Operated by DeFi lender Aave, its decentralised social media platform, Lens Protocol has gone live on the Polygon blockchain mainnet.

Lens Protocol was first introduced in February 2022. Aave decided to introduce Lens Protocol as a decentralized competitor to Twitter and Facebook. Lens Protocol is a network which is used to build decentralized social media and has gone live on the Polygon blockchain.

The social media platform is similar to Twitter however, Lens profiles are linked to Non-Fungible Tokens which can then be ported to decentralised applications.

According to reports, close to 50 applications were brought to the fore on the Lens Protocol platform.  Apps include Lenster, Lens Booster, SpamDAO, GoldenCircle, PeerStream, Swapify, Social Link to name a few.

Stani Kulechov, CEO And Founder Of Aave Wants A Better Social Media Experience

The thought behind creating the platform was to facilitate a social media platform that will allow decentralisation of the content ownership and user accounts with a help of a blockchain network.

Traditional social media accounts function through the help of email-ids and the system of unique usernames.

Lens Protocol is different because the latter uses crypto addresses and Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) for authentication and monetisation.

Due to this particular feature, the users rather than centralised company is in control of the content and personal data which are associated with the user accounts.

Often centralised social media have the right to suspend and terminate accounts permanently without an explanation.

Recently, the CEO of Aave faced a similar issue with Twitter after his account was suspended owing to a particular tweet.

Right after this suspension, he took the issue into consideration and had decided to come up with the decentralised social media platform.

He stated,

The social media experience has remained relatively unchanged for the last decade, and much of that is due to your content being solely owned by a company, which locks your social network within one platform

Related Reading | Aave To Introduce A Decentralized Social Media Platform Built On Polygon

Polygon In Alignment With Aave’s Vision

Aave CEO also noted that the ownership over content created has been missing and is in fact, “long overdue”. In accordance with the aforementioned idea, co-founder of Polygon, Sandeep Nailwal, agreed with the importance of ownership of content.

Polygon also is of the similar notion that there has to be “secure content ownership”. Aave had also additionally launched a $250,000 grants program which will fund the projects that will build decentralized applications (dapps) on Lens.

Barring the social media DApps, the liquidity market protocol creators have also targeted to use nonfungible token (NFT) technology alongside the Lens’ open-source blockchain technology which will allow developers to create marketplaces, with algorithm suggestions and recommendations along with other applications.

Aave had begun developing a decentralized social media platform, but had finally decided to build on Polygon mainnet rather than Ethereum’s mainnet.

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