A Detailed Explanation of Port3 Network: Becoming a Web3 Social Data Gateway to Accelerate the On-Chain Migration of Web2 Users

Author: Ygritte

With the emergence and in-depth exploration of the SBT "Soulbound Token" concept, many people have high hopes for the future where "the sum of countless SBTs forms the identity of the Web3 world."

In January 2022, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin wrote about the SBT concept: if we understand SBT as a token with labeling properties, on one hand, SBT is deeply bound to user accounts (wallets), and on the other hand, the non-transferability of SBT weakens speculative attributes. With these two characteristics, as a wallet accumulates more and more SBTs, the on-chain identity represented by this wallet becomes richer and more trustworthy.

Looking back at Web2, the application layer revolves around the "user identity" for data value capture, while the narrative appeal of Web3 lies in the return of data sovereignty + data value mining. Therefore, data mining and social extension centered around decentralized on-chain identity naturally become the essential path to accelerate Web2 users' transition to Web3.

As a feasible solution for building a decentralized reputation system, the SBT concept quickly focused the community's attention. In this field, the project Port3 Network (hereinafter referred to as Port3), which aims to "achieve Social Data Oracle," has emerged as one of the latest incubated projects of BNB Chain MVB V.

The project, considering its development ideas highly aligned with the SBT concept, recently launched its first SBT design competition (click to view event details). From August 17 to September 13, Web3 enthusiasts can unleash their imagination and design unique SBTs for various application scenarios. Currently, 379 creators have actively participated in designing the image of Port3's SBT. This SBT will represent users' Pass within the Port3 system, achieving identity recognition and verification. The project will officially launch its SBT Mint factory in the fourth quarter of 2022.

Port3's Vision for the Social Gateway

The goal of the Web3 social platform is to outline an on-chain relationship map based on open data and provide richer, more efficient information matching services. The key to achieving efficient matching lies in extensive data acquisition and precise data analysis capabilities. Port3 aims to become the social data gateway of the Web3 world and has presented a fairly specific implementation approach, showing a "two-step" strategy:

Step One: Aggregate on-chain and off-chain data from multiple dimensions and analyze it to build a mechanism for extracting standardized data from Raw Data.

The foundation of user identity is data; without sufficient data, a user's Web3 identity cannot form. Port3 aims to expand effective data sets and seek application scenarios as much as possible in its early stages. With data, Port3 can label users' identities, preferences, social connections, etc., in a secure and private manner to realize the Web3 identity system.

People are increasingly aware that it is unrealistic to leave existing Web2 platforms to create independent social territories. A large number of social behaviors still occur in Web2, and there is no directly usable data on-chain for scenarios like NFT Minting, intelligent airdrops, and DAO governance. Aggregating data from Web2 and Web3 and selectively providing the necessary data for certain scenarios is currently the most reasonable choice.

Broadly defined social behavior includes not only tweets posted on SNS platforms but also various aspects of your on-chain and off-chain activities. Due to the massive volume of Social Data, the value contained in each piece of source data is relatively small, necessitating the cleaning, analysis, and extraction of high-value standardized data from vast amounts of Raw Data to effectively serve third-party applications. Moreover, unlike price data, Social Data is more centralized in its sources, making it difficult to determine the authenticity of data submitted by third parties. Therefore, in the early stages, Port3 has explored a standardized mechanism by obtaining potentially useful data through self-built DAO Tool matrices and products like SoQuest.

Step Two: Build a decentralized Social Data Oracle based on data aggregation to provide an open data layer service for various Web3 identity and asset applications, integrating an Incentive Layer to ensure data rights belong to users.

In terms of bridging on-chain and off-chain data channels, Oracles play an indispensable role, as evidenced by the contributions of Price Oracles like Chainlink to DeFi. Without reliable price data, on-chain lending, trading, and other scenarios cannot unfold. In the future wave of Web3, the on-chain integration of social scenarios and data is essential. However, the issues that Social Data and Price Data need to address differ significantly; what needs to be achieved is the demand for massive data exchange. Therefore, Port3 has specifically built a Social Data Oracle to bridge off-chain and on-chain data.

