New Open-Source Twitter Competitor In Town: Interview With Aave's David Silverman On Lens Protocol For Decentralized Social Media

The recent $44 billion bid for Twitter Inc. TWTR from Tesla Inc. TSLA CEO Elon Musk highlighted the need for an open-source social media protocol for some. 

Transparency is one of the fundamental principles of public blockchains and something that many early backers of Bitcoin BTC/USD have been attempting to bring to the internet-scale for more than a decade. The advent of Ethereum ETH/USD and smart contract blockchains has provided a platform for decentralized social media protocols. 

Benzinga talked to David Silverman, an Aave employee and Lens project manager, on launch day at Permissionless.

“Lens is a decentralized web3 social graph and a lot of people think we're adding blockchains and, you know, apps for no reason," Silverman told Benzinga. "I think that social is unique case where it makes sense to add a blockchain currently."

"Today, the closest thing I would point to as an analog to lens is weirdly Facebook, right? You have Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp and those are three applications reading from the same common database, right? When I'm connected to WhatsApp, it still knows about all my data."

"It's just choosing what experience to load for me and lens is designed to be this kind of way to define how social data lives, relates, and is interacted with on chain and accessed on chain. And so the idea is, is this common backend database that any new web3 social application can pull from,” Silverman added.

While the Aave team decided to build its multi-billion-dollar-TVL staking protocol on Ethereum for the advanced decentralization, they looked elsewhere for Lens.

Lens is a protocol made entirely of Polygon-based MATIC/USD smart contracts. At least, for now. 

There is no default app, feed, or ad revenue potential for the protocol governors to be distracted by. Any developer can integrate the Lens feed on their website, similar to Twitter’s API, but more of a public good.

Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok are all capable of integrating the Lens feed directly into their own platforms. If this were to paly out, Lens would likely be the fastest and most ideal way for creators to monetize their content across all platforms simultaneously.

Silverman explains, “you don't even need to know solidity. If you're a website developer, we have a graphical API. It looks and feels exactly like Twitter's API or Instagram's API, except gives you full access to the social graph. We abstract away all the hard parts of a web3 like typed data for signatures. No one knows what that is. We can make it easier because we want to make sure that all developers can access it. You don't have to take a two year solidity boot camp.”

All wallet addresses that signed Lens’ digital roots pledge last year were able to claim a Lens username, which is an NFT. Similar to profiles, all posts on the Lens protocol are also represented on chain by NFTs. 

The protocol is currently free to use. “Obviously, someone has to pay for it to go on chain," Silverman said. "We think that apps are going to monetize in the front end level. But to be a real user experience... no user wants to pay gas.”

The Aave/Lens team currently covers the marginal gas fee incurred by each use of the Polygon network. This can’t last forever and the Polygon sidechain that the app lives on is not intended to be a long-term solution. First, Ethereum needs to scale. 

This means that the team may have methods of censoring the protocol for the time being. In contrast to Twitter, however, a decentralized application on a decentralized protocol has the potential to eventually become entirely permissionless.