According to BlockBeats, on August 25, Aave and Lens Protocol founder Stani Kulechov shared his thoughts on building resilient social networks in light of recent events, such as the arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov. Kulechov emphasized the importance of moving away from the concept of 'decentralization,' which he believes is often misunderstood and lacks consensus on its meaning. Instead, he advocates for focusing on resilience, which aims to minimize single points of failure that could disrupt or compromise the network's functionality and integrity.
Kulechov pointed out that the most successful DeFi projects today are built with resilience in mind. These projects, including Aave, are designed to withstand potential threats and single points of failure from various participants. A truly resilient social network, he argues, is one that is extremely difficult for any single entity or coalition to infiltrate or disrupt. Resilience ensures that participation at all levels of the network or protocol is safeguarded. Information flow should be resistant to manipulation or biased censorship, administrators should be free from undue influence, and content should be controlled entirely by its authors, immune to operator deletion.
Blockchain technology currently offers methods to achieve resilience. At its core, blockchain ensures secure access control (who can write) and value storage (assets). It determines who can post in information streams, join communities, review content, act as legitimate fact-checkers, and how funds are distributed within the network. Additionally, it enables community-driven frameworks through voting mechanisms to select administrators or fact-checkers. For resilience to be effective, accountability and transparency are crucial. Transparent networks are more likely to ensure resilience, and if privacy is needed, guarantees like zero-knowledge proofs (ZK-proofs) can provide verifiability while maintaining transparency. Public blockchains inherently possess these features.
Kulechov believes that truly resilient social networks will unlock new and interesting use cases, as developers will no longer need to worry about being shut down. These foundational principles will guide the development of Lens V3.
