Wilson Wei on data ownership and social graphs at CyberConnect

0:00i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investmentpitch media and today on the crypto coin show we have wilson way co-founder and ceo of cyber connect wilson great to have you here yeah hey aston thanks for having me yeah i'm wilson and nice to meet you all likewise thanks for being here i would love to just dive straight in with the first question on learning a little bit

0:25more about cyber connect protocol the solutions that your team have been developing for quite a while now and then we'll dive into everything cyberconnect sure so um cyberconnect it's a decentralized socialgraph protocol that aim to empower developers to bootstrap their network effects and also help them build personalized contextualized social experiences

0:52for for their apps and um yeah for users will help them to store their social graph data um in a decentralized manner ensuring data integrity and also data ownership giving back essentially your you know data self-sovereignty back to you okay great a lot to unpack there i guess my next question is what is a social graph sure uh so um

1:20a couple examples social craft it's basically how you're connected with others um it's a graph based you know um to describe your relationship between between different parties and and users um one example would be your following and follow on twitter or um friendless on facebook or on your contact book on um your address book on your on your cell phone those

1:48are considered just a graph okay great wilson and you know that leads me to think of the network effect building communities in the blockchain space and how their protocols will be stronger if they work together right and i'm curious on your take on you know how layer one protocols are designed right now and you know whether they're isolated or working together and and how cyber

2:13connect can improve that and as you mentioned at the beginning increase the network effect um i think most of the layer one protocols are designed for transactions um it's a open ledger for you know people to make transactions and also ensure their their assets right but right now like with all the wallet connect so so here's how we take a look at that you know when we when we see

2:42users logging into different apps using their metamask wallet or just in general like wall connect um it it both into a account based system that's based on a user account based system it's based on your address and your wallet um and um that's a pretty different model compared to web2 in web 2 you see each application each platform they have their own segregated

3:11you know account system and there's no data into our ability and all those data generated from users that belong to you know belong to the to the platform but on web3 um the ethos here is a user-centric model that enables users to own all the data rights and and of course including your asset and and all those layer one blockchain that i already ensured like

3:34you could carry your erc 20 tokens and your nfts cross platforms um and and there's a whole bunch of you know it's it guarantee guarantees interoperability because of the token standard and also guarantees some some level of composability as well but in terms of like social graph and in general your social data not all of your social data are suitable

4:00for um you know storing on chain um because you know uh blockchain it's a it's a it's a it's a data storage uh that's a scale resource you know um and and social graph and in general like social data requires some kind of like data abundancy and that's why cyberconnect is built on top of ipfs and ceramic um and using this model um we are connecting

4:30users based on their address so so all the social graph data that we're recording right now um when you're writing to it um it's address a following address b or address a it's friend of address b and that means the whole model of the whole standard that we're pushing it's a blockchain agnostic so or we already support in theory and blocking we're going to support most of the evms

4:54in the future and we also support solana as well and yeah um within the last six months where they accumulated more than you know there are more than 700 of 700 000 unique addresses or users already um establish at least one other connections on cyberconnect and um in total they make 50 million plus connections and that's a huge database um yeah that's incredible and yeah you

5:24know as you explain you know the differences i feel like this is a huge advantage because currently in web 2 you know you're having a thousand accounts on a thousand different websites and then you have to have a thousand passwords and none of them speak to each other and all of those a thousand counts are are held by third parties that are holding your information if they get hacked then

5:50that information is compromised and you know there's like a thousand little holes in your uh in your personal information that could at any time be be stolen um and moving to the wallet connect and having like one wallet um that you own the information and i think what's important is to have that black box where it's like oh i want to provide this information to this

6:13company specifically but not other information and at the same time ensuring that your personal private information can be kept secret inside of that wallet and your funds and and your fund history and all of that i feel like there's a ways to go before that is still ideal but i feel like this is a step in the right direction yeah absolutely um i think for privacy um

