In the eyes of most people, the decentralized social space seems to have been disproven. Projects that raised tens of millions a few years ago have made no progress, even the leading platform Farcaster has announced a shift to wallets, and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey's favorite Nostr has seen a decline in users. Everyone is increasingly concentrated on platforms like X and Threads.
Against this backdrop, Mask Network's announcement to take over Lens Protocol appears particularly unusual.
Lens is another product from Stani, the founder of the top DeFi project Aave, which officially claims to have 110,000 active users. The acquirer, Mask Network, has a vast presence in the social domain, having previously acquired the second-largest server of the decentralized social platform Mastodon, and developed the largest third-party client in the decentralized social space, Firefly.
In this "acquisition," Rhythm BlockBeats spoke with Mask founder Suji Yan about his choice of Lens and his views on the future of social products.
Q: Can you share the specific details of this acquisition? Lens Protocol has also had previous funding.
Suji Yan: To be precise, it’s not really an acquisition; saying it’s an acquisition is easier to understand, but it’s more complex than that. We discussed this term for a long time, and we finally chose "steward," which is more about leading.
Q: So will Stani (the founder of Lens) still be part of the team?
Suji Yan: He will focus more on Aave's DeFi business and will serve as an advisor for Lens.
Q: Many people’s biggest question is why take over Lens, as in most people's perception, the Lens project is almost gone, and even the so-called decentralized social space is nearly nonexistent. Farcaster is also shifting, and Vitalik seems to be using it less.
Suji Yan: If viewed from the perspective of failure, I personally believe that the narrative of Web3 is a failure. Take Facebook as an example; everyone knows they spent a lot on AI, but at that time, their spending on Web3 was no less than what they are spending on AI now. They worked on stablecoin Libra, NFTs, DIDs, wallets, and they completed all of that, but in the end, they scrapped everything and left no products behind.
Lens is primarily compared to Farcaster. We have studied both with various algorithms; both have over a million users, and Lens has slightly better data, but in my view, both are quite poor. The poor data here includes not just Lens but also many large wallet products.
I firmly believe that social products should have weak financial but strong social attributes. There is not completely no finance, but it should be weak; this is the hope for Crypto's future. Mask is also an investor in Lens, and I am quite familiar with Stani, knowing what kind of person he is. Lens has not made any secret deals with any major platforms, which is why I chose Lens.
This space has raised a lot of money and has made money; Friend Tech, for instance, had revenue of two to three million dollars just from transaction fees, but they ended up wanting to sell for a million dollars. Farcaster has also sold old shares. I believe this money has not been placed in the right hands.
Q: What are the specific plans for Lens moving forward?
Suji Yan: There are very few social products still in development; you can count them on one hand, and even fewer are lightly financial. For example, Base is working on Creator Coin, which is completely wrong. Long ago, those Rally and Whale projects, where tweets were turned into NFTs for speculation, all failed. So these products have already told us which paths to avoid, helping us filter out potentially correct paths. We are not sure which ones are right, but we now know which ones are wrong.
In terms of products, first, we are very open. For example, Twitter used to have a 140-character limit, which later changed to 280 to support Japanese. Why support Japanese? Because, apart from the U.S., Japan is Twitter's largest user region. We will do the same, being open to support things like multi-chain, multi-language, and prediction markets.
Secondly, we cannot detach from the data roots of Web2. We are not part of the native Web3 generation; most of the data from people before the 2010s is still on Web2, and some of it isn’t even online. Their data is on phones, broadcasts, Weibo, Renren, Twitter, WhatsApp, etc. So it’s impossible to ask these people to go directly to Web3, which is why we will do Web2 data mapping. This has actually been in transition for some time; it doesn’t necessarily require direct authorization, but more understanding and integration.
Finally, I believe we are a team capable of creating good products, unlike those companies that have raised a lot of money but still have poor products.
Q: What do you think about Twitter's recent series of reforms on the platform? It doesn’t seem to be heading in a lightly financial direction.
Suji Yan: I don’t know Nikita Bier. Regarding Twitter's updates, my current understanding is that his tactics are very successful, but the strategy is failing. Smart tags are impressive, but the strategic issue is, for example, whose wallet to use? Twitter has applied for money transmitter licenses in over 50 states; how will that be resolved? Personally, I don’t quite understand his thinking in terms of direction.
Q: Is there any expectation for Lens to issue a token soon?
Suji Yan: There is no clear expectation for a token issuance. I also don’t hope that users interact just for the sake of it; we do not encourage such behavior. We promote genuine social interactions.
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