Aave launches open-source platform for social networking DApps on Polygon

Aave (AAVE) has announced a new project called the Lens Protocol that focuses on helping developers build social networking decentralized applications (DApps) on the Polygon blockchain. 

Apart from social media DApps, the liquidity market protocol creators aim to use nonfungible token (NFT) technology along with Lens’ open-source blockchain tech to allow developers to create marketplaces, recommendation algorithms and other applications. According to Aave, this will allow users to completely own their own data and give creators new monetization opportunities.

Lens Protocol allows users to have a single Lens profile that can be used through various DApps within the Lens platform. With this, users who are able to mint Lens NFT profiles will be able to access the 50 apps that will be released on Lens Protocol at launch. To further the creation of more apps on Lens, Aave also created a grant program worth $250,000 to fund developers who wish to create applications on the platform.

Stani Kulechov, CEO and founder of Aave Companies, believes that the people are ready for a new social media experience, as demonstrated by reactions to Elon Musk’s bid to buy Twitter. Kulechov explained:

“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 noted that ownership over content created online is “long overdue.” Furthermore, Sandeep Nailwal, the co-founder of Polygon, agreed with Kulechov’s notion and said that Polygon aligns with Lens’ goal of powering “secure content ownership.”

Related: Spotify reportedly tests NFT galleries on musician profiles

Back in April, Kulechov was banned from Twitter hours after jokingly tweeting that he will be joining Twitter as its interim CEO. The ban was lifted the next day as Kulechov tweeted another joke saying that he was back as the interim CEO of the company.