Companies Bet Big on Decentralization
On June 15, Lens Protocol took to Twitter to announce the “Lens Improvement Proposal (LIP)“ process to foster decentralized governance, allowing developers, creators, and protocol users to publish proposed changes and upgrades to the platform.
Taking inspiration from the successful Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) and Aave Improvement Proposals (AIPs), LIPs takes a step towards decentralized governance. The LIPs process will foster an inclusive, transparent and collaborative environment.
— Lens Protocol (@LensProtocol) June 15, 2023
It seems the new governance proposal has been heavily borrowed from the successful Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) and Aave Improvement Proposals (AIPs). These are a bunch of formal proposals that describe proposed changes or improvements to the respective networks. Lens highlighted,
“The Lens Improvement Proposals (LIPs). is an open, collaborative process that will guide the future development of Lens Protocol. LIPs take a step towards decentralized governance. The LIPs process will foster an inclusive, transparent, and collaborative environment.”
What are Lens New Proposals?
According to the official blog post, there are three live proposals at the moment. The first proposal LIP-0, establishes the open governance model along with subsequent LIPs to propose developing open technical standards to accelerate development and enable interoperability across the Lens ecosystem.
The second proposal LIP-1, recommends standards for building Lens-based algorithms to promote interoperability and collaboration. Meanwhile, the last proposal, LIP-2, proposes expanding on the “flat” metadata structure currently used by the protocol with multiple standards. This would allow community members to develop new standards on top of those that currently exist.
Lens Protocol – A Brief Primer
This comes hot on the heels after Lens raised $15 million, earlier this month. As per Stani Kulechov, Aave’s founder and CEO, the fresh capital round that was led by IDEO CoLab Ventures with participation from leading venture capital firms like General Catalyst, Variant, and Blockchain Capital will be used to help expand the protocol’s ecosystem and continue its development.
What does a more social, open, equitable, & democratic internet look like?
Enter @LensProtocol.We're thrilled to participate in Lens Protocol's $15M funding round & welcome @StaniKulechov & the entire team to the GC family!
More from @TechCrunch ↓https://t.co/nS6nAzo1aM
— General Catalyst (@generalcatalyst) June 8, 2023
Lens is a protocol that is built on top of Polygon, an Ethereum scaling solution. Social media platforms built on Lens can use smart contracts and NFTs to tokenize social data—making a user’s posts, preferences, and network both proprietary to that user, and transferable to any other social network built on Lens. Kulechov hopes the protocol will solve problems that social media users and companies alike face, not just in the crypto space in the long run. He had previously explained,
“What’s most valuable for us, we want to create a protocol that’s open for contribution. A protocol where we can’t make all the decisions for users and developers, where we can have an open platform and discussion on how Lens Protocol can evolve in the future.”
