Lens Accounts Are Not Wallets I’ve recently seen a few discussions around Lens Accounts, and some understanda…

Lens Accounts Are Not Wallets I’ve recently seen a few discussions around Lens Accounts, and some understandable confusion regarding how they work. For most of your daily basic social interactions, none of this really matters. However, there are a few important points worth knowing if you ever plan to go further. The TLDR; on Lens Accounts: 🚫 Not NFTs\ 🚫 Not Smart Wallets\ 🚫 Not Cross-chain addresses\ ✅ Are smart contracts\ ✅ Are full self-custody\ ✅ Are transferrable It might be easier to first talk about what Lens Accounts are not. For starters, they are not NFTs. In Lens V1 and V2 “Profiles” were ERC-721 tokens (NFTs) on Polygon. This meant they could be sold on marketplaces and transferred like CryptoKitties. In Lens V3 the “Account” replaces the Profile, and it is no longer an NFT. Lens Accounts are smart contracts with their own addresses. Lens Accounts are also not Smart Wallets. It’s important to understand that there is no private key, seed phrase, or passkey related to the Account. Instead, there is only the concept of an “owner”. When the V3 Accounts were created, the addresses that owned the V2 Profile NFTs were assigned as the owners of the corresponding V3 Accounts. This means that you, and only you, own your Lens Account. The owner of a Lens Account is able to submit transactions as the Account. We call these “delegated transactions”. The owner is also able to add other addresses as “Account Managers”, which gives those addresses the same ability. Accounts can be transferred by updating the owner address, but crucially, a new owner can only be set by the current owner. Similarly, Account Managers cannot update the Account metadata, nor transfer any tokens, without explicit permission. Delegated transactions enables signless usage, allowing for things like creating posts and comments without signing messages or submitting transactions directly. The Lens API is generally added as a Manager at Account creation, making for a smooth (and free!) onboarding experience. Notably, any transaction that results in the transfer of tokens always requires the Account owner to sign the transaction. One side effect of the “Smart Account” approach in Lens V3 is that the Account addresses only exist on Lens Chain. This means that there’s no way for you to add your Lens Account address to a wallet, like MetaMask. Any tokens sent to an Account address on other chains are unfortunately lost forever. For this reason, whenever conducting cross-chain transactions, the Account owner address should always be used. Happy to answer follow up questions in the comments. Should I do a similar write up on Usernames in Lens V3?