Twitter Rival ‘Lens Frens’ Launches on Polygon, Decentralised NFT Social Platform

Aave has launched a decentralised, NFT-based Twitter competitor on the Polygon network. Lens Protocol is designed to power social media apps such as Lens Frens to rival centralised giants like Twitter.

Lens Protocol is essentially a decentralised social graph that utilises NFTs stored within a crypto wallet to power social media platforms. Users retain ownership of their content, and anyone can build on the protocol.

Faster, Cheaper, Greener

Lens utilises the Polygon network, a sidechain scaling solution for Ethereum. Polygon enables faster, cheaper, and less energy-intensive transactions than Ethereum’s own mainnet, making it more viable for a social network built on a potentially large number of NFT assets:

‘Content Creators Should Own Their Audiences’

Lens Protocol was first teased in June 2021 when Aave founder and CEO Stani Kulechov tweeted: “Since [Square CEO and then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey] is going to build Aave on Bitcoin, Aave should build Twitter on Ethereum.”

Kulekhov added:

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.

Kulechov went on to outline his mission statement: “We wanted to create a social media protocol, or essentially a social graph, and create these profiles on the network by tracking relationships on the network and creating an unauthorised way for content to be distributed between creator and audience.”