Gliss

Everything sucks nowadays. There is so much noise, in Discord, on Crypto Twitter, everywhere. Noise from shills, from psyops, from misinformation optimized for engagement. We have no control over our feeds, over the algorithms, and definitely no control over our spaces. Why can’t I see a chronological feed, Twitter? Why does YouTube recommend the same content, over and over? Why can’t I find the interesting people and content anymore, on any of these platforms? The algorithm, and its owners, has gone rogue. They got greedy, they got arrogant. But what’s the alternative? Imagine if the algorithm was open-source, and we could write a better one. Imagine if there were was more than one you could choose from. Imagine if we could filter out the shills, and amplify the real relationships underneath. Imagine if the user wasn’t the product, but the majority shareholder. These things are not far-fetched anymore. They’re actually liiiiike, so fetch. In February of 2022, Aave debuted the Lens Protocol. Lens is an open, programmable social graph with UX that is on par with web 2.0. We saw its immediate value. Posting and following, on-chain. An indexer that optimistically adds content, so there is no waiting for tx’s to be mined into a block. Native meta-transactions, so users don’t ever see that pesky Metamask dialog. And the creative potential - programmable follow and reference modules. Algorithmic NFT’s. They are building it. We cannot understate this enough. The Lens guys get it. So we started building. In two weeks, we built the first open web3 inbox. We’re still polishing it for March 30, the finale of the LFGrow hackathon. We derived research no-one else had done on transactional throughput - and discovered that Lens can scale to 50K users, today on Polygon, with minimal cost. And we invented a couple new primitives - attention, influence, and fame - to redesign the economics of how we measure cultural value, so we can make it better. We want to create and show the magic of open, programmable social. We want to build beautiful experiences of lasting substance.