Mas left Kyivstar on 31 July 2019. He had been with the company since 2015 as IT&Digital adviser to president Peter Chernyshov, and later headed the Innovation lab. Before that, he was co-organizer of iForum and host of the ‘Internet Business’ track—one of the people who set the tone for the Ukrainian internet industry.
The new project was called ‘Craft Social Networks’. It launched in August 2019, when a syndicate opened with a $100 entry fee. By November 2019 it had about 280 members. In the 2021 interview, Mas described the scale of the work: 60,000 lines of code, of which about 10,000 made it into the build, around ten active prototypes, and the most functional of them was number 77. At that time there were about 400 investors, the goal was 500, and weekly brainstorms drew 50 participants.
Decentralization against platform dictatorship
According to Mas, the main idea was decentralization. He put it briefly: ‘It’s easy to create a centralized system, hard to create a decentralized one.’ In the logic of the conversation, the difficulty lies not in writing code but in the structure of governance: a center always makes decisions more simply and quickly.
‘Any centralized system comes to dictatorship like Facebook.’
With this phrase Mas named the main fear behind the project: users gathered into one company sooner or later lose their voice. For 2021, this argument sounded quite contemporary, since discussions about the dominance of a few large platforms were going on all over the world at the time.
The theme of decentralization was not new to him. In April 2018 he wrote a column about the crisis of ‘blockchain dot-coms’—that is, startups that were tied to blockchain with the same expectations that were tied to internet companies in the late 1990s. The column appeared a year before Mas himself began building his own network.
Past projects behind him
Mas’s interest in networks arose long before Kyivstar. In 2000, the Ukrainian portal UAportal, whose investor was Alexander Soroka, launched ‘Tree of Friends’, the first social network on a Ukrainian portal. In the early 2000s he took part in the launch of Infostore, a photo hosting service that became prominent in the Ukrainian internet. On 4 December 2008, the militia seized Infostore’s servers, and the project closed. UAportal was sold in 2007 to the holding.
Working with investors also had a past. In 2012, Mail.ua, co-founded by Alexander Olshansky, was sold to Mail.ru for about $0.5 million. Olshansky remained one of the key people around ‘Craft Social Networks’, and later he was among the syndicate’s investors. It was Ivan Savchenko, not Mas, who created, and Forbes directly pointed out this error in a number of materials.
After death
Mas died on 6 October 2021. His brother Viktor was the first to report the death; his post appeared on 8 October, after which a wave of obituaries followed. On 11 and 12 October, retrospectives were published by LIGA and Forbes.
The fate of the project became a matter of dispute. On 29 November 2021, Larisa Mas, who described herself as Mas’s ex-wife, announced the project closed, while Bogdan Gnatyuk continued to run the syndicate. The next day the project was renamed Craf. It later received the name Chakloon. Bogdan Gnatyuk, owner of Maralles magazine, became the one who continued Mas’s work in practice, not only in conversations about it.
When republished the interview in October 2022, it did not report on the project’s fate in the year after the founder’s death. The text contains only references to materials from November 2021 about the dispute over his legacy.
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