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Source: Jay Jiang
Original title: Cyber Connect Protocol V2 Introduction
Originally, I wanted to find information about the Link3 interface in the CyberConnect Dev Center. I found that the Developer Center has updated the content of the CyberConnect V2 protocol, so I have this article to summarize my understanding of the V2 protocol.
Overview
CyberConnect is a decentralized social graph protocol that helps Web3 applications boot network effects. It enables users to truly have their own social identities, content and connections in a social network and provides developers with a wealth of tools to build applications with meaningful social experiences.
The early CyberConnect V1 protocol was just a social graph protocol. The current V2 protocol has expanded many functions, such as building the following platforms. Link3 is also a social platform built based on the CyberConnect V2 protocol.
social platform
developers can use the CyberConnect protocol to build social dApps to store and manage users' social data such as profiles, posts and content in a decentralized way. In addition, users can publish their data in NFT format on selected blockchains for monetization purposes. For example, a content creator can publish 100 versions for their blog, each priced at $14 CYBER token, and only allow its subscribers to collect such content NFTs.
SBT/NFT Platform
uses airdrops and tokens to attract early adopters, convert them into contributors and retain them with rewards like badges, which is a popular and proven practice in top Web3 projects. The CyberConnect V2 protocol enables the community to gather early users using social data on Cyber Connect (as an ERC-721 NFT).
Recommended Algorithm
Developers can use network connections to obtain interesting recommended data when building social dApps. For example, the protocol can generate a list of recommenders based on user relationships and social data from off-chain and on-chain sources. In addition, a list of recommended tokens and recommended personnel can be generated based on modeled transaction behavior and holdings relative to other addresses (i.e., collaborative filtering models).
CyberConnect has two components that can help developers build social applications: the social data network and the interest map engine.Social Data Network
Users generate various data when participating in social platforms by setting up their profile for the first time, following the content creator and creating content. We divide them into the following three components.
Identity The social configuration file and on-chain address related data generated by the user form the user's scattered identity. Whether it is NFT, ENS name, Twitter handle or DID, we map them to a whole identity.
connection connection represents the relationship between the identifiers. Social relationships include following and subscribing to creators, becoming friends with friends, being part of organizations and participating in events and communities.
content user generated content such as posts, videos and publications. We also looked at how people can participate in this content through innovative smart contract support methods such as funding public products, donating to charities and governance.
Infrastructure
To build social applications, developers should only focus on user experience, user acquisition and content audits, without worrying about building and maintaining the infrastructure. CyberConnect supports developers to build new applications through APIs and SDKs. While this experience is seamless for developers, we want to emphasize that our architecture design makes CyberConnect gas-free, composable and highly scalable.
is a sufficiently decentralized data infrastructure to help users manage their portable and self-sovereign social data at scale. Data is represented in verifiable credentials, and developers can safely rely on infrastructure to write and update millions of records.The
smart contract protocol consists of smart contracts deployed on the EVM-compatible blockchain, enabling content creators to build their on-chain social networks and monetize their social data through highly customizable middleware.
Enough decentralized data infrastructure
Developers who use CyberConnect to store user social data should be able to safely rely on this protocol to write and update millions of records. At the same time, developers need to be sure that CyberConnect will not become a malicious attacker's single point failure . Therefore, we need a sufficiently decentralized data storage system that has high performance and provides guarantees of data sovereignty, availability and integrity.
Data Sovereignty
In order to achieve data sovereignty, every connection and content on CyberConnect must be signed by an encryption key pair, which means that only those who have the private key can generate such connection and content. This mechanism is designed in a way that is easy to use and future-proof. When users first interact with CyberConnect via dApp, they create a key pair on the device and publish the public key to the CyberConnect social data network. For compatibility, we support various elliptic curve digital signature algorithms (ECDSAs). When the user initiates an operation, the previously generated private key is loaded from the local environment to sign the message. It is worth noting that, at the same time, the social data network is compatible with Ceramic's DID design, allowing some data to be easily stored on Ceramic.
