Starting from the social graph, what is Web3.0 doing?

Cycle Trading

特邀专栏作者

2022-07-26 09:18

This article is about 4907 words, reading the full article takes about 8 minutes

The social graph is an important component of building a Web 3.0 decentralized identity infrastructure.

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The social graph is an important component of building a Web 3.0 decentralized identity infrastructure.

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1. Social graph value

A social graph is a mapping of social relationships between individuals, which reflects people that users know through various channels: family members, work colleagues, school classmates, etc. Facebook CEO Zuckerberg introduced the concept of the social graph at the first Facebook F8 developer conference, when it was used to explain how the newly launched Facebook platform will use the relationship between individuals to provide a more friendly network experience.

Today, the social graph has become the core value of every social platform. When a user registers and logs in on a social platform, the platform will search for people he may know based on the user's registration information, learn about your preferences by recommending topics you are interested in, record all the content you have browsed on this platform, and interact with others. And based on this information, a user-centered social graph is formed. In other words, this map will include your interpersonal relationships, hobbies, living habits, etc., and the platform can roughly outline your user portrait based on these data.

So, what is the use of this? Let’s take a look at a set of data first:This is the financial report released by Facebook in Q3 of 2021. According to the report, Facebook’s total revenue in the past year was approximately US$209 billion, of which advertising revenue was US$205 billion, accounting for more than 90%. Because most Web 2.0 applicationsThe core profit model is to obtain user data by providing free services to users, and obtain advertising payment income through advertisersRealization using user behavior data as a bargaining chip。

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2. Talk about the pain points of Web2.0 social graphSince the characteristic of the Web2.0 application architecture is to store all data in the centralized database, each user formsSocial graph data is controlled by the company that owns the platform. And when a user registers a social application or any application, they need to sign the "User Service Agreement" and "Privacy Policy", which means that you agree that the ownership of your data belongs to the platform, and the right to interpret also belongs to the platform , and even face the risk of being blocked when users make inappropriate remarks. Therefore, for users,Their social behavior creates value for this platform, but the value will not be distributed to them

, all they have is the right to experience this product.Moreover, the platform monitors all user behavior trajectories and collects user data. Many data may not be purposeful at the time of collection, but as the application of big data technology matures,Privacy data breach

It also occurs frequently, and even causes serious social problems. Huge numbers of fraud cases in pension, medical care, charity, etc. are all caused by information leakage. Facebook user information has been leaked and used by the data company Cambridge Analytica, and Facebook has also faced multiple lawsuits for violating user data privacy.Also, in the Web2.0 world,, it is difficult to communicate between the islands. Because the social giants spend huge sums of money to create a moat in order to retain users and increase user stickiness. Once users jump to another application, they need to abandon the social graph they have built. Therefore, every time a user registers a social account, he needs to repeatedly authenticate his identity information, and build his own social relationship on a new platform from scratch, and the migration cost is very high.

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The purpose of the Web3.0 project is to return data ownership to users. Based on blockchain technology, user data is very transparent. Information such as how many transactions you have conducted and which DeFi projects you have participated in mining are hidden in the wallet address. An address can log into countless applications, and the behaviors that occur in each application are clearly recorded. By mining and analyzing these data, the user profile of each address can be completely drawn. The social graph protocol is organizing and presenting users' on-chain portraits and behaviors in different ways.

Lens Protocol

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Lens Protocol is a social graph protocol built on Polygon based on Web3 smart contracts. It was developed by the Aave team and advocates allowing creators to own the connection between themselves and the community, forming a permissionless, composable, and user-owned social graph.

The Lens protocol mainly revolves around [Profile NFT]. Profile NFT is the key for users to control their own data ownership. Its metadata includes the history of all posts, reposted articles, comments and other behaviors generated by users. When a user logs in to an application based on the Lens protocol, all the data in the Profile NFT can be synchronized, and the activity track on the user chain can be obtained. If the user changes the address, the NFT can also be transferred.The user uses the wallet to connect to the Lens protocol, creates a homepage, and the homepage will be minted as a Profile NFT.

Only users who hold Profile NFT can create content and publish, comment and forward. Other users without Profile NFT can only follow favorite bloggers and collect content published by content creators.

Classification of users in the Lens protocol:content creator
, you must link the protocol to create a personal Profile homepage and obtain the Profile NFT accordingly, in order to publish content, forward content and comment;, you can only follow your favorite bloggers and bookmark their published content. When a user follows a certain content creator, he will get a Follow NFT, which records the order and quantity of the user's attention. However, content publishers can set whether followers can get Follow NFT, such as paying or completing certain tasks. When a user collects a creator's content, the user will get a Collect NFT, which records which fans have collected or purchased which content.
Developer, providing modular components for developers to customize these components and build social products, so Lens is more like a back-end product.

