Lens Protocol: A composable decentralized social graph for a web3-ready community

Building a societal media level from scratch is simply a daunting task. First, you request to found a societal graph which is simply a representation of the relationships betwixt people. A societal graph comprises nodes (individuals oregon organizations) and the edges (relationships) that link them.

To make a societal graph, you request to person a mode to way these relationships betwixt people. This is usually done with immoderate information structure, similar a graph database.

There are a fewer antithetic ways to make a societal graph. One mode is to usage a centralized service, similar Facebook oregon LinkedIn. With a centralized service, each of the information is stored successful 1 spot and controlled by that company. This has the payment of being casual to use, but it comes with a fewer downsides. First, the institution that controls the cardinal work tin censor contented oregon delete accounts astatine will.

Second, these centralized services are siloed, meaning that the information is not accessible to different applications and addons that mightiness privation to integrate with the centralized application. Finally, these services are taxable to azygous points of failure. If the server goes down, the work is unavailable.

At a clip erstwhile societal media platforms find what accusation we spot and don’t see, it’s much important than ever to person a decentralized societal graph that volition alteration the instauration of a censorship-resistant Web3-ready societal media platform.

Cue Lens Protocol, a web3 societal graph built connected the Polygon Proof-of-Stake blockchain to empower creators advertisement communities astir the satellite with the capableness to motorboat societal media platforms and profiles they own.

What is Lens Protocol?

Lens Protocol is the brainchild of the squad down DeFi mainstay Aave led by Aave’s laminitis Stani Kulechov and CEO Alexander Svanevik. The squad besides includes CTO Jan Isakovic, who antecedently worked connected 0x’s astute contracts, and Product Manager Filip Martinka.

Lens is an open-source societal graph that allows developers to motorboat web3-ready societal media platforms and profiles. It is built connected Polygon’s eco-friendly blockchain and works to let creators to instrumentality ownership of their contented wherever they spell successful a Web3 environment.

Web3 simply refers to the adjacent procreation of the net wherever users are successful power of their data. In a Web3 world, determination is nary request for intermediaries similar societal media platforms due to the fact that users tin interact straight with each other. Lens Protocol is built with modularity successful mind, thereby allowing caller features and fixes to beryllium added to it frankincense ensuring that the societal graph keeps up with the ever-evolving Web3 world.

How does it work?

With web2 societal media networks, each the platforms work information from a unsocial centralized database. With specified a framework, determination is nary casual mode to larboard information from 1 level to another. This is wherever Lens Protocol comes from.

This open-source and composable societal graph tin empower creators to ain the links betwixt themselves and their assemblage arsenic good arsenic the contented they station connected the level done the usage of NFTs.

NFTs are utilized connected the level to correspond idiosyncratic profiles. Users are allowed to make profiles that interact with each different forming a societal graph. The information and the relationships betwixt users are stored on-chain connected Polygon’s Proof-of-Stake Layer 2 solution. This makes it imaginable to larboard information from 1 level to different without immoderate cardinal authority.

For instance, a illustration proprietor tin people a modular portion of content, a remark which points backmost to the illustration proprietor oregon follows different illustration owners done Lens Protocol’s whitelisted logic embedded successful the NFT’s astute contract.

From mounting an representation for the illustration to the mounting of the profile’s “dispatcher,” everything astir the illustration tin beryllium managed on-chain, thereby giving users afloat power implicit their data.

The level besides allows for the improvement of societal media platforms and profiles that are compatible with Web3 wallets similar MetaMask, Gnosis Safe, and Argent. This compatibility makes it imaginable for users to log successful to their societal media accounts utilizing their Web3 wallets without having to make a caller relationship connected each different level they interact with.

What occupation does it solve?

The societal media scenery is presently controlled by a fewer centralized platforms. These platforms find what users spot and don’t see. They besides person the powerfulness to censor contented they don’t hold with.

This centralized power implicit societal media leads to respective problems. First, it results successful the suppression of dissenting voices. Second, it leads to the curation of contented that is designed to entreaty to the lowest communal denominator. Third, it gives emergence to echo chambers wherever radical lone spot contented that they hold with.

Lens Protocol is designed to lick these problems by giving users the powerfulness to motorboat their societal media platforms and power the online profiles that they transportation with them passim a web3 internet.

With modularity astatine the halfway of the Lens Protocol, not lone is ownership guaranteed but besides the assemblage tin find the aboriginal of the level by gathering and processing caller innovative features that tin beryllium integrated into the societal graph.

This way, Lens Protocol tin make an ecosystem of societal media platforms that are decentralized, open, and fair.

The aboriginal of web3 societal media

From the crushed up, Lens Protocol is designed to beryllium a community-owners and ever-evolving societal graph. The protocol is open-source, and anyone tin lend to its development.

The semipermanent imaginativeness for the squad down the task is to make a societal media ecosystem that is composed of galore small, autarkic platforms that are each connected done the Lens Protocol.

At the moment, Lens Protocol is moving a run that is offering $250,000 successful grants to developers to physique caller apps connected Lens. already, determination are immoderate imaginable ideas ranging from apps and games specified arsenic Phaver (a societal mobile app with Lens support), Iris (a token-gated contented app ), and Clinto, which is simply a contented personalization app.