Ep.2 [EN]: Wilson: Managing the social relationship as assets with Cyberconnect / 用 Cyberconnect 管理你的社交关系资产
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You are now listening to Hotlong. I'm the host, Mabel Zhang. This show attempts to shed light on the broader Web3 community. The guests will include Web3 operators, investors, or ecosystem participants of other forms. The show will also have a special focus on the Asia-based Web3 world. Connect East and West. Enjoy the warmest Web3 conversation.

Hello everyone, welcome back to the new episode of Hotlong. Today we have the co-founder and CEO of CyberConnect, Wilson Wei, to join us. First of all, congratulations on the recent fundraise. It was great to have you here, Wilson. Thank you. Thank you, Mabel. Thanks everyone. Glad to be here. Great. So let's kick off with the purpose of the goals for this fundraise. Can you maybe share a little bit more about it?

Yeah, sure. So we recently just closed our Series A and it was led by Animoca Brand and Skynet Capital.

Also, we have a whole group of pretty selective and amazing investors joining us. For example, Delphi Digital, Protocol Labs, Tribe Capital, and so on and so on. The purpose of our Series A is mainly about getting us well prepared for whatever is coming in the future.

We're expanding the team and we have been expecting some kind of potential winter for the whole industry. So it's always better to be a little bit over prepared than less prepared for it. We are a little bit more of the conservative team since we are a serial entrepreneurial team.

But the general purpose is just to expand the team, make sure we have enough resources and a group of great investors backing us to help us achieve to build CyberConnect as the first go-to protocol for any application who want to build social experiences and bootstrap their network with the data that we have.

Previously, I had Ryan, who's your CTO. Well, now he's in charge of BD and whatnot here to talk about CyberConnect. But I always like to ask people a little bit about their backstory. So I guess from your perspective, what was the inspiration for you guys to build CyberConnect? I think...

You know, when we were doing Lino Blockchain, our first startup back in like 2017, we were trying to build a decentralized content blockchain, mostly serving for content creators to get a better split cut from platforms. And also later on, we tried out the live.tv I bought on PewDiePie to the platform.

And after we got acquired, we took a whole year break and we have been thinking about what the future of Web3 social networks are going to look like. And then we take a look at what we have right now within the industry. We found that one thing that is very special and different

than Web2, it's an account system. Right now, users' account system on Web3, it's basically your wallet-based and address-based account system. You use your wallet to log into different platforms, different dApps, and you travel through all those different applications with the same group of assets and cryptos and NFTs that's within your wallet.

And that makes the whole user account system really as a user-centric user account system versus what we had on Web2 was kind of platform-owned account system. So each platform will have their own account system and there's no data interoperability. There's no assets. There's no asset interoperability, of course.

So that we found that this account system will potentially solve the problem for individual data ownership. And then when we look into that, we found that the most important social related data is actually the social graph data.

So because we had this experience with PewDiePie when we were onboarding PewDiePie from YouTube, PewDiePie had more than 100 billion followers on YouTube. It was great that he joins DLive exclusively, but one of the challenges that we had back then was trying to migrate his audience from YouTube.

And that's mostly because YouTubers, they do not actually own any of their social related data on any platforms. And that becomes a huge problem. And also, I believe that's also one of the fundamental reason why platforms are put in a spot where they could actually manipulate users' data and also enforce a lot of

unfair kind of regulations or demonization policy against its user and creators. So that's when we actually start originating the idea of building CyberConnect to enable users to own those social graph data, especially if you have a large amount of

followers, that becomes a huge part of your social capital. Yeah, so that's how we started the whole idea. Right, so kind of coming back to this question,

about owning the social graph, I guess one general observation for a lot of the large social media like WeChat or some of the other things like Telegram is that these social graphs are highly private to the platform itself or obviously to the users themselves as well, right? So it's only of Tencent or of Telegram's interest to not share this with other people, right?

versus right now, CyberConnect obviously is more on the public side. People actually would let other people see the social graph they have. So how do you think about that? I'm sure you get this question a lot, but I figured that asking you some spicy question at the upfront will kind of warm up this conversation.

