New Social Media Platform Turns to NFTs for Digital Ownership
Lens Protocol launches after Aave founder Stani Kulechov’s public push to decentralize social media
Stani Kulechov, Founder and CEO of AAVE | Blockworks exclusive art by Axel Rangel
key takeaways
- Aave introduced a new protocol as an alternative to traditional social media platforms
- The Lens Protocol, built on the Polygon blockchain, is powered by NFTs
The team behind DeFi liquidity protocol Aave is unveiling a new way for social media users to own and control their content.
The Lens Protocol is “a permissionless, composable, and decentralized social graph that makes building a Web3 social platform easy,” according to a tweet Monday by Lens Protocol.
The protocol features traditional social media functions, including profiles, comments and sharing posts. Here’s the twist: it is powered by NFTs that allow users to own their content, according to an Aave blog post Monday. The Lens Protocol will be built on the Polygon blockchain.
Baked into the NFTs are a user’s social media history, including posts and comments. Following someone triggers a corresponding NFT to be minted.
A user can also create photos and music through a publication feature, as well as collect publications from accounts they follow.
Stani Kulechov, founder and CEO of Aave, has over the past year hinted at an offering that decentralizes social media.
In a Feb. 5 tweet, he predicted that Web3-native social media will “kill” Twitter.
An open letter drumming up support for Web3-driven social media came out before that, when people were encouraged to cryptographically sign the letter with their wallet.
“We spend time building unique selfhood across these Web2 media platforms, even though we know they are antiquated, centralized systems,” the letter stated. “Web3 brings forth a renewed hope for what social media can be. It offers the ability for us to control how our content is used.”
The Lens Protocol Twitter account went live last month, and Kulechov teased the protocol at the time.
The Aave team also revealed in the Monday blog post a $250,000 grant program to accelerate the growth of Lens Protocol.
The post did not specify a mainnet launch date. An Aave spokesperson did not immediately return a request for comment.
Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:
- Blockworks Daily: The newsletter that helps thousands of investors understand crypto and the markets, by Byron Gilliam.
- Empire: Start your morning with the top news and analysis to inform your day in crypto.
- Forward Guidance: Reporting and analysis on the growing intersection of crypto and macroeconomics, policy and finance.
- 0xResearch: Alpha directly in your inbox. Market highlights, data, degen trade ideas, governance updates, token performance and more.
- Lightspeed: Built for Solana investors, developers and community members. The latest from one of crypto’s hottest networks.
- The Drop: For crypto collectors and traders, covering apps, games, memes and more.
- Supply Shock: Tracking Bitcoin’s rise from internet plaything worth less than a penny to global phenomenon disrupting money as we know it.
