In Web 2.0, every application all try their best to retain users, improve user retention, build up a moat of users and data, and extract the maximum value from them. Although the arrival of Web3.0 has solved the problem of data ownership, there is still an insurmountable chasm of data interoperability of public chains providing underlying facilities from a segmentation perspective.
AMA interview:
Q1. What kind of project is Relation?
Joe: Relation is a social app middleware, it will be the next generation of socializing infrastructure in Web3. Relation provides tools and services as a data layer2 to enable people to create and manage their own transactions and behavioral data, and interact with others across all chains. No matter which chains users are active on, they can manage everything in one gateway. The on-chain transactions and behavioral data generated will be processed by Relation to create value and provide data services to benefit the individual users and developers within the community as a whole.
Relation manages the underlying logic and data flow of Web3 social networking through four cooperating product modules. IC One is a user plug-in that serves as a gateway that embeds the user's private data space and can manage all authorizations, transactions, and data. IC Graph is a graph database deployed on blockchain to store the relationship data after obtaining user authorization. The data stored will build the Global Social Relation Graph covering multi-chain ecology, it can provide various data services such as recommendation engine, community detection, business intelligence, etc. IC Link is used to manage the whole data Life cycle, including data authorization, who is accessing the data, what data to view, length of access, etc, IC Link will be the data managing pipeline. IC Terminal will be an Etherscan-like interface, which is the Dashboard of Relation. In addition, IC Terminal will be containing a dApp store, user communication forum, developer community, etc.
Relation hopes to promote a new social networking paradigm, return data ownership by building a data space controlled by users only, and open the social graph for dApp access after user authorization. Users own their data, which is portable to any new dApps, thereby reconstructing the relationship between users and Apps, returning control of social networks to users themselves. Relation will not focus on user personal data but pay more attention to the organizations, relationships, and behavior patterns formed by people. We believe these data can play a greater value.
Q2. What do you think is the advantage of Relation?
Joe: From our vision, "People are the sum of social relationships". One of the important features of the evolution from Web2 to Web3 is to strengthen privacy, emphasizing macro-behaviors and relationships. Relation starts with relational data as the key, we think it captures the essence of the Web3 social networks at the mindset level, and can well promote the evolution.
In terms of products, Relation is oriented to the entire Web3 ecosystem, not restricted to a single blockchain or a single address, Relation is people-oriented and focuses on the people behind addresses, as well as the relationship between people. The finally established Global Social Relation Graph is oriented towards the multi-chain ecosystem.
From an architectural perspective, Relation decomposes the complex social middleware into four modules that are both relatively independent and closely cooperating, maintaining the software engineering characteristics of high cohesion and low coupling, which is very conducive to the cooperation and docking of business integration.
Technically, Relation has implemented a Graph Database implemented in rust that can run on WASM. Based on the graph database to organize relational data, Relation builds a Global Social Relation Graph and provides services for users and dApps.
In terms of business model, Relation takes advantage of the portability of user social data to empower games, IM, and other types of social dApps, allowing dApps to focus on business logic and improving the social attributes at a lower cost. Meanwhile, Relation is based on Global Social Relation Graph to provide high-level data services such as N-degree relationship recommendation, data mining, and business intelligence, bringing business model upgrades to dApps including DeFi.
Ecologically, Relation is deployed and developed on Internet Computer. In view of the underlying advantages of IC in terms of operational efficiency, storage, stability, and security, Relation has obvious advantages over similar social applications.
Q3. What kind of problems Relation is designed to solve?
Joe: In the first is the issue of personal data ownership. In the Web2 era, data is stored in social app giant’s system and relies on giants’ apps to persist. Relation hopes to fit the features of Web3 to reconstruct social applications so that personal data can truly belong to users and be portable. By decoupling the data from the application, the application can now focus on business logic itself. Without data, applications are inherently incomplete. With data, together with empowered users and apps, a small ecosystem has flourished.
Secondly, social giants always stare at users' personal data, hoping to extract value from user privacy. Relation hopes to explore the relationship between people and behavior data, and the value of big data through a new organization form and data storage tool. The graph database has proven its value for large-scale social applications in Web2, and here we inherit it from Web2. Of course, it is not easy to make a graph database run on the blockchain, and this is the value of our work of IC Graph.
