Aave officially debuts protocol for decentralized social media, dubbed Lens

Aave’s long-in-the-making protocol for a decentralized social media ecosystem was unveiled on Monday.

Dubbed Lens Protocol, the project is described as “[a] permissionless, composable, & decentralized social graph that makes building a Web3 social platform easy.”

The Block profiled Aave’s efforts on this protocol in a feature last summer. As noted at the time, Aave, the team behind the decentralized finance lending protocol, has dedicated significant resources to the social media project since the beginning of 2021. A tweet from January 20 teased Monday’s debut.

Originally pitched as a way to create a kind of Twitter-on-Ethereum, the project now known as Lens has since grown in scope, with the goal of supporting a range of social media platforms on a shared protocol layer. Per the announcement thread, non-fungible tokens lie at the heart of Lens: “Profile NFTs are the main primitive of the Lens Protocol. These dynamic NFTs are composable, non-custodial & permissionless. Individual addresses can own profile NFTs, an address can have multiple profile NFTs & a profile NFT can be owned & run by a DAO via a multisig wallet!”

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.