Mask Network · 237

Collectibles RWA infrastructure agreement Renaissance Protocol closes $1.5 million seed round led by YZi Labs

In comparison, real-world collectibles liquidity infrastructure Renaiss announced the completion of a $1.5 million seed round, led by YZi Labs, with participation from Gate Ventures, Hash Global, XIN Family, and Redline Labs. Angel investors came from Mask Network, Far East Group, Logoman, Hoopi, and Legit App. Renaiss is built on BNB Chain and is committed to connecting third-party vaults, card stores and escrow nodes through Renaiss Vault OS, and using Renaiss.xyz as an application layer for users to connect to the on-chain collectibles market, providing verifiable escrow, standardized settlement and on-chain liquidity for physical collectibles, eliminating their friction in verification, escrow, pricing, and cross-border transactions, so that escrow verified collectibles can complete the transfer of ownership on the chain and circulate without trust or permission around the world. This round of funding will be used to expand the treasury network, strengthen product ecosystem integration with Renaiss SDK, expand collection categories, promote global market expansion, and support DeFi integration and AI Agent-related infrastructure construction. According to reports, Renaiss was selected for the YZi Labs incubation program EASY Residency for the third season and won the 2025 Binance Blockchain Week Dubai Demo Night winning project, while also ranking first in the BNB Chain RWA category. Since the launch of the beta in November 2025, the Renaiss platform has surpassed $20 million in revenue and over 260,000 users. This article is sponsored by GENG, Build Your Fortune on GENG (https://geng.one)

65d agoburnking

Decentralized fundraising platform LEGION now integrates the RootData API

Compared to the news, LEGION, a decentralized fundraising platform, has now integrated the RootData API to obtain more reliable support in expanding customers and market research. According to reports, Legion enables retail investors to invest in on-chain fundraising through regulatory compliance and investor accountability. Investors include VanEck, Brevan Howard Digital, and Coinbase Ventures. Currently, the RootData API has accumulated more than 220 partners, including Ethereum Foundation, OKX Wallet, CertiK, Gate, Blockworks, Amber Group, CMT Digital, TechFlow, Mask Network, Token Pocket, and many other well-known projects covering many scenarios.

155d ago

RootData Announces Series of API Partners: Ethereum Foundation

Comparing news, Web3 asset data platform RootData announced a series of API partners on Twitter. The fourth one is the Ethereum Foundation. It is reported that the Ethereum Foundation is using the RootData API to obtain rich funding round data to conduct in-depth assessments and research on the financial status of the Ethereum ecosystem. Currently, the RootData API has accumulated more than 200 customers, including OKX Wallet, Blockworks, CMT Digital, Amber Group, Mask Network, Tokenpocket and many other well-known partners covering many scenarios.

205d ago

Lens and Farcaster “Change of Ownership”: Can the Secondary Startup of On-Chain Social Networking Break the Game?

Source: Bankless Author: William M. Peaster Compiled and edited by BitPushNewsWeb3 The landscape of consumer apps is undergoing drastic changes. Over the past few years, the two flagship social projects on the chain — Farcaster and Lens — have both experienced a change of “helmsman” this week. Lens's new chapter Avara (parent company of Aave and Lens) has just announced the handover of management of the Lens Protocol to Mask Network. The Mask team has developed on-chain social apps such as Firefly and Orb, and is experienced. Avara will bet entirely on the DeFi business in the future, and Mask's goal is to open up a new “product-centric” era for Lens. Farcaster followed shortly after Lens news broke, Farcaster co-founder Dan Romero announced that Farcaster infrastructure provider Neynar was acquiring Farcaster's applications, agreements, and Clanker technology stack. Farcaster's startup leadership team will not be joining the new company, but Neynar said they will work to reinvent the project as a “developer-first” social network. The pros and cons weigh Mask's familiarity with Lens, and Neynar knows every detail of Farcaster. These two teams are unquestionably the top developers and thinkers in the field of on-chain social networking. In the long run, Lens and Farcaster seem to be in the right hands. However, the road ahead is far from easy. Until now, on-chain social projects have been trying to become a mass social network with “quality gravity.” If that goal had been achieved, today's change of ownership wouldn't have happened. Obviously, there are still some things in the underlying structure that haven't been worked through, so some degree of “tearing it down” is inevitable. Whether these changes can break through bottlenecks and achieve long-lasting user stickiness remains to be seen. In response to Lens's change of ownership, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin (God V) expressed his opinion. He wrote, “What we need are social tools that serve the long-term interests of users, not just extract short-term engagement. [...] Decentralization is the way to achieve this goal: by sharing a data layer, anyone can build their own client on top of it.” “But crypto social projects have often gone the wrong way in the past. [...] Blending 'money' and 'social' itself didn't pay off: Substack proved that it is possible to build an economic system that supports high-quality content. But Substack's core is about subscribing creators, not creating a price bubble around creators.” “Decentralized social networking should be run by people who believe in the nature of 'social' and are driven by solving social problems in the first place. [...] I'm excited about Lens's development next year because I think the new team that's taking over is someone who's really interested in 'social' itself.” “I encourage everyone to invest more time in Lens, Farcaster, and the wider decentralized social world this year. We need to move beyond the state where everyone is constantly tweeting in the global 'information warzone' and enter a reopened frontier where better and more novel forms of interaction will become possible.” Macro picture For Lens and Farcaster, the key to this game was to cultivate multiple overlapping “public squares” — connected by shared data, but differentiated by different clients and cultures. This diversity can spawn innovation. Innovation brings more socialization, and social networking attracts more users, which in turn drives more innovation. This cycle goes back and forth. How to make this “flywheel” spin is still a core challenge. Mask and Neynar seem ready for this task, and I'm optimistic about how they'll perform in their new roles. If you want to support their second launch and respond to Vitalik's call, a great entry point is to try out the Firefly app developed by Mask. It gives you simultaneous access to platforms like X (Twitter), Farcaster, and Lens...

