Aave (AAVE), one of the leading decentralized finance (DeFi) lending and borrowing platforms, has successfully launched a new Web3 social media platform, “Lens Protocol,” on Polygon (MATIC) blockchain. The new Web3-native social network powered by non-fungible tokens will allow content creators to distribute content and ideas with their audience.
In a February 9 blog post, Stani Kulechov, CEO and founder of Aave, confirmed the successful launch of a new social media platform, Lens Protocol that would ultimately compete with other leading social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook:
“We wanted to build a social media protocol, or essentially a social graph, and make those profiles on-chain, following the relationships on-chain and creating a permissionless way to distribute content between a creator and the audience.”
In a subsequent Tweet, Kulechov and his developer team outlined some archaic problems within current social media platforms, with @Zer0dots, one of the Aave developers, asserting:
“We’re people. We’re not products. We’re neither numbers nor data points.”
In that case, @Zer0dots argues that users have the right to own and distribute their feeds, asserting that whether it is a photo on Instagram or a Tweet can be sold as data to marketers. He explained how the new Web3 social media platform would allow users to own and distribute their content.
New Aave Protocol
By design, the new protocol allows users to create a fully composable NFT profile containing the history of all posts, reposts, comments, and other content generated, including music, commentary, art, photography, and video.
A key difference with other social media platforms is that profiles are somewhat attached to a wallet address, allowing owners to choose how to monetize their content. Moreover, according to @Zer0dots, a follower can collect a publication and receive a tradable follow NFT, adding:
Buy Crypto Now“And you can choose who gets to collect them.”
“You can choose what logic gets executed. Is there is a fee? Is it a bonding curve that is a subscription? Or is it only specific addresses you want? There’re so many different options.”
Before summarizing the Twitter Spaces session, the Aave team hinted at the possibility of turning profiles into a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), where a follower can vote and delegate what could be in the DAO profile.
Aave relates its new media ecosystem to an open-source “developer garden” where they invite the community to “grab fertilizer.” In this case, the community can build anything from social app and analytics platforms to DAO tooling.
In the meantime, the Lens Protocol code is available for test on the Polygon Mumbai Testnet. According to Kulechov, Aave integrated the Polygon chain due to its super speed, scalability, and cost-effectiveness.
