Mask Founder Responds to Lens Takeover: Sticking to a Product of Weak Finance and Strong Social is the Future of Crypto

In the eyes of most people, the track of decentralized social networking seems to have been debunked. Projects that raised tens of millions of dollars a few years ago have made no progress, even the flagship Farcaster has announced a pivot to a wallet, and Nostr, a favorite of Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, can no longer see any users. Everyone is increasingly concentrating on platforms like X and Threads.

Against this backdrop, Mask Network's announcement to take over Lens Protocol seems exceptionally rare.

Lens is another product of DeFi leader Aave's founder Stani, with official claims of 110,000 active users. The acquiring party, Mask Network, has a large footprint in the social field, having previously acquired the second-largest server of decentralized social network Mastodon and also developed Firefly, the largest third-party client in the decentralized social networking field.

Regarding this "acquisition," BlockBeats and Mask's founder Suji Yan discussed his views on the choice of Lens and the future of social products.

Q: Can you reveal the specific details of this acquisition, given that Lens Protocol has previously received funding?

Suji Yan: Strictly speaking, it's not considered an acquisition, but using the term makes it easier to understand, although the situation is more complex. The two sides discussed this term for a long time, and in the end, we chose "steward," which is more like a leadership role.

Q: So, will Stani (Lens founder) still be part of the team?

Suji Yan: He will be more focused on Aave's DeFi business and will serve as an advisor in Lens.

Q: Many people's biggest question is why take over Lens, because in most people's minds, the Lens project is almost gone, and even the so-called decentralized social networking is disappearing, with Farcaster also undergoing a transformation, and Vitalik seems to be using it less.

Suji Yan: Looking at it from a perspective of failure, I personally think the narrative of Web3 has failed. Take Facebook, for example. Everyone knows that they spent a lot of money on AI, but at that time, their spending on Web3 was no less than it is now on AI. They did stablecoins, Libra, NFTs, DIDs, wallets – all of these things were actually fully done by Facebook at the time, but in the end, they cut everything, leaving no products behind.

The main comparison of Lens is with Farcaster. We have studied both with various algorithms, both of which have over a million users. Lens has slightly better data, but in my opinion, both are quite poor. By "quite poor" here, I don't just mean Lens; many large wallet products have very poor data quality.

I insist that social products should have weak financial but strong social attributes, not completely devoid of financial aspects, but they should be weak. This is the hope for the future of Crypto. Mask is also an investor in Lens. I am very familiar with Stani as well and know what kind of person he is. Lens also does not have any secret deals with any major platforms, which is why I chose Lens.

This track has seen a lot of funding and also some profit. At that time, Friend Tech had tens of millions of dollars in revenue from gas fees alone, but in the end, they actually wanted to sell to someone else for $1 million. Farcaster has also sold old shares. I feel that this money has not been placed in the right hands.

Q: What are the specific plans for Lens in the future?

Suji Yan: There are very few social products that are still active now, and even fewer have a light financial focus. For example, Base is creating Creator Coins, which is completely wrong. A long time ago, projects like Rally and Whale, which turned tweets into NFTs for hype, were all failures. So, these products have already shown us which paths not to take, helping us narrow down the potentially correct paths. We are still not sure which paths are the right ones, but we now know which ones are not.

On the product side, first and foremost, we are very open. I'll give you an example from Twitter. Twitter used to have 140 characters, then it became 280 characters because it needed to support Japanese. Why support Japanese? Because, apart from the United States, the largest user base of Twitter is in Japan. We will be the same, open to options like supporting multiple chains, multiple languages, and prediction markets.

Secondly, we cannot stray from the data roots of Web2. We are not from the native Web3 generation. Even now, those in their 10s are part of the Web3 era; those before that mostly have their data on Web2, or they may not even be online; their data is on phones, radios, Weibo, Renren, Twitter, and WhatsApp. So, asking these people to directly adopt Web3 is not possible; therefore, we will do Web2 data mapping. This transition has actually been happening for some time. It doesn't necessarily require direct authorization but rather understanding and integration.

Lastly, I believe we are a team capable of creating great products, unlike those companies that have raised a lot of money but still have poor product quality.

Q: Twitter has recently made a series of reforms on its platform. What is your view? It seems to be moving away from the light finance direction.

Suji Yan: I don't know Nikita Bier, but regarding Twitter's updates, my current understanding is that his tactics are very successful, but the strategy has failed. Smart tags are cool, but the strategic issue is, for example, whose wallet are you using, Twitter has applied for money transmitter licenses in more than 50 states, how do you solve that? I personally don't quite understand his thinking on the direction.

Q: Is there any coin issuance expectation for Lens recently?

Suji Yan: There is no clear coin issuance expectation. I also don't want users to interact just to farm rewards. We do not encourage rug-pulling behavior; we encourage genuine social interaction.