Original ｜Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)
On January 20, the decentralized social protocol Lens team announced that it would transfer project management authority to the Mask Network team, while the original team would retreat to the background as technical advisors. This news has attracted considerable attention in the crypto community, and people are not particularly surprised by Stani Kulechov's decision to "let go" of Lens, as it is wise to withdraw in a context where decentralized social platforms have lost capital and user interest.
Lens was a highly anticipated presence in the SocialFi space from 2023 to 2024—backed by the halo of Aave's founder, solid technology, and a compelling narrative of user-controlled social interactions. Even after Lens lifted registration restrictions in February 2024, the number of users continued to grow. However, by 2025, all of this turned to dust, especially when Lens Chain launched in May, but the team failed to issue a token in response.
This left me puzzled: why is the Mask team willing to take over this "mess"?
In the official statements from both parties, Lens stated that the reason for handing over the project to the Mask team is that Lens has completed the construction of decentralized social infrastructure, and now Lens should shift from infrastructure to large-scale application, with the Mask team being the right choice to help Lens achieve this goal.
However, I don't think it's too harsh to compare Lens to a mess. According to web3.bio, the total number of Lens accounts created reached 808,000, with 680,000 unique users. Even when compared only to its peer Farcaster, it looks slightly worse. Farcaster has a total of 1.867 million accounts created and 1.858 million unique users, both more than double that of Lens. In terms of new users, the two also show a gap, with Farcaster adding 373,000 new registered users in January 2026, while Lens only added 1,492.
Lens User Metrics
Therefore, in a context where the decentralized social space is generally considered to have been disproven, and Lens is left with only a technical shell, what does Mask think? What magic will they perform after taking over Lens? With these doubts, Odaily Planet Daily spoke with Mask Network founder Suji Yan.
Issuing Tokens Harmed Decentralized Social
Mask Network was founded in 2017, with the vision of building a bridge connecting Web2 and Web3 users. On the product side, Mask is a browser extension that allows users to seamlessly access various Web3 services on mainstream Web2 social platforms (such as X, Facebook, etc.). After 2022, Mask became more deeply involved in the decentralized social ecosystem through investments and acquisitions, with Orb and Firefly being key projects that Mask is currently operating.
When discussing the reasons for taking over Lens, Suji Yan stated that Mask has actually been a shareholder of Lens for a long time, and Suji even played a role in Stani's founding of Lens, which has established a deep trust between the two parties. Besides this reason, Suji believes another more important reason is the alignment of philosophies between Stani and himself.
“We are not people who lack money; we are more interested in doing decentralized social well,” Suji stated, which is a consensus he shares with Stani. Therefore, Suji believes that one of the core reasons for the failure of past generations of decentralized social products is the attempt to issue tokens to every user. Friend.tech failed because it made this mistake, and Suji even referred to it as a disgrace to decentralized social, as it eroded the market's confidence in true decentralized social.
Friend.tech is a decentralized social product that emerged in 2023, with a core model of tokenizing individual social influence, allowing fans or other users to purchase shares of KOLs and gain opportunities for private chats with them, while their shares would increase in value as more people buy in, creating profit opportunities for holders. The simple model and the rapid fluctuations in token value in wallets quickly generated significant FOMO, with Friend.tech's daily fee revenue once surpassing TRON.
Success and failure stem from the same source; when players understood that this was merely a "pass-the-parcel" game under the guise of decentralized social, and KOLs could harvest retail investors at almost no cost, Friend.tech quickly collapsed. However, to this day, whenever SocialFi is mentioned, it remains the most extreme case that pushed "Fi" to its limits.
Friend.tech's fee revenue dropped to 0 starting mid-2024
Now, although Farcaster outperforms Lens in various metrics, Suji believes Lens still has advantages, “The best thing about Lens is its neutrality and its distance from any exchange ecosystem,” which is also one of the reasons Suji is willing to take over Lens.
In Suji's view, Farcaster has no neutrality at all, “It is close to Coinbase and deliberately caters to the ideas of Coinbase founder and Base protocol founder Jesse.” The user growth of Farcaster, aside from airdrop expectations, largely comes from Creator Coin, with trends from Degen to the later AI token issuance being similar, but Suji told Odaily that these are all “toxic growth strategies.” _(Odaily note: This interview took place before Neynar announced its acquisition of Farcaster, and _Suji is a shareholder of Neynar)
In this regard, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin also believes that decentralized social should not overly regard "issuing tokens" as innovation, attempting to create price bubbles around individuals to incentivize creators, as practice shows that such models often reward existing social capital rather than content quality, and tokens have a short lifecycle.
However, Suji also stated that after taking over Lens, they will re-establish an entity, discourage "rug pulls," but will not deliberately reject issuing tokens, and will wait for the right opportunity.
