Dialogue with CyberConnect Founder: How to Build a Decentralized Social Ecosystem and Create Phenomenal Web3 Products?

Guest: Wilson, Founder of CyberConnect

Interviewed by: Grapefruit, ChainCatcher

As of July 5, the cumulative minting volume of CyberProfile NFTs has reached 1.243 million, with the number of wallet addresses holding them at 1.218 million. CyberConnect has become the first truly million-user Web3 social network protocol.

Founded in 2021, CyberConnect aims to return the ownership and usage rights of social data to users, enabling them to truly own and control their social identity, relationships, content, and monetization methods on social networks. It has built an account system centered around CyberProfile NFTs, serving as users' passport in the Web3 world.

Currently, CyberConnect's development roadmap is mainly divided into protocol layer and ecological applications. The former provides developers with a foundational infrastructure for building applications or integrating social data, while the latter consists of social ecological applications developed based on the protocol. There are already over 50 applications built or integrated, with Link3 being one of the representative products.

As the first application built on the CyberProfile NFT scenario, Link3 has become the flagship product within the CyberConnect ecosystem and a phenomenal product in the Web3 social space. Currently, Link3 has gathered over 2,200 enterprises and organizations in the crypto field, including Messari and dYdX. Additionally, the platform aggregates products and features such as Event (event calendar), Post (posts), Fanclub, and W3ST.

According to CyberConnect founder Wilson, the CyberConnect protocol will release its latest version in the next two months, featuring significant upgrades and improvements. The upcoming account abstraction wallet, CyberWallet, aims to enhance the usability of Web3 products and the multi-chain compatibility of CyberConnect accounts, and Link3 will also launch interesting new features.

Moreover, he believes that due to the significant changes in underlying infrastructure, the Web3 world will inevitably give rise to a new social way based on virtual networks, and protocols and product ecosystems similar to CyberConnect will be the foundation of this new generation of social interaction.

What stories lie behind CyberConnect's journey from zero to a million users in the decentralized social network space? What new features will the product upgrades bring? Will the playability of the Link3 product that users care about improve? What is the development status of the decentralized social track? To explore these questions, ChainCatcher invited CyberConnect founder Wilson for a discussion.

CyberConnect Product Positioning and Advantages of the New Upgrade Version

1. ChainCatcher: Could you introduce the product positioning of CyberConnect? What was the original intention behind founding the project? What is the status of the team members?

Wilson: Regarding product positioning, CyberConnect currently plans to create a centralized account system, similar to Login with CyberConnect. Behind this is a complete user account system, including username, social relationship data (or graph data), published content, monetization, identity badge collection, and various social data related to accounts.

As a multi-chain account system, CyberConnect will have a complete set of smart contracts around CyberAccounts to write various data formats, including on-chain and off-chain, storing content related to social data. In the future, when connected to different applications through CyberConnect, users can directly bring the data from their account system to other applications, such as friend data, identity data, content articles, and even monetization channels, and continue to enrich their identity data in different applications.

The reason for this project is that we found that the entire Web3 world emphasizes asset ownership, but many valuable personal data ownership issues have not been resolved, and no one has worked on a complete Login system. We believe that the most important aspect of data ownership should start with relational graph data. For example, if a KOL accumulates millions of followers on a platform, how can they truly own this data and their followers, and carry these relationships to different platforms for continued use and monetization?

Additionally, CyberConnect is related to our previous blockchain project.

Our team started in blockchain entrepreneurship in 2017, creating Lino Blockchain, which raised nearly $20 million and developed the decentralized video game live streaming platform DLive, achieving millions of daily active users before being fully acquired by BitTorrent in 2019.

After the acquisition, we began to research the bottlenecks in the cryptocurrency industry and where the breakthrough points were. We ultimately concluded that social interaction might be a very important aspect. However, we found that the data issue had not been resolved, so we decided to create a decentralized social graph protocol to allow creators to receive a more reasonable value distribution.

Currently, the team members are quite globalized.

2. ChainCatcher: In the simplified white paper released in May, it mentioned that CyberConnect has three core components: CyberProfile (decentralized digital identity), CyberConnect Social Graph (social relationship graph), and CyberWallet. What roles do these three play in the CyberConnect protocol, and what is their relationship? What stage are the products in?

