fbpx

Aave Launches Lens Protocol, a decentralized backbone for social media apps

Aave Launches Lens Protocol, a decentralized backbone for social media apps
Image Credits: Lens Protocol

Popular DeFi lending protocol Aave announced the launch of Lens Protocol, a decentralized social graph that uses NFT assets to power an array of potential social media applications and services.

Employing blockchain technology for social media empowers platforms that are censorship-resistant by letting users control and profit from their own content. Unlike its centralized competitor, Twitter, Lens Protocol lets users own their content by storing it as an NFT within a crypto wallet. 

Although the development has been ongoing as early as February, the announcement comes after a teaser last June, 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.”

Lens Protocol, however, ended up being built on Polygon, a sidechain scaling solution for Ethereum. Polygon enables faster, cheaper and less energy-intensive transactions than Ethereum’s mainnet, making it perfect for a social network built around a large number of NFT assets.

This is not the first social media application on blockchain technology. Minds, an open-source, Ethereum-based decentralized social networking platform where users are rewarded with Minds tokens for contributions to the community, has a total of 14 million users as of June 2021. LensFrens and Lenster are other social media applications tapping into Lens Protocol.

Twitter is also planning a decentralized social media protocol called Bluesky, built with a mission to let “users have a choice in their experience, creators have control over relationships with their audiences, and developers have the freedom to build.”

If you see something out of place or would like to contribute to this story, check out our Ethics and Policy section.