Thanks for that. I think I like it. First of all, we take privacy data seriously. But I think it really, it's about like where we're at, like which phase we're at right now within the industry. I think most likely we're gonna, right now, like on the market, you don't see

any popular social decentralized social media platforms out there yet. But I think and also there's no I am decentralized I am system like WeChat or Telegram yet. So our bet here is the more

more like the public related, social graph related platforms will come first and will generate a larger database compared to instant messages, for example. And then to the latest stage, we're going to at some point announce an encrypted version of user social graph

And I don't think like keeping the data private, owned by a platform would be a good reason for developers to just, you know,

um here you go here's the reason i'm protecting your data for you um and therefore i have to own your data and then turns into the facebook problem you know um they could do whatever they want with their data um no matter like without any disclosure um that that would that would uh make make web 3 you know fall into the same trap um um with web 2 so i don't think like um

Privacy is a reason for developers to just ignore the data ownership problem. But for now, CyberConnect's data is mostly publicly available. We think it's best to do it at the beginning because publicly accessible data would be much more composable for developers.

And definitely for lots of the platforms, those social graph data are supposed to be public and accessible by other developers and users. For example, your social graph data on Twitter, your social graph data on, let's say, Instagram. So, yeah, I'll say it's a process and we're taking it step by step. Yeah, so...

Two weeks back when I recorded the podcast with Harry from Project Galaxy, we actually talked about the same thing. I think the biggest issue is like if some data right now is publicly queryable, then

the monetization or ownership still doesn't go to the user because everyone else can access it. But like you said, this is probably something that would take a longer period of time to really accomplish. And then obviously right now, a lot of the relationship within Web3 world, if you're starting from here, is surrounded by asset or centered by asset, meaning the relationships are...

kind of formed around the assets that someone owned. And it is possible that people are fine with these type of data being public for a pretty long period of time. I don't think that's going to be an issue. Those data are not like a non-sensitive data. And I would say most of the social relationships that we establish online are non-sensitive.

And of course, there will be some kind of sensitive data which requires some kind of encryption. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Go ahead. Yeah. So you mentioned a little bit about monetization, like how important it is to enable users to monetize their data. I mean, in a lot of the cases, publicly accessible data, it's going to be hard for users to monetize them. But in our case, it's quite different because SosoGraph itself has a huge value.

It's your social capital. If you have, let's say, for example, if you have like 5 million followers on TikTok and if the next day you created a new account on, let's say, Instagram and with CyberConnect, you could have the same amount of followers on Instagram. And that's already a huge monetization buff for your account.

And that's what we call mobility of your social capital, which is essentially super important for all the influencers.

I think you got to a very interesting point, which is the social graph that you own essentially is your asset. So the way you monetize it is actually because this is portable. So then unlike for Web2, you have to rebuild the whole social...

social network and whatnot across different platforms but here like you can actually leverage this as a portable asset and then kind of just like do it get it everywhere which is actually pretty interesting um and i think like you know the reusability of the the asset is definitely what really um what three gets us to so i'm excited to see some of the actual use case when you guys try to

promote this to get to be used by other like you know larger influencers and whatnot so how have you guys been over the past few months in terms of like what you've been building some of the progresses and whatnot yeah we have been head sound like focusing on building and delivering

I mean, we have some huge upgrades on the protocol side. We upgraded our SDK and APIs, making it more developer friendly. We also launched a new dev center and we came up with a new product. It's called Link3, which could potentially be the portal of CyberConnect. And yeah.

And of course, we closed the Series A, which is important for us. Right. So I guess what kind of role, I guess you hinted a little bit earlier, but what kind of role do you see CyberConnect plays among all the other decentralized applications and projects that you guys serve? I think CyberConnect, it's trying to be the social data layer for all the decentralized applications.

Decentralized applications require many different components from different protocols and chains. Most of the assets, let's take Ethereum ecosystem for an example. So a decentralized application built on top of Ethereum will have its assets natively live on the Ethereum blockchain.

And then when they're trying to read data through the blockchain, they will normally use some kind of API services, for example, the graph. And then if they're trying to read NFT data, a lot of them are actually using essentialized service provided by OpenSea.

And we're trying to be there whenever developers try to query any social related data, for example, your social graph. And also we not only provide the data, we also provided the data structure to enable developers to help users write data decentralize and own those data. So essentially the value prop here is to become the social

social general, like a social data layer for all the applications. And by design, our protocol is blockchain agnostic. And we currently support most of the EVMs and also Solana. Right. So you actually mentioned one good point, which is like, you know, creating APIs for some of the data sources. I was always kind of

I guess this is probably also another challenge that you guys have, but we're curious to hear what you have to say about this, which is for some of the data sources, what do they get if they offer that data access to you? Because obviously if they don't do it, they will just own the data themselves. But if they are doing, obviously they are going to exchange for something else that they can't have without integrating CyberConnect.

