Aave Launches Lens, an NFT-Based Social Media Protocol

The team behind the DeFi platform Aave has launched the testnet for Lens, a social media protocol that relies on NFTs for data management.

Lens Will Promote User Data Ownership

Today’s announcement describes Lens as a social media platform “powered by NFTs, so you own and control all of your content.”

For end users, the experience will be similar to traditional social media. However, certain data such as user profiles and follower relationships will be represented by non-fungible tokens.

This will allow users to monetize and freely manage those pieces of data. For example, users can hold multiple profile NFTs in a crypto wallet, sell NFTs that represent follower relationships, or manage DAO voting by working with follower NFTs.

Furthermore, users will be able to create various “publications” such as posts and comments. Users can also create mirrors of content, which seem to be similar to retweets on Twitter.

Though publication data will be stored on-chain, the protocol will also support IPFS hosting for the off-chain storage of large files such as videos, music, and images.

Lens Protocol is also advertising its features to developers, calling itself a “composable and decentralized social graph” that “makes building a Web3 social platform easy.”

Relationship With Aave and Polygon

Lens Protocol has close ties with Aave, a leading DeFi protocol and crypto lending platform with $11 billion of locked value.

Aave acknowledged Lens today, stating that Lens is made by the “by the dev team who brought you the Aave Protocol.”

Aave founder Stani Kulechov also confirmed that the “Aave fam launched the Lens Protocol” and has changed his icon to the Lens logo. Kulechov was also one of the first to hint at the idea of the social network protocol as early as January 2021.

Despite those connections, Lens does not appear to be built directly on Ethereum, as Aave is. Rather, it is built on top of Polygon, a second-layer network for Ethereum noted for its low-energy consumption.

Aave itself has previously worked with Polygon. In March 2021, Aave worked with Polygon to avoid congestion on Ethereum. In April 2021, the two projects partnered to offer liquidity mining rewards.

Disclosure: At the the time of writing, the author of this piece owned ETH and other cryptocurrencies