Palo Alto-based CyberConnect has recently closed a Series A financing round amounting to $15 million to fulfill its promise of putting data back in the hands of owners through decentralization.
The funding round was led by Animoca Brands and Sky9 Capital.
Animoca Brands is a Hong Kong-based company that has in recent years risen from an underdog in game development to an investment juggernaut in the web3 world.
On the other hand, Sky9 Capital is a Shanghai-based venture capital firm founded by Ron Cao, who is known for helping Lightspeed Venture Partners set up shop in China back in the day.
According to Coindesk, CyberConnect CEO Wilson Wei wrote in an email that the company plans to put the funding towards building out the protocol, expanding the team, and onboarding new Web 3 projects.
CyberConnect Builds Social Graph Protocol
Wei and his team are building a social graph "protocol", the underlying rules that allow data to be shared between computers, for applications, according to TechCrunch.
In web3's case, data will be shared even without a centralized agent like Facebook. Traveling across web3 platforms with their followings and followers is the end goal of the company for users.
"In web2, companies with the largest social network own users' social graphs and build walls around them to stem competition and advance corporate interests," Wei said.
According to TechCrunch, an app experience powered by CyberConnect will allow users to connect their crypto wallet, which has become a universal gateway to any web3 app, or a social platform, upon which they will be shown all their existing connections.
Users will then get recommended user addresses to follow based on CyberConnect's indexing. That piece of information will be added to CyberConnect's network and become "portable and self-sovereign," once they follow someone.
As of writing, 23 projects have integrated CyberConnect, including Project Galaxy, Mask Network, and Metaforo. They already reached a total of 710,000 users.
TechCrunch added that other companies are also building similar infrastructures to allow follower interoperability, such as Lens. This is operated by Aave, a decentralized lending protocol backed by Blockchain Capital.
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CyberConnect's Solution Offers A Software Development Kit
Wei tells TechCrunch that CyberConnect's solution consists of two components.
It offers a software development kit (SDK), similar to Lens. SDK is a piece of software for developers to create custom apps that let end-users manage their social graphs and a "social data network."
SDK aggregates users' behavior in web3, such as what tokens and NFTs they bought, said TechCrunch.
TechCrunch reported that CyberConnect's SDK is built on top of InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), a peer-to-peer data storing and sharing network, and Ceramic, a network that manages mutable data without centralized servers.
Wei claimed that this is a more "economic and gas-efficient solution."
Smart contracts are computer programs that execute automatically according to the terms of contracts and incur "gas fees."
"Smart contract-based protocols are creating value from scarce items while any data stored on-chain costs a nontrivial amount of gas fee. There are only 10,000 NFTs in one collection and a limited amount of bitcoins," Wei stated.
Based on CyberConnect's plan, it will generate revenues through the social data network. This will include different participants like data contributors, indexers and recommenders, curators, and users.
As the network will be permissionless, anyone can join, and include incentive mechanisms revolving around query fees, according to Wei, as reported by TechCrunch.
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