Learn about the Lens Protocol from the AAVE team: how will it transform social media?

When Meta, the parent company of Facebook, threatened to withdraw from the European market due to its resistance to the new EU data privacy regulations, the team of the open financial protocol Aave launched the decentralized social tool Lens Protocol (hereinafter referred to as "Lens") on February 7, and began to deploy Web3's social media platform.

At present, Lens is already running on Mumbai, the testnet of the Polygon chain, and the official website has been released.

Aave founder Stani Kulechov described Lens on Twitter as "an open, composable Web3 social media protocol that allows anyone to create unmanaged social media profiles and build new social media applications." Since there is no actual product available to users yet, from this description alone, Lens will enable other social media to build backends with it.

According to Lens’ official website, the protocol allows users to create NFT-based profiles, which can store posts, publish content, and sort out follower history; content hosted on IPFS has the function of revenue sharing; it also has a built-in governance function for mutual followers .

Lens is trying to break the control of user data by centralized social media such as Twitter and Facebook. "Content creators should have the right and control to publish content." So, how will it return content data to users?



Breaking social media's grip on users

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Lens Protocol cannot be simply translated as "Lens Protocol". According to its official website, its name actually comes from Lens Culinaris (lentils), a tall branched plant with lens-shaped lentil pods. In a symbiotic relationship with certain soil bacteria, the roots that remain in the ground will provide a source of nitrogen for surrounding plants.

From the name of the Lens protocol, it hopes that user interactions on social media can form a root-like association in this product, connecting with each other and generating value.

The Lens protocol does not yet have a product for users to experience, but the official website shows that a social application will be launched in the future. The Aave team has publicly stated that this "flagship social media app" will be available in the first quarter to provide examples for other developers.