A Deep Dive into CyberConnect

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Last week, we announced the CyberConnect Community Sale on CoinList, taking place on May 18th.

CyberConnect is one of the hottest projects in the Web3 social category, and is considered Web3’s earliest and biggest decentralized social network.

CyberConnect aims to challenge the status quo of profit-driven social media corporations by establishing a community-owned social network that offers users ultimate control over their digital lives, free from centralized and biased tech.

This week, we sat down with the CyberConnect team to learn more about the real world problems that CyberConnect solves, their target audience, use cases, token utility, and recent traction.

Let’s dive in.

1. To begin, what is CyberConnect and what real world problems does it solve?

CyberConnect envisions a world where we have ultimate control over our digital lives and identities, and where meaningful, long-lasting connections aren’t decided by centralized or biased tech. Today, this biased tech usually refers to the current social network landscape, which is dominated by a limited number of profit-driven corporations, whose primary focus is their own financial interests — not users and their ability to create value.

These platforms, which are often walled gardens that lock out developers and users from having any real sense of control, commonly exploit user data and manipulate content, communities, and users on a massive scale to maximize revenue. This rampant centralization of social network data creates an ecosystem that unfairly monetizes user data and hinders innovation, preventing developers from introducing new social products and features. Users and developers see these limitations in actions due to siloed data, closed systems and APIs, and the need to trust centralized parties who don’t have our best interests in mind when releasing new features.

CyberConnect, along with others in the decentralized social category, offers a solution to the limitations and common failures of centralized social media. As Web3’s earliest and biggest social network, CyberConnect enables developers to create social applications with intuitive and flexible user benefits built directly into the tech. Currently, this consists of three user-focused features: (1) CyberProfile, a decentralized identity standard that provides access to Web3; (2) CyberConnect Social Graph, which links your digital identity, data, content, and friends; and (3) CyberWallet, a smart contract wallet that provides an easy onboarding experience to Web3 social.

Together, CyberConnect’s features, products, and overall vision strive to create a future for social interactions where on-chain friends last forever.

2. What are the inherent use cases for CyberConnect’s native token, CYBER?

CYBER is CyberConnect protocol’s native utility and governance token; its goal is to give its community members and earliest adopters a way to convert their ongoing support and dedication into a token that will help guide the future of our protocol.  

How does that come to life? One way is CyberDAO, which is a core element to CyberConnect’s vision of building a user-owned and developer-friendly decentralized social network. CYBER will help provide a framework for CyberDAO, an independent, decentralized autonomous organization responsible for stewarding the protocol’s community development and ecosystem growth. CYBER holders/CyberDAO members will vote to determine the future use of its community treasury as well as all core upgrades to the protocol’s infrastructure.

  • A) Governance: CYBER token holders will vote on ‘CyberConnect Improvement Proposals’ aimed at sustainable and long-term success of the CyberConnect Protocol. Upcoming proposals include: activating a service fee for paid transactions across the protocol; changes to the service fee take rate; changes to the acceptable tokens for payment; expansion of the protocol to new blockchains; budget allocation for a developer grant program, community contributor program, offline and online community events for ecosystem development purposes.
  • B) Payment for CyberProfile Minting: CyberProfile is the entry point for developers and users to the CyberConnect ecosystem, and to the decentralized social space overall. CYBER will be used as the de-facto currency for payment when purchasing CyberProfile with a premium username.
  • C) Payment for Gas in CyberWallet: CyberConnect’s forthcoming smart-contract wallet solution, CyberWallet, will provide users with a seamless onboarding experience to Web3 social without the need for seed phrases or acquiring native tokens for the purposes of gas fees across different blockchains. CYBER will be used as the means of payment for gas fees for all transactions within CyberWallet across EVM-compatible chains. CyberWallet is still under development and will be available on Ethereum, Optimism, Arbitrum, BNB Chain, Base, and Polygon.

3. What benefits will the CYBER token bring to its users?

Currently, almost all of the value generated by users and creators on a social application is captured by a handful of companies that own and control those applications. This creates a dangerous precedent for the open web where the application with the most users is able to build walled gardens, cutting off access to user social data for third-party developers, ultimately establishing a monopoly over online interactions. Blockchains and token-powered protocols provide a decentralized alternative to this. As the native currency on CyberConnect protocol and its ecosystem dApps, CYBER will empower users with a multitude of Web3-native social applications to co-own their favorite applications and benefit from the growth and success of that platform.

4. How does CyberConnect differ from other similar projects in the market?

CyberConnect’s unique vision sets itself apart from what’s quickly becoming a crowded and competitive decentralized social ecosystem. For starters, CyberConnect is Web3’s earliest and biggest decentralized social network. As of April 2023, the protocol has over 900k user profiles and 327k monthly active users who have conducted more than 8.3M transactions (source), making it the leading social platform for users and developers to experience Web3 social applications.