By aggregating Web2 and Web3 data, Port3 provides open data services within the blockchain network, laying the foundation for forming user identities, protecting user privacy, and enabling various applications. The Web3 space has already seen numerous applications in reputation systems, identity verification, intelligent airdrops, community management, DAO governance, advertising recommendations, and even in recruitment and matchmaking. However, currently, these scenarios only exist in limited connectivity, lacking widespread interconnectivity. Just as Price Oracles are crucial for DeFi, the burgeoning Web3 scenarios also need their own Oracles to achieve this connectivity and create a powerful network effect.

The goal of the Social Data Oracle is to solve three core issues:

• How data is organized and interconnected;
• How data rights belong to users;
• How user privacy is protected.

Port3 has deeply considered these three aspects and designed a decentralized mechanism to realize them. First, various source data is aggregated through multiple channels (reporting, crawling, indexing) to Port3. Developers can define their own data models, which means defining inputs, outputs, and processing algorithms, and publish them to Data Markets. The Aggregator nodes in the Oracle will run the algorithms defined by the data models and output the results to the Oracle contract, which can be directly read and used by third-party applications. The data models in Data Markets can be combined with each other and indexed by the Readers nodes in the network, forming secondary aggregated data for third-party use.

In this process, the Oracle also integrates an Incentive Layer, where reading data requires payment to the Oracle network, and the fees paid will be distributed to the network's Aggregator and Readers nodes, with a portion distributed to data contributors. Individual users are the smallest contribution unit; before receiving contributions, they need to possess Port3's SoulBound NFT as identity verification within the Port3 ecosystem, which also effectively isolates user privacy. Ultimately, only the user's Web3 identity and the aggregated target data are output to the Oracle. In this way, even if a user only participates in an off-chain activity read by the Oracle once, they will benefit from sharing data, something that has never existed in Web2. Meanwhile, users will be able to index all their associated data through the Readers of the Social Data Oracle for unified management.

SoQuest Product Interface

SoQuest's Impressive Performance After Launch

As the first data scenario focused on by Port3's vision, SoQuest aims to become a traffic aggregation platform in the Web3 world, with the goal of opening the collected data in Quest scenarios to NFT Minting and Airdrop scenarios. SoQuest was recently launched in July and has achieved impressive data performance.

In the two weeks since SoQuest's launch, over 70 partners have opened SoQuest Spaces and held 61 Campaign events, with a total of over 18,330 users participating, completing over 313,640 Action operations, and a total of 29,130 users connecting their wallets to log in, resulting in SoGraph's daily active users reaching over 2,100.

Any project party, opinion leader, or DAO in the Web3 world can easily build a dedicated Space through the application page and easily initiate brand activities that include various on-chain and off-chain tasks. After interconnecting with SoQuest data, all participants can immediately receive rewards upon completing SoQuest tasks, without the cumbersome processes of snapshots, address uploads, or whitelists.

Market Performance of SoQuest

As more and more project parties launch various activities to attract user participation, the continuous enrichment of on-chain and off-chain data promotes Port3's labels to be more diverse and identities more precise, accelerating Port3's progress toward becoming a true social data gateway and traffic entrance in the Web3 world.

Three Core Modules of Port3 Network

How has Port3 demonstrated strong growth momentum in a short period? What makes its design special? From the project's design system perspective, Port3 has three core modules corresponding to data collection, data viewing, and data application.

The three core modules of Port3 correspond to data collection, data viewing, and data application

• Social Data Aggregation Channels: Data Collection

Through DAO Tools, the data aggregated by Port3 covers community dynamics from instant messaging platforms like Telegram/Discord, trends in social media content on Twitter (with future support for YouTube/Instagram), as well as real-time prices and trading interactions on-chain. Additionally, through the Contribute to Earn model, more people are encouraged to contribute data to earn platform token rewards and governance rights, providing a broader data source for Port3's data aggregation.

