Avara, the parent company of the decentralized finance platform Aave, has launched the Lens Chain mainnet, an affordable Ethereum overlay blockchain designed for building decentralized social media applications.

Numerous startups focused on blockchain or Web3 aim to provide users with less centralized alternatives to platforms like Facebook and Elon Musk’s X (previously Twitter).

According to Avara CEO Stani Kulechov, offering better alternatives to existing social media giants necessitates a thriving protocol level. This involves creating a developer-friendly layer 2 environment powered by composable features that unlock the economic potential of decentralized “SocialFi.”

“The direction we have taken with Lens in the past 12 months is to bring the best developer tooling for building on-chain social experiences,” Kulechov shared. “We chose the optimal stack to run Lens Chain where we get the lowest possible transaction cost while ensuring adequate security for these social transactions.”

Lens Chain uses mathematical proofs to validate the accuracy of aggregated off-chain transactions, featuring its dedicated stablecoin, Aave’s GHO, for managing gas fees and its decentralized data storage. It offers various application building blocks for developing features like composable social graphs, customized feeds, and token-gated communities.

The blockchain has formed partnerships with various DeFi and infrastructure projects such as Uniswap, Balancer, LayerZero, Circle, Consensys, and Chainlink.