In a 48-hour period at the end of January, the two largest decentralized social protocols underwent major management changes. Farcaster moved management of its protocol, flagship client and leading Base launchpad, Clanker, to its primary infrastructure provider, Neynar. At the same time, Lens Protocol announced its transition from Avara (the team behind Aave) to Mask Network.
The suddenness of these transitions was enough to revive a familiar debate: Do these restructurings of the sector’s most established projects signal a failure for crypto social? For many critics, the response was immediate yes. They argued that crypto social never moved beyond the crypto bubble, failed to compete meaningfully with Web2 giants, and ultimately imploded under its own momentum. For them, the ownership changes confirmed that decentralized social media is a dead end — a niche experiment at best. This view misconstrues a necessary market correction as a complete collapse.
Why the first rescue struggled
What these transitions actually reveal is a long overdue recognition of reality: building social networks is not primarily a matter of ideology or infrastructure, but of product quality, distribution and incentives. The first wave of crypto socials struggled not because decentralization is inherently flawed, but because it tried to recreate older social platforms while layering the complexity of crypto on top of them. Farcaster and Lens were ambitious efforts to reinvent social media around user-owned identity, open graphs and composable data. Both attracted top capital and world-class engineers. And yet, none of them managed to break meaningfully beyond a crypto-native audience.
A key misstep was assuming that social graphs would scale like blockchains, that you could first build a shared, open layer, and that value would naturally emerge. In practice, social graphs are not composed simply by existing. And this is definitely not a crypto lesson. Decentralized social graphs have been around for years, with Mastodon and Nostr being the obvious examples, but neither has achieved sustained mainstream adoption. The pattern is consistent: users don’t migrate for ideological reasons, and portability doesn’t overcome the cold start. Without a flagship experience that feels materially better today, with better content, better loops, better status, and better tools, decentralization remains an implementation detail that appeals to a committed minority, not a mass-market niche.
Additionally, both ecosystems leaned too early into platform building and developer ecosystems, overestimating their ability to solve the cold start problem for developers. With user numbers in the low tens of thousands, the financial pie was simply too small for third-party applications to thrive. Builders were asked to assume distribution risk before meaningful distribution existed while competing, implicitly or explicitly, with flagship customers who controlled prime surface area.
Social networks live and die by network effects, and crypto introduces additional friction at every layer: wallets, security assumptions, moderation tradeoffs, and identity management. Convincing users to leave platforms where their social graphs already exist is difficult in any case. Asking them to do so while navigating unfamiliar tools raises the bar even higher.
From social media to social financial networks
Instead of chasing a decentralized Twitter analog, the narrative is shifting toward what might be better described as social financial networks. In these systems, the primary function is not to broadcast opinions or accumulate followers, but to coordinate information, capital, and collective belief. Success is measured less by engagement metrics and more by signal quality and value flow.
Viewed through this lens, crypto may have already found its most compelling native social platform, just not in the form many expected. Prediction markets such as Polymarket act as social coordination engines. They gather meaning, surface collective intelligence, and transform discourse into likely outcomes. It is crucial that this model is not a copy of Web2 social media. It does not rely on advertising, algorithmic outrage or attention-grabbing. And it has shown relevance beyond a purely crypto-native audience.
But social financial networks are only the first wave of what crypto can unlock. Blockchains make certain end-user experiences possible in a way that Web2 rails simply don’t, and speculation is just the most legible early expression of that. Polymarket transforms conversation into responsible faith. Products like FOMO show how commerce itself can become social, with transparency, shared context and real-time feedback loops built into the graph.
The bigger opportunity goes far beyond a social + market equation. They are social systems where ownership, identity and monetization are native rather than hard-wired. Digital ownership can turn content and status into lasting assets. Programmable incentives can align creators, curators, and communities around long-term behavior rather than short-term extraction. Onchain coordination can unlock new group behaviors, from collective funding to shared membership, shared governance and shared upside. The point is not that crypto makes social cheaper or more open, but rather it expands the design space of what social networks can be.
A reset, not an obituary
Declaring cryptosocial “dead” misses the point. What has been completed is a particular vision of Web3 social, one that assumed that older social media could be recreated on crypto rails with better incentives and better values.
What remains is a harder, more grounded challenge: identifying where crypto enables forms of social coordination that were previously impossible. Capital formation, information markets, community-owned infrastructure, and new mechanisms for aligning incentives all remain open design spaces. Crypto social is not going away. It is losing its earliest assumptions.
One reason the “dead” narrative feels premature is that we may have been looking for the next crypto-social breakout in the wrong place. Moltbook is a deliberately strange experiment: a social network designed primarily for AI agents, with humans as observers. In a matter of days, tens of thousands of agents have reportedly invented new behaviors that appear eerily social, created religions, organized governance, published manifestos, and even experimented with privacy and encryption.
The surprising part is that watching it has been engaging for people precisely because it feels like observing a new social class forming in real time, negotiating norms, status and even income strategies, sometimes explicitly trying to avoid human readability. It is too soon to know whether this is a durable phenomenon or a passing narrative, but it is a bold reminder that new forms of social can emerge as the participants, incentives and constraints change. If AI agents increasingly need to act and coordinate across the digital world, blockchains are a natural substrate for them to do so.
For now, it turns out that the cryptosocial obituary was written for the wrong thing.
Long live crypto social!
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