TL;DR
- Aave transferred the stewardship of Lens to Mask Network, which will lead the development of consumer-facing applications.
- Mask Network will take over experience design, the roadmap, and day-to-day operations of Lens, managing existing SocialFi projects such as Orb, Lenster, Focalize, Soclly, Phaver, and Iris.
- Lens retains all its core components: the onchain social graph, profiles, relationships, and smart contracts.
Aave transferred the stewardship of Lens to Mask Network, handing over the execution of social products while keeping the protocol as open-source infrastructure.
The transition places Mask in charge of consumer-facing application development, including experience design, roadmap decisions, and daily operations, while Aave will focus on technical advisory and protocol maintenance.
Lens Will Retain All Its Core Components
Lens Protocol will retain all its core components: the onchain social graph, profiles, relationships, and smart contracts. Protocol ownership, intellectual property, governance, and funds are not being transferred. Mask Network will lead the SocialFi applications built on Lens, including existing projects such as Orb, Lenster, Focalize, Soclly, Phaver, and Iris.
Since its launch in 2022, Lens was designed as Web3 infrastructure that allows users to own their identities and content through onchain profiles and NFTs. V1 was deployed on the Polygon Mumbai testnet, enabling users to mint profiles and follow one another. Each profile is an NFT, each relationship is portable, and all applications rely on a shared social graph. More than 50 projects were built during the initial phase.
Lens V2 launched in November 2023, introducing improvements in composability, monetization, and the migration of profiles and connections. V3 and Lens Chain, announced between 2024 and 2025, enabled decentralized storage through Grove, Family Accounts, and near gasless transactions using the GHO token. These upgrades allowed social activity to become economically programmable and enabled the network to scale to hundreds of millions of users.
Mask Network Will Take Control of User Experience, Development, and Distribution
Mask Network will lead the next phase with a focus on user experience, product execution, and global distribution. Its approach centers on building mass-market consumer applications on top of Lens Chain infrastructure and consolidating SocialFi into products ready for end users. Aave will continue to provide technical advisory on protocol-level decisions without leading product development.
Lens infrastructure will remain open and permissionless, allowing Web3 and Web2 developers to build on the shared social graph. The network supports economic interactions through profiles, relationships, content, and communities. Existing applications will integrate into the platform without relying on centralized intermediaries.
Vitalik Buterin commented that the Aave team has stewarded Lens up to this point and highlighted the importance of shared data layers for mass communication and client creation. Lens established a model where social activity and data ownership can be monetized directly in onchain markets
