Gitcoin Grant Round 15 Web3 Social Ecosystem Round Review

Mask Network
36 min readSep 20, 2022

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Gitcoin, the open source software and community donation platform, has launched its 15th round of donations from Sep 7–22, which will allow users to fund great open source software teams.

The GR15 Web3 social Twitter space will be held on Wednesday, 9/21 at 9:00 PM BST (9:00 AM EST), and project participants and interested parties are invited to attend.

Mask Network is really excited to continue supporting Web3 Social Ecosystem in Grant Round 15 with $50,000 in matching funds. We received over 400 applications, and after several rounds of review, 157 projects were selected for this Web 3 social ecosystem round, including 60 returning projects from GR14.

Mask Network is also pleased to see that 20% of projects in GR15 Web3 Social Ecosystem Round came from Mask Network’s recommendations, down from 50% in GR14, while the rest came from organic traffic — this shows the booming scene of the web3 social.

Gitcoin uses a quadratic voting model to crowdfund projects and allocate funds, solving the problem of inefficient financing of public goods in the Ethereum ecosystem and encouraging minority voting. In addition to the donations received by each project through crowdfunding, Gitcoin also uses this as a guide to coordinate the allocation of funds from the Ether Foundation thus increasing the chances of quality projects receiving investment.

In the first 14 grant rounds, Gitcoin funded $67.1 million into thousands of open source projects. This not only helps builders and creators in the Web3 ecosystem, but it also uses secondary funding mechanisms to support climate, Ukraine, and crypto advocacy-related events.

Below are our recommendations for the current round of grants and including a few of the best-returning grantees from GR14, which we have grouped into seven broad categories:

1. Communication/Messaging (7 in GR15 + 3 in GR14)

2. Social Network (11 in GR15 + 4 in GR14)

3. Social Profile (14 in GR15 + 1 in GR14)

4. Reputation data analytics and application (9 in GR15 + 3 in GR14)

5. Creator Economy (7 in GR15 + 1 in GR14)

6. DAO and DAO Tooling (5 in GR15 + 2 in GR14)

7. Metaverse/Gaming Identity (4 in GR15)

1. Communication

1.1 Web3MQ

Brief:

Web3MQ is a Web3 native messaging protocol and communications network. The ability to send messages between users, addresses, and machines, is so fundamental and important that it should (and in the long run needs to) be driven and owned collectively by developers and users (all mankind). This is why we’ve built Web3MQ so that anyone can participate by hosting nodes and growing the Web3MQ network just like Ethereum.

Features & Use Cases:1) DMs: Let users and users connect, 2)Notifications & Web3 mail: Allow projects to notify and send asynchronous messages to users/wallets. 3) Chat & Community: Build community amongst your users. Web3MQ is one of a handful of Web3 messaging protocols that natively support group chat from day one.

Characteristics:

  • Interoperable: We reconnect isolated social platforms with a unified inbox, enabling information to be freely generated, flowed and communicated across terminals. All you need is the other person’s address or compatible DID.
  • Scalable Fast: We’re already faster and more scalable than any other Web3 messaging network and are approaching Web2 performance.
  • Composable: Developers can achieve higher levels of privacy protection and satisfy other personalized features/needs through highly customizable configurations.
  • Natively Multi-Chain: Our design is fundamentally compatible with any chain, and with minimal extensions, can send messages between addresses between any two chains.
  • Ownership: No singular party can tamper with your messages or dictate the way you build on Web3MQ, it’s a collective network of nodes. Web3MQ will ultimately be driven, refined, and updated by the community,

Reasons to Recommend:

Web3MQ is a Web3 native messaging protocol and communication network. It has a web2-like message transmission performance, a developer-friendly composable design, native multi-chain, strong interoperability, and allows users to have ownership of their own data

1.2 SwapChat

Brief:

SwapChat is a Web3 native cross-platform chat application incubated by S3 Labs. Users can message addresses across platforms such as OpenSea, Twitter and so on. Integration with Next.ID allows Swapchat to connect user addresses with social profiles. SwapChat has also integrated trading tools and protocols such as SudoSwap natively, making it much safer to trade on SwapChat, compared to current messaging tools such as Discord and Telegram.

