Aave Companies recently announced the launch of Lens Protocol, an open-source tech stack for “building decentralized social networking applications.”
Lens has been launched on Polygon’s “low-cost” and “eco-friendly” blockchain .
Using Lens’ open-source blockchain tech, developers can now “build Web3-powered social media apps, marketplaces, recommendation algorithms, and more.”
Leveraging NFT tech, the connections and interactions between people on social applications built on Lens “allow users to fully own their data, unlocking new ways for creators to monetize their digital content and own their relationships with their friends and followers.”
Stani Kulechov, CEO & Founder of Aave Companies, said:
“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. But ultimately, as seen from Elon Musk’s bid to purchase Twitter, people are ready for a better experience than what they’re used to. Ownership over not only the content you create online, but also your profile and social network is long overdue, and empowering users is what Lens aims to achieve.”
An open social graph will “allow creators to be truly multi-platform and go direct-to-community.”
With Lens, each user’s followers, community, and content are “linked to their NFT profile and can be ported into any new app powered by the protocol.”
As mentioned in the update, signers of the Lens Open Letter will be able to “mint” their profile on Lens to “begin interacting with the first of many Lens-powered apps on Polygon.”
Once someone creates a Lens Profile NFT, it will be where all of the content they “create and all of the relationships they have with their audience are stored.” This way, creators can “own the content they create, regardless of which application it’s created on or shared.”
At launch, there are 50+ applications built on Lens, spanning social apps “to creator monetization tools.” Users who mint their Lens NFT profiles can “explore these applications at launch.”
@yoginth.eth, Founder of lenster.xyz, noted:
“Building a Web3 social media platform on Lens Protocol has opened up a new realm of possibilities for our development team and users. With a user-first foundational architecture, Lens fundamentally changes the landscape of social media platforms and user experiences as we know them today.”
Lens Protocol provides a user and creator first foundation for any application to plug into, and “gives people full ownership over their profile, content and relationships with their community.”
G.Money, NFT filmmaker and creator, added:
“An open social graph will allow creators and brands to fully own content distribution and their audiences in a truly multi-platform way. Lens empowers platform choice and opens up wider audiences through direct creator/brand-community relationships.”
How It Works
Modularity is “at the core of the Lens Protocol and allows for an infinitely expanding amount of use cases.”
Developers can “access three core modules: profile creation, content collection, and content sharing.” These modules enable users “to mint a profile, follow others, and interact completely on-chain content.” The user profiles and content built on Lens Protocol are “powered by NFTs which puts users in control of how they own their content, social network, data, and engagement.”
Lens Protocol is currently “overseen by a multi-sig but will be completely owned by the community via progressive decentralization.” It is fully open and composable, and due to its on-chain nature, it can “interact with any other smart contract within the same network.”
Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of Polygon, remarked:
“Aave Companies is at the forefront of pushing what can be built with Web3 technologies, and Lens Protocol is the culmination of those efforts. Lens is uniquely designed to put power back into the hands of the community and Polygon aligns with its goal of enabling secure content ownership. Polygon is committed to bringing millions of users to Web3 through a range of scaling solutions, and we are excited to empower the creator community together with Aave.”
To accelerate the growth of the Lens ecosystem, the Aave Companies has also “launched a $250,000 grants program to issue funds to projects and developers that are building Web3 social infrastructure and high-quality front-end experiences.”
At the recent LFGrow hackathon, 530 participants “submitted 120 projects built on top of Lens Protocol.”
As noted in the update, anyone who has signed the Open Letter, a community petition to bring forth a renewed hope for social media in the Web3 era, prior to 5/5 at 5:55:55 UTC, “is eligible to mint and claim their Lens profile here: https://claim.lens.xyz.”