BNB Chain Spotlight: CyberConnect

Social Media, Web3 Style

For the final edition of November's Project Spotlights, our team sat down with the creators of CyberConnect and Link3 - a decentralized social network protocol. It aims to give users custody of their social data while also creating powerful tools for Web3 developers to build social networking features. Read ahead to learn more and get connected with CyberConnect!

Please describe CyberConnect for those unfamiliar with it. What's your vision and mission?

CyberConnect is a decentralized social network protocol that helps Web3 applications bootstrap network effects and build meaningful social experiences while empowering users to truly own and monetize their social data and contents.

The protocol defines a Social Data Network to enable users in storing, managing and monetizing their social data at scale in a decentralized manner, as well as the Interest Graph Engine which provides a data pipeline and an analytics platform powering valuable insights into Web3 social data.

CyberConnect protocol was launched in November 2021, as the first social graph protocol published. Within the first 7 months since the launch, we have accumulated 1.5m users, and 22.3m connections, effectively making us the biggest decentralized social graph in the market. CyberConnect API has been called 130m times.

Developers - can integrate with us easily with two lines of codes. Fast forward bootstrapping and build upon it with agility for quick iterations. All without the need for dedicated backend data servers.

Users - can own digital social connections as easy and portable as owning an ERC20 token. Reclaim their sovereignty over social data, and how, where, and for what the data is used.

Social connections aggregated to addresses lead to holistic digital identities. Together with our democratized indexing system, this gives connections a whole new multitude of meanings and brings out data value like never before.

Our mission is to connect everyone on Web3 and let everyone has meaningful connections and identities. And our vision is a truly connected and decentralized Web with ownership for everyone and meaning for every connection.

What can you tell us about Link3?

We also have flagship product Link3.to, proudly built on CyberConnect. Link3.to is a Web3 social network of verifiable identities and a community hub where teams build meaningful relationships with community members.

Aggregating both on-chain and off-chain data, the Link3 profile page serves as your holistic identity enabling trustworthy networking and meaningful connections among users and organizations.

With Link3, users will have their holistic identities to present themselves in a more complete and credible manner, easily build trust with new connections and be more discoverable in the network to get connected with the right people. For organizations, Link3 could be the all-in-one link that helps the community discover everything about the project in one place.

Link3’s latest feature is its Event Planner, which is the world’s biggest Web3 AMA platform and provides a powerful toolkit to enable teams to build meaningful relationships with community members through Web3-native events. With Link3 events, projects and teams can upgrade the same old Twitter Spaces and Discord AMAs to Web3 native events and streamline the events organization, analysis, SBT issuance, and reward distribution to supercharge community engagement. Since the features launched in late September, there have been 1,501 events hosted on Link3 with 1,172,225 participants joining.

When was the idea behind CyberConnect and what led to it?

CyberConnect was born with the mission and vision mentioned above, which are a natural progression of what the team has in the previous ventures of Lino and DLive (see below.)

Tell us about your team's background.

We are a Silicon Valley-based serial entrepreneurial team, Berkeley/NYU/Google/Facebook, with 7 years of long-term commitment to social, Web3 and blockchain.

In 2017, the same team founded Lino blockchain and built DLive.tv, the biggest blockchain-based live streaming platform. We achieved more than 1 million daily active users for DLive and exclusively partnered with PewDiePie, the No.1 YouTuber. Lino and DLive were acquired by BitTorrent in early 2020.

Lino and DLive was our venture to build the infrastructure for a better content economy and ultimately for meaningful social experiences.

The same ethos got us here for CyberConnect.

What are the main advantages of CyberConnect for users, compared to a similar project from a mainstream financial market?

• Self-Sovereign: We return the ownership and utilities of social graph data back to users. Only users should have autonomy over how, where, and for what their data is used.
• Portable: Interoperability is key to a truly open web. We empower everyone to travel between apps with their own social graph as part of their Web3 identity.
• Composable and bootstrapping: We created social data standard to improve interoperability. Our Interest Graph Engine and the portable social graphs let developers tap into the rich data resources with one click and never have to start from zero again.
• Creator Monetization: Our smart contracts empower content creators to easily engage with crypto-native communities, gated events, and monetize their content and social capital.

Compared to other projects in crypto.

1. We build for the abundance of social data with both on-chain&off-chain solutions - The purely smart-contract-based protocols for Web3 social are built to carry the value of social connections in scarcity-driven systems. Think of DAOs, NFTs - it is the exclusiveness and limitedness here that generate value. However, in a user-centric Web3 where everyone is able and encouraged to build connections and generate content, abundance and dynamic could be the defining feature sometimes.
   
