Interview with Relation Labs: The Next generation of Social Graph Data on Web3
We interviewed Santry, responsible for Relation's brand and operational coordination. Relation One is a social DApp built by Relation Labs for Web3 users to easily manage their social relationship data and get friend matching and interest recommendation services.
1. Please tell us about you, your name, position in the project, etc., so that we can introduce you.
Hello everyone, I'm very pleased to be interviewed. My name is Santry from Relation Labs. I am responsible for Relation's brand and operational coordination globally. I joined the blockchain industry in 2017, and the industry is changing rapidly. From the beginning, tokens are only used for transaction circulation. There are now very rich application scenarios with the continuous development of smart contracts. Our team has also been deeply involved in the blockchain industry and has grown with it.
2. Can you tell us about your project?
Relation strives to be a multi-chain explorer of the value of Web3 social graph data. Our vision is to provide the most powerful and rich social graph for the global multi-chain ecosystem. Based on DFINITY's underlying protocol, we have launched Relation One, a social DApp to help users build social graph networks on Web3. We have also built the Relation Link Tool Suite to enable developers to quickly access and index Web3 social graph data. We also support DApps to use our modular social functionality components, which can build into their businesses in any combination like Lego. We aim to be the next generation of Web3's social graph infrastructure.
3、Relation One is a social product for users, what can you offer them? Why do you want to make a product like this?
Relation One is a social DApp built by Relation Labs for Web3 users to easily manage their social relationship data and get friend matching and interest recommendation services. Its built-in one-stop social features include personal profile management, on-chain identity management, P2P chat, group chat, DAO, NFT avatar display, friend invitation, private domain game rank, etc. Currently, users are supported to log in quickly through wallet applications such as MetaMask, Internet Identity, and Polkadot. In the future, more wallet login portals from the public chain ecosystem will be integrated, making it easy for any crypto user to experience the social applications of Relation One. For now, Relation Labs will subsidize a 1T Gas Fee per user to create a private data-space with 0 cost interaction.
After adding a multi-chain address on Relation One, users will quickly get an exclusive Web3 personality tag. They can get accurate matching of friends on the chain and recommend services for enthusiasts with the same interests, forming a personal-centric visual Web3 social graph and quickly building a social network they know and trust in the Web3 world. In the future, users can easily get all push notifications sent from connected DApps or NFTs, on the corresponding chains in Relation One. Users get a better engagement experience when using new applications without creating data repeatedly.
4、How does Relation ensure users' data sovereignty?
Our vision of One person, One private key, One data space, One data sovereignty, All in one, is to give Web3 users control over their data.
We decouple social relationship data from the Web3 application and store it in data space that the user is in full control of. Users can store, manage and modify any data in the data space, including contacts, game assets, DAO identities, wallet assets, and DApp authorizations. Users can determine the content, scope, and length of open access to their social relationship data through the permissions management suite. We will help the user earn rewards through Data to earn in our subsequent plans.
5、What is the function of your medals? Will NFT be issued in the future?
We are issuing medals to the community as an incentive for early contributors, which are currently earned by participating in official events or completing specific tasks in Relation One. We encourage users to collect as many medals as possible, as in the next phase, we will be releasing NFTs. Users will be allowed to integrate rare NFTs through medals, and in the future, we may have a token drop program for those who support us.
6、There are a lot of platforms doing on-chain data analysis. Why did you choose to enter the track of social graph data?
We all know that on-chain data is like a gold mine; the more applications there are, the more data there is and the bigger the gold mine. So, it is clear which addresses have played which games and how much money they have spent on the chain. Which addresses have participated in YFI mining, Curve pre-mining, and NFT trading? We can easily access the list of users' addresses as all this on-chain data is open and transparent. As a result, on-chain data analysis platforms like Nansen and Glassnode have emerged.
However, social graph data is not easy to obtain. First, on-chain wallet addresses can generate at any time. For users, their focus perhaps limits to maintaining at most 2 or 3 different public chain wallet addresses, except for the big whales. And private key management is a rather careful matter. It means that users are not interacting with as many wallet addresses as there is data on the chain.
