Aave’s social layer Lens Protocol opens up access for everyone to join and build

Lens Protocol, the decentralized social media platform built by DeFi lending protocol Aave, announced today that it has officially gone permissionless. This means anyone can now access the platform and build on top of it.

After two years of building a decentralized social protocol, we are excited to announce that Lens is now permissionless and open for everyone to join!

— Stani^ (@StaniKulechov) February 27, 2024

Launched in beta in February 2022, Lens was designed to be an on-chain alternative to web2 social networks like Twitter or Instagram. It allows users to own their digital identities, relationships, and content.

The move was spurred by strong community demand for permissionless access.

“Still, as we built out Lens’s functionality over the past 18 months, we heard ongoing feedback that made one thing clear: the community wanted to go permissionless,” Lens founder and CEO Stani Kulechov explained.

Developers can now build whatever experiences they imagine on top of Lens without limits. This freedom to innovate is expected to create new use cases and business models. For example, users may soon be able to monetize their content in customized ways or join communities guarded by tokens.

Lens also provides the advantage of a ready-made social graph. This allows new apps to leverage Lens’s existing relationships and profiles to bootstrap their platforms more quickly rather than having to build their networks from zero.

Lens Protocol’s transition comes at a time when decentralized social (DeSo) networks are seeing surging interest and growth. This month, Bluesky – a decentralized Twitter rival backed by Jack Dorsey – opened its platform to the general public after months of invite-only testing. Within a single day, it attracted over 800,000 new users.

Another DeSo protocol called Farcaster has also seen exponential growth recently after rolling out new functionality like in-app NFT minting and game playing. These features that merge social networking and Web3 activities appear to resonate with users.

Farcaster currently has over 203,000 users, according to data from Dune.