Decentralized finance protocol Aave has handed over stewardship of the social infrastructure project Lens to Mask Network, shifting responsibility for building consumer-facing social applications while keeping Lens as open-source infrastructure.
The transition was confirmed in statements from both Lens and Aave founder Stani Kulechov. In a post on X on Tuesday, Kulechov said Aave will scale back its involvement to a technical advisory role as it refocuses on its core DeFi activities.
He added that Mask Network — a Web3 company that integrates blockchain features into social and messaging platforms — will lead the next phase of Lens’ development, with a focus on applications and product design.
Although described as a change in “stewardship,” neither Lens nor Aave referred to the move as an acquisition or a full exit from social infrastructure.
How responsibilities change under the Lens transition
Under the new arrangement, Mask Network will take charge of consumer-facing execution, including product roadmap decisions, user experience design, and day-to-day operations for social applications built on Lens.
This responsibility covers the development of apps such as Orb, as well as how Lens-based products are positioned and distributed to end users.
Lens and Aave said the protocol’s core infrastructure — including its onchain social graph, user profiles, follow relationships, and smart contracts — will remain open-source and permissionless.
The companies emphasized that the transition does not involve any transfer of protocol ownership, intellectual property, treasury assets, or governance control.
Aave will continue to serve as a technical adviser, providing input on protocol-level decisions without leading product or application development. The move narrows Aave’s role from building social products to maintaining and advising on social infrastructure.
Lens’ infrastructure-first vision predates the handover
Lens was positioned as infrastructure from the outset. Aave launched Lens in 2022 as a Web3-native social protocol designed to give users ownership of their social identities and content through onchain profiles and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
That vision was reinforced in later updates. In 2023, Aave founder Stani Kulechov said Lens was not meant to operate as a front-end social platform, but rather as a shared social layer that allows both Web3 and Web2 applications to connect to a common social graph and user base.
At the time, Kulechov told Cointelegraph that a shared audience could help developers overcome the “cold start” problem faced by new social platforms, while allowing multiple apps to coexist without competing for locked-in users.
Vitalik Buterin supports decentralized social platforms
Following the stewardship transition, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin praised the evolution of Lens, saying the Aave team “has done a great job stewarding Lens up to this point” and that he is “excited about what will happen to Lens over the next year.”
Buterin also highlighted the importance of decentralized social platforms, arguing that competition enabled by shared data layers is essential for improving online discourse.
In a post published Wednesday, he said, “If we want a better society, we need better mass communication tools,” adding that decentralization enables this by allowing “a shared data layer, with anyone being able to build their own client on top.”
Buterin said he has already returned to decentralized social platforms in 2026, noting that every post he has made or read this year has been through Firefly, a multi-client that supports Lens, Farcaster, X, and Bluesky.
