Aave Officially Launches ‘Lens’ – A Decentralized Social Media Platform
Aave’s long-awaited protocol for a decentralized social media ecosystem was officially launched on Monday.
Aave founder Stani Kulechov took it to Twitter to officially announce the launch of Lens, what he described as an “open, composable social media protocol to allow anyone to create a non-custodial social media profile and build new social media applications.”
The project now known as Lens has since grown in scope, with the goal of supporting a range of social media platforms on a shared protocol layer.
According to the announcement, non-fungible tokens lie at the heart of Lens:
“Profile NFTs are the main primitive of the Lens Protocol. 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!”
As per Lens official Twitter account, the project is live on the Polygon Mumbai testnet, with plans for an alpha mainnet launch at a yet-to-be-disclosed time.
The launch comes at a time when permissionless social media platforms are once again a hot topic of debate. Over the weekend, Ethereum Name Service core team member Brantly Millegan was removed after old posts condemning transgenderism and homosexuality were resurfaced on Twitter.
The episode launched a heated debate about the nature of censorship in Web3.
In the case of Lens, interoperability and composability will be key features of the new platform. According to the Lens website, the protocol’s name comes from Lens Culinaris, a “tall, branched plant” that has “a symbiotic relationship with certain soil bacteria. If the roots are left in the ground, they will provide a source of nitrogen for its neighbor.”
In much the same way, Lens serves as a platform on which developers can build a wide range of applications – all while growing on and drawing on a shared base of users.
According to the Lens website, the protocol allows users to create NFT-based profiles that can store posts, publications and follower history; revenue-sharing features for content hosted on IPFS; it also has built-in governance for groups of mutual followers. The protocol is built on Polygon, the blockchain that just raised $450 million in a token sale.
According to the Lens website, a grants program for developers who want to build applications on the protocol is currently open, and a homebrewed social app designed to demonstrate how the platform might be leveraged is “coming soon.”
