Aave's Decentralized Social Media Platform Lens Protocol Releases New Governance Model

Lens Protocol – a decentralized social media platform that originated from DeFi lending giant Aave – introduced Thursday a new open governance model where community members can propose improvements to the protocol.

Lens Improvement Proposals (LIPs), which is inspired by Ethereum and Aave’s model for improvement proposals, is an attempt to create a framework for developers, creators and users to participate in the decision-making process of Len’s future development.

Currently, there are three live proposals, according to the announcement. The first proposal establishes the open governance model, while the second and third proposals are centered around open standards. The second proposal “will encourage third-party algorithms and machine learning (ML) services to be integrated into Lens Protocol,” while the third proposal defines “how metadata is classified, organized and labeled within Lens,” as stated in the announcement.

The protocol’s embrace of open governance through LIPs comes one week after the social media platform raised $15 million from a group of high-profile investors like IDEO CoLab ventures, Palm Tree, Uniswap CEO Hayden Adams, OpenSea co-founder Alex Atallah, entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan and Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal.

According to the GitHub page for LIPs, which has contributions from Aave founder Stani Kulechov and Aave senior engineer Josh Stevens, “LIPs provides the the basis to ensure that Lens Protocol remains flexible and uniform across all potential use-cases, improvements ad ideas within the community.”