve censorship resistance for social media apps and help them unlock new forms of content monetization with NFTs, as well as other crypto assets. These include apps such as Lenster, Lens Booster, Phaver, Lenstube, LensPort, Memester and others. 

To help such apps scale to a large number of users, Bonsai will optimize cost and scalability by batching transactions into off-chain data availability layers for storage, avoiding the limitations of block space on Ethereum and other blockchains, Aave explained in a press release. Bonsai will also allow developers and users to store select transactions off-chain in such a way that they remain accessible and verifiable, the team said.

Similar to existing scaling solutions, Bonsai will process most transactions off-chain, relying on a data-availability layer. Additionally, it will have a verifier component to help validate user transactions on-chain. Data availability is essential for scaling solutions like Bonsai because it ensures that off-chain data remains accessible and verifiable when needed for on-chain settlement, dispute resolution or audits.

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