211d agoWendy#Farcaster #Lens #SocialFi

How was the idealism of Western founders “taken over” by Chinese buyers?

Author: David, Shenchao TechFlow Original title: Web3 social networking, or Chinese, the two decentralized social agreements changed owners within two days. On January 20, Lens Protocol was announced to be taken over by Mask Network. On January 21, Farcaster announced it had been acquired by Neynar, one of its clients. Together, these two agreements have combined to finance more than $200 million. Farcaster was valued at $1 billion last year, and investors include a16z and Paradigm. Behind Lens is DeFi giant Aave. Now, the founders have all “quit their daily jobs to work on new projects.” Counting Steem, another well-known project acquired by Tron in 2020, two of these three phenomenal decentralized social agreements have already been taken over by Chinese teams. You've probably forgotten about Steem. It's the originator of “writing mining,” which was launched in 2016. At its peak, it was a benchmark project for the entire Web3 social circuit. After being acquired by Sun Yuchen, the community directly forked off the road. More on that later. Takes over Lens's Mask Network, founder Suji Yan. Chinese, dropped out of UIUC to start a business at age 20. He previously wrote for Caixin and Interface. Mask was founded in 2017 to superimpose Web3 features on traditional social platforms such as Twitter. Mask has been acquiring over the past few years: it took over two large Japanese instances of Mastodon in 2022, bought Orb, the most active client on Lens last year, and now it has taken over Lens itself. Suji Yan positioned himself as “Tencent of Web3.” On Farcaster's side, the two founders, Neynar, who took over, are of Indian descent and are former Coinbase employees. However, the reality that two of the three agreements were taken over by the Chinese was still established. Why Chinese? One possible explanation is ability endowment. The two most successful countries in the world for social networking products are the US and China. WeChat, Douyin, and Xiaohongshu, the Chinese team proved that social networking can reach 1 billion users. But there's a problem with this explanation. Making a product and acquisition agreement isn't the same thing. The protocol is an infrastructure and does not directly face users. You can make a product on it, but the agreement itself doesn't create a user experience. Another reasonable explanation is price. Looking at Brother Sun's acquisition list, he bought BitTorrent for $140 million in 2018, Poloniex in 2019, Steemit in 2020, and won HTX in 2022. These targets have one thing in common: they have all been brilliant, but they are going downhill. BitTorrent is the originator of P2P downloads. Poloniex was once the leading exchange in the US, and HTX was once one of the top three exchanges in China. What Sun Yuchen bought wasn't the best; it was the cheapest good thing. Now Farcaster is valued at $1 billion but monthly revenue has dropped to $1 million, down more than 95% year over year. Founder Dan Romero posted last month admitting “trying the social-first route for 4 and a half years without success”; Lens has only 50,000 monthly active users, and the Aave team wants to get away from the main DeFi business. The most valuable time of these agreements is over, but the technical foundation and brand are still there. In the case of A-shares, this is called: it has fallen out of value. Another more subtle extension of thinking is that decentralized social networking is a belief in the West and a business in China. The founders of the West built this track with some idealism. Users should have their own data, social graphs should be migrable, and platforms should not have censorship rights... Farcaster's slogan is “Able Decentralized,” and Lens is “User-Owned Social.” But after five years, users didn't care. Normal people don't care who the data belongs to, and they don't care if the social graph can be taken away. They care about whether there is anyone to chat with, if there is fun content, and if there are any related assets that can skyrocket. Chinese buyers took over the deal, to a certain extent, by taking this business from idealists and handing it over to pragmatists. Suji Yan said...

