Whether you’re a beginner or a veteran in the tech industry, you have some idea about how complex yet consequential the dilemma of social networking is. The social media experience has remained unchanged for the past decade thanks to privately owned online social networks. Not only has this space seen little innovation, but the incumbents have also successfully suppressed any new competition from coming up by tightly controlling user social identities, content, and social graph. This is not what early pioneers of the internet envisioned as the promise of the open web.
Thanks to Web3 and its composable, interoperable tech stack, we have unlocked a new future of social networking that is user-centric and developer friendly. Have a great idea for decentralized social?
Connected 2023, a Web3 social hackathon by BNB Chain & CyberConnect is your opportunity to take your ideas from concepts to fundable projects and learn about leading Web3 technologies on the way.
For the collectible version of this article, see our Mirror.
While there are no restrictions on the kind of product you can build at Connected 2023, our team has compiled a list of ideas we are excited about internally. We hope some of these ideas can serve as an inspiration to hackers:
Creator-centric Content Platform
There is a massive disconnect between creators and popular social networks. While creators are the source of most user traffic on these platforms, in most cases, they get 45% or less share in the revenue they help generate. Furthermore, out of over 50 million creators, only 2 million make a living from their work. With Web3, this is an opportunity. By empowering creators to have complete ownership over their audience and content, this dynamic can be shifted to enable millions to reap the rewards of their hard work and build a more equitable creator economy.
CyberConnect makes it easy for Web3 developers to build decentralized social networks with social data sovereignty. Using CyberConnect with Livepeer, a powerful video-sharing platform could be created that allows creators to issue subscriptions for their content. Further, Lit Protocol could be integrated to enable niche creator communities to thrive by gating access upon fulfilling specific criteria like holding x token or payment of y token.
Community Building and Management Tooling
Web3 enables communities to create and define their desired future together. Using CyberConnect’s decentralized social graph protocol, developers can build easy-to-use, no-code community-building tools for Web3 projects to expand their audience. For example, an app that helps projects issue SBTs to their community members could be built easily using CyberConnect’s EssenceNFT module. Further, CyberConnect’s APIs could provide more insight into users’ on-chain activity, like wallet activity, NFT purchase history, etc., to provide additional context to Web3 projects that can help design relevant growth campaigns. An exciting take could also be a platform that allows users to discover new communities based on the activity/interests of their connections.
Social Events & Ticketing Platform
CyberConnect protocol is very well suited to build social platforms that allow users to view the content or communities their friends interact with and get in on the action. An example could be a social app where users can see what events their friends are attending and join them. Additionally, this app could allow all users to organize their events, and issue SBTs as proof of attendance or set customized rules about who can or cannot attend said events.
Professional Networking
LinkedIn remains the most popular platform for networking or verifying someone’s professional credentials online. But we all know how reliable that is, right? Developers can quickly build a new social application that enables organizations to issue SBTs to their employees or contributors while allowing users to showcase those credentials in a resume-like format. Additional functionality could be supported that allows interested applicants to apply for jobs.
Fundraising Platforms
CyberConnect’s protocol can also be a helpful toolkit for building a launchpad for early-stage projects to raise community funding and bootstrap themselves. CyberConnect’s ccProfileNFT module can enable organizations to start their fundraising campaign and issue EssenceNFTs to their early supporters to recognize their contribution. CyberConnect’s APIs can also be leveraged to help users discover new projects to support.
Anonymous/Privacy-Preserving Social Networks
Imagine a social network with anonymity features as the key highlight. With ccProfileNFT, users can be empowered to create profiles and then use ZK badges (from Sismo or internally built zk badges) to populate their accounts with attestations of what they own. This will allow users to post/comment/like on the social platform anonymously but still show that they own the assets they do (without revealing which ones exactly). For example, user A has a Cryptopunk, a ccProfile, and >10 ETH. User A could use the private account they own all those credentials on to issue an SBT attestation badge to their new social address/account that certifies that they own one of those without revealing which exact ones or who they are.
Once again, there is no restriction on the kind of social feature you can build with CyberConnect for Connected 2023. We are looking for innovative, new ideas that match or exceed the Web2 experience and showcase the power of Web3 technologies in building a new future of social networking on the internet.
To learn more about Connected 2023, visit https://connected.cc.me/
About BNB Chain
BNB Chain is a community-driven, decentralized, and censorship-resistant blockchain, powered by BNB. It consists of BNB Beacon Chain and BNB Smart Chain (BSC), which is EVM compatible and facilitates a multi-chain ecosystem. It is the world’s largest smart contract blockchain in terms of transaction volume and daily active users. It has processed 3 billion transactions from 200 million unique addresses, bringing developers massive user access with ultra-low gas fees. The ecosystem has over 1,300 active dApps across multiple categories, such as DeFi, Metaverse, blockchain games, NFT, and more.
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About CyberConnect
CyberConnect is a decentralized social graph protocol with identity sovereignty for mass adoption and network effects. It enables users to create profiles as the anchor of users’ decentralized identities. With CyberConnect, users own their social graph, content, monetization channels, and social data allowing them to travel across several dApps seamlessly without having to recreate their network on every new platform. As of February 2023, CyberConnect has 123k+ user profiles and 200k monthly active users who have done more than 1M transactions.