All the users on SwapChat are verified by their Twitter accounts and are wallet-oriented. Thus, users can talk to their contacts on any supported platform using SwapChat. Moreover, SwapChat makes it possible for users to chat even when the platform does not have a chat function, for example, when users see their favorite NFTs on Opensea, they just need to create a SwapChat and talk to the real owner of the NFT, make their offers and make the deal. Users’ information will be transferred in a decentralized and encrypted way.

Reasons to Recommend:

With security, SwapChat fills the gap in the lack of communication tools between buyers and sellers on Opensea. It also provides SDKs to be utilized by extensions, wallets and apps, and has the potential to grow into the default cross-platform communication solution. Web3MQ, the protocol that powers this effort, also has the potential to grow into the next generation of SMTP/POP3.

1.3 PipeMail

Brief:

PipeMail is a blockchain-based mailbox Dapp. Instead of simply adding a layer of web3 to the mailbox of web2, it reconstructs the traditional mailbox software with the concept of Web3: 1. The email body and attachments are encrypted with the wallet’s public key. 2. Email metadata is uploaded to the chain, which is permanently valid and can be checked at any time, greatly reducing spam. 3. The encrypted email body and encrypted attachments are stored using distributed storage (IPFS). Only the sender and recipient can view the content of the email, providing users with “absolute privacy” services.

Reasons to Recommend:

Email contents and attachments are encrypted using the public key

1.4 Beetroot

Brief:

Beetroot is a wallet-to-wallet messaging platform. Users can use encrypted signatures for authentication and send messages to other encrypted addresses. Upon receiving the message, users can choose to get notified through email. Users can also verify each other’s assets so there is no room to fake information. Beetroot is focused on making chat more interactive to provide a great user experience of creating and conducting NFT transactions through the chat interface.

Reasons to Recommend:

The IM tool between wallets enables NFT transactions in the IM tool.

1.5 beoble

Brief:

beoble is a social module with API and SDK for Web 3.0. It is an on-chain communication window and a user-owned Web 3.0 product. With Beoble, Web 3.0 services can easily integrate social functionalities of social profile, messaging, and posting & feeds into their services in 5 minutes. Beoble aims to contribute to the overall web3 social ecosystem.

Beoble’s core features include:

1) modularized social profile,

2) modularized wallet-to-wallet messaging,

3) modularized posting & feeds (Can think of improved Bitmex trollbox for native Dapps)

Review: Web3 communication protocol, integrated profiles, messaging between addresses, and feeds posting

Reasons to Recommend:

Beoble’s modular transformation makes it easier to integrate with third-party applications; its flexibility helps project parties better add social features

1.6 RootMeta

Brief:

RootMeta is a portal to a decentralized social world built on web3. Our objective is to build an infrastructure of web3 social networking. Features including IM communication, contents and on-chain asset display… Everyone can build or find their community on our platform and we will rank them by algorithm so that users can easily find the best community of their interests.

Communities on RootMeta are wonderful space for DAOs. Every DAO can create and manage their communities here.

Social Token on RootMeta will be awarded for all web3 contributors and buidlers.

Reasons to Recommend:

Web3 portal to a decentralized social world, including features: IM communication, contents and on-chain asset display

1.7 nfty chat

Brief:

nftychat.xyz is a web3 chat platform built to replace discord.Our main functions include direct messaging, community creation, and community discovery. Users can chat with friends directly or make their own private/token gated community. It is completely free to use and requires no username or password. In nfty chat, the user’s wallet is your identity.

Compared with Discord, Nfty is building a base on Web3, which is safe and secure. No one can impersonate you when you use ENS and Sign In With Ethereum (SIWE). As long as your private keys are secure, so is your identity.