Data Integrity and Availability
For a decentralized data network, we must ensure the availability of data (data cannot be reviewed) and data integrity (data cannot be modified in an unauthorized manner). The CyberConnect protocol adopts a hybrid model for different data use cases based on the write frequency and data volume.
Data Privacy
We are also constantly researching providing privacy-protecting social data networks. Our solution in the CyberConnect protocol is likely to be a combination of the following two approaches.
- encrypted data. Users should be able to control access to their social data by third parties without having to waive ownership or disclose the data to anyone who is not their intended recipient. On the other hand, third-party developers should be able to decrypt the data after a set of permissions is reasonably satisfied, or lose access if they no longer meet the required qualifications. Lit Protocol's access control list solution has received considerable support in this regard, and the network connectivity team has learned a lot about their strengths and weaknesses.
- zero-knowledge proof. Zero-knowledge proof is a method by which one party (proverifier) can prove to the other party (verifier) that a given statement is true without revealing any information about the statement at all. In a social environment, Bob should be able to prove to third-party social apps that need to access his friend list that he is indeed connected to Alice without sharing any other information about how, where, when the connection is established, or what other things they have in common.
Smart Contract Protocol for Social Network Data
Although the data infrastructure provides solutions to data sovereignty and interoperability issues, we still need a way for users to monetize their social data (such as content and connections). Additionally, developers may need an on-chain computing environment to build their dApps and communities.
For example, dApps focused on providing quality services to certain NFT community members may want to generate token gated social networks, or publishing platforms may want to provide users with the ability to monetize their high-quality content. We have developed a smart contract protocol deployed on the EVM-compatible blockchain to make all these requirements possible.
core concept
smart contract protocol consists of generating smart contracts, which means it will generate a set of new smart contracts associated with dApps or users when interacting with the protocol. This pattern is similar to the Uniswap protocol, when people create a new liquidity pool, a set of liquidity pair smart contracts will be generated.On CyberConnect, these generated smart contracts enable dApps to create on-chain social networks with their specific context, or users publish their customizable NFTs to monetize their social data. At a high level, the protocol uses the concepts of Profile NFT, EssenceNFT and SubsrcibeNFT in the ERC-721 token format to represent social data.
ProfileNFT
Profile NFT represents each user's profile as NFT. It is a prerequisite for users who want to publish their EssenceNFT or SubsrcibeNFT. Additionally, deployed Profile NFT contracts are used as gateways for users to perform actions, such as collecting the best, creating profiles, and subscribing to profiles in a specific dApp context.
SubsrcibeNFT
SubsrcibeNFT represents a one-way relationship between the address and the Profile NFT. Each Profile NFT holder can only issue one unique subscription NFT. Each subscription NFT can configure rules such as paid followers (paid subscribers), NFT Hold followers (token gated community) and other rules.
EssenceNFT
EssenceNFT is a universal NFT that individual Profile NFT holders can publish to express arbitrary relationships such as investors, sponsors, team members, community participants, etc. Each EssenceNFT can be configured with rules such as paid to coin (crowdfunding), holding to coin (community participants). It can also be configured as a tradable NFT or a non-transferable Soul-Binding Token (SBT).
Namespace
Namespace represents a context-specific social network. Any application can customize ProfileNFT coin conditions such as coin price, handle verification logic, and Treasury fee structure. This project can extend the utility of Namespace and build a decentralized domain name service on it.
Compositional Middleware
Although the computing conditions vary greatly between dApps, many common patterns can be generalized to reusable and extensible modules. For example, dApp A wants to set up a BAYC club by setting conditions, i.e. only BAYC holders can mint their application-specific profile NFTs, while dApp B wants to do the same for CloneX holders. The underlying mode is the same, the only difference is the gated ERC-721 contract address.
This protocol utilizes a composable middleware layer before and after the user applies their coin operations (such as subscribing to configuration files or collecting essences). Middleware can be created to express general constraints, such as allowing only certain ERC-721 holders to pass the inspection. In this way, the community can work together to build a variety of reusable middleware, and dApp developers can pick relevant middleware to easily insert into their dApps.
