Lens Protocol, Aave Companies’ social media tech stack, has been launched. Users can now create a Lens Profile NFT and begin interacting with over 50 Lens-based applications. Decentralized social media has become a hot topic in cryptocurrency in recent months, aided by Elon Musk’s recent attempts to acquire Twitter.
Lens Protocol has been launched on Polygon by the team behind the leading DeFi project Aave. Users can now create a Lens Profile and begin interacting with the protocol’s more than 50 applications.
The Lens Protocol has gone live
Aave is increasing its focus on decentralized social media. Lens empowers creators to own their social media data and use it in any application built with its tooling set.
Users can import their followers, community, and content into any new app by linking them to their NFT profile. When someone creates a Lens Profile NFT, they can use it to store all of their content as well as their relationships with their audience. The goal is to give creators ownership of their work, regardless of where it came from.
Stani Kulechov, CEO and founder of Aave Companies, commented on the launch: “The social media experience has remained relatively unchanged for the last decade, and much of that is due to your content being solely owned by a company, which locks your social network within one platform.”
Kulechov added that a switch from the Web2 paradigm of companies owning user data towards self-ownership of user-created content and social media profiles is long overdue. “Empowering users is what Lens aims to achieve,” he stated.
Because Lens Protocol is built on the Ethereum scaling solution Polygon, creating NFT social profiles and publishing content is relatively inexpensive. Lens also has a low carbon footprint due to Polygon’s Proof-of-Stake validation mechanism.
Aave Companies has launched a $250,000 grants programme to fund projects and developers building Web3 social infrastructure and high-quality frontend experiences in order to accelerate the growth of the Lens ecosystem.
Considerations on Decentralized Social Media
Since Lens Protocol first released developer tools in February, the debate over how social media applications should be structured has grown significantly. Free speech and user autonomy have dominated the debate, fueled largely by Elon Musk’s $44 billion bid to buy Twitter.
Crypto enthusiasts have been wondering how Musk could integrate blockchain into the social media behemoth, but recent developments indicate that the deal may fall through due to Musk’s concerns about bot accounts.
Other prominent crypto voices have previously expressed their views on the potential for decentralized social media.
Vitalik Buterin said he thinks Ethereum “has to expand” beyond DeFi at a talk in July 2021, adding that the network he helped create could become a decentralized login service.
Meanwhile, in a discussion about how a decentralized version of Twitter might look, Sam Bankman-Fried recently stated that on-chain social media “has to happen eventually.” Unlike Buterin, Bankman-Fried appears to be more interested in how decentralized social media will expand beyond Ethereum. Last year, when discussing the future of Web3 and social media, FTX CEO said that crypto social networking was a “massive opportunity” that suited one of Ethereum’s top competitors, Solana.
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