Reasons to Recommend:

nftychat.xyz is a web3 chat platform built to replace discord, using your wallet as your identity to login

1.8 Mail3

Brief:

Mail3 is a crypto native communication protocol that promises security, privacy preservation and self-sovereign identity. It also enables the users to capture the value of social connection, and accumulate the digital reputation on-chain. Mail3 aims to be the infrastructure for web3 communication and the platform for valuable information such as relationships, reputation, and trust. Thanks to the decentralized architecture, any user can directly establish a private connection with one another, without the concern of being monitored and censored. And the personal data, social relationship, and corresponding value is stored distributedly and permanently. The web3 data that users accumulate on-chain is a perfect filter to form a valuable, effective and serious social network. Mail3 will make full use of these invaluable data to provide a spam free, efficiency focused communication protocol.

Reasons to Recommend:

Mail 3 is a communication protocol that protects privacy and data security and can be a mail protocol that eliminates junk email

1.9 Ourlog

Brief:

Ourlog is a decentralized communication tool for communities to log their research, thinking, and insights in a collective environment for the purposes of publishing. From scientific research, to government, to social groups, to web3 builders, Ourlog is a public, networked goods tool for any team to cohere and publish its collective intelligence. It’s like Discord plus Wordpress for web3.

Reasons to Recommend:

Ourlog would be the Ethereum’s communications infrastructure, and will to do the development of public, networked communications goods in the future

1.10 MetaMail

Brief:

A web3 email provider, users use wallet/ENS as email address (e.g. suneal.eth@mmail.ink), and sign/encrypt to ensure the security. MetaMail is compatible with other mail like Gmail, and all features are free to use

Reasons to Recommend:

One of the representatives of web3 mail, ENS compatible feature is very user friendly. overall user experience is smooth and seamless. It also connected to few well-known social graph projects like KNN3/Next.ID/CyberConnect, which bring users’ web3 social connection into dapp

2. Social Network

2.1 TeaParty

Brief:

A Web3 social growth tool based on Promote2Earn, currently compatible with social graph on the Lens protocol and content on the Twitter platform. Project/individuals publish rewarding post by offering TEA Tokens, and users can gain rewards by completing specified tasks (repos, likes, follows etc.).

Reasons to Recommend:

It’s a play2earn version of Project Galaxy, Tea Party can incentivize rewards to each Twitter/Lens post, which is equivalent to aggregating all advertising posts into one platform and performing token incentives, which can effectively resist Sybil attack, but the delivery accuracy will be very low. Currently, there is a Demo, which is relatively smooth to use.

2.2 Lenstube

Brief:

Lenstube is an open-source Web3 video-sharing social media platform built on top of Lens protocol and lives on Polygon mainnet. It protects the creators’ privacy, and censorship, and avoids the problems of being banned and de-platformed without warning or any justification channels. Users can upload their content to Arweave and monetize with low gas fees, while viewers can support creators by minting their favorite content, and tips, by joining the channel using membership, and more. By storing videos permanently in Arweave and the metadata stored permanently on-chain, no one can restrict users from creating content of their choice, and users retain the right to monetize their content with various means like nft modules and tips.

Reasons to Recommend:

Youtube in Web3 field, the overall product is mature. The platform has accumulated a lot of video content, and with the help of Lens, it can get a lot of user-side traffic, which is a relatively mature project in the video creator economic project. However, compared with the passive advertising revenue that web2 can obtain, Lenstube relies on the ability of creators to release and manage NFTs themselves, so the enthusiasm of early creators may be lower.

2.3 Pink Paper

Brief:

Pink Paper is a decentralized and permissionless publishing platform for individuals and communities worldwide to express their opinions and share information with the rest of their communities. Users can come and publish blogs and other forms of content on the platform and showcase it to the world. At the same time, one can raise funds for their endeavors on the platform allowing donating to world-changing technologies. Pink Paper will provide a decentralized and censorship-free platform for everyone to use and express their views about different topics. Last, Pink Paper is providing a censorship-free decentralized publishing platform that supports freedom of speech.

Reasons to Recommend:

Pink Paper will provide a decentralized and censorship-free platform for everyone to use and express their views about different topics.

