Mask Network has officially taken on the Vai of leading and operating the next phase of Lens Protocol development, marking a significant step in the roadmap of one of the most prominent SocialFi platforms in the Web3 ecosystem.
According to an announcement on January 21st, Lens's original founding team will no longer directly run the project; instead, Mask Network will "host and lead" Lens in its next phase. The new focus is clearly defined: building SocialFi products that users actually use, rather than continuing to expand the pure protocol infrastructure.
Lens Protocol was launched in early 2022 by Stani Kulechov, founder of AAVE, with the vision of becoming a “Twitter on Ethereum” – where social data is stored on-chain, owned by users, and governed by smart contracts. The project initially deployed on Polygon and quickly attracted significant interest from the Web3 community.
Chia on the X platform, Stani Kulechov stated that Lens is built as a neutral social infrastructure, allowing developers to create applications aimed at the general public, with the ability to expand beyond the traditional crypto community.
After about a year of operation, Lens announced that it had supported over 110,000 social media accounts and become the platform for hundreds of different SocialFi applications. However, the biggest challenge remains the transition from infrastructure to a mass-market product – something that Mask Network believes Lens needs to prioritize in this new phase.
Conversely, Mask Network asserts that the next phase of Lens will not revolve around further protocol development, but rather focus on user experience, community culture, and the ability to create real-world value. Mask Network Capital has extensive experience in the decentralized social sector, having previously supported the Mastodon ecosystem and acquired the platform's second-largest server in 2022.
