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DeFi project Aave launches social media platform Lens Protocol

Aave Companies has publicly launched Lens Protocol, an open-source technology stack that enables developers to build decentralized applications for social media. Starting yesterday, users can create/mint a Lens NFT profile and begin interacting with over 50 applications running on the open social graph of Lens.

Lens allows creators to own their data on social media and take it with them to any application built using its toolkit. Users can connect their followers, community, and content to their own NFT profile and transfer them to any new application. When someone creates a Lens NFT profile, they can use it to store all the content they create and the relationships they have with their audience. The goal is to give creators ownership of their content regardless of where it originated. 

– “The social media experience has remained relatively unchanged over the last decade, largely because your content is solely owned by the company that locks your social network within one platform,” said Aave CEO and founder Stani Kulechov.

Kulechov added that the shift from the Web2 paradigm of companies owning user data to self-ownership of content created by social media profile users has long been overdue.

– “Empowering users is what Lens aims to achieve,” he said.

Lens Protocol is built using the Ethereum scaling project Polygon, which means that creating NFT social profiles and publishing content comes at a relatively low cost. Additionally, Lens maintains a low carbon footprint thanks to Polygon’s proof-of-stake mechanism. 

To accelerate the growth of the Lens ecosystem, Aave has launched a grant program of $250,000 for developers building Web3 social infrastructure and high-quality frontend experiences.

Thoughts on decentralized social media

Since Lens Protocol first launched its developer tool in February, the discussion on how social media applications should be structured has become much more prominent. The debate has been dominated by issues of free speech and user autonomy, largely spurred by Elon Musk‘s $44 billion acquisition of Twitter. Crypto enthusiasts are pondering how Musk might integrate blockchain into the social media giant.

Other prominent crypto voices have also shared their thoughts on the potential for decentralized social media in the past. Vitalik Buterin stated that he believes Ethereum ‘must expand’ beyond DeFi in July 2021, adding that the network he helped create could become a decentralized application service.

Sam Bankman-Fried, meanwhile, recently stated that blockchain social media ‘must happen’ in a discussion about what a decentralized version of Twitter might look like in the future. However, unlike Buterin, Bankman-Fried seems more interested in how decentralized social media will grow beyond Ethereum. Reflecting on the future of Web3 and social media last year, the CEO of FTX said that crypto social networking is a ‘huge opportunity’ that perfectly aligns with one of Ethereum’s main competitors, Solana.