Cody McGrath 
Aave has unveiled the Lens Protocol, a new project aimed at assisting developers in the creation of social networking decentralized apps (DApps) on the Polygon blockchain.
Aside from social network DApps, the architects of the liquidity market protocol hope to employ nonfungible token (NFT) technology in conjunction with Lens’ open-source blockchain technology to enable developers to create markets, recommendation engines, and other applications.
According to Aave, this will allow consumers to fully own their data while also providing new monetization opportunities for authors.
Lens Protocol allows customers to have a single Lens profile that can be used across the Lens platform’s many DApps. Users who can create Lens NFT profiles will be able to use the 50 apps that will be available on Lens Protocol when it launches.
To encourage the development of more Lens apps, Aave has established a $250,000 award program to support developers who want to create apps for the platform.
As seen by reactions to Elon Musk’s offer to buy Twitter, Stani Kulechov, CEO and founder of Aave Companies, feels that consumers 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 “long overdue” control of online content. Sandeep Nailwal, the co-founder of Polygon, agreed with Kulechov’s point of view and stated that Polygon is aligned with Lens’ purpose of enabling “secure content ownership.”
Kulechov was banned from Twitter in April after jokingly stating that he would be taking over as interim CEO of the company. The restriction was lifted the next day after Kulechov tweeted another joke announcing his return as the company’s interim CEO.
