Aave launched Web3 social betting with the Lens protocol

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Ave Companies has launched the Lens Protocol, a social media tech stack. Users can now extract the Lens Profile NFT and interact with over 50 apps built on the Lens. Recently helped by Elon Musk's effort to buy Twitter, decentralized social media has become a hot topic in crypto in recent months.

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Aave, the team behind the leading DeFi project, has launched the Lens protocol on Polygon. Users can now create a lens profile and interact with over 50 apps over the protocol.

The lens protocol goes straight

Ave is doubling down on decentralized social media.

Ave has officially launched the Lens protocol, an open-source technology stack that allows companies to build decentralized social networking applications. Starting today, users can issue Lens Profile NFTs and interact with more than 50 apps that run on Lens' open social graph.

Spectacles allows creators to take ownership of their social media data and leverage it into any app built using the toolkit. Users can link their followers, communities and content to their own NFT profile and send them to any new app. When someone creates a Lens Profile NFT, they can use it to store all the content they create and their interactions with their audience. The goal is to give ownership to creators of their content, regardless of where it comes from.

Stany Kulekov, CEO and Founder of Aave Companies, commented on the launch:

“The social media experience has remained relatively unchanged for decades, and much of that is because your content is owned by a company, locking your social network into one platform.”

Kulekov added that the transition from companies owning user data to the Web2 paradigm of self-ownership of user-generated content and social media profiles is long overdue. “Empowering users is what Lens aims to achieve,” he said.

The Lens protocol is built using the Ethereum scaling solution Polygon, which means that creating NFT social profiles and publishing content comes at a relatively low cost. The lens also maintains a low carbon footprint thanks to Polygon's stock proofing method.

To accelerate the growth of the Lens ecosystem, Ave Companies has launched a $250,000 grant program for projects and developers building Web3's social infrastructure and building high-quality front-end experiences.

A reflection on decentralized social media

Since the Lens protocol first launched its developer tools in February, the debate over how social media apps should be structured has become more widespread. Issues of free speech and user autonomy have dominated the conversation since Elon Musk's bid to acquire Twitter for $44 billion. Crypto enthusiasts have been speculating about how Musk could integrate blockchain with the social media giant, but recent developments suggest the deal may fall through due to Musk's concerns over bot accounts.

Other prominent crypto voices have also shared their thoughts on the potential of decentralized social media in the past. Vitalik Buterin In July 2021, he said he thinks Ethereum will “expand” beyond DeFi, a network he envisions could become a decentralized login service. Sam Bankman-Fried, for his part, said in a recent discussion about how a decentralized version of Twitter on the chain would look like: “It has to happen eventually.” Unlike Buterin, Bankman-Fried seems more interested in how decentralized social media can grow beyond Ethereum. Reflecting on Web3 and the future of social media last year, FTX's CEO said the crypto social network is a “huge opportunity” that fits perfectly with Solana, one of Ethereum's top competitors.

Disclosure: At the time of writing this piece, the author owns ETH, SOL and many other cryptocurrencies.

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