Guest:

Val, Marketing Head of 4EVERLAND@4everland_org

Andy, Core Builder of Unimeta@Unimeta_Dao

Edward, CSO of May Social@May_Social

Gerry, CMO of everVision@everVisionHQ

Thomas Yu,Co-Founder of KNN3@wenqingyu

Host:

Errance, Co-Founder of KNN3@knn3network

Q1：It’s near the end of the year, what has your project done and achieved in 2022? Could you summarize some sparkling time of your project in 2022?

Andy@Unimeta_Dao：

Since 2017, we have started to help some blockchain projects to promote, operate, market, and incubate, and we have accumulated a lot of resources such as KOLs and communities. We believe that in the current Web3 industry, if it wants to achieve a prosperous state, it must require a large number of new users to access, and only in this way that we can re-attract large capital to bring funds into the market in this round of bear market washing, which will eventually drive the market activity of the entire industry. So we think the next most valuable thing is to solve how to drive a large number of people to understand and enter the industry. We believe that the key link is actually KOLs and web3 communities. They are the most accessible and trustworthy for new users. So we began to launch the development plan for Unimeta — — the decentralized promotion of connector.

We have decided to divide it into several stages. At present, the first stage is to lower the threshold, let KOLs and the communities settle in, to let excellent projects launch first, and other protocol layers such as matching cooperation and value settlement functions are placed in the follow-up and take longer to develop and build.

What is exciting is that the official website unimeta.com is currently online, and you can already see that there are a large number of Web3 KOL & community resources displayed on it, as well as the information and needs of the project parties that are still in operation are gradually increasing, and we are constantly receiving various launch cooperation consulting from institution

Thomas@wenqingyu：

I think 2022 is a very long year, KNN3 has achieved a lot of stuff. First of all, we have finished our seed round fundraising. From the product side, we have completed a development of a high performance data processing and algorithm-friendly infrastructure solution for the multi-chain user-centric data, which is very important because right now, we have a lot of blockchains running parallely, but the data has been segmented into the different platforms, so within this infrastructure we can enable those dapps and interoperate on different blockchains. Besides, it’s worth mentioning that we’ve been empowered by cloud technology companies like AWS, PingCAP and we have been co-building some stuff in the past quarters.

Second part is that we are working with a range of web3 native solutions, and collaborating with projects such as Chainlink and lens protocol, to build a future infrastructure for social apps. I think this is very important to understand that today we’ve already had some basic components for building a native social landscape. Yet, we don’t have a very powerful data middleware to apply the algorithm and AI to enlarge the capabilities of social power. So I think this would be very useful for the coming 2023, and for those developers to take a look.

In addition, we’ve expanded our product and service offering from on-demanded data API services to on-chain solutions, analyzing by the ZKP and Chainlink oracle network, sending the data from off-chain to on-chain. This would be a vital capability that we can enable smart contracts to have higher data processing and algorithm processing capabilities in the future.

Overall, I think KNN3 has made a significant step in 2022 in building our infrastructure and data solution system. We’ll keep moving forward and keep building.

Edward@May_Social：

Our project has existed for a long time, we started the start-up 2 years ago, and this is the first year we’re undergoing the bear market. Last year, the whole industry was on a hype, especially for the metaverse, while this year, we saw a lot of challenges to the entire metaverse as well as the crypto market.

In 2022, even though we are facing these challenges, I think we’re still very proud of what we’ve achieved. First of all, we’ve fully launched our product on the app store as well as on google play. We have our product ready to scale. If you’re curious about what a pure virtual social is like, please head over to the app store and search for MAY- Meet Another You. The metaverse life is not just in everyone’s dreams, but is accessible on your mobile phone.

№2 is that we’ve achieved another round of funding, which is really difficult because we started raising money in the middle of the year, right after LUNA hit the bottom. Overall, the market is still confident about our team.

Thirdly, we’re more and more clear about our future strategy in terms of how to onboard more and more users into web3 and bridge web2 and web3 users. If you talk about the next generation social experience, web3 social app right now, if you talk about the numbers, especially metaverse, the interactions, DAUs and retention are poor. Practically, we are all web2 users. Although we carry web3 wallet, NFT assets across different chains, we’re still using web2 communication and web2 social apps to look for news, which is really the potential for apps like us. Adding on that, leveraging the web3 features, the identities, on-chain verifiable assets and tokens, all the perks that we can add on top of web2 social experience which is much richer than the social experience on the current platforms like twitter or instagram. That’s our goal.

Val@valsdh：

For 4EVERLAND, 2022 was the year of the growth, actually we started our project last year. In terms of development, this year was tough, we have to pay attention to building instead of looking at the market. Thus, the 4EVERLAND team was building pretty hard with some new features and servicesprojects launched.

From the marketing activities, we collaborated with our followers and fan base, in which huge growth can be seen. The last but not the least, of course is the fundraising. We’ve met some interesting funds and projects.

