Written by: David, TechFlow
Within two days, two decentralized social protocols changed hands.
On January 20th, Lens Protocol announced it was being taken over by Mask Network. On January 21st, Farcaster announced it was acquired by Neynar, one of its clients.
These two protocols have raised over $200 million combined. Farcaster was valued at $1 billion last year, with investors including a16z and Paradigm. Lens is backed by DeFi giant Aave.
Now, the founders have "stepped back from day-to-day operations to work on new projects."
Including Steem, another high-profile project acquired by Tron in 2020, two out of these three phenomenal decentralized social protocols have been taken over by Chinese teams.
You might have forgotten about Steem. It was the pioneer of "writing to earn" launched in 2016, a benchmark project for the entire Web3 social track at its peak. After being acquired by Justin Sun, the community forked and left, but more on that later.
The Mask Network taking over Lens was founded by Suji Yan. Chinese, dropped out of UIUC at 20 to start a business, previously wrote articles for Caixin and Jiemian.
Founded Mask in 2017, focusing on overlaying Web3 features on traditional social platforms like Twitter.
Mask has been on an acquisition spree: acquired two large Japanese instances of Mastodon in 2022, bought Orb, the most active client on Lens, last year, and now has taken over Lens itself.
Suji Yan positions himself as the "Tencent of Web3".
On the Farcaster side, the acquiring Neynar was founded by two Indian-origin former Coinbase employees. But the reality that two out of three protocols were taken over by Chinese teams still holds.
Why the Chinese?
One possible explanation is capability endowment. The two most successful countries globally in making social products are the US and China. WeChat, Douyin (TikTok), Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book) – Chinese teams have proven they can build social platforms for billions of users.
But this explanation has a problem. Building products and acquiring protocols are not the same. Protocols are infrastructure, not directly facing users. You can build products on them, but the protocol itself doesn't generate the user experience.
Another reasonable explanation is price.
Looking at Brother Sun's (Justin Sun) acquisition list: bought BitTorrent for $140 million in 2018, Poloniex in 2019, Steemit in 2020, and HTX in 2022.
These targets have a common trait:
They were all once glorious but are on a downward trend. BitTorrent was the pioneer of P2P downloads, Poloniex was once a top US exchange, HTX was once one of China's top three exchanges.
Justin Sun isn't buying the best; he's buying the cheapest good stuff.
Now Farcaster is valued at $1 billion but its monthly revenue has dropped to $10,000, down over 95% year-over-year. Founder Dan Romero admitted last month in a post that "tried the social-first approach for 4.5 years, didn't succeed";
Lens has only 50,000 monthly active users, and the Aave team wants to offload it to focus on its core DeFi business.
The most valuable time for these protocols has passed, but the technical foundation and brand remain. In A-share market terms, this is called:
Fallen out of value.
There's a more subtle line of thought: decentralized social is a belief in the West, but a business in China.
Western founders in this space often carry idealism. Users should own their data, social graphs should be portable, platforms shouldn't have censorship power... Farcaster's slogan is "sufficiently decentralized", Lens's is "user-owned social".
But after five years, users don't care.
Ordinary people don't care who owns the data, or if the social graph is portable. They care if there are people to chat with, if there is interesting content, if there are associated assets that can skyrocket.
Chinese buyers taking over, to some extent, is taking this business from the idealists and handing it to the pragmatists.
Suji Yan says Mask's goal is to "bring decentralized social from the lab into daily life". Translating that:
Stop talking about ideals, first make people want to use it.
Of course, the last time a Chinese entity acquired a decentralized social protocol, the outcome wasn't pretty.
In 2020, Justin Sun acquired Steem. After the acquisition, he collaborated with exchanges to take control of Steem's network governance. The original community's reaction was a collective fork to create a new chain, Hive, using code to exclude Justin Sun's wallet.
A fork is the most extreme form of protest in the blockchain world – we're not playing with you anymore, we'll copy everything and leave.
Steemit is still running, but most active users moved to Hive long ago.
So the question is, will it be different this time?
Mask taking over Lens is officially termed "stewardship" in Chinese, meaning caretaker or custodian, not the word acquisition. The founder will continue as an advisor, and the protocol remains open.
But the fact that a "decentralized protocol" can be acquired itself says something. Contracts can be transferred, codebases can be transferred, Apps can be transferred. So where is the "decentralization"?
After the disenchantment, decentralization is just a technical architecture, not a business model. Technically decentralized doesn't prevent someone from calling the shots commercially.
After the change of leadership at Lens, Vitalik posted. He said every post he made in 2026 was through Firefly, which is precisely the multi-platform client under Mask Network.
He also said: "If we want a better society, we need better tools for mass communication."
That's true. But who builds this tool, who operates it, who decides what it looks like – decentralization doesn't answer these questions.
The answer now might be the Chinese will build it.
Then again, maybe nothing will happen. After all, there aren't many active users left.