Wilson: CyberConnect is expected to release its latest upgraded version in July or August, which will feature significant changes compared to the current version.

In the latest version, CyberProfile and CyberWallet will be equally important products. Profile NFTs will become a standalone username product to connect user account information.

CyberAccount is a new name for the account system (the specific name has not yet been finalized), and Accounts will be a smart contract wallet representing a person's account, facilitating communication and interaction between accounts.

This system will support two login methods: the first is traditional EOA login, where users can log in directly with MetaMask. If they do not have a CyberAccount, an account will be automatically registered for them. This process essentially helps users deploy a smart contract wallet on-chain and includes some contracts needed for this account system. The second method allows users to register a smart contract wallet using Web2 methods like email, which lowers the user threshold.

Additionally, the relationship between the wallet and identity will be more unified, with all information converging under the CyberAccount. This is essentially ERC-4337 account abstraction, and the written social graph can include data content, various monetization channels, and SBT (referred to as W3ST, Web3 Status Token within the CyberConnect system). These content data can be divided into on-chain and off-chain parts, allowing developers to choose based on their needs. For example, SBT, Content NFTs, or content that requires monetization can be stored on-chain, while ordinary follow relationships and data that do not need to be on-chain can be stored off-chain on Arweave or BNB Greenfield.

3. ChainCatcher: Currently, there are various on-chain wallets in the crypto market, most of which support users entering CyberConnect-related applications. Why does CyberConnect need to create a separate wallet? How does it differ from common wallets like MetaMask?**

Wilson: The core of CyberWallet is to build the CyberAccount account system.

CyberWallet is defined differently from wallets like MetaMask; it is not an EOA wallet, but users can log in and register a smart contract wallet directly using an EOA wallet. This relationship can be simply understood as users can now use their phone numbers to register a smart contract wallet.

The difference is that users' heavy asset portions can continue to use their existing EOA wallets to fulfill their original obligations and functions. This new smart contract wallet is primarily used for social interactions or interactions within games, providing various conveniences. User onboarding is very easy, as they do not need to remember complex mnemonic phrases and can optimize multi-chain interaction gas payments. For example, in the future, users can use CYBER tokens to help pay various on-chain fees. This means users do not need to buy Matic for interactions on Polygon or BNB for interactions on BNB Chain, simplifying the process. In this account system, users will have a very smooth experience using products without needing to focus on which blockchain they are on or requiring extensive financial knowledge to interact with Web3 ecological applications.

Furthermore, this smart contract wallet has a significant difference from ordinary wallets; it also includes a complete set of Social Graph features. Previously, competition among ordinary wallets mainly focused on user base, TVL (total value locked), etc., while smart contract wallets focus more on user network data, such as how the data network effect works, how many people are using it, how many meaningful relationships users have generated, and how much content has been accumulated in this account system. This data is valuable to application parties, similar to logging into other applications using a Facebook account or logging into Honor of Kings using WeChat, bringing friend relationships along.

CyberWallet is more open; not only do accounts belong to users, but they can also selectively bring their friends, content, etc., into certain applications, continuing to fill, write, record, read, and monetize within each application. Therefore, when third-party developers choose which account system to integrate, data networks may become a competitive point. In the early stages, ordinary wallets focused more on adoption, capital accumulation, or comparing who has more DeFi features, while smart wallets focus on usability and efficient data architecture.

Regarding the CyberWallet product, we will first invite developers for testing, and once the features are perfected, it will be opened to the ecosystem and users. The first version is expected to launch around July or August.

4. ChainCatcher: In the social track, both CyberConnect and Lens use NFTs to represent profiles, and users often compare the two. What are the differences in product design and operational strategies between the two?**

Wilson: Firstly, the latest upgraded version of CyberConnect mentioned earlier is significantly different from Lens. Lens is still entirely based on an NFT social graph, while CyberConnect has already developed a complete and user-friendly universal account system.