2.4 Troop Finance

Brief:

Troop Finance is a social investment platform built on Lens Protocol.

More than 70% of crypto investors collaborate on their investment strategies using social media platforms like Telegram or Discord, friend chat groups and influencer platforms.

Troop tackles these three opportunities:

-Community thought leaders and active members get compensated for their contributions to the community.

-Scammers are kept at bay through an on-chain reputation system with Soulbound badges.

-Retail investors can copy community curated portfolios without having to give up the custody of their money.

It facilitates the creation of collaborative portfolios to help communities invest better together. The protocol allows anybody to become a member and contribute to the curation of investment portfolios.

Reasons to Recommend:

social investment platform built on Lens Protocol, Contributors receive badges that track their reputation to keep scammers away and reward those who actively contribute to their investment communities.

2.5 ECHO — decentralized comment widget based on Arweave

Brief:

Echo is a widget-based product based on Arweave to help collecting comments, likes, dislikes and receiving tips. Echo can be embedded into any websites supporting iframe including Mirror. Echo is designed to solve the following issues. First, each comment will be uploaded with signature of user. Second, wallet and data can’t be deleted or modified. Finally, It is an out-of-the-box solution.

Reasons to Recommend:

Echo is a widget-based product based on Arweave to help collecting comments, likes, dislikes and receiving tips.

2.6 Atlantis Climate Network

Brief:

Atlantis is a climate impact network connecting communities and companies working to address climate change by providing digital infrastructure and improving coordination and incentives.

As a climate system with social attributes, it can establish the user’s personal social climate impact home page, and also establish the ranking within the community and friends. Atlantis also supports the ability to create squads to help users complete rewards with their friends.

A network where every action counts, Atlantis incentivises companies to mine climate action bounties on the platform in exchange for “Impact Credits (ICs)” tokens. ICs is used to rank businesses and individuals on their global sustainability measures. The higher they rank, the greater their impact in the fight against climate change.

Atlantis has raised a total of $125,000 and completed their prototype, which will be divided into civic applications for individuals and communities, and enterprise applications for businesses and companies.

Reasons to Recommend:

Users are encouraged to participate in climate change with their friends through social interaction whilst gaining on-chain reputation and rewards, thus accelerating both ESG and Web3

2.7 Punstar

Brief:

PunStar expresses various social relationships and interactions in the Web3 world by building a resource-oriented next generation NFT architecture, and capitalizes all of this, so that the social capability value of each participant is confirmed.

PunStar is an initial form of this social network. The earliest will be built on Flow, and in the future this will be expanded to Aptos and Sui. We use the resource mechanism to condense some of the attributes of innovation into NFTs and capitalize on them. These innovative attributes include dynamic social relationships among participants as a result of resource interactions.

PunStar chooses to share interesting stories as the entry point of social networks, because it is easier for users to spread widely. PunStar participants are called “Punsters” (an NFT), and they share their fun stories in the form of “Duanji” (an NFT). Users can follow and like the Punster that they think is funny, and the Punster’s funny index will increase.

Each person can express their preference for “Duanji”, which stimulates the construction of social relationships between participants and can estimate each Punster’s hilarious index. After Punster reaches a certain funny index, they can promote content (such as advertising) based on the relationship they have built in PunStar.

Reasons to Recommend:

PunStar uses a fuss-free and efficient way to acquire users and get them to interact, which could be a new entry point for Web3 social traffic.

2.8 Otomee

Brief:

Otomee is a censorship-resistant hub for the metaverse, a place communities can call home. Users are able to create and exchange value on it without fees.

Otomee aims to be the place where communities can have all they need to thrive. With a built-in, open marketplace, communities can exchange NFTs and decide whether they want to pay royalties or transact completely for free.

Otomee introduces a new user-centric model where individuals will be able to curate NFT listings from different communities and display them on their themed profile page, under the Curation tab. All sales made through a user’s Curation page will bring him a % of the sales defined by him, creating new markets and opportunities for individuals to leverage the metaverse economy.

Reasons to Recommend:

open market built into personal pages.