How do you think about that? I think, first of all, we think of it as what we're providing for developers first. So what we're providing them is right now we have more than 700,000 unique addresses and they're establishing, I think, more than 15 million connections between those addresses and unique users.

So those would be the first chunk of data that developers require and start bootstrapping their user experience. So for that, it helped developers to solve the co-starter problem. By co-starter problem, I mean, let's say a developer want to create a decentralized Instagram or Twitter.

The problem they will have is they have no data. They have no knowledge about any new coming users. And they will have to create a complicated onboarding process to try to gather users' interest. And some people do it during the mobile application era. A lot of them are trying to request access from your mobile contact, your address book.

to bootstrap the network. And now on Web3, we're the one that's providing you all those data. So that's a huge incentive for developers to integrate with us.

And then second of all, another thing that we're providing would be the recommendation engine. We're recommending users' social implicit connection data. That's how we call it. It would be based on users' on-chain and off-chain interactions, and then also based on your second degree or multiple degree connections to come up with those recommended friend lists.

And for developers to write data, incentivizing them to write data back to us would be like, since you are already reading the data from us, in the future, there will be some kind of fee structure. We don't know how exactly we're going to structure it yet, but I imagine there will be some kind of fee structure to help the protocol become self-sustainable. And by writing data back to the protocol, you'll be able to

you know, earn a portion of those data query fee that happened from all the other data courier. So there will be definitely some kind of like financial incentive for providing, you know, valuable data. And we're also thinking about some other ways to incentivize those behaviors. Like, for example, maybe a token incentive model. But yeah, those are still under discussion. Yeah.

other than just like, you know, financial incentives, I think another perspective is actually from more of an ideology perspective. I think developers should at least like

developers who claim to try to build decentralized applications should always think from a user's perspective and try to protect users' data instead of trying to get into the same route with Facebook. If there are another company or another product that is providing the same service as the prior product,

application which choose to centralize, own and store those data, not letting users to have the self-sovereignty over those data. I think most of the user will go back to, will choose the

the platform that actually allow them to own their own data. And then that would become a user pick scenario instead of we dealing with the developers only. We need to educate users how important it is and then user will fight back to push developers to integrate CyberConnect or use some other ways to try to own their own data.

That's definitely a very good point. I also realized that from your business development perspective, it's probably easier to tap into the

proprietary data sources when the applications are small. So one of the key questions then it's really becomes like whether you can identify the ones that would be extremely meaningful for your data source and then make sure that they integrate with you at the beginning so that like you can have

some sort of way to tap into that. So I think it's definitely easier to do that rather than, you know, try to convince OpenSea to share their API with you. That's just going to be a much harder kind of fight, I feel like.

Yeah, so what type of, I know Ryan last time he talked about that as well. I guess still want to iterate the question, what type of projects are you integrating with or about to integrate with? I know you have a pretty huge pipeline. Yeah, so we have now like, I think about 25 projects already integrated with us.

Some of them, like content platforms, will have a forum called Metaforo that's using it. They are also providing the forum for OpenDAO. That means OpenDAO's forum is also using us. And they have been writing good data to the protocol as well. And you mentioned Project Galaxy. Project Galaxy ID also integrated with us. So I

how you know now you're actually able to um use your pod galaxy id to follow other ids and that's powered by us um and um in the future we'll have more content related platforms and some games as well um yeah some of the games are pretty big and a lot of the game five projects are trying to become more and more social fire or or you know um

they find a way to create a community inside their app, so making their game more sticky and create a more

I'll say a more engaging community versus just playing games. And that would be the time when they will need us. And we already established some pretty good partnership with a lot of the games. And, you know, also plus Animoca being our lead investor in our Series A, that says a lot as well.

Absolutely. I think this is pretty cool. Excited to see what you guys unlock next.

You earlier mentioned link3.2. Is that how I should pronounce it? Yeah, yeah. So... Link3.2. Yeah, so... Yeah, I noticed this because yesterday I was chatting with Dialect and then I realized that their domain was also .2. Maybe this is like a new trend. So I wanted to...

Yeah, that's awesome too. I get that. IO is probably something pretty expensive. So yeah, like I want to talk a little bit more about that. It sounds like this is a pretty major initiative that you guys are exploring. So what is Link3? Yeah.

