Avara, the parent company of decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Aave, has announced the arrival of Lens Chain mainnet, a fast and inexpensive Ethereum overlay blockchain for developing decentralized social media applications.

There are now several blockchain-oriented, or “Web3,” startups looking to provide users with an alternative to the giant, centralized social media companies like Facebook and Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter).

To offer better alternatives to existing social media giants requires a fertile protocol level, according to Avara CEO Stani Kulechov. This means offering a developer-friendly layer 2 environment, propelled by composable features designed to unleash 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 said in an interview. “We chose the optimal stack to run Lens Chain where we get the lowest possible transaction in cost, but a sufficient amount of security for these social transactions.”

Lens Chain, a system that uses mathematical proofs to check the veracity of batched off-chain transactions, has its own dedicated stablecoin, Aave’s GHO, to handle gas fees, and its own decentralized veri storage. A range of application building blocks are on offer to create things like composable social graphs, custom feeds, token-gated communities etc.

The blockchain has cemented partnerships with several DeFi and infrastructure projects including Uniswap, Balancer, LayerZero, Circle, Consensys and Chainlink.