2.9 Lenster

Brief:

Lenster is a decentralized, and permissionless social media app powered by the Lens protocol. Lenster lives in the Polygon network so users can interact with dApp seamlessly with zero gas fees, no one can take down any content from the app, even the admins.

Users don’t need to provide any personal information except their usernames (it’s their choices) and wallet address, and Lenster doesn’t collect any sensitive information. Lenster or the Lens team doesn’t have access to moderate user posts. In Lenster, users need to sign for everything.

Reasons to Recommend:

No 1 Lens ecosystem app, in the form of a web3 Twitter. Not only built-in the daily use of social networking functions such as posting and comments, but it also has web3 native features like establishing communities, crowdfunding, and DAOs.

Currently, they have a very smooth UX of the beta version, and with the foundation of the social graph from Lens, it shows more competitive than other alike products.

2.10 MetaJam

Brief:

MetaJam is building a web3 BUIDL network where people discover cool web3 products/dapps and build disruptive web3 projects with Proof of BUIDL Protocol, a decentralized reputation protocol for web3 BUIDL. As an individual, users can build your web3 resume via the verified quests, verify skills and build a track record, apply for your web3 jobs among the network, and contribute to web3 projects to earn reputation credits & token incentives. As a team, team user can showcase your project among the community, hire talents via web3 resume & scouts, and raise funds for your project.

Reasons to Recommend:

Metajam is a bit like Web3 Product Hunt. Its project profile feature can help the project build its own reputation.

2.11 Blocktracker

Brief:

Blocktracker, built by ex-Tiktok engineers, utilizes AI to extract data from blockchain and match wallet addresses with Twitter accounts. Users can see Web3 information from people they follow, such as the latest NFT transactions, lifetime yield rate, and more.

Reasons to Recommend:

A very practical Twitter plug-in, users can intuitively see the on-chain data like the latest NFT transaction and the overall profitability of other users on Twitter. It is a powerful tool for Whale catching and identifying KOLs.

2.12 Bfrenz

Brief:

Bfrenz is dedicated to becoming the best crypto-native social media. Bnews is the first product we build that provides personalized crypto news feed based on user wallet and social behaviors. Bfrenz’s unique features includes: 1)NFT Holder Tracker: Tracking the NFT transactions from holders who are similar to you. 2) Crypto Tracker: Keep users updated on the crypto currency market on a daily basis. 3)Personalized Crypto News Aggregator: Bnews collects news from comprehensive data sources but everyone will has his unique newsfeed finally. Users won’t miss anything interesting, while not spending too much time looking up from various news products. 4) Social features: Users can create a unique profile choosing the user’s ENS address and NFT as your name and profile picture for yourself on Bnews. Everyone can give likes, comments, forward and reactions on newsfeed.

Reasons to Recommend:

Bfrenz is focused on being the best crypto-native social media, integrating user-interested content through crypto-news, and encouraging users to social based on content

2.13 Feed.xyz

Brief:

Feed.xyz is the metaverse of public knowledge in the future, and aims to build the main portal for entering Web 3.0 from Web 2.0, and effectively delivers the desired contents to audiences.

Our vision is to infinitely expand interoperability of Socialfi. Focusing on the needs of day to day users for the interoperability of Web3.0 content, we will deeply integrate Mirror and other content creation platform and create the first economy model of Writer to Earn and Share to Earn in practice effectively, where content generators can maximize their influence while content consumers can get reward for their contribution to the spread good thoughts and content. At the same time, in Feed.xyz, content can be seamlessly synced to Mirror with a more user friendly create environment for creators.

Reasons to Recommend:

Feed.xyz creates a write to earn place for content creators, providing components for the future development of socialfi, and the ability to sync to mirror

2.14 CrossSync

Brief:

CrossSync is a socially-oriented web3 Dapp that runs on the Crossbell. CrossSync aims to allow a user-owned flow of social information by using a Chromium extension that helps user sync all tweets onto the Crossbell chain.

