From the dev team that brought you the Aave Protocol

“Our digital identities have become inseparable from how we define ourselves.” This is how mysterious Open Letter began, going viral populating feeds across Crypto Twitter. To date, over 10,000 people have signed the letter supporting the vision and need for Web3 native social media ✍️

Many in the community guessed this Open Letter was the precursor to the long-awaited Web3 social graph project that CEO & Founder of the Aave Companies, Stani Kulechov, teased back at LisCon in 2021...

Today, we are excited to confirm that you degens were right – introducing Lens Protocol from the dev team that brought you the Aave Protocol! 👏👏👏

Introducing the Lens Protocol 🌿

The Lens Protocol is a permissionless, composable, and decentralized social graph that makes building a Web3 social platform easy.

Visit lens.dev or more information about the Lens Protocol.

Why We Built It 🌞

Digital identities should be ours to control. As stated in the Open Letter, social media has allowed us to find our communities and discover true self-expression. It holds the promise of connection, freedom, livelihood, and voice. We spend time building unique selfhood across these Web2 media platforms, even though we know they are antiquated, centralized systems. Content creators do not truly own anything published on these platforms.

Web3 brings forth a renewed hope for what social media can be. It offers the ability for us to control how our content is used.

In this spirit, the Lens Protocol was developed. 🌿

What It is 🧬

The Lens Protocol is a Web3, smart contracts-based social graph on the Polygon Proof-of-Stake blockchain designed to empower creators to own the links between themselves and their community, forming a fully composable, user-owned social graph. The protocol is built from the ground up with modularity in mind, allowing new features to be added while ensuring immutable user-owned content and social relationships.

Since users own their data, they can bring it to any application built on top of Lens Protocol. As the true owners of their content, creators no longer need to worry about losing their content, audience, and livelihood based on the whims of an individual platform's algorithms and policies. Additionally, each application using the Lens Protocol benefits the whole ecosystem, turning the zero-sum game into a collaborative one. Developers can design meaningful social experiences without needing to turn to feedback mechanisms to lock in a user's attention.

TL;DR

Lens Protocol is a composable and decentralized social graph, ready for you to build on so you can focus on creating a great experience, not scaling your users.

Explore the Roots 🌳

The protocol’s key features. It has the functions of familiar social media systems like having a profile, commenting, resharing a post, and more – but at its core, Lens Protocol is Web3 native, and thus any social platform built on the protocol will be innately different. Users will own everything, as these key functions are powered by NFTs. Here is a quick overview of the key features of Lens Protocol:

• 👤 Profile NFTs – This is the main primitive of the Lens Protocol. Composable, non-custodial, and permissionless, these dynamic NFTs contain the history of all posts, mirrors, comments, and other content you generate. Individual addresses can own profile NFTs, an address can contain multiple profile NFTs, and a profile NFT can even be owned and operated by a DAO through a multisig wallet!
• 👥 Follow NFT – When you follow someone, you’re granted a follow NFT. Each of these NFTs has a unique token ID that comes with innate rarity & utility. These unique traits can be used to limit voting to your most loyal fans in governance snapshots. They can even be traded on an open market!
• 📝 Publication – Pictures, music, videos, a great poetic work of art – whatever masterpiece you want to create and share, you can with a publication. Lens Protocol supports IPFS and any media type that inspires you!
• 💚 Collect - Like what you see? Like what you see? You can collect publications from people you follow. A new form of self-expression, curate your collection, and show off what you love. This collect feature enables anyone to collect your content based on the price, edition size, and time limit you set!
• 🔄 Mirror – Some things are too good to keep to yourself. Re-share a post using the mirror feature! By amplifying content, you can earn a cut from anyone who collects the original content through your share.

Grow the Garden 🌷

Lens Protocol is fully open source for the community to build on. There are an infinite number of possibilities of tooling and front ends that can be built on the protocol. Social apps, content moderation tools, analytics platforms, verification systems, DAO tooling... whatever you can dream up, you can build.

Need more inspiration? There is a hub of innovative ideas on lens.dev including:

✔️ Social Based Verification

🌐 Fair Launch Drop Mechanics

👥 DAO Profiles

Visit the dedicated Discord channels to start building!

Grab Some Fertilizer 🪴

Inspired to build and solve the kick-starters above, or have another great idea and need funding to get building? To start the mission, there is a $250,000 grants program to accelerate the growth of the Lens Protocol ecosystem. Apply here!

Audits, Fresh from the Market 🧺

The Lens Protocol code is available to test on the Polygon Mumbai Testnet!

A Peckshield audit has been completed! You can find the full audit and its findings here.

In a few days, the public audit contest will go live with our frens at Code4rena. Access the code on Github here, and join their Discord for more information.

Bug Bounty 🪲

Any developers that discover vulnerabilities within the code are encouraged to report them to ensure the security of the protocol. Subject to evaluation, a public bug bounty is eligible to reward developers for identifying critical bugs up to $250,000. Catch a bug? Email us at wecare@lens.dev

Fellow Gardeners 👩‍🌾

Current collaborators include Polygon and various Web3 name service providers. We look forward to building a community with more collaborators to create better and more sustainable online social experiences. Are you interested in collaborating with Lens Protocol? Contact us at partnerships@lens.dev

The Garden is Open 🎉

Explore the developer hub that we lovingly call our Developer Garden where you can learn more about the key features of the protocol and how they work: lens.dev/garden

Dig In 🥄

📚 Read up! Make a nice cup of coffee and dig into the developer documentation here: docs.lens.dev

💬 Get chatting. Feedback from the community is always extremely valuable. Join the Lens Protocol Discord and share your thoughts, excitement, and make some frens along the way.

✍️ Sign the Open Letter. It's not too late to share your support for the vision and need of Web3 social media. Endorse it here: lens.dev/letter

🚀 Wen mainnet? Get updates by following us on @LensProtocol on Twitter while we’re still there.

👀 Wen Web3 Social Media app? Start building one or stay tuned for more alpha...

Let’s Bloom 🌿 ❤️

Designed by our frens at We3, a design collective built on the idea that internet platforms should be more participative, open, and community owned.

Now, who’s going to build a blog UI on Lens Protocol so we can post there instead? 😜

- The Lens Protocol team