Finally, by advancing the paradigm shift of data ownership, a lot of data that was at your fingertips in Web2 will become less accessible, which will be another big problem we hope to solve. Most of the data needs to be authorized, and along comes questions, “which data can be viewed”, “which people or applications can be viewed”,” how can it be viewed”, and “how long it can be viewed”? This entire data lifecycle management is the mission of IC Link.
Q4. How does Relation ensure users' data sovereignty?
Joe: Relation utilizes characteristics of Web3 to reconstruct the social network paradigm, returns data sovereignty to users, and decouples social relationships and data from Social App. Users can create their own Data Canister on Relation, and it’s controlled only users. Based on the IC design, it is impossible for anyone to access, update or call it without the authorization of the user's private key. We will open the API of personal Canister in the future so that users and developers can build their own front-end applications.
Through this design, the data agency changes from a centralized social application to the user himself. Users create a private storage space that only they themselves can access, and data needs to be authorized before it can be accessed by developers. Users can choose to disclose part of the data in their storage space, in return, they will get better content and information services, or data usage fees.
Q5. Can Relation be considered a DID project?
Joe: The short answer is no. The core of Relation is the establishment of relationships amongst people and dApps. Relation does not intend to mine user privacy. We hope that users can directly conduct social interaction through on-chain addresses.
Relation is people-oriented. We hope to aggregate the relational data of users on multiple chains and multi-dimensional applications and build a complete social relationship graph in Web3.
The DID standard of W3C has become complicated and bloated and difficult to implement due to the intervention of giants. Relation hopes to provide a simpler and easier way so that users' social behavior in web3 can be created or inherited, and the establishment of the network can be completed by ecological co-construction.
Q6. What is the rationale for developing on IC? How can IC empower Relation?
Joe: Social behavior is usually carried out in a high-frequency and low-cost way. A blockchain-structured network such as Ethereum is not suitable for the deployment of social applications. Our idea is to use decentralized cloud services to deploy our systems. In this field, IC is currently the most mature one and is most suitable for Relation at this moment in terms of performance, cost, or its technical architecture.
In addition, IC's reverse gas fee is very user-friendly. For social applications, this will lower the user's threshold for use, so that Relation's services can be better adopted by users.
IC is more friendly to Web3 applications, and it is easier to burst out good applications. We think this will also be very helpful to the development of Relation.
Q7. IC's current ecosystem is not perfect, what kind of part does Relation hope to be?
Joe: Relation hopes to bring a more friendly development experience to various developers of the IC ecosystem through the infrastructure construction of the new social network paradigm, and bring a more private and unbounded interactable experience to IC users. Relation builds an open and complete data lifecycle management tool and opens APIs, making it easier for IC-based social applications to connect to Social Graph. We will be an important part of the IC ecosystem construction and develop together with IC and the ecosystem.
Q8. What is the layout and planning after seed round financing, in other words, what is the Roadmap?
Joe: In terms of products, we will rapidly develop and iterate functions, release some more friendly login portals, as well as multi-chain management functions, content management, and subscription functions. We will gradually open the technical docs of existing modules of Relation. In the future, we will open-source our graph database IC graph and open the developer forum.
Ecologically, we will establish more cooperation and integrate more dApps to make our Web3 social ecology easy to use and interesting, increase the time that users are willing to stay in Web3, generate richer data, and jointly build the Global Social Relation Graph.
Q9. IC is a community-oriented ecosystem. What part of Relation works well with the community?
Joe: Relation is a project dedicated to building a social graph. We hope that more users will participate in the construction of the social graph by using our tools to generate more social behaviors in Web3, the community's social applications and ecology can be more prosperous.
For community developers or dApps, Relation will gradually open up our services in the future and promote the decentralization of the protocol. We hope that more community developers can participate in the construction of Relation services, and more users to join to enrich Relation's data system.
Q10. What is Relation’s vision for future ecology?
Joe: Relation hopes to provide infrastructures including a series of tools and services in the form of multi-chain middleware, bringing paradigm changes to Web3 social networking. In Web3, personal data returns to users, developers focus on the essence of application logic to release creativity. Being people-oriented and based on the relationship network, Relation makes Web3 more interactive and interesting, hope people stay longer in Web3. We also hope that all the future data generated by Web3 will be related to us. Relation and Web3 natives will jointly build a prosperous social ecology.
Community Question:
Q1. Is Relation a global platform or is there any restriction to certain regions?
Joe: Relation is a global platform without restriction to any region. In addition, we are supporting login from multiple blockchains and web2 identity login, we hope to gradually lower the threshold for the use of web3 applications. You can use Twitter, discord, Facebook, or even a mobile phone number to log in to Relation’s services soon.
