In the eyes of most people, the decentralized social networking track seems to have been disproven. Projects that raised tens of millions of dollars a few years ago have made no progress. Even the leader, Farcaster, said it was transforming into a wallet. Nostr, the favorite of Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, no longer has users. People are increasingly concentrated on platforms such as X and Threads.
Against this backdrop, Mask Network's announcement of taking over Lens Protocol appears exceptionally rare.
Lens is another creation of Stani, the founder of Aave, a top DeFi platform, and officially claims to have 110,000 active users. The acquiring company, Mask Network, has a vast presence in the social networking field, having acquired Mastodon, the second-largest decentralized social networking server, and also developed Firefly, the largest third-party client in the decentralized social networking space.
Regarding this "acquisition,"BlockBeats and Mask founder Suji Yan discussed his choice of Lens and his views on the future of social products.
Q: Can you reveal some specific details about this acquisition, since Lens Protocol has previously raised funds?
Suji Yan: To be precise, it wasn't an acquisition, but saying "acquisition" makes it easier to understand, though it's actually quite complicated. We discussed the word for a long time before finally choosing "steward," which is more like a guiding word.
Q: So, will Stani (the founder of Lens) still be in the team?
Suji Yan: He will focus more on Aave's DeFi business and will play an advisory role in Lens.
Q: The biggest question many people have is why we took over Lens, because in most people's minds, the Lens project is almost gone, and even so-called decentralized social networking is almost gone. Farcaster is also transforming, and Vitalik seems to be used less.
Suji Yan: From a failure perspective, I personally think the Web3 narrative is a failure. Take Facebook as an example. Everyone knows they spent a lot of money on AI, but back then they spent just as much money on Web3 as they do now. They developed stablecoin Libra, NFTs, DID, wallets—Facebook actually completed all of these back then, but ultimately scrapped them all, leaving no products behind.
Lens is mainly compared to Farcaster. We have studied both using various algorithms. Both have more than a million users. Lens's data is slightly better, but in my opinion, both are very poor. This poorness is not only for Lens, but also for the data of many large wallet products.
I firmly believe that social products should have weak financial attributes but strong social attributes. They don't have no financial aspects at all, but they should be weak; this is the hope for the future of cryptocurrencies. Mask is also an investor in Lens, and I know Stany well enough to know what kind of person he is. Lens didn't have any secret deals with any major platforms, so I chose Lens.
This sector has raised a lot of money and made money; Friend Tech, for example, earned tens of millions of dollars in transaction fees at the time, but they ended up selling it to someone else for only $1 million. Farcaster also sold off its existing shares. I think this money wasn't put in the right hands.
Q: What are the specific steps to take after using Lens?
Suji Yan: There are very few social products still in development now, you could count them on one hand, and even fewer of them are light financial products. For example, Base is making Creator Coin, which is a complete mistake. A long time ago, there were Rally, Whale, and those tweet-to-NFT hype projects, all of which failed. So these products have shown us which paths we should definitely avoid, and they've helped us filter out the potentially correct ones. We're not sure which ones are right, but we know now which ones are wrong.
In terms of products, firstly, we are very open. Let me give you an example of Twitter. Twitter initially had a character limit of 140, but later increased it to 280 to support Japanese. Why support Japanese? Because, outside of the United States, Japan is Twitter's largest user base. We will be the same, open to development, for example, supporting multiple blockchains, multiple languages, and prediction markets.
Secondly, we cannot abandon the Web2 data root. None of us are native Web3 users. Those born after 2010 are, but for those before that, most of their data resides on Web2, or even offline. Their data is on phones, radio, microblogs, Renren, Twitter, and WhatsApp. Therefore, it's impossible to directly migrate these people to Web3. So, we will implement Web2 data mapping. This process has actually been underway for some time; it doesn't necessarily require direct authorization, but rather understanding and integration.
Ultimately, I believe we are a team capable of creating excellent products, unlike those companies that have raised substantial amounts of money but still struggle with their products.
Q: What do you think of Twitter's recent series of platform reforms? They don't seem to be heading in the direction of light finance.
Suji Yan: I don't know Nikita Bier. My current understanding of his Twitter updates is that his tactics were successful, but his strategy failed. Smart hashtags are impressive, but the strategic problem is, for example, whose wallet do you use? Twitter has applied for money transmitter licenses in more than 50 states. How do you solve that? I personally don't quite understand his directional thinking.
Q: Are there any plans for Lens to issue its own token in the near future?
Suji Yan: There are no clear expectations for issuing a token. I also don't really want users to interact just for the sake of grinding; we discourage "freebie hunting" behavior and encourage genuine social interaction.