Specifically, CyberConnect has unique advantages for ordinary users and those deeply involved in high-frequency operations and multi-chain collaboration. In terms of protocol design, CyberConnect focuses more on user usability and the future market landscape, firmly believing that the future is multi-chain, while Lens is designed for a single chain. In terms of product usability, CyberConnect has an advantage in making it easier for ordinary users, users without wallets, and existing users to interact with various applications. Additionally, CyberConnect was created nearly a year earlier than Lens, and in terms of data, the overall activity of applications is also higher than that of Lens.

5. ChainCatcher: Is it correct to say that CyberConnect focuses more on C-end users, while Lens provides products and functions that are more suitable for developers?**

Wilson: Not really. In fact, the issues that CyberConnect focuses on and aims to solve are also concerns for developers. From the perspective of future predictions, developers are more willing to accept multi-chain deployment, and from the industry's development landscape, multi-chain is an inevitable trend. Additionally, the issue of user usability directly affects the difficulty of user growth for developers in the future. Therefore, these issues are fundamentally problems that developers need to address. Ultimately, what developers care about is still the real needs of C-end users.

6. ChainCatcher: CyberConnect has personal profile NFTs (ccProfile), content NFTs (Essence), and subscriptions (SubscribeNFT). However, in terms of the number of minted NFTs, ccProfile is the most (with 1.243 million minted), while the other two NFTs are far below in both quantity and user attention. What causes the numerical differences among the three? How can user engagement in content creation and subscriptions be improved?

Wilson: The main reason for this difference is that the data currently counted is only on-chain data, while a large amount of social relationship and posting data is stored on Arweave or other decentralized platforms. This part of the data may not be visible to users, but these operations are actually very frequent.

The core reason for this approach is that not everything is suitable for being placed directly on-chain; otherwise, it would only increase the user's interaction costs without meaning. Users are more concerned about whether they own the data and whether the architecture is reasonable.

For example, a user's ordinary like or follow does not need to be on-chain. If these are placed on-chain, it would actually waste on-chain resources; whereas high-quality content is more suitable for being on-chain and can be turned into an NFT to encourage users to collect it.

CYBER Token Distribution and Impact

7. ChainCatcher: The CYBER token was publicly sold on Coinlist on May 18. What is the current situation after the token issuance? What are the plans for token empowerment and application?

Wilson: The CYBER token has not yet had its TGE (Token Generation Event) for the market. According to public information from Coinlist, the TGE should be around Q4. The entire CyberConnect ecosystem, whether for developers, application parties, or users, is in a very active state.

8. ChainCatcher: There have been many complaints from users in the Chinese community regarding this token sale. On one hand, Coinlist restricts Chinese users; on the other hand, many users have reported that their Coinlist accounts were banned due to improper operations related to the CYBER whitelist and winning users. Does CyberConnect have any explanation for this?**

Wilson: This is mainly a legal issue. Coinlist has a complete set of rules, including user prohibitions and whether identity verification is compliant, and CyberConnect can only execute according to Coinlist's official rules without any other operations. For the community, the most critical aspect for the platform is how to recognize each person's contributions to fairly conduct an airdrop based on user contributions in the future.

9. ChainCatcher: For users who cannot participate in the whitelist public sale, they are more concerned about the 12% community reward mentioned by the official, of which 20% (2.4% of the total CYBER tokens) will reward early community users. What was the original intention behind this distribution design? Besides tokens, what other incentive activities can early users participate in?**

Wilson: The original intention of this design is to hope that CyberConnect can achieve decentralization early on, distributing governance and ownership of the network. How to distribute it? ------ Based on users' contributions to the network to allocate tokens.

Early users can participate in platform activities such as Mystery Box (which currently has a floor price of over 0.4 ETH), Mini Shard NFT rewards, and SBT issuance. As development progresses, the incentive mechanisms will also continue to iterate.

Please pay attention to official information regarding how rewards will be distributed.

10. ChainCatcher: Regarding data changes, according to Dune, the growth in ccProfile NFT numbers was mainly concentrated in March this year, with a daily average minting volume of over 90,000. However, after the token announcement, both trading volume and user activity have declined. What are your thoughts on the changes in ccProfile data? Is there an impact from the expectations of airdrops?

