Quick take:
FTX has made its first major bet on web3 social media after its venture arm, FTX Ventures invested in Aave’s social media graph Lens Protocol. The amount and funding round were not disclosed in the announcement first reported by Fortune.
FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried revealed earlier this year that the company’s venture arm planned to invest at least $1 billion by the close of 2022, a similar figure Binance’s Chengpeng “CZ” Zhao is backing his company to pour into web3.
Lens Protocol is a decentralised project created by open-source liquidity provider Aave to allow users to control and monetise their own data. The product is built on the Layer 2 Ethererum scaling protocol Polygon.
According to an announcement on Twitter, Lens Protocol officially launched on May 18, 2022, ushering in a new era of social media apps.
Bloom into a new era of social 🌿 Lens Protocol is ready for you to build the next gen of social media apps. The garden is open… https://t.co/bhzgxs9JFt pic.twitter.com/m2IqtIfb7P
The product allows developers to accelerate the development of social experiences for community-driven platforms like blockchain games and metaverse events.
Lens Protocol describes itself as “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.”
The user-owned ecosystem allows any application to plug into it. Users can also mint profiles as NFTs, follow others, and create and collect any publications, completely on-chain.
A non-fungible token (NFT) is a blockchain-based digital file that represents proof of ownership of a JPEG, a digital collectible, virtual merchandise, or in Lens Protocol’s case a unique digital profile.
Unlike Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, where users must create a different social media profile for each platform, Lens Protocol allows users to use their NFT identity across several web3 experiences.
Lens Protocol has already sealed key partnerships with leading blockchain game companies like Laguna Games, allowing its users to connect their profiles across both mobile and web versions of the game.
Lens Protocol is betting on an emerging segment of the web3 space as decentralised identities continue to gain traction. While some solutions like JPMorgan’s web3 identity product by Onyx are driven by the rising need for more security and privacy in web3, they all seem to have a similar end game, which is enabling users to choose what data to share with providers of web3 services.
Dubbed the next iteration of the web, web3 is a next-gen internet which leverages emerging technologies like decentralised apps, blockchain, artificial intelligence and AR/VR solutions to power community-owned platforms in the metaverse.
Lens Protocol is betting on the metaverse— a 3D virtual space where people can interact immersively through gaming, virtual concerts and other experiential events, to play a key role in the mass adoption of its decentralised identity solution.
Stay up to date:
Immutable is Enforcing NFT Royalty Fees on Ethereum
Web3 SaaS Platform Versify Labs Launches NFT Loyalty Solution on Polygon
Square Enix’s First NFT Game Receives Mixed Reactions After Reveal
Metaverse Launchpad Enjinstarter Raises $5M in Total from True Global Ventures
The European Union Agrees on a Compromise to Regulate the NFT Market
Triller Takes the Battle With TikTok to the Metaverse