Secondly, users' relationships can not analyze purely from on-chain behavior. We must go the extra mile to develop product features to guide users to form their relationship network data on Web3. Therefore, we use Relation One as a carrier to encourage users to associate with more real and valuable on-chain addresses and follow their on-chain friends and people with the same interests recommended by the system. Hence, such social relationship data is very valuable and scarce.
We believe that data such as social graphs is of significant importance to the blockchain industry. We hope that users' on-chain social graph data are easily portable. Users can walk around with their address profiles, tags, and on-chain behavior in every DApps. The value vehicle is the data center on you, and it belongs to you. And Web3 is an era that is remodeling the value of data.
7、What is Relation Link? How do you empower DApps to build their businesses?
We have built the Relation Link Tool Suite to support all public chain DApps and developers to quickly access Web3 social graph data and modularly combine the social components of Relation One like Lego. Relation aims to help DApps quickly explore business opportunities, increase social attributes, improve user stickiness and gain effective user growth in a cost-effective way.
We offer the open-source Relation Graph access query API, Relation Dashboard API, modular social functionality components, and multi-chain smart contract wallet solutions. Relation provides development scaffolding that is easy to develop, test, and deploy for developers. No developer is required to understand the underlying protocols, and contracts can be deployed efficiently with the help of our front-end templates, enabling low-code development.
We also explore diverse Web3 track DApps and tap into potential usage scenarios. For example, DID will acquire valuable on-chain users after linking the Relation Graph to co-construct a pervasive Web3 reputation system based on their social relationship data. Another example is that GameFi projects can integrate the chat function, invite friends function, Rank PK, and other functions of our social function component to increase the stickiness of their community users and expand their user base. Or even a SocialFi project can start a business quickly by adopting the open-source Relation One use case, without the high cost, leaving them more time and energy to focus on their business logic to better serve their users.
8. What is your core technology, and how do they support the proper functioning of your business?
Relation Graph is our core technology. It is the first graph database written in Rust and deployed on WASM and is the underlying core engine of Relation. As the basis for the construction of Relation Social Graph, it provides graph storage, graph query, graph computation, graph analysis, and basic database technology capabilities. It will extend with technical modules for graph visualization and graph neural networks. Using the graph database as the underlying storage engine for complex social data and providing a SPARQL query language interface, we help Web3 DApps achieve a higher-order data application paradigm and more granularly exploit the value of social relationship data.
Relation Graph is storing the authorized data of users and provides data interfaces to support data analysis and data mining in the upper layer. Relation Social Graph will synchronize after users update their authorization data and aggregate all users' authorization data with the public data in each blockchain network. It will eventually build an N-degree social relationship graph of users based on their on-chain behavior, asset status, and interest preferences in different blockchain networks.
Users or other DApps can quickly get the Relation Social Graph analysis results without complicated calculations when they make deep queries. All these operations, which were not possible on the native blockchain, became a reality with the technical support of Relation Graph.
We currently provide enriched data analysis modules based on the underlying graph database, including N-degree relationship recommendations, content subscription push, etc. We will subsequently support higher-order behavioral trend prediction, business intelligence, AI, and other data services.
9、What benefits do you think the Internet Computer has over other L1 blockchains when it comes to creating Social graphs?
Relation hopes to bring a more friendly development experience to various developers of all ecosystems through the infrastructure construction of the new social network paradigm and bring a more private and unbounded interactable experience to Web3 users.
Because social behavior is usually conducted in a high-frequency and low-cost way, a blockchain-structured network like Ethereum is unsuitable for deploying social DApps. 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 technical architecture.
In addition, the reverse gas fee of IC is very user-friendly. For social DApps, this will lower the user's threshold for use so that Users can better adopt Relation's services.
10. What advantages do you believe you have over other competitors?
From our vision, "People are the sum of social relationships." One of the important features of the evolution from Web2 to Web3 is strengthening 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 promote evolution well.
Relation orients to the entire Web3 ecosystem in terms of products, not restricted to a single blockchain or a single address. Relation is people-oriented and focuses on the people behind addresses and the relationship between people. The finally established Global Social Relation Graph orients towards the multi-chain ecosystem.