Non-neutrality Equals Death
“Non-neutrality equals death” is Suji's prophecy for decentralized social products. A non-neutral product cannot be a qualified social product. Suji uses Truth Social as an example; Truth Social is a social platform under Trump, existing specifically to "voice" for Trump. It is the ceiling of non-neutral social platforms, and no one has ever created a social platform that surpasses Truth Social in terms of personal influence.
But Suji pointed out that the underlying code of Truth Social uses the open-source project Mastodon's code (most of the code was donated by Mask). If the largest non-neutral social product in the world is such a "shoddy production," then what uniqueness do other similar social products have?
Therefore, Suji believes that the rapidly growing Binance Square is just a "small version" of Truth Social, and Farcaster is merely a North American version of Truth Social. In contrast, the neutral Lens is destined to have a higher ceiling in the future than they do.
To better leverage Lens's advantages, Suji also revealed to Odaily that after taking over Lens, it will deeply integrate with Mask's products like web3.bio, Orb, and Firefly to form a complementarity. Firefly has already deeply integrated X features (posting, liking, etc.), and Lens's social graph can help enhance user stickiness. Meanwhile, Lens will also combine with prediction markets in the future to achieve personalized recommendations based on friends' dynamics (such as NBA betting information streams), improving prediction efficiency.
Web3 Social Must Be Built on Web2 Social
The earliest Web3 social narratives often criticized Web2 social for exploiting users in terms of data ownership, privacy, and freedom of speech, highlighting Web3's advantages in these areas. Over time, this has created a "this or that" competitive relationship between Web2 and Web3 social.
“We should respect Web2 as the source of data, as most people were not born after the decentralization boom,” Suji believes that since most of us were born in the internet era, Web3 social should be built on the foundation of Web2 social, meaning it must support Web2 databases.
Suji stated that they are correcting this obvious mistake. Firefly is currently one of the best products on the market for deeply integrating X features, including synchronized posting, liking, bookmarking, and history. To achieve this leap from Web2 social data to Web3, Firefly also spends a significant amount of money each year to purchase X's API.
Vitalik Buterin stated in a post on January 21 that since the beginning of this year, all of his content has been synchronized across platforms like X, Lens, Farcaster, and Bluesky through Firefly. Users do not have to abandon their existing Web2 social platforms while enjoying the advantages of Web3 social features, which may be Firefly's biggest selling point, essentially perfectly aligning with Mask's vision of connecting Web2 and Web3 users.
Firefly's UI is similar to X
There is a contradiction in social applications: people do not want to be bound by KYC, yet they desire a semi-anonymous environment with high-quality content and freedom of speech. To resolve this contradiction, Suji revealed to Odaily that in the future, they will integrate various Web2 social graphs to determine that a person is not a bot and can be held accountable for their statements. Suji believes this is also a key breakthrough point for the future of Web3 social.
Founders Living in Their Own World?
However, there are always few people with a geek mindset in this world, and not all users are Vitalik.
Firefly and all Web3 social applications must answer a practical question: Your philosophy is great, but why should I use you?
Lens currently does have the infrastructure capabilities to support decentralized social operations, but as a user, without airdrops or token incentives, there is no motivation to create a unified account just to "come and go freely" in various decentralized applications. Similarly, since one can post directly on the X platform, why would one want to put on a "shell" and complete it through Firefly?
Many believe that the reason Web3 social has been disproven is that whether it is decentralized or has data autonomy is not the core competitive advantage of social; rather, differences in content quality, creative incentives, emotional recognition, and other product and operational aspects are key for a social product to stand out today. After immersing itself in technology for five years, Lens has also realized this issue, “What the ecosystem needs is not more protocols, but an excellent user experience,” which is why it handed over project management authority to Mask.
But what if Mask is also living in its own little world?
Suji appears at industry events
When Odaily asked about this issue, Suji cited Manus as an example, “Manus simply supports AI like ChatGPT, Gemini, and DeepSeek to help users get work done. If users can complete these tasks themselves using AI, Manus essentially just puts on a shell, yet it still succeeded in the end.” Suji attributes this to the "taste" of the product, and thus he believes that in the future, Firefly will also have more users actively using it, and what needs to be done now is to steadily advance the project and wait for the flowers to bloom.
“After success, the market will forget the painful waiting period before,” Suji maintained a strong sense of belief throughout the interview, firmly believing that his venture will succeed in the future, and that the vision of seamlessly linking Web2 and Web3 users will ultimately be realized.
Ten years of drinking ice water cannot cool hot blood. The more realistic question is whether this hot potato, Lens, will drag down Mask?
In the face of uncertainty, cutting costs has also become Mask's survival strategy at this stage. “Most projects actually do not need to hold large meetings; conserving cash flow is key,” Suji stated, although he will not reject capitalization, he will also not rush to monetize, “The easy but wrong path will not go far.”
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