Aave officially introduces NFT-based social media platform ‘Lens’

On Monday, Aave founder Stani Kulechov announced the launch of Lens, a social media protocol that relies on NFTs for data management. He described it as "[a] permissionless, composable, & decentralized social graph that makes building a Web3 social platform easy […] powered by NFTs, so you own and control all of your content.

In terms of user experience, Lens will be very similar to traditional social media. However, extensive use of NFTs will be employed to manage and represent features like user profiles, publications, and relationships with followers.  This will allow users to monetize and freely manage pieces of data.

Users are allowed to create various “publications” such as posts and comments. They can also create mirror content, similar to the retweet feature on Twitter.

Lens will support IPFS hosting for the off-chain storage of large files such as videos, music, and images, even though all publication data will be stored on-chain.

The team behind the decentralized finance lending protocol (Aave) has dedicated significant resources to the social media project since the beginning of 2021. Its original goal was to become a kind of Twitter-on-Ethereum. However, the project “Lens” has grown in scope, with a new aim of supporting a range of social media platforms on a shared protocol layer.

Kulechov has previously confirmed that the “Aave fam launched the Lens Protocol” and has changed his icon to the Lens logo. He was also one of the first to hint at the idea of the launch since January 2021.

Unlike Aave, Lens is not built directly on Ethereum. Instead, it was built on top of Polygon, a second-layer network for Ethereum touted for its low-energy consumption.

According to the project's official Twitter account, Lens is live on the Polygon Mumbai testnet, with plans for an alpha mainnet launch at a yet-to-be-disclosed time.

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