Aave Launches Lens Protocol For Decentralized Social Media

The Lens Protocol was unveiled on Feb. 8 as a “permissionless, composable, and decentralized social graph that makes building a Web3 social platform easy.”

It aims to replicate the features of centralized social media platforms but put the user in control of the information and data rather than the corporation. Lens is powered by nonfungible tokens (NFTs) which the users can digitally own and trade.

DeFi flash loan platform Aave, which launched an institutional DeFi platform earlier this month, started developing the system in mid-2021 touting it at the time as Twitter on Ethereum.

2/ Today everything changes. We’re excited to introduce Lens Protocol 🌿 a permissionless, composable, and decentralized social graph that makes building a Web3 social platform easy.

Dig in at https://t.co/UTTngajt2f

— LensProtocol.eth 🌿 (@LensProtocol) February 7, 2022

NFTs at The Heart

The protocol is primarily driven by NFTs which it states are its “main primitives”.

“These dynamic NFTs are composable, non-custodial & permissionless. Individual addresses can own profile NFTs, an address can have multiple profile NFTs & a profile NFT can be owned & run by a DAO via a multisig wallet!”

This way, users are getting something in return for their participation rather than getting bombarded with advertising while the company harvests their personal data.

Users can obtain a “follow NFT” when they follow another user. These have unique token identifiers that indicate their utility and rarity. The tokens can be used for voting purposes, governance snapshots and can even be traded, the announcement stated.

The protocol supports the web-standard IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) for all media types and has a collect feature for users to accumulate content they like. Users can also re-share content and collect a “mirror fee” from others than collect original content through the shares.

Aave also announced a $250,000 grant program to accelerate the growth of Lens Protocol which is currently running on a testnet on Ethereum layer two network Polygon.

Founder and CEO of Aave, Stani Kulechov, has previously hinted at launching a system that decentralizes social media, posting earlier this month that Web3-native social media will “kill” Twitter. An open letter on the Lens website said that Web3 brings forth a “renewed hope for what social media can be.”

“It offers the ability for us to control how our content is used. We can have the power to own and monetize our content and community with no middlemen or centralized data harvesting.”

AAVE Price Outlook

Aave’s native token of the same name (AAVE) has seen an uptick in prices over the past 24 hours. The DeFi token has gained 7% to reach $184, building on a 17% gain over the past week as crypto markets rebound.

AAVE is currently trading down 72% from its May all-time high of $662, however.