   We believe a killer Web3 social app for mass adoption must adopt a hybrid solution for both scarce values capturing and also economically viable mutability. CyberConnect provides on-chain smart contracts plus optional blockchain-agnostic and gas-efficient protocol to support such abundant and highly dynamic user-centric social data, all while keeping the promise of user ownership and portability.
2. We are blockchain agnostic - Current social protocols are also by design tied to a certain blockchain. Some deploy its own blockchain upon which they build social functions. We think it limits their ability to scale across Web3, whereas our blockchain-agnostic design enables a truly Web3 social experience that hinges on interoperability.
3. We are the first and have long-tested conviction - We also have the first-mover advantage in being the very first published social graph protocol. We now have the largest connection data with 1.5m users and 22.3m connections, we support Ethereum, BNB Chain, Polygon, NEAR, and Solana. Our team also has an unparalleled track record, a longstanding and unswerving vision for social and Web3, tested and proven by 7 years in the industry, and our previous project DLive, the biggest blockchain-based live streaming platform which was acquired by BitTorrent in 2020.
4. We are product-driven and have provided real utilities and use cases for Web3 users and organizations - Web3 social cannot be just a map looking for territories. It is essential of us to pioneer and find real use cases where users can naturally and meaningfully engage with each other in Web3-native ways and accumulate social data that can contribute to holistic decentralized identities. Our product Link3 has succeeded in validating such a proposition by having 18,000 Unique Active Wallets interacting with CyberConnect protocol in a 30 days period.

What is the security strategy of your project?

To further develop a better version of the cryptocurrency market with the highest level of security, we already had chosen Certik— the leading security-focused ranking platform — to perform extensive audits on our project. The audit is successfully evaluated. It is our honor to declare that our smart contracts are all secured. The report is published here:

https://www.certik.com/projects/cyberconnect

Let's say I want to start using CyberConnect. Where do I start? Where can I find some how-to guides?

For developers, please visit our Developer Center at https://docs.cyberconnect.me/

For general users, we believe the best way to understand CyberConnect protocol and Web3, in general, is to simply play and use it. Link3.to is the best place to immediately jump into Web3 and start engaging with the top projects and building your decentralized, self-sovereign, verifiable and meaningful identity.

Why did you decide to migrate/build on the BNB Chain?

BNB Chain is one of the most vibrant, active, and welcoming blockchain ecosystems out there. We are constantly amazed and humbled by the vitality of the BNB Chain community and their passion for a truly decentralized Web3. It is the place to build with a great shared vision and also a place to build with quick iteration to actually create utility and use cases for real users. It is the place to play the long game and also be the bridge for crypto’s mass adoption.

What do you hope to see next from the BNB Chain community?

We encourage all developers building with BNB chain to consider how to leverage the robust data & API that our decentralized social graph protocol provides in order to build the most dynamic, engaging, and personalized Web3 experience for users. The use cases of a social graph are not limited to merely social projects, but any project that can benefit from having better understanding of their users’ social & on-chain behavior. With our smart contracts that provide Profile NFTs, Subscription NFTs, and Essence NFTs, developers are able to build experiences that come with on-chain identity curation & aggregation as well as on-chain monetization methods.

On the product end, projects in the BNB chain community are able to leverage Link3 as a bridge between them and their communities - enabled via verified profiles, event hosting, and proof-of-participation sbt issuance.

Users are able to tap into Link3 to have a better view of events happening in Web3 & interact in a verifiable way with Web3 projects.

Where do you position your brand in the DeFi/NFT/GameFi / Metaverse space?

Social network protocol, data sovereignty, and holistic decentralized identities are the backbones of DeFi/NFT/GameFi/Metaverse. It is ultimately about the users and how they are meaningfully connected within the space. We are here to help build the social infrastructure that underpins a decentralized society and with us, all the DeFi/NFT/GameFi/Metaverse projects will be able to easily build social networks and experiences into their experiences that bring the whole digital experiences of every user to a different level.

What's your impression of BNB Chain so far?

BNB Chain is one of the most vibrant, active, and welcoming blockchain ecosystems out there. We are constantly amazed and humbled by the vitality of the BNB Chain community and their passion for a truly decentralized Web3. It is the place to build with a great shared vision and also a place to build with quick iteration to actually create utility and use cases for real users. It is the place to play the long game and also be the bridge for crypto’s mass adoption.

Please include roadmaps, whitepapers and all/any relevant links.

We will be releasing a new paper soon with some exciting news about the protocol updates and future roadmaps. Stay tuned.

To learn more and stay updated:

Link3.to/cyberconnect

link3.to/link3

🏠 Landing Page 🖇️ Link3 🎴 In the News 🖥 Developer Center

🚀 Discord ✍️ Mirror Blog 🐦 Twitter 🔮Branding Assets

What can you share about your tokenomic model?

To be introduced later down the roadmap.

Finally, are you planning any upcoming events?

CyberConnect&Link3 are currently running #Connect2022, our grand end-of-year celebration with our closest leading partners in Web3 and all our core communities.

#Connect2022 kicked off on Dec 12 and the first part is a series of online special Twitter/Discord events hosted by our dearest partners with their community to recap the key milestones of 2022 and look into 2023. The events series will wrap up as we enter 2023 and the finale of our #Connect2022 campaign, a get-together mega online Finale Event hosted by CyberConnect where our partners & industry leaders join and talk about the year we’ve been through.

During the campaign, we will be running huge Link3 profile access whitelisting with our partners along with the events. And participants can collect special event Web3 Status Tokens to be eligible for a final NFT minting and thus eligible to enter into grand raffles during the finale event and the first batch of Mystery Box perks will be revealed.

To learn more about the campaign please see our announcement blog here. And to stay updated and not miss out on any rewards, please follow us on Twitter CyberConnect & Link3.

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