Aave Launches New Decentralized Social Media Platform

Decentralized finance (DeFi) lending platform Aave has announced the launch of a new decentralized social media ecosystem described as an 'open, Web 3 social media protocol to allow anyone to create a non-custodial social media profile and build new social media applications.' https://twitter.com/LensProtocol/status/1490782692786515970 Dubbed Lens Protocol, the project aims to offer an alternative to centralized social media networks where users are in control of the information and data rather than the corporation. The experience will be similar to that of traditional social media networks. The only difference is that the upcoming platform allows users to own their content in the form of non-fungible tokens or NFTs. For instance, users can hold multiple profiles of NFTs in a crypto wallet, hold NFTs representing follower relationships, or even manage DAO voting by working with follower NFTs. In addition, they can also create various “publications” such as posts and comments including creating mirrors of content, similar to Twitter's retweet feature. While the publication data will mostly be stored on-chain, the protocol also supports IPFS hosting for the off-chain storage of large files such as videos, music, and images. In a separate blog post on Monday, the Aave team also revealed a $250,000 grant program to accelerate the growth of Lens Protocol but did not specify a mainnet launch date.