There are already over 50 projects that are using CyberConnect to build social features for a variety of use cases, such as community-owned social networks, marketplaces, content curation and discovery tools. While similar projects in the market are almost exclusively designed for powering Web3 clones of traditional social media platforms like Twitter or Instagram, CyberConnect’s unique protocol design empowers developers to introduce Web3 technology through a variety of use cases that solve multiple problems for users and developers.

Finally, CyberConnect protocol is the only multi-chain Web3-social protocol already deployed on Ethereum, BNB Chain, and Polygon, with support for more EVM-compatible chains coming soon. This level of flexibility and interoperability means developers will have the opportunity to onboard a growing decentralized social ecosystem. CyberConnect’s unique hybrid storage solution that combines on and off-chain decentralized data storage allows developers flexibility while serving users with a seamless product experience that matches and exceeds the Web2 social experience.

5. What is the total supply of CYBER and is there a limit on its issuance?

The total supply of CYBER is fixed at 100,000,000 tokens.

6. What is the governance model for CyberConnect, and how will decisions be determined about its future development?

CyberConnect is on a mission to create long-lasting on-chain connections. It is committed to building a new paradigm for social networking on the internet founded upon Web3’s guiding principles of permissionless access, radical transparency, and self-sovereignty of user identity and social data.  

Through CyberDAO, CyberConnect will provide an open, trustless, and neutral gateway for stakeholders to shape the future of its ecosystem, community, and technical infrastructure. In doing so, it will entrust upon CYBER holders a self-sustainable infrastructure to take CyberConnect towards the next evolution of social networking on the internet, where users of a network directly benefit from the value they create themselves. Upon the formation of CyberDAO, CYBER holders will vote upon the processes the DAO will follow to execute an efficient and transparent governance model.

7. Describe your target audience, and how CyberConnect helps users onboard to Web3?

CyberConnect’s target audience is likely many of the same people reading this: users of traditional social media applications (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) who are looking for better alternatives. CyberConnect is for anyone, from content creators to developers, who want to own and build more value over their online identities and the social applications they choose to use. Those who want to begin creating and connecting in a decentralized social environment can sign up for CyberConnect’s dApps for a more valuable and dynamic online experience. If you're a developer looking to build innovative dApps for the next generation of users, you can utilize CyberConnect’s Web3-native infrastructure to power existing applications — or create new ones.

CyberConnect helps onboard users to Web3 — a process in need of major improvement and simplification — by providing a censorship-resistant, on-chain identity (CyberProfile)  that allows them to travel across social applications seamlessly without having to recreate their network. CyberProfiles help reduce the friction around endless social log-ins and scattered social data through a single, user-owned asset that can’t be altered by a centralized authority. In another effort to improve Web3 onboarding and usability, CyberConnect’s forthcoming CyberWallet empowers users to sign up for CyberProfiles and use social applications without having to deal with confusing tasks such as seed phrase management or gas transactions.

8. What types of use cases are best suited for CyberConnect?

Social applications with a core need for ownership of identity, content, and connections are best suited for utilizing CyberConnect’s social network protocol. These include but are not limited to creator-focused products like blogs, audio/video-streaming platforms, news/media publishing, marketplaces, and more.

Other applications well suited for CyberConnect’s infrastructure are growth-focused products like membership/loyalty programs and traditional social media-integrations for platforms like Instagram and Twitter, where creators and communities can boost their engagement through Web3 tools. Not to forget, community management tools like discussion forums can also be powered with CyberConnect’s decentralized social network protocol.

9. What are the main differentiating features between Web3 and Web2 social? How do you think existing Web2 social companies will respond as Web3 grows?

At its core, Web3 social introduces opportunities for ownership, and decentralization (both in governance and moderation policies) at the user level, where social data and online identities are stored independently rather than on the centralized servers found in Web2. As a result, Web3 social enables users to have unprecedented control over monetization of their content, connections and identities. Allowing people to own and control their digital identities and providing a framework to take their content and connections to interoperable applications empowers users with unparalleled mobility to build durable social capital. Using blockchains and token-powered protocols allows no central authority to control a network, therefore enabling the members of a particular community to define their own moderation, governance and value systems.

Existing Web2 social companies commonly act (and build) differently based on their position in the market. Platforms like Facebook or Twitter can't provide a matching experience to decentralized social without completely stripping their existing infrastructure into smaller user bases that would require entirely new business models to stay competitive.

10. Explain the protocol design of CyberConnect and what makes it so attractive to developers building on-chain social applications?