But it is important to point out that while middleware is powerful when used to set constraints on the current blockchain state or collect on-chain assets, its utility is limited when using it to check historical state or off-chain data. One possible solution is to call the oracle contract in the middleware to get the data feed from the off-chain indexer.
Infrastructure
Interest Map Engine
CyberConnect Interest Map Engine indexes, aggregates on-chain and off-chain data sources related to identity and its activities to create an overall map. Developers can easily utilize indexed data and recommendation algorithms for user acquisition and user retention.
index
There are three data sources in our indexing system: blockchain (e.g. Ethereum, Solana, BNB chain), decentralized storage (e.g. IPFS, Arweave) and off-chain platforms (e.g. Foundation, Rarible, Twitter). Its general philosophy is to index data that may be reused in various social environments. For example, connection data on existing platforms (such as Foundation), POAP tokens for each address, etc.
Recommendation Engine
CyberConnect's last component of the decentralized social network protocol is its recommendation engine. recommendation engine is designed to further reduce barriers to launching social applications and increase access to high-quality ML models by new developers. Although CyberConnect's recommendation algorithm has not been published and is behind our API, we plan to expose the creation and service of these models in the future.
Since most of the data used to train CyberConnect recommended models is publicly accessible, in theory, anyone can build a similar model from this data. However, the ability to quickly and cheaply guide social dapps is at the heart of our protocol, so we decided to build them internally first. We need to equip developers with the tools they need to build decentralized social applications that are truly competitive with their Web2 peers.
Although the scope of CyberConnect's recommendation model will be expanded with its partners, the current products can be divided into three categories: 1) Social contact recommendations 2) Content and project recommendations 3) Information flow rankings.
Let's dig deeper into each one and show some examples to make things concrete:
- Recommended Account: Get a personalized list of EOA (externally owned accounts) to follow based on user interests and people who are similar to those who are following.
- Recommended Contract: a list of contracts based on user's interests (e.g. NFT ownership) and/or similar user concerns with input users.
- Content recommendation: Obtain a set of personalized recommended content based on user interests and similar contents that users participate in. This may look like a specific NFT, token, or game recommended.
- related content: Obtain content similar to other content based on category or tag and user engagement. For example, get recommendations from the boring Apes and Dogs Club after opening BAYC’s profile page.
3. Information flow Recommended
(1) User information flow: cater to specific user/address content and information flow on-chain
- to get content from the account that the user is following.
- Timeline to get content from the account the user interacts with.
- This will look like NFT transfer, highlight
(2) Community information flow: Catering for specific community content and on-chain interactions
- Get recent user activities related to a specific community (e.g., red bean holders, UNI voters, etc.)
(3) Domain information flow: Catering for specific domain content and on-chain interactions (e.g., social, Defi, etc.)
- Get recent user activities related to a specific project (account, product, tags, posts, videos, etc.)
Recommendation engine is the last part needed to build a killer web3 social dapp.
identity
social profile data generated from the user's chain and on-chain address related data, forming the user's decentralized identity. Whether it is NFT, ENS name, Twitter, or DID, we map them to a whole identity. In CyberConnect's infrastructure, identity is currently manifested through address or Profile.
Address
users can bring their already familiar EVM Address data to CyberConnect and create new social data on applications built with CyberConnect.
Profile
Although address is very useful as a decentralized identifier, they lack more complex access control and key rotation capabilities, which are key components in social applications. A profile is the entry point for operations on each chain, and it behaves similarly to a profile in a web2 social application. Each profile is an ERC-721 NFT, similar to other on-chain identities, except that each profile has its paid subscribers and content. Each real user can also have multiple profiles. View the configuration file running on Link3.
summary
It can be seen that although it seems that the CyberConnect team has only launched the Link3 platform recently, the team has developed the CyberConnect V2 protocol behind it, and Link3 is also developed based on this protocol. We hope that in the future, each team can develop more interesting applications based on the CyberConnect V2 protocol.
Editor in charge: Kate