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Lens protocol basic module

Lens is currently not open to the public. Only some addresses are eligible to mint Profile NFT. The total number of minted is 44,525, and the total number of posts is 93,335. Other data are shown in the figure below:

The number of applications built based on the Lens protocol has reached 9, and no coins have been issued yet.

Lens protocol features:1) Tokenization of content and data ownership:

With NFT as the core to build relationships, the interaction of multiple NFTs presents social behaviors such as following, reposting, and collecting, forming a map. Users can independently 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. Data migration is more advantageous.The social function is modularized, and the whitelist smart contract is called in specific execution steps. For example, when the user pays attention to the personal information, the [Follow smart contract] will be triggered, and when the user likes or favorites the content, the [Collect smart contract] will be triggered, allowing development Or use these modular components to build their own applications on Lens.

limitation:

limitation:

1) Every step of the operation when using the Lens protocol requires signature verification of the wallet address, especially for high-frequency applications such as social networking, which brings some troubles: first, users need to pay for actions such as attention, comments, and favorites , so Lens chose to be based on Polygon. Although the gas fee is relatively low, this design will make the use process not smooth enough; secondly, users need to constantly confirm the wallet address, which also greatly affects the user experience.

3) Applications built based on the Lens protocol can share user data, but developers still need to capture the data on the chain by themselves, and then use the database to restore it, which also requires a certain cost.

CyberConnect

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The CyberConnect protocol was founded in September 2021. In November, it received US$10 million in financing from Multicoin Capital, Sky9 Capital, Animoca Brands and other institutions. It is the first decentralized social graph protocol.

The social module of CyberConnect is relatively simple, mainly composed of [follow button] and [follower list]. Users can pay attention to each other through the Follow button, so as to establish the relationship between users. The core of the protocol is a decentralized and tamper-proof social address book, which can effectively promote user-centered data creation, update, query and verification. Its technical architecture focuses on three aspects: 1) Storage: Customized by Ceramic The IPFS variable data stream storage realizes the decentralized storage and data update functions of graphs; 2) Identity authentication and authorization: a security key scheme is designed to separate the identity key from the user's transaction key to avoid Funding risk; 3) Data capture: The data indexer (Index) aggregates on-chain and off-chain data.

The data source of CyberConnect mainly has three aspects: first, the data in the off-chain data source and transaction data source are captured, organized and integrated; secondly, the indexer forms new data according to the existing off-chain social graph; in addition, After the user authorizes to log in with CyberConnect on DApps, the data of the user's social graph on DApps will also be captured by CyberConnect. Therefore, CyberConnect combines existing social graph data to form a social graph on Web3.

CyberConnect supports address binding on the two chains of Ethereum and Solana (BSC chain is not counted), the number of users has reached 1.49 million, and the number of index users has reached 1.89 million. CyberConnect is developing in the direction of multi-chain. In addition, the agreement has also carried out ecological application incubation. At present, more than 30 projects are supported in the ecosystem, covering multiple sectors including social networking, NFT, decentralized identity, and wallet.

Features of the CyberConnect protocol:

2) CyberConnect solves the user social data sovereignty problem with a centralized storage technology solution, which is more conducive to storing large data, and the creation and modification of data will be relatively convenient.

limitation:

limitation:

2) CyberConnect adopts the Ceramic storage solution, which once caused a downtime due to the influx of users, and its high-concurrency solution needs to be tested.

5Degrees

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5Degrees is a social graph protocol incubated by TokenPocket wallet. It is constructed using the ERC-1155 standard and generates the core data of users (ie user relationships such as the list of followed addresses) into Profile NFT, thus forming the infrastructure of a social network.

The implementation of the 5Degrees protocol is similar to Lens to a large extent, running around Profile NFT and providing basic social function modules. However, the agreement only provides the [Follow] function. When users follow a creator, they can get the creator's personal NFT, namely Follow NFT.

At present, 5Degrees has launched the personal home page product Fans3.0. After connecting the wallet, users can enter the personal home page. This page will directly display all assets in the user's wallet address, including NFT, POAP, and interacted DeFi protocols and identity authentication protocols.

In addition, there are Uniswap and PancakeSwap after adding social modules, all users can intuitively obtain detailed transaction data of the people they follow.

5Degrees Protocol Features & Limitations:

1) The implementation principle of the 5Degrees protocol is largely similar to that of Lens, but the functions provided are relatively simple, and there is still a certain distance from building a social graph.

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write at the end

write at the endLooking at the current Web 3.0 social ecology, from bottom to top it can be roughly divided into the underlying public chain application carrier, the decentralized data repository, the decentralized identity layer that presents user identities and relationships on the chain, and the upper-layer social application products As well as tools and plugins for user portals. Among them, the social graph is to capture the relationship between users on the chain and accumulate data.