Connected 2023, a Web3 Social Hackathon by CyberConnect & BNBChain

On 13 March 2023, CyberConnect, the decentralized social graph protocol is culminating in the wrap of Connected 2023, a Web3 social hackathon organized in partnership with BNBChain, the world’s largest blockchain in terms of daily active users. The Web3 social hackathon took place from February 7 - March 9, 2023, and attracted over 2,000 applications from around the globe. From reputation-based social networks to creator platforms, NFT marketplaces, event ticketing, and more, the event featured a diverse range of concepts over the four-week building period, where participating hackers received hands-on support from BNBChain and CyberConnect along with feedback and dev support by co-sponsors Notifi, Lit, Livepeer, and XMTP.

With around $50,000 in prizes and a range of rewards, including mentorship, seed funding opportunities, and more, the Connected 2023 demo day saw 57 projects compete for six categories of bounties.

There were 23 winners announced, with Oasis Origin winning the best overall social dApp prize, Phaver scoring the second and ReadOn the third place in the main Best Overall Web3 Social dApp built with CyberConnect&BNB Chain category. Other categories included: ‘Rising Stars’, Best Overall Web3 Social dApp built with CyberConnect & Notifi, Best Overall Web3 Social dApp built with CyberConnect & Lit Protocol, Best Overall Web3 Social dApp built with CyberConnect & Livepeer and Best Overall Web3 Social dApp built with CyberConnect & XMTP.

Industry veterans and judges from top teams included Multicoin Capital, CoinMarketCap, Sequoia Capital, STEPN, Sky9 Capital, Delphi Digital, SevenX Ventures, Lattice Fund, IOSG Ventures, and LearnWeb3 DAO, who evaluated projects on a range of criteria, including business plan, technical complexity, impact, innovation, and user experience.

In the coming weeks, winning teams will be receiving additional support and mentorship to continue developing their projects and adopt new users into Web3 social. Starting this week, CyberConnect will be featuring the winners with an in-depth look into their projects and how they’re solving key problems for users in Web3 social. With CyberConnect’s recently announced FanClub Loyalty Program, users will be able to engage with the winning projects and earn rewards, helping to bootstrap project communities.
Additionally, BNB Chain will be rolling out the benefits to winning hackers such as invitation to join BNB Greenfield Testnet, access to BNB Chain Growth Initiative, and BNB Chain Starter Pack Credits or Discounts. Winning teams will also be invited to access free tokenomics advisory by the BNB Chain Research team, free infrastructure review by BNB Chain Solution Architects, and free internal audit and security check, to join BNB Chain events and panel discussions, and to access other BNB Chain Ecosystem Initiatives.

CyberConnect is planning the next edition of the hackathon and more incubation programs for later this year and hopes to provide more diverse real use cases and social experiences to mass users. The full list of winners & prizes can be viewed here.

About CyberConnect
CyberConnect is a decentralized social graph protocol with identity sovereignty for mass adoption and network effects. It enables users to create profiles as the anchor of users’ decentralized identities, allowing them to travel across several dApps seamlessly without having to recreate their network on every new platform. CyberConnect protocol was launched in November 2021, as the first social graph protocol published. As of Mar 13th, 2023, CyberConnect has350k user profiles and300kmonthly active users who have done more than 2.8M transactions.

About BNB Chain
BNB Chain is a community-driven, decentralized, and censorship-resistant blockchain, powered by BNB. It consists of BNB Beacon Chain and BNB Smart Chain (BSC), which is EVM compatible and facilitates a multi-chain ecosystem. It is the world’s largest smart contract blockchain in terms of transaction volume and daily active users. It has processed 3 billion transactions from 200 million unique addresses, bringing developers massive user access with ultra-low gas fees. The ecosystem has over 1,300 active dApps across multiple categories, such as DeFi, Metaverse, blockchain games, NFT, and more.