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.”