Aave Finance, mostly known for lending and borrowing crypto, has recently launched a decentralised social media platform on the Polygon blockchain.
The new platform will be called Lens Protocol and it is being stationed to dethrone the already existing centralised social media giants like Meta and Twitter.
The idea for Lens Protocol came from an open letter by some web3 developers stating the issues with traditional social media and the lack of privacy that abounds.
They believed that content creators should own and control their digital identities, and proposed to Web3-native social network that uses Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) and is powered by the blockchain.
In a conversation on a Twitter Space which Aave hosted this week, Stani Kulechov, Aave’s CEO and founder, described the mission behind Lens Protocol.
“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.”
On the Twitter space, Kulechov and his developer team highlighted all the problems with current social media platforms and concluded that a decentralised platform would solve most of it.
According to one of the developers who worked on the project, “We’re people. We’re not products. We’re not numbers nor data points.
He referred to content on social media feeds, which could be a photo on Instagram or a Tweet, that Meta or Twitter can sell as data to marketers.
He mentioned that Lens Protocol wants to change the narrative from “users being products” to them having ownership and the choice of how their content is used and distributed.
Lens Protocol enables users to create a profile, which is a fully composable NFT. These NFTs contain the history of all posts, reposts, comments, and other content generated including music, commentary, art, photography and video.
A key difference between Lens Protocol and other social media platforms is that profiles on Lens Protocol are connected to a wallet address, and owners can choose how to monetize their content.
During the Twitter Spaces session, the Aave team also suggested the possibility of turning profiles into a decentralised autonomous organisation(DAO).
A DAO is an organisation that exists solely on the internet and is collectively owned and operated by its members.
Basically, it is a social club that is created using blockchain technology, exists only on the internet and was created to fulfil a specific purpose.
Decentralised social media platforms might become the norm in the years to come. As blockchain technology increases in popularity, more use cases are beginning to come up that can disrupt the current state of things as we know it.