So first of all, I was just joking about being, you know, it was because of chip. Now we like the doc too, because it has a meaning like link three doc two slash cyber connect would be a website like a cyber connect web page, web three page. So the two actually has a meaning there. Yeah. So link three,

In a short sentence, we're building an all-in-one link for Web3 projects for Phase 1. You could actually compare it to Linktree. So, you know, we have been thinking a lot about how users and projects have a demand for a place where they could establish their status.

and represent them as a holistic identity in the Web3 world or even in the metaverse in the future. And that's always lacking right now within the space. You couldn't find any place, like one single place to find all the information about one person or one project.

And then we noticed that a lot of the projects within the space are already using Linktree on their Twitter bio to aggregate all the community links and all the other information, mostly links because that's what Linktree is about within one link. And then therefore we came up with the idea of

you know, creating a Web3 native better version to help Web3 native projects to display more content natively. And also there are a couple of key differentiations. The first one is every page on link three will be verified with a verified check. The verified check means we

we manually verify the official Twitter accounts of this page and making sure this page is owned by and added by the official owner of this project's official Twitter account, the owner of it. And then in that way, we could prevent a lot of the phishing links and scams.

which in the case of Stappen or Galaxy or so many other projects, if you search their project on Twitter, you will find a whole bunch of other fake projects on Twitter. And that's how people get scammed. And then the second differentiation is retrieving content. Like Linktree right now only supports links. We support a lot more than links. We show off your...

industry sector of the blockchain that you support. If you listed a token, we show off your tokens with the price as well. You could post all the links you like. You could post mirror, medium. You could feature any tweets that you like. You could show off your teams there. You could show off your investor backers there.

So it's much more than just links. It's a better way for projects to show off themselves in one place. And then the third differentiation would be the part that is powered by CyberConnect. So we enable users to follow our projects pages.

And that's based on CyberConnect protocol. And in that way, projects could start super early on to collect their community's address and also form a Web3 native communities based on those addresses. They could in the future potentially run any kind of campaigns that's related to addresses.

It could be a token-cated campaign, it could be airdrops, it could be anything. So that's very different than Twitter as well. It's another incentive for projects to display them on their Twitter bio. And finally, the last differentiation point with Linktree is data ownership.

The same structure with CyberConnect, it's also powered by CyberConnect. We store everything on IPFS and Ceramic. So those data are owned by users and also will have interoperability across platforms. So who are the expected users in the early days? So right now in phase one, we're only onboarding projects.

And then probably by the end of June, we're going to announce the individual version, individual page. But it's going to be under testing period as well. So we'll have some kind of like the invitation only period. Got it. So you mentioned some of the points that is differentiated from

I guess, Linktree or some of the other products. I guess from the user perspective, what would be really the better experience if they use this versus use some sort of other Web2 product? LinkedIn? Oh, wait, LinkedIn? Yeah, if we're talking about from the user's perspective, the closest project that I could think of would be LinkedIn.

But we're not going to get into that super professional and recruiter route. I think for users, this would be even like their Web3 passport. So we think about, first of all, the first step would be having projects to invite their community members to join us.

And we're also brainstorming a section on the project page, which might be called

top contributors board or top community members board something like that to recognize uh community contributors and then um let's say a project display like like 20 of them and then you could click on any one of them and go to their individual page and then for users page uh

Of course, you could decorate it with whatever NFTs that you own. And of course, you could show off all the links. And there will be more Web3 native information as well. For example, maybe if you want to show off the tokens that you are holding or the tokens that you are ruling for, you could do it. And another key differentiation would be how users are building their

Web3 community status, like showing off your badges, your

on-chain credentials from Galaxy, your POAP badges, and some other achievements that you made in communities. I think that's pretty important for any community members to come up with a profile that could show off all the status and achievements that I want to show off. And essentially, it could become really a personal profile

status profile or like a personal passport. And I could imagine people using it to apply for a wire list in the future, maybe apply for jobs or use that for application for like, let's say, joining Fence with benefits, that kind of DAO. Yeah. And then if we have more users, it will also become

It also becomes a place where you could search for other users because here is a place where everyone has a real identity and you can see their achievements and records of their history. Not necessarily transactional records, but more like social-related.

So, when it becomes a place for, you know, if you are looking for someone from the projects, you could find them on Link3. If you're looking for job opportunity, you could find projects on Link3. It becomes where we're actually connecting everyone on Web3 with their real identity, not like real life identity, with a real meaningful identity. That's what I meant.

I think it has a huge potential. Right now, all addresses or users within the space is so messy because everything is address-based. It's understandable because right now within the industry, most of the application and use cases are around transactional stuff.

