Author: David, Deep Tide TechFlow
Original Title: Web3 Social, Still Dominated by the Chinese
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 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 daily operations to work on new projects."
Including Steem, another well-known project acquired by Tron in 2020, two out of these three phenomenal decentralized social protocols have now 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, which we'll discuss later.
The founder of Mask Network, which took over Lens, is 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 two founders of Neynar, which took it over, are of Indian descent, both 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 United States and China. WeChat, Douyin (TikTok), Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book) – Chinese teams have proven they can scale social products to billions of users.
But this explanation has a problem. Building products and acquiring protocols are not the same thing. 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 (formerly Huobi) 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 downloading, 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 "after 4.5 years of trying the social-first approach, it didn't work";
Lens has only 50,000 monthly active users, and the Aave team wants to offload it to focus on its DeFi core 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 (Undervalued).
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 a degree of 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 whether the social graph can be taken away. 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 is, in a way, taking this business from the idealists and handing it to the pragmatists.
Suji Yan says what Mask wants to do is "bring decentralized social from the lab into daily life". Translating that:
Stop talking about ideals, first make people willing 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 bought 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 on our own.
Steemit is still running, but more active users have long since moved to Hive.
So the question is, will it be different this time?
Regarding Mask taking over Lens, the official term is "stewardship", not the word "acquisition". The founders will continue as advisors, and the protocol remains open.
But the fact that a "decentralized protocol" can be acquired itself already says something. Contracts can be transferred, codebases can be transferred, Apps can be transferred. So where is the "decentralization"?
After the disillusionment, decentralization is just a technical architecture, not a business model. Technically decentralized does not prevent someone from having the final say commercially.
After Lens changed leadership, 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."
This is 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.
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