Aave is one of the emblematic protocols of Ethereum. After having revolutionized the decentralized finance industry many times, the protocol now wants to revolutionize social networks. Thus, Aave has announced the launch of Lens, its decentralized social network.
AAVE unveils Frenz Lens
The Aave protocol had indicated its will to create a social network in February. Entitled Lens Protocol, this new decentralized and open-source social network was to be born on the Polygon blockchain.
Four months after unveiling its plans, Aave has just announced the deployment of Lens on the Polygon mainnet.
In practice, Lens is a suite of decentralized applications allowing the creation of social networks. One of the main objectives is to allow users to regain control over their personal data. This is a frequent theme in social networks such as Facebook or Twitter, where the management of personal data is still extremely opaque.
The first application presented by Aave is called Frenz Lens and allows the creation of profiles usable through the Lens ecosystem of applications.
At its launch, the Lens Protocol already has about 50 applications, including Lenster, Lens Booster, SpamDAO, GoldenCircle, PeerStream, Swapify and Social Link.
In parallel to the launch of Lens Protocol, Aave’s teams have also announced the creation of a $250,000 fund. Its objective will be to help finance the development of applications on Lens.
Faced with the costs, Lens chooses Polygon
Initially, Aave was a protocol deployed on the Ethereum network. However, faced with rising fees, it has migrated to other less expensive blockchains.
This is why the Lens protocol was not deployed on Ethereum, but on the Polygon scalability solution.
Indeed, a social network application requires many interactions by users. Therefore, it was unthinkable to deploy it on the Ethereum network, because the blockchain is too expensive to use.
Thus, Polygon seems to be an ideal choice, combining Aave’s experience on this network with transaction fees much lower than those encountered on Ethereum. Moreover, Stani Kulechov, the co-founder of Aave does not exclude the possibility of migrating one day the protocol to second layer solutions (layer 2).
“Eventually, many networks such as Polygon (and Ethereum) will evolve on second layer networks, inheriting the security of the underlying network. This would be the way forward for the Lens protocol in the long run.”
In mid-March, the Aave protocol announced the deployment of its v3 on 7 different blockchains. This one brings improvements in security as well as cross-chain interoperability.
