Lens Protocol Decentralized Social Media Platform Launches on Polygon

Lens Protocol is now live on Polygon Mumbai testnet. The decentralized social media platform created by Aave’s Stani Kulechov and his team, is aiming to redefine social media by giving the masses a censorship-free platform that enables them to completely own and control their digital identities, while also being able to monetize their content without third-party interference.

Lens Protocol Transforming Social Media

At a time when the creators of popular traditional social media platforms like Facebook and others have turned these applications into powerful surveillance tools and money minting machines, Aave creator, Stani Kulechov and his team are aiming to give a whole new meaning to social media with Lens Protocol.

Built atop the Polygon proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain, Lens Protocol is a Web3, smart contracts-based social graph designed to empower content creators to own the links between themselves and their community, forming a fully composable, user-owned social graph. 

From Facebook to Twitter, down to YouTube and other web2 social media platforms, censorship has become the order of the day, a strong culture that can never die. However, with Lens Protocol, creators no longer have to worry about losing their content, audience, and livelihood based on the censorship whims of centralized platforms. 

Social Media Redefined 

Per a blog post by the team, Lens Protocol is built from the ground up with modularity in mind, making it possible for new features to be added to the platform in a frictionless way, while ensuring immuable user-owned content and social relationships.

“Digital Identities should be ours to control. As stated in the Open Letter, social media has allowed us to find our communities and discover true self-expression. It holds the promise of connection, freedom, livelihood, and voice. explains the team.”

Adding:

“We spend time building unique selfhood across these Web2 media platforms, even though we know they are antiquated, centralized systems. Content creators do not truly own anything published on these platforms,” “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. In this spirit, the Lens Protocol was developed.”

Lens Protocol comes with the entire features of regular social media systems like having a profile, resharing post, commenting and more. However, unlike Web2 social media platforms, key functions on Lens Protocol are powered by non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Find a quick overview of the key features of lens Protocol below:

• Profile NFTs – are the main primitive of the Lens Protocol. Profile NFTs are dynamic, composable, non-custodial and permissionless. They hold the history of all posts, comments, mirrors, and other contents a user creates.
• Follow NFT – are automatically minted when you follow someone on Lens Protocol. These NFTs come with a unique token ID with innate rarity and utility. Follow NFTs have various use cases and can even be sold on an open market.
• Publication – this feature allows users to create any form of content they may desire, including music, pictures, videos and more
• Collect – this feature allows anyone to collect publications from other users based on the price, and other parameters set by the original owners.
• Mirror – the mirror feature allows users to re-share a  post and earn a cut from anyone who collects the original content through the re-share.

While a good number of decentralized social media platforms have been launched in recent times, these systems have so far not been able to gain enough traction to disrupt existing centralized systems. It remains to be seen whether the Lens Protocol will finally break the jinx!