Lens Protocol Might be a New Social Media Project and It Could be From Aave

Aave founder Stani Kulechov has been teasing a play at decentralizing social media for most of the past year.

Few reasons why existing social media should be based on web3 and decentralized. WGMI pic.twitter.com/Ts7N7H5Yqq

— stani.eth (?,?,?.?) (@StaniKulechov) July 21, 2021

Not only him, the Twitter account of the company he founded has been doing so too.

He may have started rolling out the product he’s been teasing. Or he may have simply found one that he likes. Five crypto figures told The Defiant that Kulechov had privately messaged them a cryptic text that just says “sign please,” with a link to the URL lens.dev. One source told The Defiant that another member of Aave staff had messaged about the site.

Kulechov and an Aave spokesperson did not reply to a request for comment from The Defiant.

Web3 Social Media

The link goes to a simple site that contains a short letter expressing dissatisfaction with web2 social media companies, such as Facebook and Twitter. The letter says, “Web3 brings forth a renewed hope for what social media can be. It offers the ability for us to control how our content is used. We can have the power to own and monetize our content and community with no middlemen or centralized data harvesting.”

Users who want to sign the letter can do so with a tweet. The tweet includes a cryptographic signature that uses their Etherum wallet and text that usually reads “I should own this tweet @lensprotocol #digitalroots.” Such tweets, which have been only coming out since Jan.20, have been retweeted by a Twitter account called “Lens Protocol.”

The only Twitter account Lens follows is for Verses. That account became active in November, when it first tweeted a link to “A Declaration of the Interdependence of Cyberspace.”

This is hardly the first attempt to create a more decentralized social network. Efforts along these lines have been coming out nearly as long as there have been blockchains. Some of the more prominent examples have included STEEM, which emphasized blogging; FEEDWEAVE, which was built on Arweave and Cent is an experiment in selling content.

There have been many more but they generally flicker and fade out quickly. Nevertheless, the top minds in the space seem to believe that this is still a crackable use case for one blockchain or another.

Last November, FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried said, “I think social media on the blockchain — I continue to think this could be absolutely huge. I think it solves a lot of existing pain points, which are really coming to the forefront of society right now.”

Vitalik Buterin made much of social media based on Ethereum last July, in a talk about uses for the blockchain beyond decentralized finance.

Aave has been hinting it’s getting ready to take a crack at this problem and we might be getting the first glimpse at their solution.