Starting from the social graph, let's see what Web 3.0 is doing?
No one knows what Web 3.0 will be like, and most users of Web 3.0 do not know what they want. However, one thing is certain: cultivating users' decentralized identities is very important, but this process will definitely not happen overnight.Author: LD Capital Research
Produced by: Jill
Value of Social Graphs
A social graph is a mapping of social relationships between individuals, reflecting the people users know through various means: family members, work colleagues, schoolmates, etc. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduced the concept of the social graph at the first Facebook F8 Developer Conference, where it was used to explain how the newly launched Facebook platform would leverage personal relationships to provide a more user-friendly online experience.
Today, the social graph has become the core value of every social platform. When users register and log into a social platform, the platform searches for potential acquaintances based on the user's registration information, recommends topics of interest to understand preferences, records all content viewed on the platform, interactions with others, and forms a user-centered social graph based on this information. In other words, this graph contains your interpersonal relationships, interests, and lifestyle habits, allowing the platform to roughly outline your user profile based on this data.
Image sourced from the internet
So, what is the use of this? Let's take a look at a set of data:
Image sourced from the internet
This is Facebook's financial report released in Q3 2021, which shows that Facebook's total revenue over the past year was approximately $209 billion, with advertising revenue accounting for $205 billion, exceeding 90%. This is because the core profit model of most Web 2.0 applications is to provide free services to users in exchange for user data and to generate advertising revenue from advertisers. Taking Facebook as an example, personalized ad recommendations and content recommendations can generate hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue each year, and this is essentially monetized using user behavior data as leverage.
Discussing the Pain Points of Web 2.0 Social Graphs
Due to the nature of Web 2.0 application architecture, where all data is stored in centralized databases, the social graph data formed by each user on social platforms is controlled by the company that owns the platform. Moreover, when users register for a social application or any application, they must sign the "User Service Agreement" and "Privacy Policy," which means they agree that the ownership of their data belongs to the platform, and the interpretation rights also belong to the platform. Furthermore, users may face the risk of account suspension if they make inappropriate remarks. Therefore, for users, their social behavior creates value for the platform, but that value is not shared with them; what they possess is merely the right to experience the product.
Additionally, the platform constantly monitors all user behavior trajectories, collecting user data. Many data points may not have a specific purpose when collected, but as big data technology matures, privacy data breaches have frequently occurred, leading to serious social issues, with massive fraud cases in areas like pensions, healthcare, and charity arising from information leaks. Facebook user information was once leaked and exploited by the data company Cambridge Analytica, and Facebook has faced multiple lawsuits for violating user data privacy.
Moreover, in the Web 2.0 world, user data is like isolated islands that are difficult to connect. Social giants spare no expense in creating moats to retain users and enhance user stickiness; once users jump to another application, they must abandon the social graph they have built. Thus, every time a user registers a social account, they need to repeatedly verify their identity information and start building their social relationships from scratch on a new platform, resulting in high migration costs.
Exploring Web 3.0 Social Graphs
The purpose of Web 3.0 projects is to return data ownership to users. Based on blockchain technology, user data is highly transparent. Information such as how many transactions you have made and which DeFi projects you have participated in is hidden in your wallet address. One address can log into countless applications, and the behaviors occurring within each application are clearly recorded. By mining and analyzing this data, a complete user profile for each address can be drawn. Social graph protocols are organizing and presenting users' on-chain profiles and behaviors in different ways.
- Lens Protocol
Lens Protocol is a social graph protocol built on Web3 smart contracts on Polygon, developed by the Aave team. It advocates for creators to own their connections with the community, forming a permissionless, composable, and user-owned social graph.
The Lens protocol primarily operates around the Profile NFT, which is key to users controlling their data ownership. Its metadata includes all posts generated by the user, articles shared, comments, and other historical records of behavior. When users log into an application based on the Lens protocol, they can synchronize all information within the Profile NFT, obtaining the user's on-chain activity trajectory. If users change their address, they can also transfer the NFT.
Users connect their wallets to the Lens protocol to create a homepage, which will be minted as a Profile NFT. Only users holding the Profile NFT can create content and publish, comment, and share; other users without a Profile NFT can only follow their favorite creators and collect the content published by them.
User classification within the Lens protocol:
Content Creators must link to the protocol to create a personal Profile homepage and obtain a Profile NFT to publish, share, and comment on content.
Non-content Creators can only follow their favorite creators and collect their published content. When users follow a content creator, they receive a Follow NFT, which records the order and number of users followed. However, content publishers can set whether followers can receive the Follow NFT, such as requiring payment or completing certain tasks. When users collect a creator's content, they receive a Collect NFT, which records which fans collected or purchased which content.
Developers provide modular components for developers to customize and build social products, making Lens more of a backend product.
Basic modules of the Lens protocol
Currently, Lens is not open to the general public; only certain addresses are eligible to mint Profile NFTs, with a total of 44,525 minted and 93,335 total posts. Other data is shown in the figure below:
Image sourced from the Lens official website
There are currently 9 applications built on the Lens protocol, and there are no tokens available yet.
Image sourced from the Lens official website
Features of the Lens Protocol:
Tokenization of content and data ownership: Relationships are built around NFTs, and the interactions of multiple NFTs represent social behaviors such as following, sharing, and collecting, forming a graph. Users can autonomously control the ownership of these NFTs, such as transferring, selling, or participating in governance, and can bring them to any application built on the Lens protocol, making data migration more advantageous.
