We’d love your feedback.
Take a 30-second survey to help improve The Block.
Lens Protocol’s future no longer rests with its original builders. Instead, the SocialFi project said Tuesday that Mask Network “will steward” its “next chapter.”
Stani Kulechov, the founder of Aave, first launched Lens Protocol in early 2022. Lens was initially pitched as a kind of Twitter-on-Ethereum.
“We built the Lens Protocol and its underlying onchain rails, including state-of-the-art decentralized data storage for content, governed by smart contracts,” Kulechov posted to X on Tuesday. “Our goal was to create neutral social infrastructure that developers could rely on to build consumer-grade applications capable of reaching mainstream users.”
About a year after launching on Polygon, Lens said it supported over 110,000 social media profiles and hundreds of applications.
On Tuesday, Mask Network also took to X to outline its vision of taking Lens mainstream. “The next chapter isn’t more protocols. It’s about products people actually use, the culture we build together, and communities that truly thrive,” the organization said in a post.
Mask Network is also known for its support of Mastodon, another decentralized social ecosystem. In 2022, Mask Network acquired the second-largest Mastodon server as part of its plan to foster growth across SocialFi.
While Mask Network attempts to chart a new path for Lens, at least one other SocialFi project has pivoted from its original mission. At the end of last year, the team behind the decentralized social media protocol Farcaster switched focus to its wallet service after spending years trying to build a Twitter-like social network.
As far back as 2024, one of the startup’s investors acknowledged Farcaster might struggle appealing to mainstream users. “We tried social-first for 4.5 years … It didn’t work for us,” Farcaster co-founder Dan Romero said last month.
