Aave Hands Lens to Mask Network, Doubles Down on DeFi Ambitions
Aave has handed stewardship of the Lens Protocol to Mask Network, marking a strategic shift that narrows Aave’s focus back to decentralized finance.
This will place the next phase of decentralized social development in the hands of a team more tightly focused on consumer-facing execution.
The transition was confirmed this week by statements from Aave and Lens founder Stani Kulechov, as well as from Mask Network.
Aave Keeps Advisory Role while giving Lens App Development to Mask Network
Kulechov said Aave’s role in Lens will now be limited to technical advisory support, describing the move as a refocus rather than a retreat.
He explained that Aave initially expanded beyond onchain financial primitives to build social primitives that users could own, resulting in the creation of Lens.
The original aim, he said, was to create neutral social infrastructure that developers could rely on to build consumer-grade applications capable of reaching mainstream users.
With that foundation now in place, stewardship is shifting to Mask Network, which will lead development at the application and product layer while Aave returns to its core expertise in DeFi.
Both Aave and Lens emphasized that the move is not an acquisition, sale, or exit. There was no indication of a transfer of protocol ownership, intellectual property, treasuries, or governance control.
Lens’ core components, including its onchain social graph, profiles, follows, and smart contracts, will remain open-source and permissionless.
Aave said it will continue to provide input on protocol-level decisions but will no longer lead product development or operate social applications directly.
Mask Network, a Web3 company known for integrating blockchain features into social and messaging platforms, will now assume responsibility for consumer-facing execution.
This includes product roadmap decisions, user experience design, and day-to-day operational leadership for social applications built on Lens, such as Orb.
In a statement announcing the transition, Lens said the ecosystem’s next phase requires less protocol experimentation and more focus on unified social experiences that can operate at scale and meet user expectations.
Lens was launched by Aave in 2022 as a Web3-native social protocol designed to give users ownership over their social identities and content through onchain profiles and NFTs.
From the outset, it was positioned as infrastructure rather than a standalone social network.
Since launch, Lens has grown into one of the most widely used decentralized social protocols. Early builder adoption was rapid, with more than 50 projects built on Lens shortly after launch.
By early 2023, the protocol had surpassed 100,000 minted profiles and supported more than 120 applications.
Lens later migrated to Polygon mainnet, rolled out V2 and V3 upgrades, and introduced Lens Chain, a purpose-built network powered by ZKsync and Avail, aimed at improving scalability, speed, and monetization.
Lens uses GHO as gas, enabling near-instant, low-cost transactions, and includes decentralized storage through Grove and features like Family Accounts.
The handover to Mask Network comes as decentralized social regains attention across the crypto industry.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said he plans to spend more time on decentralized social platforms in 2026, arguing that better mass communication tools are needed and that decentralization enables competition by allowing multiple clients to build on shared data layers.
Mask Network founder Suji Yan described the transition as aligned with the cypherpunk values at the heart of crypto, saying decentralized social should be part of everyday life rather than limited to financial products.
He said Mask Network intends to focus on building consumer-ready SocialFi applications that bring Lens from infrastructure into daily use.
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