6:40it's gonna be you know um our probably like phase two or phase three we're gonna come up with um some type of like encrypted uh social graph database uh but right now we're focusing on the publicly accessible of social craft database um because i think why would pick like social graph as the you know um the first priority to ensure like data accurate on like users

7:08actually you know will be able to own those data it's because we we think social graph has a huge value that people you know for most of the time actually ignored um let's take influencers on on youtube or tick tock for an example if you spend years on on youtube and created a channel with like five million followers it's your social capital and and it

7:32it's those data should belong to you you know you should be able to own your community instead of youtube um and that's what we're in maple lane we enable them to you know um for example um that let's say all those applications uh um integrated with cyberconnect um influencers could go to another platform and still have the five million followers that that he built on on one

7:58platform you know and that's what we call enabling mobility of your social capital um and in a lot of the cases it actually works much more than just you know um getting some some uh tips or subscription model so um yeah yeah i think that's super important especially now with uh the social media platforms you know they're really on the edge of if you talk if you say the wrong

8:25thing then your account gets deleted or blocked and you know we've seen cryptocurrencies yeah exactly monetized or you know all of the followers you worked for are just deleted you know and even people that did nothing wrong you know we've seen many cryptocurrency youtube channels just get deleted and they didn't do anything wrong and then of course they

8:45were like oh we're sorry we'll we'll give it back to you but like to be at the mercy of you know some other party with your you know your life and your income i feel like that something needs to change there um so that's great to hear and and you mentioned about you know how uh the traction is already building on cyber connect i feel like this is a uh

9:06not an easy task i feel like this is a big project i'm curious on you know how long you've been working on it and like where exactly you see yourself right now compared to where you guys want to be i think cyberconnect like right now we have um more than 20 projects already integrated with us and that that's how you know we grow our database

9:34um and we also recently launched that um um one in-house um you know app called link 3.2 which um could help projects and individuals to come up with their own web3native mini site you know to aggregate other links um and and and present your assets um and and your web identity um as a whole um and that's exciting as well

10:02uh but in terms of like where we're at right now i think um we're at a stage when you know what we're getting into a point where we could reach to become the largest network um for the whole ecosystem and uh i think right now we're basically i believe the largest but in order for this network to be the absolute dominant network that provides the most utility

10:31because we have this this is saying okay the largest network almost always win uh but the in our case it's different than facebook because this network belongs to the people the user right um so that's a whole different sorry and and then uh where we want to go to is like if we could get to a point where we covered let's say like 20 or 50 of the users um

10:56in web3 um that would make us absolutely the largest platform for for social data and developers already have a huge incentive in web 2 era for example um you see application mobile applications um always trying to request the assets query your uh local contact book right your address book to bootstrap that network um because like that's a co-star

11:25problem that they have always because like facebook uh already branded um their social graph database from third-party query and basically you cannot get any social graph data to bootstrap your network and we're helping them to solve this co-star problem um starting from like almost nothing to right now like more than 50 million connections um the more data that we have the more

11:52developers that we have um uh the faster we will grow it's uh it's a pretty good dynamic and we're getting there we reached to this level within six months of time you know um i'm expecting us to cover at least like 20 plus um users in the next probably like about two years incredible wilson and yeah that sounds like you guys are making good progress

12:16quickly and you know i recently saw the announcement uh from cyber connect about the series a closing 15 million dollar round with animoka brands and sky 9. that sounds like a great partnership excuse me with animoka um i would love to hear your insight on on love to hear your insight on that closing of that round and just the importance of uh the partners that you

12:42have and you know with the raise in the bag what are the next steps yeah um so uh prior to this round where do you have like multi-coin that hour previous round and then animoka was in our last round as well but uh they they they they they was in the lead and this time they become the lead investor because they they see how valuable this network could

13:04be and they are building a huge empire for gaming um and for games social graph and the social element is so important and we could become the infrastructure for you know connecting all those games like you could play in different games with right now you're already able to bring your enough teaching into different games but in the future with cyber

