Oleksii Mas was born in Kyiv in 1974 and from the 1990s worked in banking, the internet and telecoms. In 2015 he became IT&Digital adviser to Petro Chernyshov, president of Kyivstar, and then headed the company's Innovation lab. On 31 July 2019 Mas left Kyivstar, and already that August he launched the first platform of the 'Craft Social Networks.' The project was to be financed through a syndicate, that is, a group of private investors who pool their money into a single project. The minimum contribution was $100. By 2021, according to, the team was working on the seventh generation of the networks.
A syndicate of 411 people
The number of participants grew quickly. In November 2019 the syndicate had around 280 people, one special project cited the figure 315, and in August 2021 Dziuba counted 411 investors. His own tally came to $58,326.55, or about 1.5 million hryvnias. The last contribution, $110, came in on 2 August 2021 from Pavlo Shylo.
The list of the first investors looked familiar to the Ukrainian internet. At number 4 was Oleksandr Olshansky, co-founder of Mail.ua, which was sold to Mail.ru in 2012 for around $0.5 million, and an investor in Infostore. At number 132 was Volodymyr Fedoryn, at number 229 Garyk Korogodsky, at number 500 Denys Dovhopoly. Two more participants were listed as 'secret investors,' and a titular investor who would represent the syndicate before the law never appeared.
Why people put money in
The participants themselves explained their contributions in different ways. Ihor Danylenko called his investment 'purely sporting interest,' comparing it to a bet with a bookmaker. Roman Liashko of the Kyiv Invest Club believes Mas 'rethought' crowdfunding, that is, raising money from a large number of people, and expects a horizon of five to ten years. Natalia Limonova believes in the author's passion for the project and allows that its direction may change.
Mas called the investors friends. Asked about a legal entity, he said he needed three more days, but by the time published he had still not answered. Dziuba did not hide his irony and summed it up thus:
'It looks as though Mas has gathered his own little sect.'
It matters that the takedown appeared two months before Mas's death, not after it. The tone of the piece was mocking, and the question of the project's succession was not raised in it. Two days later Mas responded to the publication in detail, and that response became the continuation of a discussion that Mas himself could no longer finish.
What happened next
On 6 October 2021, Oleksii Mas passed away. In November 2021 a dispute broke out over the project's fate: Larysa Mas, who in 2021 described herself as his former wife, declared the project closed. The syndicate continued to be run by Bohdan Hnatiuk, owner of Maralles, which by then numbered more than 400 participants. On 30 November the project was renamed Craf. Later the project that Hnatiuk continued became Chakloon.
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