212d agoburnking#a16z #Aave #DeFi #Farcaster #Lens Protocol #MASK #Neynar #Paradigm #WEB3

Aave founder: Management of the social protocol Lens will be handed over to the Mask team, and the original team will act as technical advisors

In comparison, Aave and Lens Protocol founder Stani Kulechov said in an article on X that the management of the social protocol Lens Protocol will be handed over to the Mask Network team, which has always focused on advancing the development of Lens Protocol at the application level. The Lens social infrastructure module will always remain open source and will continue to be the infrastructure for building social apps on a decentralized track. The original team will continue to act as technical advisors while focusing on innovating in DeFi, an area where it has always been a core strength.

213d ago

Mask Network announces takeover of decentralized social protocol Lens Protocol

Comparing news, the decentralized social networking protocol Mask Network and Lens Protocol jointly announced that Mask Network will become the new manager (new steward) of Lens Protocol. The future focus of Lens Protocol will no longer be protocol experiments, but user experience, product design, and global distribution to consumers. “Mask's mission is to make decentralized social features easy to use, intuitive, and meet the needs of everyday users, which coincides with Lens's next stage of development,” said Suji Yan, founder of Mask. “As Mask enters this important phase, our role also shifts from routine product development to consulting. In this role, we have always upheld our mission to make an open, scalable, and user-owned social network the core pillar of the future Internet. We're committed to the long-term success of Lens, its developers, its community, and the Suji and Mask team.” Lens said on its official blog. According to RootData data, Lens Protocol has raised more than 46 million US dollars. Investors include Tencent, Robot Ventures, Variant Fund, etc. In June last year, there were media reports that it plans to carry out a new round of financing at a valuation of 500 million US dollars. Mask Network's previous cumulative financing amount exceeded 57 million US dollars, and its token MASK currently has an FDV of 60 million US dollars.

214d ago

Mask Network takes over Lens Protocol and aims to create products that people actually use

Compared to news, Lens Protocol's future will no longer be dominated by its original team. The SocialFi project said on Tuesday that Mask Network will host and lead Lens's next phase of development. Lens Protocol was launched by Aave founder Stani Kulechov in early 2022 and was initially positioned as Twitter built on Ethereum. Kulechov said in an article on the X platform on Tuesday: We have built Lens Protocol and its underlying on-chain infrastructure, including advanced decentralized content data storage governed by smart contracts. Our goal is to create a neutral social infrastructure for developers to build consumer-grade apps that reach mainstream users. About a year after Lens went live on Polygon, it was officially revealed that it has supported more than 110,000 social accounts and spawned hundreds of apps. On the same day, Mask Network also explained its future plans for Lens on X, saying that the next phase is not more agreements, but rather building products that people actually use, as well as the culture and truly prosperous communities we have shaped together. Mask Network is also known for supporting the decentralized social ecosystem Mastodon. As early as 2022, Mask Network acquired Mastodon's second-largest server as part of its strategy to expand the SocialFi ecosystem.

214d ago

RWA project TBook announced a cumulative total of over $10 million in financing

Comparatively, according to market news, the embedded RWA liquidity layer TBook announced the completion of a new round of financing led by SevenX Ventures, with a valuation of over $100 million. This round of financing also attracted the participation of Mask Network, well-known family offices, and existing investors, bringing TBook's cumulative funding amount to more than $10 million. After the latest round of funding, TBook's investors include SevenX Ventures, Sui Foundation, KuCoin Ventures, Mask Network, HT Capital, VistaLabs, Blofin, Bonfire Union, LYVC, GoPlus, etc. The agreement is scheduled to conduct a token generation activity (TGE) in the first quarter of 2026. TBook is building an embedded RWA liquidity layer that intelligently connects asset issuers and eligible users through on-chain reputation infrastructure. TBook's infrastructure is built on a proprietary three-tier architecture: an identity layer (incentive passport and vSBT), an intelligence layer (WISE credit score), and a settlement layer (TBook vault).

225d ago

Honeypot Finance completes a new round of financing, Mask Network and others participate

Comparing news, Honeypot Finance, an integrated liquidity hub, announced that it has completed a new round of financing with a valuation of 35 million US dollars. Participants include Mask Network, CatcherVC, and Credit Scend. The specific financing amount has not yet been disclosed. The funding round will mainly be used to advance the development and deployment of its AMM Perp DEX.

307d ago