We are still exploring other public chain underlying protocols. Our goal is to expand the Web3 social graph data towards a multi-chain ecosystem, which we will currently do through a unified user login to a multi-chain wallet. We have already opened up Metamask, Internet Identity, and Polkadot support. We will open up more wallet login portals in the future.
Technically, Relation has implemented a Graph Database 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 social relationship data to empower a new generation of DApps such as GameFi, DID, and NFT marketplaces. It allows DApps to focus on business logic and enhance social attributes at a lower cost. At the same time, Relation provides higher-order data services such as N-degree relationship recommendation, data mining, and business intelligence based on Web3 social graph data, bringing business model upgrades to DApps, including DeFi.
11. Tell us about your team?
Relation has completed a seed round of funding at a valuation of US$20 million, it has successfully secured capital backing from Hashkey Capital, SNZ, Signum Capital, and others. Relation has a team of 20, located in Singapore, the United States, and other places, most of them are developers. Our 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.
Relation's vision is to provide the most powerful and data-enriched social graph for the global multi-chain ecosystem, jointly explore a new paradigm of people and organizations, relationships and behaviors in the next generation of the Web3 Internet, and become the next generation of social infrastructure for Web3.
12、Can Relation be considered a DID or SocialFi Project?
The short answer is no. At our core, Relationships build relationships between people, people, and DApps. Relation does not intend to dig users' privacy. We want users to be able to associate real on-chain addresses and interact socially, forming a social graph of individuals on Web3.
Due to the giant's involvement, the W3C DID standard has become complex, bloated, and difficult to implement. Relation wants to provide a simpler and easier way for users' social behavior in web3 to create or inherit, completing the network through ecological co-construction.
Based on the development and operation of Relation One, Relation has provided a typical example of a Web3 social DApp, a pioneering exercise in exploring the value of Web3 social graph data. We will make it free for any DID or SocialFi project to integrate, and we will not compete with them. In the future, they can directly access the indexing API to achieve a win-win situation.
13. Any challenge or problem you've faced during project development? How did you solve it?
Relation Graph Database is a data storage tool based on the underlying development of IC. Since there is no IO and database, if you want to do complex data operations such as fuzzy search, social relationship query will need to stitch together various complex structures. It won't be easy to reuse, test, and troubleshoot.
We were able to finalize Relation Graph Database can be based on the standard SparSQL language to design business models for enterprise-level development, testing, troubleshooting, and structure stitching through our technical efforts. And supports centralization to a unified Graph DB interface, which can improve development efficiency by orders of magnitude (about 5-10 times).
14. Please give us some details about your roadmap
With this new update to the brand website, we plan to listen to user feedback on the product and continue to optimize the experience.
We will release a mature economic model and a data atom trading model in the second half of this year. These will allow users' authorized data to be earned and freely traded on the marketplace. By 2023, we expect to complete the Global Social Relation Graph, begin advanced analysis of AI intelligent data, and support native social relationship data for the Metaverse.
15、How will you build your ecosystem in the future？
Next, we'll launch some Grant support, DApps integration incentives, and a developer incubation program.
Any influential media community or individual KOLs who are beneficial to the Relation brand or community development are welcome to apply for Grant support.
We also welcome global eco-projects to integrate with the Relation Link Tool Suite and provide feedback and suggestions for optimizing our products. These will receive our Early Integration Support and share the Relation community resources and brand linkage.
We plan to launch a developer course to help developers quickly learn the Tool Suite of Relation Link to enrich the usage scenarios of different DApps through online classes. We will set up a variety of topics, including the analysis of multiple public chains underlying protocols, developer use cases, code practice, Etc. We will turn your idea into reality if you have a great idea!
16、Let's ask the most interesting question for users. Do you have plans to issue tokens this year?
To be honest, we do have plans for this year. We are also currently building the Data to Earn economic model and the Data Trading Atom model, so please follow us on Twitter or join our community to get the latest news.
17、What does Relation want to say to everyone?
We hope to construct a social networking ecosystem with users and community developers. Relation will not 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 data, contribute to 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.
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