According to BlockBeats, Lens Protocol announced on February 28 that it has officially entered the permissionless phase, marking an important step in its mission to connect people through new forms of ownership, including data, social graphs, and user-created relationships and content. Over the past few years, Lens has chosen to remain in the testing phase to enhance security and scalability while fostering a vibrant developer ecosystem. The protocol-first approach has supported over 400 community-built applications, some of which are fully open-source with up to 100 contributors.

Lens has quickly established a thriving community, particularly among crypto-native users eager for on-chain alternatives to constantly changing Web2 social platforms. Since the beta release six months ago, over 100,000 users have interacted within Lens applications. The community has created more than 37 million on-chain social transactions, including 5 million posts, 4.5 million mirrors, 2.2 million comments, and 11 million follows.

Over the past 18 months, Lens has continuously improved its features while receiving ongoing feedback from the community, which has expressed a clear desire to move towards permissionlessness. In preparation for this moment, Lens has taken cautious steps, building data expansion infrastructure called Momoka, making Lens more modular, and creating higher-quality graphs through the Lens API. Additionally, Lens has gradually decentralized governance by introducing the Lens Improvement Protocol (LIP) process.

As curiosity and demand for on-chain social interactions continue to grow, people want social networks to serve them rather than the balance sheets of tech giants. Lens has taken steps to introduce decentralization on-chain when a community-driven LIP quickly gains consensus. In the future, the Lens core team and the broader community will work together to drive the development of the protocol, facing new challenges such as expanding the network to continuously attract new users and building a new type of improved social network that gives users more ownership control. With the shift to a permissionless protocol, Lens has removed all barriers to development, allowing developers to build anything they can imagine.