Aave, popular decentralized finance (DeFi) lending network, has finally leaped on social media after months of teasing it. Aave’s move comes after Julien Gaillard, a Twitter data scientist, was hired last month.
On Monday, Aave founder Stani Kulechov announced the introduction of Lens on Twitter. He called Lens as an “open, composable [Web 3] social media protocol to allow anyone to create a non-custodial social media profile and build new social media applications.”
What is Aave’s Lens?
Interoperability and composability will be important characteristics of Aave’s new Lens platform. The protocol’s name originates from Lens Culinaris, a “tall, branching plant” with a “symbiotic interaction with particular soil bacteria,” according to the Lens website. “If the roots are left in the ground, they will offer nitrogen to the plant’s neighbour.”
Similarly, Aave’s Lens serves as a platform on which developers may theoretically construct a wide range of applications, all while growing and drawing on a common user base. Originally, the idea was pitched as being a Twitter-like platform on Ethereum.
In an interview with CoinDesk, Kulechov said, “The cool part is that every app will expand the social graph, essentially there is less need for developers to grow a hack for users, instead the focus can be shifted towards better and more humane user experience.”
The protocol, according to the Lens website, allows users to construct NFT-based profiles that may record posts, publications, and follower history, as well as revenue-sharing capabilities for IPFS content and built-in governance for groups of mutual followers. Lens is live on the Polygon Mumbai testnet, according to the project’s official Twitter account, with plans for an alpha mainnet debut at a later date.
A grants program for developers who wish to build applications on the Aave protocol is presently open, according to the Lens website, and a homebrewed social app aimed to demonstrate how the platform may be used is “coming soon.” Kulechov told CoinDesk that the social app will be available in Q1 2022 when questioned about a release date.
From the beginning of 2021, Aave has channeled significant resources to its social media project.
The announcement comes at a time when permissionless social media platforms are once again a source of debate. Brantly Millegan, an Ethereum Name Service core team member, was fired over the weekend when past tweets denouncing transgenderism and homosexuality surfaced on Twitter. The debate that unfolded touched on various facets regarding censorship on Web3.
At the time of publication, AAVE was trading at $185.55, up by 3.8%.