The FTX venture fund is expanding its investment into AAVE’s decentralized social media solution Lens Protocol.
FTX Ventures is a $2 Billion venture fund set up by FTX in Jan. 2022 that is now expanding operations to cover the Lens Protocol, a blockchain-based social media platform.
The official Lens Protocol website describes the platform 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.”
Officially launched on May 18, 2022, Lens Protocol aims to give users more control and ownership over their data and the content they create by operating as a base layer for other social media applications.
This means that instead of creating multiple profiles on different social media sites, your unique digital profile can be used across many different web3 social media experiences.
As it stands today, social media platforms like Instagram and Twitter maintain complete control over a user’s data; however, Lens Protocol also allows users to mint profiles as NFTs and follow others, and create content on the blockchain.
Besides facilitating unique online identities for its users, Lens Protocol also accelerates the development of new social experiences for platforms, including blockchain games and virtual events.
The FTX Ventures investment shows how much faith the platform has in decentralized digital identities.
According to a Dune Analytics query, there are already over 90,000 wallets that own a Lens profile, with those numbers almost certainly continuing to grow over time.
The number of Lens profiles isn’t the only number continuing to rise either, as October marked an all-time high in activity by Lens users.
24,744 or just under 29% of Lens profiles made at least one post, comment, or mirror, which is similar to Twitter’s retweet function that month.
FTX and Lens Protocol aren’t the only ones showing faith in decentralized social media, as JPMorgan’s blockchain subsidiary Onyx also announced plans to develop a blockchain-based identity solution of their own in late October.
Though Onyx’s plans are driven more by a need for increased security and privacy rather than interest in facilitating more web3 gaming and experiential events, both will enable users to choose what data they want to share and where they want to share it.
The amount of money FTX Ventures is investing in Lens Protocol is still unknown; however, Sam Bankman-Fried, FTX’s CEO, stated earlier in the year that the venture fund plans to invest at least $1 billion by the end of the year, meaning the investment could be substantial.
According to Crunchbase, this marks the 49th investment for FTX Ventures, which has also made substantial investments in blockchain distributed ledger Celestia, crypto market intelligence platform Messari, and crypto accounting platform Tactic.
