Stani hands Lens Protocol stewardship to Mask Network while keeping Lens as open, neutral social infrastructure as his team refocuses on DeFi.

Lens Protocol founder Stani Kulechov and Aave’s parent company Avara have handed stewardship of Lens to Mask Network, shifting responsibility for consumer-facing product development and ecosystem growth while keeping Lens as open, neutral social infrastructure. Aave/Avara and Kulechov will step back from day‑to‑day product execution to focus on their core DeFi stack, remaining involved with Lens primarily in a technical advisory role. Lens, launched in 2022 as an onchain social graph and later extended with Lens Chain and Lens V3, is positioned as shared infrastructure for Web3 social and SocialFi rather than a single front-end app. Under the new arrangement, Mask Network will lead the next chapter by driving consumer-grade applications on top of Lens—setting product roadmaps, UX, and distribution for Lens-based social apps such as Orb—while the underlying protocol, smart contracts, and social graph remain open-source, permissionless, and neutral for any developer to build on. Both sides characterize this as a stewardship/leadership transition rather than a sale or change in protocol ownership, with no transfer of governance control, IP, or treasuries, aiming to preserve Lens as shared, user-owned social infrastructure while Aave refocuses capital and attention on DeFi innovation.

✨ AI-generated background, compiled from web sources — not editorial content.

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