Currently, Port3 covers over 3.3 million users through its DAO Tools matrix on Discord and Telegram, supporting over 340 projects across 10 popular public chains, including Ethereum, BNB Chain, Solana, Avalanche, and Fantom. Project parties can easily achieve on-chain interactions and community analysis through DAO Tools.

• SoGraph.xyz: Data Viewing

As the terminal page of Port3, SoGraph.xyz is the result of data aggregation, visually presenting key information such as community trends, project activities, and market trends.

For individuals, SoGraph.xyz serves as an entry point to associate Web2 and Web3 identities, participate in various activities, and view Web3 development trends. The integration of on-chain and off-chain simplifies the process of individual participation in project activities, freeing users from cumbersome page transitions to easily complete tasks like airdrops and whitelists.

The Dashboard version of SoGraph provides project parties and communities with more data insights, with ML-based analysis algorithms capable of analyzing various data metrics, such as community user composition and market sentiment. The data dashboard better helps project parties understand their communities and keenly capture user trends and needs, allowing for the correct incentives for users.

• Port3 Protocol: Data Application

The Port3 protocol is the foundation for building an open collaborative data network and is the core for realizing data service matching.

First, after data aggregation and privacy protection processing, the data results are uploaded to the Port3 data trading market. When someone wishes to read data content from Port3, the reader needs to pay Oracle tokens to the platform. When the data is used, the data provider can receive token rewards.

Throughout this process, data providers have complete control over their data and are subject to strict privacy protection. They also gain data usage rewards and platform governance rights through the Port3 protocol's incentive layer. Meanwhile, the Port3 protocol eliminates centralized data intermediaries, allowing third-party data users to obtain effective data at lower costs and with greater precision.

Port3 Network's RoadMap and Core Competitiveness

On July 28, Port3 released the SoQuest solution and provided API support. In the upcoming September, Port3 will build the BNB Chain Action Parser to achieve larger-scale on-chain data aggregation.

In the fourth quarter of 2022, the team will officially launch the Social Data Oracle v1 version, enabling data sharing through Oracle contracts and releasing SDKs for partners' use. It is expected that by the fourth quarter, the number of Port3 partners will increase to over 200.

In the first quarter of 2023, Port3 will expand the on-chain Parser to Ethereum and other EVM-compatible chains and issue Soulbound NFTs to mark users. By the second quarter, the team will upgrade the data analysis dashboard to present more data analysis results. In the third quarter, Port3 Network will explore more data application scenarios such as trading, IDOs, DAO management, and social platforms.

The Web3 world is rapidly changing, with new narratives constantly emerging. However, the exploration of data rights, data analysis, data services, and data revenue centered around decentralized on-chain identity remains a key exploration direction across cycles.

Whether in the Gleam of the Web2 world or the Quest platform of the Web3 world, there are many products similar to SoQuest in the market. So what advantages does Port3 have in the face of fierce competition?

Compared to the task system giant Gleam in the Web2 world, first, Port3 achieves seamless connectivity between Web2 and Web3. Secondly, Port3 truly returns data ownership to users, allowing them not only to enjoy privacy protection but also to gain benefits.

In comparison to the numerous Quest platforms in the Web3 world, Port3 treats Quest merely as the most active scenario, serving as the initial fuel for the Social Data Oracle. Additionally, Port3 has a user base of millions for its DAO Tools, which means a broader data source.

Based on this continuous influx of data, Port3 is able to explore the realization of social gateways and SBTs, aiming to achieve truly secure and efficient social data aggregation, accelerating the entry of Web2 users and data into Web3. Whether Port3 can truly become the social data gateway of the Web3 world, time will be the best proof.