Aave Devs Launches ‘Lens Protocol’ to Power Decentralised Social Media Platform  

Aave, one of the top decentralised finance (DeFi) platforms, has officially launched its new decentralised social network built on the eco-friendly Polygon blockchain.

After collecting 10,000 signatures in an open letter, Aave decided to pick up the mantle to develop a Web3 native social media platform. CEO and founder Stani Kulechov hinted at designing a Web3 social graph project at LisCon 2021, and it seems the project has now come to fruition.

Named Lens Protocol, the social graph is described as a “permissionless, composable and decentralised social graph that makes building a Web3 social platform easy”. A social graph is a model or representation of a social network, and has been referred to as “the global mapping of everybody and how they’re related”.

With Web 3.0 being the ownership upgrade of the internet, the platform seeks to solve many of the issues users face with current social network services. Meta, for example, has come under investigation for allowing crypto scam ads.

Unlike social media platforms of the past, Lens Protocol and its content are powered by dynamic NFTs, giving the power and control over content directly to the users, allowing for native content monetisation.

Lens Protocol

Using NFTs to Control and Own Your Content

One of the major selling points of Lens Protocol is that unlike traditional social media, users will have complete control over their content through the use of NFTs. NFTs are the catalyst driving this project:

Profile NFTs are the main primitive of the Lens Protocol. These dynamic NFTs are composable, non-custodial and permissionless. Individual addresses can own profile NFTs, an address can have multiple profile NFTs, and a profile NFT can be owned and run by a DAO via a multisig wallet.

Lens Protocol

The mirror function is an added feature of the social network where resharing a post could actually land users a cut, or “mirror-fee”, from any user who collects original content through the share, almost like built-in affiliate marketing.

As Kulechov told Decrypt, “We believe that content creators should own their audiences in a permissionless fashion, where anyone can build new user experiences by using the same on-chain social graph and data”, adding that “Twitter makes all the revenue from your tweets and the content you share, and Twitter decides which of your tweets get traction through the algorithm”.

According to the project’s official Twitter account, Lens is live on the Polygon Mumbai testnet, with plans for an alpha mainnet launch in the pipeline.