Why CyberConnect?
The original purpose of web3 social is to forge a digital renaissance, returning identity, content, and social data ownership back to users.
Inspired by that purpose to decentralize social networking on the internet, our team behind CyberConnect has been at the frontier of innovating new web3 social primitives, empowering users to maximize the potential of their digital social identities and enabling developers to bootstrap their innovative social products.
Over the past year, building upon and expanding CyberConnect V2, we have learned several invaluable lessons to understand the challenges that lie between where we stand as an industry and truly realizing the original purpose, bringing web3 social to a billion+ users globally.
We are excited to share the breakthroughs our team has made to pave the way for web3 social into its next stage of hyper scalability and a social networking experience that feels familiar. We are honored to present to you CyberConnect V3 - a set of powerful upgrades to the CyberConnect social network protocol to usher web3 social into a new, multi-chain future.
Our Journey So Far
CyberConnect harnesses blockchain technology to empower users with ownership of their identity, content, and social data. In doing so, we enable both users and developers to experience a range of exciting new social networking primitives that are interoperable, censorship-resistant, and decentralized.
When we introduced CyberConnect V2 in August last year, we incorporated a fundamental upgrade to the original CyberConnect social network protocol that deployed a hybrid (EVM + Arweave) scaling architecture for web3 social applications. This scaling solution enabled dApps in the CyberConnect ecosystem to attract over 1.6M profile sign-ups and enable new content tokenization primitives on networks beyond Ethereum Mainnet, like BNB Chain and Polygon. By utilizing this hybrid solution, dApps could store users’ high unit value social data like profile, content, and collects on-chain while utilizing decentralized storage systems like Arweave for the rest. This crucial design implementation enables web3 social dApps to support various use cases without being restricted by limited blockspace.
Over the last 11 months, these upgrades helped engage over 1.3M unique wallets to execute 14.7M on-chain transactions on the CyberConnect protocol. In addition to 2.5M follow actions, 5.8M likes, and over 10.5M NFTs minted, more than 1.6M unique content was created across our rich ecosystem of social dApps, including Link3, Phaver, ReadOn, etc. Thanks to our dedicated community of users and developers, their engagement in the past few months has propelled CyberConnect as a top 10 contender on DappRadar across all networks and categories.
CyberConnect V2 also set the stage for soulbound tokens in web3 with W3ST (web3 status token, pronounced as west), enabling over 2,400 organizations, including CoinMarketCap, PoolTogether, Maverick, etc., to recognize and reward their most engaged and loyal supporters as proof of participation in those communities.
Inside a Resilient Web3 Social Network
Since we’re building in public, our challenges have been visible far and wide. This has also helped us learn in public and iterate the CyberConnect protocol in real time to meet the demands of web3 social users and developers.
Even though CyberConnect V2 has been deployed on the Ethereum Mainnet, BNB Chain, and Polygon, it is simply not feasible to operate on multiple chains simultaneously due to the risk of fragmenting user identity. On top of this, it’s still remarkably complex to switch between blockchain networks as a user. Not to forget, even if they somehow tread along and become a seasoned web3 user, they need to acquire native tokens through a fiat on-ramp, CEX, or a bridge for every particular blockchain!
With these challenges top of mind, we returned to the drawing board and re-engaged with the first principles of decentralized social network protocols.
A resilient web3 social network protocol:
- upholds a user’s holistic identity;
- is multi-chain;
- abstracts away the complexities of network switching; and
- is scalable.
Current Challenges
The primary challenge in introducing CyberConnect to multiple chains is to decouple different functions of a “user identity” to uphold a holistic identity.
The word ‘Identity’ is often overused but widely misunderstood. At first glance, it is a unique identifier that differentiates one person from another. However, in the added context of social networks, identity serves two crucial functions: authentication and authorization. Much like a username/email and password in web2 help validate a user and their ownership of an account, a web3 identity relies on a private key/seed phrase and cryptographic signatures to do the same. Furthermore, a social identity is like a database of a user’s social journey and constitutes important social events/actions like the content they create and engage with. In web3, Identity also needs to have a unique human readable identifier (abhi.cyber or abhir.eth) tied to it. Finally, users’ public information, like display name, bio, and avatars, is part of that same identity. While these are all distinct components of a web3 identity, they all have very different functionalities and properties.
CyberConnect V2 coupled them in an all-encompassing non-transferable ‘CyberProfile.’ Even though CyberProfile holders could change their public information like bio and avatar attached to their profile, they could not change their authentication method (EOA wallet) or username/handles after acquiring their identity.
But, much like updating your username, email, or phone number in web2, users in web3 must be able to change their authentication identity to enhance security or if their original credentials are compromised. Not only this, users must also have the flexibility to change or trade premium usernames without losing the rich history of their social journey.
Unfortunately, this is a much harder challenge to overcome. Then, if you add another difficulty of expanding a modular identity infrastructure to multiple blockchain networks, the complexity of this challenge escalates exponentially.
Fortunately, we’ve found a solution.
Web3 Social's Multi-Chain Future
CyberConnect V3 consists of a set of powerful upgrades to the CyberConnect social network to usher web3 social into a new, multi-chain future. This upgrade will power the next stage of hyper scalability for web3 social dApps and give users a social networking experience that feels familiar to web2.
V3 has three core components: CyberAccount, an ERC-4337-compatible identity infrastructure; CyberGraph, a censorship-resistant database to record users’ content + social connections; and CyberNetwork, a gas-efficient and scalable network to bring CyberConnect to the world.