Gerry@GerryWon：

I would take this year as a meaningful and special year for everVision. We’ve started the company since the end of 2020, for more than 1 year, the team was mainly focused on technology development without much market action. Since the beginning of this year, we have started to make efforts in marketing facet, in deed, there are some achievements, especially that we’ve completed all of the components in our plan, including payments, decks, tool stacks, and DAOs.

In terms of the sparkling time is that we’ve made the Arweave first off-line event, — Arweave Asia 2022 in Singapore, we invited almost every core member to join. Most people are unfamiliar with Arweave ecosystem, so we hope to bring a great impression to core members and let them experience the benefit of Arweave. After the event, we have a strong connection with the Arweave community which lets us have a good ecosystem niche.

Another thing is that we rebranded our company, from everFinance to everVision, within a powerful brand strategy. The reason behind is that we think everFinance sounds like a financial company while our project is more around technology development. And our vision is to bring all the people to web3.

Q2：After the speculation duration and Twitter acquisition, which part do you think is the most valuable in the web3 ecosystem? For example, NFTs, data infra, wallet, DIDs, and please give us your explanation.

Andy@Unimeta_Dao：

I would like to answer this question in two parts: First, what are these fields? Secondly, what are their values? Finally, You will know which field is the most valuable in the web3 ecosystem in my opinion .

NFT is already an indispensable basic element of Web3. It makes us no longer need to prove the uniqueness of the item, no need to prove that you are you ,me and me, which means that everything that needs to involve people or things with unique attributes can be bound to minted NFTs. So you will find that Web3 is full of various NFTs everywhere, whether it is identity certificates, resume certificates, event certificates, honor certificates, copyright certificates, IP collections, etc., so the value of this field depends on the social value, practical value or collection value brought by NFT itself.

I think the reason why there is huge potential in the entire Web3 industry is because its decentralized nature has brought changes in production relations. It gives most non-vested interests people more opportunities to participate in the formulation of rules, and gives us the possibility to re-price various social productivity. And the production material that is the easiest to be web3ized is data, which is the data generated by all of us and all events at all times. In fact, we can also find that every transaction in Web3 is due to the interaction of data, the transaction is smarter because of data, the cooperation is also more credible because of data, and the automation process is also more intelligent because of data. So the field of Data infra itself has very high value. However, the value of a specific project actually depends on how the project itself integrates data to optimize data provision. There can be huge opportunities.

Thomas@wenqingyu：

The Twitter acquisition has re-initiated the debate about free speech and anti-censorship on social media.The problem of content moderation and censorship online goes beyond the decision of what is acceptable content has turned into a very controversial question of who is determined to decide and who should be censored. This leads to the question of whether social graph has to be adopted by a highly-centralized platform? Or it may have a different future by applying the web3 technology to enable a decentralized internet where users will have more self sovereignty.

These thoughts drive to another thinking: the reason why companies implement the strict regulation around content control is not only because they have the power to do that but also because the business model compels them to deploy that. If they’re not doing the moderation carefully, their responsibility will impact their business model. From this perspective, let’s think about an interesting point: whether we should build another way of commercialization to allow a new type of social graph on top of web3 technology in which users have the ultimate control over their contents. However, who is going to take the responsibility?

A tricky question: if a corporation is not making money from that, they will definitely stop spending funds or resourcing on the moderation, then who else would delete the bad comments or anything else which is harmful to the social graph? I think web3 is not only about technology innovation, but also the innovation of social graph.

Edward@May_Social：

If you look at who has acquired Twitter -Elon Musk, a big big voice advocate for crypto,I think Twitter would be the influence of the crypto market in the future. Right now, almost every web3 project is popularizing their projects and making collaborations on Twitter — Twitter is already the default marketing platform for crypto projects.

Any topic related to web3 or crypto on Twitter is going to have bigger benefits of the traffic, from NFTs, DIDs, wallets, etc. More web2 users on Twitter would join this party.

From the function side, I think Twitter would integrate more features around web3, for example, crypto payments and creator friendly features. Elon Musk has his plan to make Twitter a super app.

The down side is that Twitter can be more and more speculated for projects, especially for projects with market manipulation perks. We see different voices on twitter, if disruptors get a bigger share of the traffic, that would be a problem.

Val@valsdh：

I think the acquisition of Twitter has raised a lot of thoughts, and discussion in terms of decentralization has been all around the industry, it’s interesting to see how it will react with the recent event. There is a lot of criticism about the twitter centralization, but due to the initial spirit of Twitter, the argument from my point of view would not be easily changed. I may conclude that Twitter itself would not be changed, but the owner of the content may be changed. I think in web3, the freedom of speech and decentralization is really in demand for web3 projects. Then the problem may lead to that: should we create decentralized Twitter? If we do, we can earn the money or how to make the advertisement or who is on behalf of deleting the harmful speech?

