Quick take:
- Lens will use NFTs to represent user profiles and follower relationships.
- Users will be able to freely monetise their data.
- Lens is built on Polygon, a layer 2 network for Ethereum.
The team behind DeFi platform Aave has launched the testnet for Lens, an NFT-based social media protocol that manages user data.
Lens described itself as a Web 3 social graph that any application can plug into and build on to “own the links between themselves and their community”.
The protocol includes familiar social media functions like having a profile, commenting, resharing a post. But unlike existing social media, the NFT-powered Lens Protocol allows users to fully control all of their content and data.
“As the true owners of their content, creators no longer need to worry about losing their content, audience, and livelihood based on the whims of an individual platform’s algorithms and policies,” reads its blog post.
On Lens Protocol, user profiles and follower relationships are represented by NFTs, allowing users to freely monetise their data. Individual addresses can own multiple profile NFTs, and a profile NFT can be owned and run by a DAO via a multi-sig wallet.
Whenever a user follows another user, they are given a follow NFT, which has a unique token ID that comes with innate rarity and utility. These unique traits can be used by creators to open voting in governance snapshots or even traded on the open market.
Users will also be able to publish content like pictures, music, videos, as well as collect and curate publications from people they follow. The mirror feature allows users to re-share a post. By amplifying content, users can earn a cut from anyone who collects the content through the re-share.
Lens Protocol is built on Polygon, a layer 2 network on Ethereum, for its low energy consumption. The fully open-source protocol allows front ends like social apps, analytics platforms, verification systems, DAO tooling and more to be built on it. It is also offering a $250,000 launch grant to accelerate the growth of the Lens ecosystem.
The Lens Protocol code is available to test on the Polygon Mumbai Testnet. Developers that discover vulnerabilities within the code can be eligible for a bug bounty of up to $250,000.
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