The Onchain Social Shakeup

Consumer crypto's landscape is continuing to shift in major ways. The headlining visions for onchain social in recent years – Farcaster and Lens – have both seen a changing of the guard this week. Let's catch you up on all the happenings.

A new Lens 🌱

Avara, the parent company of Aave and Lens, just passed stewardship of the Lens protocol to Mask Network, the team behind onchain social apps like Firefly and Orb. Avara will continue to double down on DeFi, while Mask aims to bring about a new product-centric era for Lens.

Farcaster follows suit 🤳

A day after the Lens news, Farcaster co-founder Dan Romero announced that Neynar, the leading Farcaster infra provider, was acquiring Farcaster's app, protocol, and the Clanker stack. Farcaster's OG leadership won't be joining, but Neynar says they will work to revitalize the project as a builder-first network.

The good and the bad ⚖️

Mask knows the ins and outs of Lens, and Neynar knows the ins and outs of Farcaster. These teams are among the most talented builders and thinkers in onchain social, so Lens and Farcaster seem to be in the best hands possible going forward.

Still, the work ahead here won't be easy.

Onchain social projects have struggled to become mass-gravity social networks so far. If the opposite were true, these handoffs wouldn't have occurred how they did.

Something structural hasn't been clicking, so makeovers of some sort were clearly in order. We'll have to wait and see if the changes to come can break through into sustained stickiness.

Keeping the faith 🧠

Responding to the Lens news, Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin offered his lay of the land. He wrote:

• "We need mass communication tools that serve the user's long-term interest, not maximize short-term engagement. [...] Decentralization is the way to enable that: a shared data layer, with anyone being able to build their own client on top."
• "But crypto social projects have often gone the wrong way. [...] Mixing money and social is not inherently wrong: Substack shows that it's possible to create an economy that supports very high-quality content. But Substack is about subscribing to creators, not creating price bubbles around them."
• "Decentralized social should be run by people who deeply believe in the 'social' part, and are motivated first and foremost by solving the problems of social [...] I'm excited about what will happen to Lens over the next year, because I think the new team coming in are people who actually are interested in the social."
• "I encourage everyone to spend more time in Lens, Farcaster and the broader decentralized social world this year. We need to move beyond everyone constantly tweeting inside a single global info warzone, and into a reopened frontier, where new and better forms of interaction become possible."

The big picture 📲

For Lens and Farcaster, the name of the game is fostering many overlapping public squares, all connected by shared data but differentiated by clients and cultures.

Multiplicity can lead to new innovations, new innovations can lead to more socializing, and more socializing can lead to more users, which spurs more innovations, 'round and 'round.

Making this flywheel spin remains the core challenge.

Mask and Neynar seem up for the task, and I'm optimistic they'll do great work in their newfound roles. If you'd like to support their second winds and heed Vitalik's call to action, a great starting point is trying Mask's Firefly app, which lets you access X, Farcaster, Lens, and etc. simultaneously without having to manually crosspost your content.

Looking ahead 🤔

Crypto social isn't dead. However, the new torchbearers will need to reflect on what worked and what didn't work in the first chapter here, and to iterate accordingly, if the second chapter is to succeed.

Broadly speaking, we've gone from "what if" to "what now." In this sense, Mask and Neynar didn't just inherit protocols this week. They also inherited a mandate to translate decentralization from an abstract ideal into something many people actually want to spend time in.

That will be no small feat, of course. Yet if these teams can keep nurturing durable communities with distinct cultures while empowering users in new ways, they've got a shot at going the distance. Now, let's see if they can pull it off.