Hello everyone, it’s been a while. This new installment of Touch Grass will focus on the latest from the builder front over the past few weeks, and don’t worry, our usual curation of great content and crypto news will be back soon.

Lately, Lens has been finding its footing on its own chain helping apps migrate, supporting new ones coming to life, and growing our builder cohorts. It’s been (and still is) a period of regrouping: checking in on ourselves, what worked well, and what didn’t.

On the Lens (Labs) front, we’re now hyperfocused on a few key things:

1. Improving the stack and evolving the Primitives.

2. Enhancing the developer experience (the Spring hackathon was extremely helpful for this).

3. Working on a new social experience, an older format we think deserves a comeback.

4. Helping apps launch, grow, and thrive through tech and GTM support, showcasing them, and advising on strategy. Our communications have been focused on them, because it's through apps that users experience Lens.

5. Incubating a few promising new apps within the Lens Developer Program.

6. Reaching out to new apps and platforms that want to integrate Lens as an easy and effective way to add social networking and monetization to existing spaces.

If any of the above piqued your interest,  and you’re a builder or integrator, join the Discord and get in touch! We’ll help you reach your goals.

The apps have been thriving these past weeks! Here’s what they’ve been shipping:

• Orb launched its Usernames marketplace. They’ve also ramped up sticker drops, with weekly releases by legends like Datartist and Haku.

• Lemonade, the beloved events platform, just relaunched with a very exciting proposal: Lemonade Stands, meant for creators to get closer to their audience, host drops, distribute exclusive content, and more. People already love them: read this thread from Haku that speaks for itself.

• Lemonade is also set to launch Lemonheads, a collection of soulbound avatars, a passport to Web3. Here’s the Fountain post explaining the collection. With NFTs being very back, there’s no doubt they’ll fly off the digital shelves.

• Bonsai released a powerful update to their Creators Studio featuring video generation. It’s worth noting that these Lens favorites are thriving, with 60% of all Bonsai supply now staked on the new Lens Chain.

• Lens Forum (from the builders of Lens Reputation) has launched, and I’m already spending a bunch of time there. The forum is beautiful and simple, designed for deeper discussion. Next week, we’re hosting an All Hands Lens Ecosystem livestream on X and Bloomers - a community proposal that came from the Forum!

• Fountain shipped newsletters! Now you can export your contacts from Substack and others, and use Fountain as a beautiful, onchain platform to distribute your media. Since the posts are composable and Lens-native, they come with native tipping and collecting for easier monetization, and they’re viewable across the Lens ecosystem for max distribution. Because of all that, Touch Grass is expanding to Fountain. For the foreseeable future, I’ll be posting on both Paragraph and Fountain, and eventually, likely moving over completely.

• I also heard that some of the most interesting Lens builders (Daoleno, Javi, and Kualta, to name a few) are working on a Developer DAO. We’re already supporting them however we can.

Next week, we’ll be hosting the All Hands Lens Ecosystem Call. Every builder will have 5 minutes to talk about what they’ve been working on, followed by open discussion, where we hope new collabs will emerge. The livestream will take place on Thursday, July 31st at 6pm CET / 12pm ET, on X and Lens (via BloomersTV). Save the date!