Q2. Will IC Link be linkable/compatible to the existing Internet Identity? If IC Graph is adopted, a larger amount of data could be achieved. How do you intend to get around dfinity’s data limit?
Joe: IC Link will be compatible with Internet Identity. In fact, our main login method for Relation is II at this moment. IC Link's mission is to manage the full life cycle of data, including whether users have authorized, what data can be viewed, who or which applications can view, the channel of accessing, length of access, etc. Based on this mission, Relation needs to be oriented to multi-chain, and even a variety of Web2 access methods, of course, including but not limited to II.
IC Graph is a graph database compiled based on WASM. Graph databases improve the efficiency of data reading and storage without extending physical storage space. Based on the current capacity of Canister, which is 4GB, IC Graph can store millions of user relational data and ensure the efficiency of query, which cannot be achieved by relational databases. For capacity expansion, we have two considerations. One is that we are developing the distributed architecture of IC Graph, and implementing a graph database through multiple Canisters to break through the capacity limit of IC; the other is that IC officials are currently working on increasing Canister capacity, which we are also looking forward to.
Q3. How big is your team? Please tell us more about team background?
Joe: Relation has a team of 14, located in Singapore, the United States, and other places, most of them are developers.
The Founder is a financial practitioner in Singapore, a trader, who continues to run quant and derivatives strategies in crypto. In her long-term trading experience, her insights into human nature and her knowledge of data have made her interested in the social field of Web3.
Our CTO has more than ten years of experience in project management and technology research and development and has worked in Fortune 500 companies. He has a strong background in cloud computing and distributed system development, and has led more than 200 people in large-scale project development experience. I am the product manager of Relation.
I was responsible for product design in Internet and top blockchain companies. I have been involved in product design in the fields of finance, logistics, social networking, and games.
Q4. What are your short-term objectives? What are you focusing on right now?
Joe: The team's short-term goals include several aspects.
Technology R&D:
- Based on the self-developed IC Graph, build a Web3 public social graph. By acquiring the public transaction data of users in the Ethereum and IC ecosystem, carrying out in-depth data analysis, and pushing content to users who may be interested in, to promote users social behavior.
- Optimize the IC Link model, formulate the initial social graph permission transfer rules, and open the access protocol, so that more dApps can join Relation's social network.
User growth:
- Integration of Ethereum user identity to continue gaining user growth for IC One.
- Continue to deepen the Web3 social scene, integrate with more social dApps, open social functions such as following, likes, and subscriptions, and record corresponding behaviors in the user's personal data space, thereby broadening the boundaries of the Social Graph.
Ecological cooperation:
Establish strategic cooperation with IC ecology, integrate with more dApps, enrich Web3 social experience, and generate more valuable data.
Q5.Will Relation issue Tokens in the future?
Joe: The short-term goal of the project is still product development.
Q6.Will Relation be involved in finance related business in the future?
Joe: There are no plans to develop finance businesses yet.
Q7.1/ What IC projects are using Relation now? Or what products will use in the future?
2/ How will common users participate in Relation, which is a middleware?
3/ In my memory, dscvr was also going to launch its own base protocol of social protocol, what is the difference between your product and dscvr?
Joe: 1/Followe our official twitter to cooperate.
2/Our current IC ONE is a social product for end users, which can help user build personal data space.
3/dscvr currently focuses on social content, while our vision is to build a social graph.
Q8. Is there a beta version of the product available now?
Joe: Yes, the beta version of IC ONE is launched.
Q9. Is it possible to encrypt the private data that I want?
Joe: In the current design, the private data in Canister is not accessible to others.
Q10.1/ Does the public API query means to query the path of a separate Canister file?
2/ Will there be a corresponding backup mechanism?
Joe: 1/Yes, but not just path query.
2/The backup mechanism is currently being designed, and now it relies on the underlying IC backup mechanism.
What does Relation want to say to everyone?
Joe: We hope to construct the social networking ecology together with users and community developers. Relation is not going to be the next social giant, instead, Relation is empowering social network participants by providing the necessary tools and services that allow them to manage their own data, contribute and govern the growth of social networks, and benefit everyone.
A more decentralized social networking ecosystem requires more individual ability and responsibility. By empowering people, Relation is making web3 easy for everyone.
See you in Web3, see you in Relation.