Twitter will not move to blockchain; Web3 social media will not be an upgrade of current platforms, but a interoperable network of new projects. In an interview with Decrypt, Aave CEO Stani Kulechov said.
In the executive’s view, ‘subscribers’ and ‘profiles’ constitute ‘social capital’. Users lose them when moving from one Web2 platform to another.
Launched in May, Lens, built on Polygon, uses smart contracts to tokenize social statistics as NFTs. Through this mechanism, the team aims to create a decentralized, interoperable social-network protocol.
Lens allows applications to connect to users’ social data via non-fungible tokens for authentication and monetization.
Non-custodial and broker-free digital assets provide profile management, subscriptions, and contain ‘the history of all posts, mirrors, comments and other content’.
The protocol is built with modularity in mind, enabling new features to be added, ensuring ‘immutable user content and social relationships’.
According to Kulechov, with Lens ‘you own your profile’. It is akin to having digital gold in your wallet.
“In Bitcoin you typically hold most of your wealth. With Lens you actually own your social capital, your social presence”, he explained.
The Aave CEO noted that the decentralized social protocol does not aim to win back the audiences of Twitter or any other platform. The project is aimed at ‘creating new things’.
Kulechov expressed skepticism about Twitter’s shift to Web3 rails after the platform to ownership by Elon Musk.
Earlier, Aave developers announced the protocol in July 2021 and considered it as an Ethereum-based alternative to Twitter.
In October, gas restrictions on Polygon and overload in a third-party relayer led to processing problems for Lens Protocol transactions.
Twitter-backed Bluesky published the first part of the protocol’s open-source code.
Read ForkLog’s Bitcoin news on our Telegram — crypto news, prices and analysis.