13:26connects um you could play in different games with the same group of friends you know that that's going to change the whole gaming dynamic as well and that's why they they saw it oh this this could be a huge important um network for us um and i'm so glad that we brought in some other partners um into the round uh we'll have skynet capital um we have delphi digital

13:51we have protocol labs um and ggp capital tribe capital uh those are pretty like long term and um and industry wise i think they're pretty you know on the top of the league um they have the expert uh we are you know constantly talking to our investors for um for example like like improving our tokenomics um in general like getting more partners on board to write data and

14:18read data from cyberconnect um yeah so um those are the important partners in um it's a very selective group of investors uh we rejected a whole bunch of others um so yeah i'm very happy with with what we got here great to hear wilson and yeah i i completely agree um and and you mentioned there about improving the tokenomics i'd love to get some insights into

14:44you know how that works on cyber connect with uh with the token and you know does it create a sustainable ecosystem um and is it you know a barrier to entry that it's needed to join into or maybe you know creates a synergistic effect between the social graph i'd love to know more yeah um it's a very good question but uh unfortunately i'm not i'm not able to

15:10you know disclose too much details at this point uh we're gonna announce our uh official white paper version in the next couple weeks um and then a lot of those details are gonna be included in there that's totally fair um and okay so we'll wait for that and then so as you continue to grow out uh with that raised close as you mentioned the white paper coming out on the token later down

15:36the road what what do you see as the main key factor to success in ensuring that the adoption rate of cyber connect you know is constantly improving and you know more people are joining into it and taking back sovereignty of their information you know faster um i think that's somehow related to the to the whole industry as well like when we have

16:03um social media platforms or anything like like for example like forum or content like platform um that's widely adopted by the users um and and that would be the time when we when we actually uh reach to the era when cyberconnect could be a huge part of the infrastructure because a lot of the infrastructure right now are just still focusing on d5 game 5 you know um

16:29pretty financial oriented and uh for social to to to to you know become a huge part of it um our our strategy right now is to work closely with a lot of the you know upcoming apps um we work with forums we work with uh projects that work on id um for example um metaphoro is already integrated with us

16:55they also provided the forum section for opendial and and and those things are powered by us that means when you follow somebody on the open doors forum or better for us forum um you're actually using cyberconnect as the infrastructure um and also um some id system and credential for example project galaxy you know they're already using it um in their id system

17:20um and so many other applications so i think the best strategy for cyber connect to grow is to just um stay really close with developers and uh help them um to bootstrap that app um and um that that's like like like the you know um what we have been doing in the last six months and then also at the

17:49same time we're building uh something pretty interesting that that what i just mentioned like link three down to uh that product could help us bootstrap as well um yeah those would be the two major strategy for growth yeah i like that wilson and i feel like if you have a protocol that has end users but there's no developers and no dapps then you know that have that functionality

18:13then it's not going to get very far so i think focusing on the developers sounds like a key solution to to helping it grow now we don't have a lot of time but um what is first of all are you guys looking specifically for you know more developers and partners to reach out and to start integrating with cyber connect and and if so what is the best way for

18:37them to you know learn more about cyber connect yeah absolutely um we we're hosting hackathons uh we're talking to a lot of the projects we have um about your project in our integration pipeline um and um the best ways to you know learn about cyberconnect would be go to our website cyberconnect.me and also if you're a developer go to our dev center there um it has all the instructions and

19:06all the api and sdk that we provide um if you're providing you know if you're creating a app um and you you you somehow wanna you know know more about a user based on their social graph or interests um we have a whole bunch of data um including like cyber connect also provides another data instax for for developers um it's a sort of like a recommendation engine

19:28um to help you um to help user get recommended implicit connections uh based on on-check and off-change um um and yeah just check it out uh cyberconnect.me and then go to the dev center sounds great wilson i will leave the link in the description box below as well for the viewers um thanks so much for taking the time to come on all the best with all things

19:52moving forward i'm looking forward to seeing the release of that white paper and we'd love to have you guys back on the show uh you know when the next updates are available awesome thank you ashton you