Wilson: Firstly, regarding the data, CyberConnect is currently performing well and healthily. I personally do not believe that a decline in data growth from its peak is a bad thing; it is a normal product lifecycle issue. The current primary task is to further refine the protocol, and there are many developments underway for the Link3 application to make it genuinely fun and useful. In terms of data, I do not think there is a significant issue with the current data or the overall network activity. There are still tens of thousands of on-chain operations daily, and if off-chain operations are included, the number is even higher.

Currently, the protocol has about 100,000 DAUs, which is a good achievement in Web3 applications.

How will Link3 improve its playability in the future?

11. ChainCatcher: What was the original intention behind the creation of Link3, and what is its current development status?

Wilson: The initial idea for Link3 was to address a very simple scenario; we found that users had a demand for profiles (all in one link-in-bio) and wanted to create a profile owned by the users themselves. CyberConnect can realize these functions and productize them, which is the initial version of Link3. Currently, this function remains practical and popular, as recently dYdX added a Link3 profile link to its official Twitter bio.

Now, Link3 has certified and added over 2,200 crypto-native enterprise clients, including Messari, dYdX, BNB Chain, and Arbitrum. About 40% of users have already added their Link3 links to their social media profiles, such as Twitter bios. This shows that Link3 has become a simple, practical, and useful Web3 product.

Later, Link3 expanded to include features such as Post, Event, Fanclub, and W3ST, which was an exploration of what functions are genuinely needed by users in the crypto-native scenario, rather than just copying Twitter and moving Web2 to Web3.

The product philosophy of Link3 is to find real users and genuinely needed scenarios. For example, the attempt at the post (Post) feature arose from discovering that creators or KOLs had a need to publish long blogs or content; the Event (event calendar) feature was developed because there are various conferences in the market, but organizers cannot track the identities of specific attendees or create better interactive experiences with users.

In July, Link3 will launch a very interesting feature, so please pay attention to official updates.

12. ChainCatcher: Although Link3 is quite innovative in the Web3 social track, many users have provided feedback that the content aggregated on the Link3 product page is too much, making it hard to focus on key points. How do you view these evaluations?

Wilson: In fact, we were already aware that this could be a problem when we developed each feature. In the early stages of the product, continuous experimentation and user feedback are needed to gradually focus, which is a normal iterative process. Just like the social products everyone uses now, there were many chaotic features in the early stages, but they were gradually optimized and iterated, with some product features disappearing.

Currently, the content on the Link3 product includes user usage processes and onboarding, and it indeed does not clearly inform users what they can do upon entering. We are aware of this issue, but it requires time and market feedback to gradually adjust, optimize, and refine product features.

We have not completely focused the content on a specific feature. From another perspective, this is also a good thing; through this continuous exploration process, Link3 can find the biggest opportunities and the most user-demanded scenarios to dig deeper, which is a product development path I personally prefer.

13. ChainCatcher: Some users have reported that Link3 feels more like an advertising and marketing platform for projects, with relatively low playability, and that many events published in Event and Fanclub are merely tasks for the sake of tasks. How do you view Link3's playability?**

Wilson: The activities on Event are basically all initiated by third parties. The organizers launch activities, and our role is to provide support as a tool provider without much control; this is a market demand. The Fanclub will undergo an upgrade and redesign, with its core demand aligning with Link3's vision, aiming to find a market space that is large and interesting.

Link3 may not be a perfect application at this stage, and it is certainly not what we envisioned. However, we hope to find the optimal solution through continuous testing and iteration. We have been thinking about how to create a truly useful and indispensable product. In July, some new features launched by Link3 will address current issues.

14. ChainCatcher: As an infrastructure, the prosperity of the ecosystem and the activity of developers often serve as important indicators for the development prospects of a protocol. Although the CyberConnect official website shows that there are multiple ecological projects, besides the Link3 product, the awareness and user activity of other ecological applications are not high. What is CyberConnect's development strategy? What plans are there for the future?

Wilson: Firstly, we strongly support the development of projects within the ecosystem. Currently, some ecological projects are performing quite well, such as Readon, W3Space, Atem Network, Phaver, CyberTune, Clasp, and Wondera (which has not fully launched yet), with their real user data surpassing most Web3 applications. Additionally, five or six applications from the CyberConnect ecosystem are listed in the top 20 apps on the BNB Chain.

