A close look at Aave’s plan to build a protocol for decentralized social media

When Aave CEO Stani Kulechov tweeted on July 17 that his company should build “Twitter on Ethereum,” it seemed like a spur-of-the-moment idea. 

Only it was anything but.

According to Kulechov, more than half of the Aave team — 30 people or so — has been working on this project since the beginning of the year. And while the finished product may include a version of Twitter built on Ethereum, if all goes as planned that will only be a small part of it. What the company is really building is a decentralized protocol that can support a wide range of social media networks. 

“Our goal is to build a decentralized infrastructure to build social media, but also the first application, which is something very close to Twitter,” said Kulechov.

Kulechov said that the project should launch within a few months (after Aave launches its institutional platform) and that it won’t come with a token, or be monetized initially.

Instead, the goal is to build market share before anyone else does.

The promise of decentralized social media

Indeed, Aave will face some competition.

The idea that decentralization could solve social media’s woes — or introduce native crypto payments — is nothing new, and a number of teams are pursuing the prize. 

Outside of crypto is a project called Mastodon, a decentralized version of Twitter that relies on a federated network infrastructure. Within crypto, there is Steemit, a five-year-old platform where writers get paid when their posts are updated — and other social networks built on Hive, which is a clone of Steemit's blockchain. There is also Block.one’s Voice, although that platform has largely pivoted to NFTs.

There have also been attempts to create foundations for decentralized social media, similar to Aave’s proposal. These include Twitter’s project BlueSky, which claims to be building an “open and decentralized standard for social media.” And there’s Clarion, a decentralized protocol for social media developed by Dan Larimer (who was also behind Steemit and Voice). That project diverges from his previous projects by lacking both a blockchain and a token.

But so far, none of them has truly seen success along the same lines as traditional, centralized social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Aave seems to be betting that it’s just a matter of finding the right combination of features to unlock this potential.

Nuts and bolts

The main storage platform for all of the content used by any social media platforms built on the protocol will be stored on the Interplanetary File System (IPFS), which is a decentralized storage network developed by Protocol Labs. This will include text, audio and video content.

Peer-to-peer value exchange within any of the social media networks will rely on the Ethereum blockchain. To work around the blockchain’s slow transaction speed, the protocol will use rollup technology. This means that transactions will happen off-chain and be periodically uploaded in batches to the Ethereum blockchain — a process that puts less strain on the blockchain.

The end goal is a platform that gives anyone the ability to build a social network on the protocol — even Twitter itself could build its own decentralized Twitter on it — and easily integrate cryptocurrency transactions and features, such as rewards or incentive mechanisms.

According to Kulechov, users will have a consistent social graph — their connections — on the protocol level, that can be used within any of the social networks. It would be the equivalent of getting a new Twitter account and having all your Facebook connections already in place.

What about content moderation?

But there is one big concern. If the protocol is decentralized, how will there be any content moderation — such as preventing the sharing of illegal content?

There won’t be any such moderation on the protocol level, according to Kulechov. But any social networks built on top of it will be able to introduce their own forms of moderation. “Probably people will go where there is actually moderation and high-quality content because they want a good experience.”

He pointed to current social networks, which employ thousands of people for moderation but are still unable to solve this issue. For instance, he said, there are various social media accounts impersonating him that still haven’t been removed.

One issue here, he argued, is that there are no incentives to report fake accounts. In contrast, social networks with in-built cryptocurrency payments could introduce such incentives, which would provide an alternative method for keeping social networks clean.

This would, however, only be on the social network level. It wouldn’t prevent people from tapping into content shared on the protocol level — since they could bypass the social network and access the content directly on IPFS. Or they could even build their own social networks designed to allow such illicit material.

What about privacy?

A key issue with decentralized networks is the lack of privacy, something that people tend to want when it comes to personal data.

The situation will be similar to content moderation. In this case, anything stored on Ethereum or on IPFS will be accessible at the protocol level, meaning there is potential for anyone to access it. 

Kulechov noted that social networks could build databases on top of the protocol where they store certain content, such as personal information. Then they can introduce their own permissions to stop people from accessing data within the networks themselves, he said.