Aave Launches Web3 Social Media Platform Lens Protocol

Decentralized finance (DeFi) lending platform Aave has launched the Lens Protocol ecosystem on the Polygon (MATIC) blockchain as its way to challenge centralized social media platforms like Twitter or Facebook. The idea that content creators should own and control their own digital identities began with an open letter and led to the development of a Web3-native social network powered by non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

Aave CEO and founder Stani Kulechov described the mission behind Lens Protocol in a Twitter Spaces conversation the company hosted this week.

“We want to build a social media protocol, or essentially a social graph, and put that material on-chain, track relationships on-chain, and create a permissionless way to distribute it between creators and audiences content."

Kulechov and his development team delved into the problems of current social media platforms. According to one of the developers, who goes by @Zer0dots on Twitter, "We're people. We don't have a product. We're not numbers and we're not data points." Whether it’s a photo of a tweet or a photo of a tweet, Meta or Twitter can sell that content as data to marketers. He described the shift Lens Protocol hopes to make from "users are the product" to giving creators enough ownership to choose how their content is distributed.

Basically, the protocol allows users to create a profile, which is a fully composable NFT. These dynamic NFTs contain the history of all posts, retweets, comments, and other generated content including music, comments, art, photography, and video. A key difference is that profiles are tied to wallet addresses, and users can choose how to monetize their content. Followers can also collect content posted by others and earn tradable Follow NFTs.

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During the Twitter Spaces conference, the Aave team also raised the possibility of converting profiles into decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). Followers can opt-in, having voting and delegation powers over material that could become a DAO.

Aave likens this new ecosystem to an open-source "developer garden," where they invite the community to "grab the manure" and build anything on top of the protocol, from social apps and analytics platforms to DAO tools. The company aims to mirror real-life social interactions independent of the platforms' ever-changing algorithms and policies.

Currently, the Lens Protocol code is available for testing on the Polygon Mumbai Testnet. According to Kulechov, Polygon is the chain of choice due to transaction speed and cost-effectiveness, and applications can be deployed to any chain because it is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine.

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