What is Lens Protocol, and how does it work?

In this guide, we share all you need to know about Lens Protocol, a decentralized social graph that simplifies building Web3 social platforms.

The innovation and, as a result, the booming popularity of social media started at the beginning of the century with the concept of the online social graph. This specific data structure draws a line between social networks’ users and the people, places and things with which they interact. However, time has shown that the major social media platforms have several disadvantages related to centralization. The flagships of the change are likely to be sprouts of current Web3 projects.

What is Lens Protocol?

Lens Protocol is a blockchain-based open-source social graph created to reshape the future of social media concepts in the era of Web3 and decentralization. Unlike contemporary Web2 social media platforms like Twitter or Facebook that use social graphs to develop interconnections among users of social networks solely in a centralized manner, Lens Protocol is designed to be permissionless and composable of empowering content creators to “own their digital roots” and enable people to uncompromisingly own the connections between themselves and the communities.

As a result, Lens Protocol development led to the emergence of the decentralized social graph that users totally own, giving them back control of their information and links and even providing features to monetize their content.

Lens Protocol was introduced in early 2022 and gained a lot of attention in the blockchain and crypto communities due to the social networking product’s revolutionary nature and the well-known Aave (AAVE) team developing it. As a branch of one of the significant lending platforms in the Ethereum ecosystem, Lens Protocol seeks to address considerable flaws in the current social media environment, which it does quite successfully, gradually gaining a base of dedicated users of a Web3-ready community.

How does Lens Protocol work?

Lens Protocol’s social graph is established through a graph database (GDB). Such databases utilize graph structures that contain individual nodes, edges as connection points between them, places, things and other properties to store data. These graphs show network members and the relationships between them.

However, Lens Protocol’s smart contracts-based social graph differs from the centralized social media graphs since, in the second case, access to the data is available only for the centralized services. Specifically, users, third parties and even projects that might want to integrate with the service do not have access to it. Profiles, content and connections are locked up and kept by the centralized network operator.

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