To my mind, the Twitter acquisition was interesting , but I don’t think there were much things changed actually.

Gerry@GerryWon：

For this thing, I think data infrastructure is critical, for instance the Arweave ecosystem to create a secure permanent data storage. And I think only Arweave can do that, because nobody has the right or power to delete or tamper the data on Arweave. In terms of regulation and censorship, I think we have to face the fact. This world is still under centralization even with the support of decentralized projects to anti censorship or regulation issues.

Hence, the future of Twitter is going to be very interesting. Elon Musk always says something unexpected on twitter and he continuously stands for the crypto market, so Twitter has the potential to be the first giant to bind web2 and web3.

Q3：What’s your plan for facing the current bear market challenges ? How do you imagine the web3 market in 2023?

Andy@Unimeta_Dao：

Keep calm, save bullets, stay focused, increase communication, and make proper layouts.

The development of an industry itself has a basic universal law of development. At the beginning, no one cared about it, and gradually it was noticed by some people and questioned by most people, until it created a huge wealth effect and then there was the first wave of crazy gold diggers poured in, and the industry began to have its first foam period. When a wave of people were cheated here and gradually formed the first wave of wealth losses, the industry began to shrink sharply and entered a cooling-off period, the first bubble burst. After the industry fell into a trough, a new round of opportunities is also brewing. At this time, a second wave of people will quietly enter the market and start to iteratively update some new technologies or applications on the basis of the previous ones, and we will gradually start the second round of great development.

In the case that many industry standards and infrastructure are not perfect, there will still be bubbles again. When the second round of progress finally ends in failure and some bubbles with no real value are pierced, there will be a second cold winter. Repeating this cycle, you will find that as long as this industry has the possibility of bringing any value to society, it will not disappear because of a bubble burst, nor will it die because of a cold winter. On the contrary, after each bubble bursts, a new round of industry progress will be born, and people with higher knowledge and belief in the industry will enter the market again with funds. In other words, it often means that real unicorns are not born in a bull market but in a bear market, so for us, what we need to do is to either become a unicorn, or save bullets and food to discover unicorns and invest unicorns.

Thomas@wenqingyu：

The biggest innovation is always happening in the bear market. Given the current market conditions, our priority of KNN3 is to keep building and moving forward without plans which is important to show our confidence to users and community. Besides, KNN3 wants to utilize the bear market opportunity to test some new products or services and establish our product market feeds. I think especially for infrastructure or middleware projects, it normally takes longer time to get mature and accepted by users, normally we’re targeting the enterprise or business clients. It’s vital for us to find the right go-to-market strategy, too. During the bear market, everything is going slowly, as long as you’re rolling, it will be a very valuable opportunity for you to keep testing.

Another thing that we cannot avoid is fundraising, which is very challenging in this current bear market. Try to keep in touch with potential investors, update your project’s progress within your future plans and maintain a long-term communication with them.

Take insight into the history, it was always the bear market to be the turning point for the new needs and new business paradigm to come out. So, keep an eye on the emerging trend and transform your development strategy accordingly.

Edward@May_Social：

No doubt this year is challenging, and I do have a negative attitude towards next year because this is not only the crypto winter, but also the macro curriculum winter around the world which is going to impact all of us. In terms of difficulty, I would give one word to the builders or entrepreneurs: that is FOCUS. For our project, we have been focusing on the core features we think are helpful for our users. The value proposition also cannot be ignored, I think all of the tracks and projects that we’re building here, we all have a bright, big future vision.

Remember to take a second look at ourselves, as well as our project and our industry to determine where we should put our efforts. Focusing on making sure to let your first 10 customers happy so that they can advocate for your project. As for MAY, we need to ensure our initial customers are super super loyal. Thus, I think FOCUS is the key word I really want to strengthen here.

Val@valsdh：

During the bull market, the hype is everywhere, and it is easy to make a lot of money, otherwise the bear market is a good chance to build our product. For 4EVERLAND, we actually do the same thing in the bull market which is focusing on our development and to see which features are really suitable or needed by users. Eventually, definitely the bull market will come and we will be ready for that. There are a lot of stories that projects rising in the bull market successfully but suddenly disappear in the bear market, which validate that these projects didn’t have the ability to survive but just depending on the hype bubble.

Gerry@GerryWon:

I don’t think the bear market is a bad thing. In the bull market, a lot of crypto speculators emerge which leads to the industry short of self reflection thinking. Many capitals encouraged the project to develop short-term profits instead of long-term benefits. On the other hand, significant incidents like FTX greatly hurt our industry, so in bear markets, we slow down our steps and concentrate on the developments, leaving us more time to introspect our products.i believe the next bull market may come from the innovation of application side which will bring more users and funds to this ecosystem. I think in the future, we may use infrastructure to build applications which can be widely adopted. That’s the most valuable thing.