The main issue currently is that the Web3 social track has not yet produced particularly good, large-scale applications, which reflects the overall market situation and requires time to develop. In the social field, in terms of traffic and actual user numbers, Link3 should be the largest application by scale at present. However, objectively speaking, these products are still small and in their early stages, which is not a problem.

We will vigorously support some quality developers and applications within the ecosystem. For example, the Fanclub occasionally launches special recommendations to support the ecosystem, and after our promotion, CyberTune's daily data performance has been quite good. However, given the current industry situation, creating a truly killer product will require a lot of time, effort, and manpower.

Compared to other ecosystems, CyberConnect's ecosystem has advantages in application scenarios, user experience, and data performance.

Why is it difficult for Web3 social tracks to have breakout hits?

15. ChainCatcher: Currently, products in the Web3 social track are mainly based on infrastructures like CyberConnect, Lens, and Deso, with very few breakout applications. Even when some applications occasionally appear, their lifecycles are very short, such as Damus, which claimed to be a Twitter killer but lost popularity in less than a week. Many Web3 social products aspire to be decentralized versions of Twitter, Discord, or Instagram. Why is it so challenging for products in the decentralized social track to achieve breakout success? What is lacking for large-scale adoption?

Wilson: Firstly, social products, whether in Web3 or Web2, are inherently difficult to produce breakout hits. When was the last killer social product that emerged in Web2? About five years ago. This is because social products require large network effects, necessitating many attempts and patience. The last major social-type product created in the industry was actually the DLive live streaming platform, which is also our team's previous project, achieving over a million DAUs with exclusive live streams from the largest YouTube streamers.

However, Web3 provides an interesting and very different soil. For example, asset ownership changes the social dynamics; when individuals own assets, their social situations become different, and the richness of social scenarios increases significantly. For instance, social interactions during school may be relatively pure and not involve assets, but once entering society, external products like designer bags, luxury goods, cars, and houses can endow more social identities.

The soil provided by Web3 is good, but there are also many bottlenecks, which is what CyberConnect needs to address, such as user onboarding, data interoperability, data architecture construction, and how data is written and stored. The underlying network infrastructure is also addressing various bottlenecks, such as scalability and privacy issues that Layer 1, Layer 2, and Layer 3 need to solve.

With significant changes in underlying infrastructure, the Web3 world will inevitably give rise to a new social way based on virtual networks. Protocols and product ecosystems similar to CyberConnect will be the foundation of this new generation of social interaction.

16. ChainCatcher: Monetization of social applications is not only a problem in the decentralized social track but has also been a challenge for centralized applications like Soul, Zhihu, and Xiaohongshu. Currently, centralized social platforms still primarily monetize through advertising. What forms of monetization will users and applications have on the CyberConnect platform?

Wilson: Application parties will have their own monetization methods, and monetization through advertising is also possible. For example, the Reddit cryptocurrency community content section monetizes through advertising, issuing MOON tokens to its community members, allowing some projects to use MOON to buy banner placements, and the official will reward quality creators of content in that section with MOON. In this case, the beneficiaries are not only the platform operators, but users can also benefit, which is a change brought about by ownership. Regardless of the monetization model, it will inevitably be more beneficial for users and creators. These are also the better monetization methods that Web3 and CyberConnect are exploring for applications.

17. ChainCatcher: Although CyberConnect can generate income through ccProfile NFT payments, this still poses a barrier for users who are accustomed to free services, potentially affecting user entry into the ecosystem. How does the team balance this?

Wilson: For CyberConnect, the Profile NFT username registration fee is a revenue stream at the protocol level. However, this actually has no barriers; registering a Profile username is similar to using a phone number. Users can register a regular phone number for free, but if they want a nice phone number, they need to pay a high fee. This is a normal situation because quality names are limited resources. This is a freemium model, providing a low barrier while also generating some revenue for the protocol.

In the latest version, there will be more application scenarios for CYBER tokens.

However, for the entire CyberConnect protocol, the focus is more on token utility rather than profit-driven motives.

As for monetization methods for the Link3 application, there are many, such as the earlier attempt to enable a donate feature on certain posts, allowing users to tip while minting NFTs, but this is not our priority.