One of the promises of web3 entrepreneurs is to return the data to the owners through decentralization. Singapore-based CyberConnect is one of several blockchain startups working to implement the vision, and it recently completed a $ 15 million round of Series A funding.

The main co-investor of the round is Animoca Brands, a Hong Kong company that in recent years has risen from an outsider in game development to a world-class investment web3. Another co-investor is Sky9 Capital, a Shanghai venture firm founded by Ron Cao, who is known for helping Lightspeed Venture Partners open a store in China.

“In web2, the companies with the largest social network own users’ social graphs and build walls around them to stop competition and promote corporate interests, ”says Wilson Wei, CEO and co-founder of CyberConnect.

Thus, Wei and his team create a “protocol” of the social graph, the basic rules that allow data to be exchanged between computers, for applications and in the case of web3, without a centralized agent like Facebook. The ultimate goal is to allow users to travel on web3 platforms with their subscribers and subscribers.

The CyberConnect-based experience will be as follows: users connect their crypto-wallet – which has become a universal gateway for any web3 application – to a social platform on which they will show all their existing connections. They will receive recommended user addresses that are based on CyberConnect indexing. As soon as they follow someone, this information will be added to the CyberConnect network and will become “portable and self-confident.”

To date, CyberConnect has supported 23 projects, including Project Galaxy and Mask Network, reaching a total of 710,000 users.

Other companies are building similar infrastructures to enable follower interaction, such as Lens, which is run by Aave, a decentralized lending protocol supported by Blockchain Capital.

The CyberConnect solution, says Wei TechCrunch, consists of two components. Like Lens, it offers a software development kit (SDK), software for developers to create custom applications that allow end users to manage their social graphs, and a “social data network” that aggregates user behavior in web3, such as tokens and NFT they bought.

Instead of using smart contracts such as Lens, the CyberConnect SDK is built on an interplanetary file system (IPFS), a peer-to-peer network for storing and sharing data, and a Ceramic network that manages variable data without centralized servers, which Wei claims is a more “cost-effective and gas-efficient solution”. Smart contracts are computer programs that run automatically under the terms of contracts and take on “gas charges,” payments that users make to compensate for the computing power needed to process transactions.

“Protocols based on smart contracts create value from scarce goods, while any data stored in a chain costs a non-trivial amount of gas fees. There are only 10,000 NFTs in one collection and a limited number of bitcoins, ”explains Wei.

“In contrast, the social context welcomes a wealth of data. The number of new users, new connections and new content is constantly increasing, and this data will be dynamic in nature and needs to be constantly updated. ”

CyberConnect plans to generate revenue through social media data that includes a variety of participants, such as data authors, indexers and recommenders, curators and users. According to Wei, the network will be without permission, which means anyone can join, and include incentive mechanisms associated with request fees.

The Pala Alta-based startup works with a team of 27 people in the US, China, Canada and Europe.

Several venture capital firms, including Dragonfliesrecently warned web3 startups that they are preparing for the cooling industry after that the recent collapse of the crypto market and broader macroeconomic complications. Wei is not afraid to say that “bear markets are a great time for us to focus on construction.”

“As a serial entrepreneurial team that has more than seven years of experience in social media, Web3 and blockchain, previous experience has taught us that it is very important to continue building during a downturn,” he says. “It will also be easier to properly recognize genuine forward-looking and value-creating projects, as the noise subsides along with the market hype.”