The announcement comes a month after Aave founder Stani Kulechov was suspended from Twitter for making a joke about being the social company’s interim CEO. Aave (AAVE) has announced the Lens Protocol, a new project aimed at assisting developers in creating social networking decentralised applications (DApps) on the Polygon (MATIC) blockchain.
Aside from social media DApps, the creators of the liquidity market protocol intend to use nonfungible token (NFT) technology in conjunction with Lens’ open source blockchain technology to enable developers to create marketplaces, recommendation algorithms, and other applications. According to Aave, this will allow users to completely own their data and provide new monetization opportunities for creators.
The Lens Protocol enables users to have a single Lens profile that can be used across multiple DApps on the Lens platform. Users who can create Lens NFT profiles will be able to access the 50 apps that will be available on Lens Protocol at launch. To encourage the development of more Lens apps, Aave established a $250,000 grant programme to support developers who wish to create applications for the platform.
As evidenced by reactions to Elon Musk’s bid to buy Twitter, Stani Kulechov, CEO and founder of Aave Companies, believes that people are ready for a new social media experience. Kulechov elaborated:
“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.”
The Aave CEO also stated that ownership of online content is “long overdue.” Furthermore, Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of Polygon, agreed with Kulechov’s point of view and stated that Polygon supports Lens’ goal of enabling “secure content ownership.” Kulechov was banned from Twitter in April after jokingly tweeting that he would be joining the company as interim CEO. The ban was lifted the next day, when Kulechov tweeted another joke announcing his return as the company’s interim CEO.
