Introducing Grove: Onchain-Controlled Storage

As a social protocol, Lens empowers users to create, share, and engage with content across onchain applications. For over two years, users have trusted Lens with their digital presence, highlighting the critical need for secure, user-controlled storage that preserves their contributions.

The storage landscape presents significant challenges. Centralized solutions compromise user control and data persistence, while existing decentralized alternatives often fall short on performance, scalability, accessibility, immutability, or cost-effectiveness —making them impractical for widespread adoption.

Grove was born from the needs we had while developing Lens: we wanted to use the verifiability of the blockchain but store the actual content data offchain. After analyzing and leveraging commonly available solutions, we recognized that genuine ownership of your digital footprint must include the ability to modify or remove your content.

We determined that the blockchain itself—a decentralized, verifiable state machine—should serve as the single source of truth. By combining this blockchain state with cryptographic signatures, we created a permission system that eliminates the need for dual sources of truth.

This fundamental insight drives Grove's architecture: using the blockchain as the authoritative reference point for all permissions, while providing flexible, user-controlled data storage that respects true digital ownership.

Grove goes beyond simply enabling user-controlled content. We built it as a comprehensive, general-purpose data storage solution that builders can leverage. Its architecture is intentionally designed to be flexible and blockchain-agnostic, allowing developers across various projects and ecosystems to integrate robust, user-controlled storage into their applications.

Now live across the Lens ecosystem and multiple EVM chains (Ethereum Mainnet, ZKsync, Abstract, Sophon, and Base), Grove provides an onchain access controlled, cost-effective storage infrastructure that delivers true content ownership without sacrificing usability or scalability. By making advanced storage capabilities accessible to all developers, Grove represents a foundational layer for the next generation of web3 applications.

Grove: A New Standard for Onchain Storage

As previously detailed in our deep dive, Grove (formerly Storage Nodes) delivers a scalable, customizable approach to Web3 storage with these key advantages:

• Customizable Onchain Access Control: Choose complete immutability, delegate management, or implement any governance structure over your data through our easy-to-use templates that abstract complexities away. Support for community-created templates coming soon.
• Web2 Performance, Web3 Values: Grove delivers the speed and cost-efficiency of leading Web2 solutions like AWS S3 and Cloudflare R2, without compromising on ownership principles. With global distribution, cached data can be accessed with response times as fast as 30ms from anywhere in the world.
• True Blockchain-Enforced Ownership: Users maintain complete control over their content, with the ability to modify or delete data based on customizable permissions. Content can be protected using EVM addresses, ensuring that only those with the proper cryptographic keys can manage the data.

Grove represents the next generation of Web3 storage—bridging the gap between centralized performance and decentralized data storage.

Grove is designed to integrate with EVM-compatible networks and is initially available on: Lens Chain, Ethereum Mainnet, ZKsync, Abstract, Sophon, Base. Additional network integrations are planned for future releases.

Looking Ahead

The long-term vision for Grove is to achieve full decentralization while ensuring it inherits Ethereum's security. This will provide a resilient, user-centric storage solution that meets the evolving needs of Web3 applications.

Grove is now live, bringing a new standard for onchain, user-controlled storage to the Lens ecosystem and beyond.

To explore Grove, head over to the Lens Developer Docs.