In a 48-hour period at the end of January, the two largest decentralized social protocols underwent major leadership changes. Farcaster shifted stewardship of its protocol, flagship client, and leading Base launchpad, Clanker, to its primary infrastructure provider, Neynar. Concurrently, Lens Protocol announced its transition from Avara (the team behind Aave) to Mask Network.

The suddenness of these transitions was enough to rekindle a familiar debate: Do these restructurings by the sector’s most established projects signal a failure for crypto social? For many critics, the answer was an immediate yes. They argued that crypto social never moved beyond the crypto bubble, failed to compete meaningfully with Web2 giants, and ultimately…