DeFi
Aave’s Stani Kulechov asks for $50 million for Lens Protocol, valued at $500 million
- Stani Kulechov pitches Lens Protocol to US venture capital firms.
- Social platform Web3 raised $15 million in 2023.
Stani Kulechov, founder and CEO of Avara, is reaching out to U.S. venture capital firms to secure another round of funding for Lens Protocol, according to people familiar with the matter.
The Avara founder is seeking $50 million in a deal that would value Lens Protocol, a social media platform, at $500 million, one of the people familiar with the effort said.
Avara’s spokesperson would neither confirm nor deny these figures and declined to comment further.
When asked about launching a token for Lens Protocol, Kulechov said DL News that they “didn’t go that far.” The main focus is the upcoming launch of the Lens Network, a native network built using ZKsync’s technology stack, he said. ZKsync is a layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum.
Avara is the umbrella company that oversees the Aave lending protocol, Lens Protocol, Family, its crypto wallet and GHO, a stablecoin.
In 2023, Lens Protocol raised $15 million. No valuation was available at the time of the increase, according to TechCrunch.
The latest increase comes four weeks after Farcaster, a competing Web3 social media protocol, raised $150 million at a valuation of $1 billion. Paradigm led the round, which included a16z’s crypto arm and other venture capital firms.
Lens Protocol and Farcaster are crypto alternatives to popular social media platforms like X, formerly known as Twitter.
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Content control
Every interaction, such as liking a post or following another user on the Lens Protocol, can be recorded on the blockchain. Farcaster and Lens Protocol allow other developers to build on the protocols to create their own versions of social media applications.
Both projects aim to give users control over their digital content and ultimately help them monetize what they post on social media.
Around 70% of Lens and Farcaster users have fewer than 50 subscribers, according to Dune analysis.
Liam Kelly is a correspondent based in Berlin and Ben Weiss is a correspondent based in Dubai. You can contact them at liam@dlnews.com And ben@dlnews.com.