Mainstream Web3 social protocols are gathering momentum, and a new chapter in encryption is opening.
Author: Asher Zhang, BiTui
As of January 2024, the Cyber Connect protocol has over 90,000 monthly active users, with over 3,000 organizations using Cyber Accounts to build community ecosystems. The leading Web3 social platform, Cyber Connect, has recently been attracting market attention. So, what sets Cyber Connect apart from traditional Web2 social applications? How will Web3 protocols develop in 2024? In the face of the challenges of Web3 social, how will Web2 social applications respond?
What is CyberConnect, and how does Web3 social change the encrypted ecosystem?
CyberConnect is a leader in the Web3 social protocol race and has recently been widely discussed. Founded in 2021, Cyber Connect has a majority of team members from Silicon Valley. Currently, over 50 projects are using Cyber Connect to build social applications with features such as community-owned social networks, markets, content management, and discovery tools. As of January 2024, the Cyber Connect protocol has over 90,000 monthly active users and over 3,000 organizations using Cyber Accounts to build community ecosystems, including well-known projects such as DyDx, Animoca Brands, and Arbitrum. Currently, Cyber Connect's first native social application, Link3, has 940,000 monthly active users, and its smart contract wallet, Cyber Wallet, has over 700,000 accounts.
CyberConnect uses account abstract wallets to bring a large amount of traffic to the entire account abstract race, thereby driving the growth of the account abstract race. In addition, CyberConnect is being used by over 3,000 organizations, further increasing the acceptance of account abstraction by more and more projects.
From a technical perspective, Cyber Connect has three core components: Cyber Account, Cyber Graph, and Cyber Network. Cyber Network: Cyber Network is an L2 network based on Optimism, which can significantly reduce gas fees and improve the performance and scalability of Web3 social applications.
Cyber Account is a set of smart contracts, and its related components can greatly meet the habits of web2 users, reduce the user migration threshold, including: 1) identity verification and authorization, including the ability to recover accounts through email, phone, etc. in case of identity/private key loss, while the team will enhance privacy in the coming months; 2) compatible with the ERC-4337 standard, achieving account abstraction, which can allow the Cyber Connect protocol, underlying networks, or any specified web3 dApp to pay transaction fees on behalf of users, seamlessly switch between different ecosystem wallets, with CyberWallet as the product layer; 3) CyberID; 4) organizational accounts.
Cyber Graph (social graph): Cyber Graph is a smart contract based on multiple EVM-compatible chains, which can be used to store user content and social data in an anti-censorship database.
Mainstream Web3 social protocols are gathering momentum, and a new chapter in encryption is opening
In addition to CyberConnect, major Web3 social protocols are also making continuous efforts. Previously, decentralized social applications often had limitations for new users due to their reliance on complex infrastructure still under development. Now, more and more applications are opening up to ordinary users. For example, the decentralized social media application Farcaster, which was heavily used by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, became completely permissionless in October 2023. In addition, Web3 social has also demonstrated significant fundraising capabilities. According to DefiLlama data, friend.tech has earned nearly $20 million since its launch in August 2023, attracting 300,000 independent users in just two months, with daily fee income reaching $320,000 (6 times that of OpenSea).
From a data perspective, according to a November report by The Block Pro, Lens has 126,000 profiles, while Farcaster has 196,000 registered IDs. This indicates that Lens is still lagging behind Farcaster in adoption. The Block Pro researcher Brad Kay analyzed that Farcaster is known for attracting users seeking high-quality discourse and community-oriented environments; in contrast, although Lens provides rich features for creators, its current interactive engagement is relatively low.
As Web3 social matures, it is highly likely to become an important track in 2024. Joonatan Lintala, CEO of the social media platform Phaver based on Lens, stated that decentralized social has moved from the alpha stage to the beta stage, and both Lens and Farcaster will enter a more open and expansion-ready stage, making 2024 a year to understand the actual needs of users, as we move away from whitelists and strict quotas.
Web2 protocols are watching closely, and fierce competition is unfolding
Against the backdrop of the continuous emergence of Web3 social, mainstream foreign Web2 social applications have also begun to embrace Web3, including Telegram, Twitter, Reddit, and Meta's Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger, each with different strategies.
Telegram announced a collaboration with Ton to Web3-ify its underlying infrastructure. Ton was originally a blockchain project developed by Telegram, and after being blocked by the SEC for several years, Telegram and Ton have once again joined forces. From its application ecosystem, Telegram hopes to become a super app similar to WeChat. It is worth noting that during 2023, Telegram Bot developed rapidly, and Telegram's Web3 path was highly anticipated.
Twitter has open-sourced its code, but blockchain integration is unlikely in the short term. Since Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter, the platform has made significant efforts to push Twitter towards mainstream Web3 social applications, with the most important being Musk's open-sourcing of the Twitter algorithm. In addition, Twitter supports users to display and trade NFTs in tweets; Musk is also actively applying for financial licenses and is optimistic about China's WeChat Pay, indicating that Musk may mainly focus on realizing the Web3 financial attributes of Twitter.
Facebook's journey into encryption was once quite "radical," attempting to give social applications financial attributes, but its strategy now focuses on the metaverse. In 2019, Facebook proposed a stablecoin called Libra, but it was ultimately opposed by multiple countries and had to be shelved. Subsequently, Facebook embraced the metaverse again and renamed the company to Meta. In August 2022, Meta announced support for displaying NFTs on Facebook, allowing users to connect their personal digital wallets to the app to display all their personal NFTs. Overall, Facebook's web3 social will most likely be deeply integrated with the metaverse.
Reddit has been involved in the crypto market for a long time, and Reddit NFTs have attracted a lot of attention. With 430 million monthly active users, Reddit has accepted cryptocurrency payments since 2013; it first introduced Ethereum-based community points at the end of 2019, and later chose to use the second-layer scaling solution Arbitrum to expand community points; Reddit briefly sold four NFT collections in June 2021. Overall, it has a very open attitude towards the crypto market.
Summary
With the launch of the Cyber Connect token, Web3 social applications are taking center stage in 2024. At the same time, highly anticipated platforms like Lens have moved from the alpha stage to the beta stage, and the dark horse of 2023, friend.tech, continues to make efforts. Web2 social applications are also actively laying out the Web3 track. Perhaps we can expect to see a truly popular Web3 application in 2024. In a broader sense, Web3 social applications naturally have strong financial attributes, and to facilitate the use of Web2 users, account abstract wallets are likely to benefit from this, which will build a new development situation for Web3 with social + financial, thereby promoting a more widespread prosperity of web3.
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