CyberConnect’s decentralized social network comprises of three major components with user-owned experiences and opportunities at their core:

  1. CyberProfile, a new decentralized, on-chain identity standard that leverages ERC-721 and its unique composable nature as a user's gateway into Web3.
  2. CyberConnect Social Graph, which represents the link between users’ digital identities, data, content, and social connections.
  3. CyberWallet, a non-custodial and EIP-4337 compatible smart contract wallet deeply integrated with CyberProfile and Social Graph to power mass adoption among Web3 users and beyond.

In addition to this, CyberConnect implements a middleware architecture to provide social application developers more design space for customized logic. Middlewares are plug-and-play custom execution logic code that run before and after an action trigger to extend the default behaviors in social networks. Currently, the decentralized social network protocol has middlewares for three actions: mint a profile, collect an EssenceNFT (a CyberConnect-specific ERC-721 token to represent any piece of content, affiliation, or membership), and subscribe to a profile.

CyberConnect provides a repository of middleware for developers to use by generalizing common computational patterns. For example, dApp A wants to build a social network for an NFT community by setting the condition that only NFT holders can mint their app-specific EssenceNFT, and dApp B wants to do the same thing for holders of a different NFT collection. The underlying pattern is the same and the only difference is the gated ERC-721 contract address. The developer community can contribute to this repository and build a wide range of reusable middleware together. Developers can pick and choose the relevant options to seamlessly plug into their dApp. Not only are middlewares possible to express custom logic, but integrations with other protocols are also easy to achieve. CyberConnect already integrates with other protocols to provide full developer toolkits. Existing CyberConnect integrations include gated content with Lit Protocol, live-streaming video with LivePeer, direct messaging with XMTP, with support for more coming soon.

Finally, even though smart contracts provide programmability and enable more feature potentials for developers to leverage, they suffer from scalability issues and high gas cost problems. Any social graph protocol that is purely smart contract-based will reach its scaling limit as soon as its user base reaches tens of thousands of users. To achieve much higher scalability, CyberConnect provides a relay service to cache and batch upload users’ actions to decentralized storage like Arweave. Arweave already processes over 2M transactions daily, and batch uploading with Bundlr Network increases that transaction throughput by 30-100 times.
CyberConnect’s composable design with customizable middlewares and a unique scalable storage solution offers an unparalleled experience to Web3 developers to build the social networks of the future. Already, over 50 applications including top Web3 social dApps including Phaver, ReadON, Galxe, Dopamine, Oasis, Mocaverse, Huddle01 and more utilize its infrastructure to serve over 327k users monthly.

11. What is the best way to grow the adoption of Web3 social? How do you see the protocol to evolve over time?the protocol to evolve over time?

Social networks thrive off of their users' engagement and activity. The problem with traditional social media is that creators and most content-consuming users receive very little for their activity because they don't own their social data, online identities, or content. As we watch the creator economy grow through the proliferation of content tools and diminishing media empires, Web3's ability to cultivate applications that match or exceed the value of Web3 experiences for users — and especially creators — is a key opportunity for adoption. Therefore, CyberConnect is especially designed to support the next evolution of creator-centric decentralized social applications and the developers who will push the space forward.

Some  developments that can be expected from CyberConnect in the upcoming months can be divided into two categories:

Creators and Users

  1. Further decentralization of the protocol to empower creators and users who utilize its ecosystem dApps to build audiences across user-owned networks.
  2. Robust, frictionless, and scalable account-creation solutions that allow for a seamless onboarding experience for all creators and their audiences to Web3 social dApps.
  3. Fully customizable content and account monetization solutions, including fiat on-ramp support to enable direct payments for subscriptions, tips, and more.

Developers

  1. Integrations with a variety of a Web3-native protocols to power exciting new use cases and functionalities for developers, like end-to-end encrypted messaging, in-app and email notifications, decentralized audio/video support, and more.
  2. More developer resources, including a grants program, improved documentation, and discussion forums to foster collaboration and easy access to the CyberConnect team for support.

CyberConnect encourages developers to experiment with its SDKs and APIs to build the next generation of social apps and is looking to specifically support teams building solutions for creator economy, news/media publishing, marketplaces, gaming, and more.

12. What is the best way to get involved with the CyberConnect community?

CyberConnect is proud to receive the support of 700k+ community members spread out across the globe. It is the power of this community, led by users and developers  representing diverse geographies, that has contributed to CyberConnect becoming Web3’s biggest decentralized social network.

If you’d like to come along on CyberConnect’s journey to build a new future of social networking on the internet through the power of long-lasting connections, you can join through the following official channels:

*Please beware of accounts impersonating CyberConnect or its employees. CyberConnect team members will never reach out to you asking for money or promising a whitelist spot for future rewards.

Register for the CyberConnect Community Sale on CoinList by May 15th »

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