Recapping the CyberConnect & BNB Chain Social Hackathon: How SocialFi is Arbitraging into Web2 Scenarios
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Recapping the CyberConnect & BNB Chain Social Hackathon: How SocialFi is Arbitraging into Web2 Scenarios
How should the potential of blockchain as a technology be unlocked in the context of social applications?
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insights
San Francisco, USA – March 13, 2023 – The Web3 social hackathon “Connected 2023,” co-hosted by decentralized social graph protocol CyberConnect and BNB Chain, the blockchain with the highest daily active users globally, concluded with a demo day and awards ceremony. Held from February 7 to March 9, 2023, the hackathon received applications from over 2,000 teams worldwide, covering concepts such as reputation-based social networks, creator platforms, NFT marketplaces, event ticketing, and more.
On demo day, 57 projects competed for approximately $50,000 in prize money across six categories, with 23 teams ultimately winning awards.
When it comes to SocialFi, opinions in the market are sharply divided. Supporters believe social will drive true mass adoption of blockchain, while skeptics argue that demand for blockchain-based social applications has yet to emerge.
We observe that many SocialFi projects focus far more on the “fi” than the “social.” As a result, the core logic of many products revolves around “how tokens are incentivized and distributed,” rather than considering user perspectives or why users would be willing to shift their existing habits just for these incentives.
How should the potential of blockchain as a technology be unlocked within social?
At this hackathon, we saw an increasing number of projects moving beyond mere token incentives to onboard users. Instead, they’re integrating with native Web2 use cases to enable meaningful, real-world interactions from the start. CyberConnect, as host, embodies this philosophy in its technical design. Beyond the common industry approach of tokenizing and on-chaining social data and identity via smart contracts (like Lens) to ensure ownership and value capture, CyberConnect also employs off-chain decentralized storage to efficiently handle high-frequency, large-scale social actions such as likes and comments. This hybrid model maintains decentralization while offering developers greater flexibility—and, more importantly, enabling a better user experience for mainstream audiences.
TechFlow has selected four standout projects from the event that exemplify this direction, offering concise insights and highlights.
1-Plato
Website: https://www.getplato.app/
Plato is a protocol that rewards consumers for creating and curating video, photo, and review content around restaurants. Users earn rewards by posting short videos or photos of their meals. These rewards are funded by restaurant marketing budgets on Plato.
70% of a restaurant’s marketing spend on Plato goes directly to diners who create content about their visit. Rewards can be traded with community members (badges and dining passes) or redeemed for food. Plato Eats has integrated CyberConnect, giving users a ccProfile and enabling easy use of follow and like functions.
2-Wonderverse
Website: https://www.wonderverse.xyz/
Wonderverse is a management tool for Web3 communities, helping DAOs, NFT projects, DeFi protocols, and others manage proposals, grants, tasks, contributor payments, and more—all on one platform. Designed for native Web3 use cases, Wonderverse integrates Link3, allowing users with Link3 profile pages to easily connect and display their profiles on the Wonderverse platform.
To date, Wonderverse has partnered with over 1,000 Web3 organizations, including Gitcoin, dYdX, Bankless DAO, and Merit Circle, and hosts nearly 60,000 contributors on its platform.
3-Huddle01
Website: https://twitter.com/huddle01com
Huddle01 is a Web3 video conferencing platform built for Web3 communities, DAOs, developers, and enthusiasts. It offers rich Web3 features such as token-gated meetings, NFTs as profile pictures, decentralized meeting recording storage, and decentralized live streaming.
Users can now register on the Huddle01 dApp using their CyberConnect profile and even restrict access to calls based on their social graph.
4-Oasis Origin
Website: https://www.oasis.world/#/new
Oasis Origin is a metaverse social super app, evolved from the original Oasis app, which previously reached over 10 million users globally. As one of the fastest-growing metaverse products in 2022, Oasis has amassed over 10 million registered users and entered social charts in more than 130 countries. Users engage in various social activities on Oasis, such as watching sports events, concerts, and playing board games.
Oasis is launching a new on-chain version called Oasis Origin on BSC, achieving interoperability with the Web2 version. Users can bind their CyberConnect ccProfile NFT as their ID, automatically syncing their on-chain friend relationships into Oasis.
Users can showcase their on-chain assets and other Link Pages content within Oasis spaces. On-chain friends can visit each other’s spaces and trade tokens and NFTs in real time.
On this trend, Wilson Wei, co-founder of host CyberConnect, commented:
“One highlight of this hackathon is how the projects spanned a wide range of real-world use cases, going far beyond traditional social media formats. Web3 social should be a foundational layer across all kinds of scenarios—everything needs social. Starting from diverse, concrete applications, most teams shared a common trait: they intentionally lowered the onboarding barrier and prepared for broader user participation, laying the groundwork for mass adoption. This aligns perfectly with CyberConnect’s technical vision and BNB Chain’s scale advantages. We’re incredibly excited. Moving forward, we’ll continue building this ecosystem together, delivering better decentralized social experiences for mainstream users.”
This article focuses on projects integrating with Web2 and other native social scenarios. For more high-quality projects from the hackathon, please refer to CyberConnect’s official blog.
About CyberConnect
CyberConnect is the world’s first decentralized social graph protocol, designed to preserve identity sovereignty while enabling network effects and driving mass adoption of decentralized social. On the protocol, users can build their own decentralized identities, fully own their social graphs, content, monetization channels, and social data, and carry these assets across different decentralized social platforms. As of March 13, 2023, the CyberConnect protocol hosts over 350k user identities, over 300k monthly active users, and has recorded more than 2.8M on-chain interactions.
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