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Decentralized finance chief Aave has raised $15 million to fund Lens, its NFT-powered protocol for decentralized social media platforms, the corporate introduced Thursday.
Lens is a protocol constructed atop Polygon, the Ethereum scaling answer. Social media platforms constructed on Lens can use good contracts and NFTs to tokenize social knowledge—making a consumer’s posts, preferences, and community each proprietary to that consumer, and transferable to another social community constructed on Lens.
“Customers can have possession of their profiles, of the presences they create, and of the audiences they construct,” Stani Kulechov, Aave’s founder and CEO, informed Decrypt.
Kulechov is betting that customers of conventional social media platforms will need to money in on— and train possession over—their artistic labor, one thing mainstream Web2 social media platforms at the moment don’t present. As Lens emerges from a yr in beta, the protocol goals to onboard a mass usership, extending past Web3-native privateness and decentralization advocates. That area of interest crowd has traditionally comprised the principle viewers for Web3 alternate options to Web2 merchandise.
The staff behind Lens, although, is assured that their pitch can have broad enchantment to social media customers who need possession over their web identification, in addition to to on a regular basis customers and influencers who’ve to date needed to construct on-line presences from scratch each time they transfer from Snapchat to Instagram to Twitter. As these platforms will not be constructed on the identical community, there’s primarily zero compatibility between them.
“Each time customers create profiles on Lens, they solely must do it as soon as,” Kulechov stated. “If all the massive social media platforms sometime share a standard community, everybody will profit from constructing collectively.”
Kulechov hopes that Lens will turn out to be that widespread community, on which content material and followers can movement freely between platforms. He says Aave’s social media community is distinct from different latest experiments in decentralized social media attributable to its prioritization of possession.
In the previous few months, a number of decentralized alternate options to dominant social media platforms have emerged, significantly since Twitter—beneath the brand new management of entrepreneur Elon Musk—has confronted quite a few challenges.
Bluesky, a decentralized social media app backed by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, just lately attracted the curiosity of quite a few celebrities and politicians. Nostr, a decentralized social media protocol additionally favored by Dorsey, has additionally just lately gained traction. Neither Bluesky nor Nostr, nonetheless, stay on a blockchain as Lens does.
The fundraising spherical was led by IDEO CoLab Ventures with participation from funds together with Basic Catalyst, Variant, Blockchain Capital, and Palm Tree, in addition to DAOs comparable to Flamingo DAO, Punk DAO, and DAOJones. Angel buyers who participated within the elevate embody Web3 entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan, Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal, Uniswap CEO Hayden Adams, and The Sandbox co-founder Sebastien Borget.
Editor’s be aware: This text was up to date after publication to make clear Aave’s relationship to Lens.
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