Lens Protocol introduces community-led governance for social media platform

Lens Protocol, a decentralized social media platform, has introduced Lens Improvement Proposals (LIPs) to promote open governance.

The initiative draws inspiration from similar strategies used in blockchain ecosystems, such as Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs).

LIPs provide a mechanism for community developers and users to contribute to the development and evolution of Lens Protocol. This decentralized model invites community members to submit suggestions, feature enhancements, bug fixes, and updates via Lens Protocol’s GitHub repository.

In a deviation from the typical approach of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), the Lens governance system evaluates a proposal's popularity based on community feedback instead of using a token-based on-chain voting system.

Lens Protocol's focus on community feedback 

This method separates Lens from other Web3 projects that typically rely on DAO tokens for decision-making.

So far, three initial proposals have been introduced under the new model to be published on its GitHub repository. This repository for LIPs will also house all open standards utilized by Lens Protocol, divided into specific folders for each type of standard, such as the "Lens' open algorithm standards."

“LIPs will progressively move Lens towards open governance. Through the LIPs framework on Github, community members can propose improvements – from the submission of proposals to transparent discussion and, ultimately, a voting process,” Stani Kulechov, CEO of Aave Companies, the core developer of Lens Protocol, told The Block. “The community will be able to have open discussions about new proposals and weigh in to provide their unique perspective on why they should be implemented.”

The first proposal, LIP-0, establishes a governance model emphasizing transparency. The second proposal, LIP-1, suggests the creation of open standards for algorithms to foster user choice and enable the integration of third-party algorithms and machine learning services. The third proposal, LIP-2, would standardize metadata to improve Lens’s interoperability with other projects. 

Launched on Polygon in May 2022, Lens says it supports over 110,000 social media profiles and hundreds of applications.

Earlier this month, Lens Protocol announced a $15 million funding round led by IDEO CoLab Ventures. The team is also working on a blockchain scaling solution called Momoka to store social media transaction data off-chain while verifying them on-chain.