Modular components and strong composability: Social functions are modularized, following specific execution steps to call whitelisted smart contracts. For example, when a user follows a profile, it triggers the Follow smart contract, and when a user likes or collects content, it triggers the Collect smart contract, allowing developers to use these modular components to build their applications on Lens.
Limitations:
Every operation using the Lens protocol requires wallet address signature verification, which can be cumbersome for a high-frequency application like social media. First, actions such as following, commenting, and collecting require payment, so Lens chose to be based on Polygon, where gas fees are relatively low, but this design can make the usage process less smooth. Secondly, users must continuously confirm their wallet address, which significantly impacts the user experience.
The social graph on Lens is built around personal homepage NFTs, so establishing social relationships starts from scratch, making the construction process relatively challenging.
Applications built on the Lens protocol can share user data, but developers still need to extract on-chain data and restore it using a database, which also incurs certain costs.
- CyberConnect
CyberConnect was founded in September 2021 and received $10 million in funding from institutions such as Multicoin Capital, Sky9 Capital, and Animoca Brands in November. It is the first decentralized social graph protocol.
The social module of CyberConnect is relatively simple, mainly consisting of a Follow button and a Follower list. Users can mutually follow each other through the Follow button, establishing relationships between users. The core of the protocol is a decentralized and tamper-proof social address book, which effectively promotes user-centered data creation, updating, querying, and verification. Its technical architecture focuses on three aspects: 1) Storage: It uses Ceramic's customized IPFS variable data stream storage to achieve decentralized storage and data updating of the graph; 2) Identity authentication and authorization: A secure key scheme is designed to separate identity keys from user transaction keys, avoiding financial risks; 3) Data extraction: A data indexer aggregates on-chain and off-chain data.
CyberConnect official website
CyberConnect's data sources mainly come from three aspects: first, data from off-chain sources and transaction data sources are extracted, organized, and integrated; second, the indexer forms new data based on existing off-chain social graphs; additionally, when users authorize CyberConnect to log in to DApps, the social graph data from users on DApps will also be extracted by CyberConnect. Therefore, CyberConnect combines existing social graph data to form a social graph on Web3.
CyberConnect supports address binding on Ethereum and Solana (BSC chain is not counted), with a user count of 1.49 million and indexed users reaching 1.89 million. CyberConnect is moving towards a multi-chain direction. Additionally, the protocol has incubated ecological applications, currently supporting over 30 projects across various sectors, including social, NFTs, decentralized identity, wallets, and more.
CyberConnect official website
Features of the CyberConnect Protocol:
CyberConnect is a multi-chain, multi-platform social graph protocol that automatically associates users' accounts on Opensea, Mirror, and other platforms, focusing on providing infrastructure integration services for developers of different applications, allowing these applications to efficiently and quickly adopt CyberConnect's social graph data.
CyberConnect addresses the issue of user social data sovereignty with a centralized storage technology solution, which is more conducive to storing larger data, making data creation and modification relatively convenient.
Limitations:
CyberConnect currently offers limited functionality, and the lack of cost for reading and writing social graphs can lead to redundant data within the protocol.
CyberConnect uses the Ceramic storage solution, which has experienced downtime due to a large influx of users, and its high concurrency solution still needs to be tested.
- 5Degrees
5Degrees is a social graph protocol incubated by TokenPocket wallet, built using the ERC-1155 standard, generating users' core data (such as the list of followed addresses) into Profile NFTs, thus forming the infrastructure of a social relationship network.
The implementation of the 5Degrees protocol is quite similar to Lens, operating around Profile NFTs and providing basic social function modules. However, this protocol only offers the Follow function, allowing users to obtain the creator's personal NFT, namely the Follow NFT, when they follow a creator.
5Degrees official website
Currently, 5Degrees has launched the personal homepage product Fans3.0. After connecting their wallet, users can access their personal homepage, which directly displays all assets within the user's wallet address, including NFTs, POAPs, and interacted DeFi protocols and identity verification protocols.
In addition, there are social modules added to Uniswap and PancakeSwap, allowing all users to intuitively access detailed transaction data of the people they follow.
5Degrees official website
Features & Limitations of the 5Degrees Protocol:
The implementation principle of the 5Degrees protocol is quite similar to Lens, but the functions provided are relatively simple, and there is still a distance to building a comprehensive social graph.
It allows other applications to integrate; any project that supports the ERC-1155 standard can integrate this protocol.
The above are the most representative projects of social graph protocols. Currently, the implementation paths of social graph protocols mainly have two approaches: one is to NFT-ize user data, and the other is to use decentralized storage technology solutions. The advantage of the former is that it directly turns user data into NFT assets without requiring more complex encryption technologies, while the latter is more beneficial for large data storage and makes data modification more convenient.
Final Thoughts
Looking at the current Web 3.0 social ecosystem, it can be roughly divided from the bottom up into the underlying public chain application carriers, decentralized data storage repositories, decentralized identity layers that present on-chain user identities and relationships, upper-layer social application products, and tools and plugins for user entry. Among them, the social graph captures and accumulates relationships between on-chain users and is an important component in building the decentralized identity infrastructure of Web 3.0.
However, the current construction of decentralized social identity layers is not yet complete, and due to issues such as technical barriers and application promotion, it is still in the early stages. No one knows how Web 3.0 will evolve, and most Web 3.0 users are unsure of what they want. However, one thing is certain: cultivating users' decentralized identities is very important, but this process will undoubtedly not happen overnight. As Foresight said, the accumulation of quality relationships and network effects must reach a critical point to form a qualitative change, and we will always remain optimistic about this!