But if we lean more into gamify or gaming in general, and also social networking, we're going to need an identity on top of the address, you know, a username, a profile, achievements, a real holistic identity.

And they will need a place to establish those identity and also somehow connected with each other. And that's a whole new network. Right. I think like what you mentioned, it's quite interesting here because you are now creating this product and ask people to accumulate some actually meaningful data here on top because I would assume...

let's say in the past, like you guys ran some campaigns and say like, if you follow someone and you'll get a badge, but for this is, this is probably going to be more based on more organic growth in terms of like, who's going to follow who's link, link to, I mean, link three to profile. And also these, these new actions people do on top of these pages are going to be

kind of credentials accumulated or social graph accumulated to CyberConnect, which I thought could be an interesting approach. I mean, the way you read it as a on-chain resume, it's something definitely quite interesting. So is it, would it be safe to say all the data relatively that are loaded on top of this page are relatively verifiable because those are

Those are on-chain. I mean, it'd be great if 100% of those data are verifiable, but that's not going to be the case because there are still a lot of meaningful information that a user or a project want to display that's not fully built on top of any blockchains. For example, if you display a link for your medium block, it won't be verifiable.

it won't be trustless at least, we'll have to query those data from Medium. Right, right, right. Yeah, that's for sure. Yeah, but a lot of the data that differentiate us from other projects would be the verifiable data. For example,

the credential that you earn, the trust. Recently, we saw an amazing essay written by Vitalik talking about the soulbound token. And that concept, it's actually pretty much matching with what we're building right now. So we're

yeah we're pretty excited and they talk about how credentials and reputations are important for a social society in general, for a meaningful society. And then yeah a lot of those things will be verifiable

Yeah. Yeah, no, one of the use case that I thought of could be very interesting is that let's say some projects claims that another group of investors invested in them. And then these investors also have a profile on Link3. And then like, you know, this data can be verified by the

by the investors on Chang so that like this, this relationship, this is not a following relationship, right? This is a investor, um, portfolio relationship and that can be accumulated. And this is something that's absolutely valuable because it previously, previously this was, um,

relationship existing in the real world it's not on Chang but then somehow you can leverage this as a gateway for such information to get it on Chang yeah I think that's definitely something we're having to think about that's

There are generally two ways to do it. One, it's how we're establishing connection. We do it with IPFS and Ceramic. Another route would be we establish a token which might not be transferable to represent the relationship and endorsement. But we're still brainstorming on that.

Yeah, no, I think this is definitely a kind of a milestone. So if this actually takes off and then can accumulate some data on top of what people do with this profile creating process, then I think the data starting to be accumulated on top of CyberConnect will be

More or less, most of them are going to be very valuable behavioral data. It's not going to be just like follow myself or follow you or whatever, because that's a lot of those. There are a lot of noises within those social graph. But like here, maybe there will be some interesting behavior inspired from there. And then like you and then you can actually kind of transport some of the behavior.

you know previously harder to verify type of social social relationship into this so i make i'm definitely excited about this yeah absolutely yeah so what are the some of the upcoming plans for you guys in the next couple months um i mean for for cyber connect uh as a protocol we try to integrate uh on board as many partners projects as possible um

And we have more than about like actually a little bit more than 100 projects in the pipeline right now. And hopefully within the next couple of months, we can onboard a lot of them. And then for Link3, we just launched it like last week.

So it's kind of still under beta and also it's invitation only. But if you guys want to check it out, just go to link3.2 and then sign up for the waitlist. For link3 in the next couple months, first of all, we're going to onboard more than 100 projects, I think.

And then that will help us generate a pretty good amount of organic traffic because those projects will pretty likely to display them within their community or social media platforms. And then another major milestone would be launch the personal version of Link3 page and onboard

individuals to the platform and start helping them to create this like universal passport or identity page and start making those connections. I think those are the two major things that we have been working on and we'll be, I'm sorry, we'll work on in the next couple of months.

Development-wise, we have a lot. But just check out our website and we'll update the roadmap pretty soon. Meanwhile, I think we also spent a fair amount of time trying to design a good tokenomics system for CyberConnect. Cool. That's awesome. Exciting to hear all of these.

I think that's it for today. I think we covered quite a bit of interesting stuff. I definitely would love to check in with you again, maybe six months or so and see how link 3.2 goes. I'm sure there will be some of the new opportunities and challenges emerge at the same time. Great talking to you today. Awesome. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you for your time, Mabel. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.