Reasons to Recommend:

Rss3 team, build a public chain and allow user publish thier tweets from Twitter on-chain with one click through CrossSync.

2.15 ClubS

Brief:

ClubS is a combination SocialFi, Creators and IPs. The team is building a social utility protocol to protect creative IPs which has an existing fanbase.

Using the concept of NFT and a social app, it helps IP owners to earn together with the community.

Reasons to Recommend:

A mobile-based group social platform, users can log in through web2 or web3 methods, and can publish posts or create token-gated groups. The product experience is relatively smooth, but there are few creator economy functions yet. It is worth see whether there are opportunities to collab with some larger IPs in the future.

3. Social Profile & DID

3.1 Re-Public

Brief:

Aiming for user’s data usage not to receive better ads, but to make meaningful changes in users’ life and significant contributions to the causes they care about,

Re-Public takes a bottom-up approach which is giving users the tools they need to have true agency with their data. Re-Public managed to build a mobile app that is currently live on the App Store (iOS) and Play Store (Android), which collected the data, saved locally to the user’s device, encrypted with EE2E, and backed up to the cloud.

Re-Public also allows individuals to share their investigated data with a vast number of projects and companies to earn rewards, and companies are able to purchase the correlated datasets.

Reasons to Recommend:

Re-public is a user-owned data management tool, the goal is to let users truly control their own data

3.2 Plasma Finance

Brief:

Plasma is utilizing ENS infrastructure as a data layer for social profile.

It builds a real-time on-chain parser to build a database of all current ENS NFTs data (content and text records), which combines ENS data with the wallet’s NFT collections and DeFi portfolio data to build a comprehensive profile of users.

Plasma builds a web UI for the Portfolio Page of ENS wallets with social links, text, website, and DeFi/NFT profile, It also offers dynamic metadata and images for social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Telegram and Google Search. For example, it will allow users to share their profiles with a nice preview image, and google bots will be able to index this data for the search engine. Plus, it creates a public API service to provide all this data for external developers via API calls. Then, anyone can use it and integrate ENS social profiles into their platforms.

Reasons to Recommend:

Plasma combines ENS data with NFT collection and DeFi portfolio data to build comprehensive user profiles

3.3 Join3 — Collaboration and Social

Brief:

Using SBT(Soulbound token), Join3 creates a Web3 resume system for individuals and helps Web2 organizations transform to Web3 DAO.

Reasons to Recommend:

Join3 creates a Web3 resume system for individuals, it can help people to create their own resume to present they are capable of doing certain tasks. Both individuals and DAO organizations can quickly find a suitable match for each other.

3.4 Nextme

Brief:

Nextme aims to create Next Generation #Web3 DID Social Gateway and On-Chain Portrait Infrastructure. The product can be divided into two layers: 1, The upper layer (to c scene) is based on a set of Nextme DIDs Network to connect users’ web2+3 Links, works, assets, contracts, etc. select templates, and quickly generate personalized social media business cards for creators, project parties, organizations and communities, nft mint/badge claim pages, etc. save an average of 3–5 manpower/tens of thousands of dollars in design front-end and back-end contracts;

Reasons to Recommend:

There is no Demo yet, but from the schematic diagram, we know Nextme can create Profile pages by aggregating Web2/Web3 data. How to monetize: Nextme will desensitize the data, and the desensitization output is sent to developers and organizations for on-chain user portrait analysis, precise delivery, advertising services, social graphs, and other scenarios.

3.5 Predomain Project

Brief:

A decentralized & powerful platform for ENS users to search, register, buy, and sell ENS domains.

Reasons to Recommend:

A tool specially made for managing ENS domains, which is convenient for users who have multiple ENS domains.

3.6 WalliD wallet

Brief:

WalliD is the self-sovereign aggregator toolkit for all Digital IDs.

Users can privately manage all their digital IDs through a single wallet independently of underlying infrastructure or network.

Webapps can use a single SDK to verify users’ IDs through their favourite protocols and ID networks can offer their users a tool to manage their non-financial assets without creating new wallets or using multiple softwares

Reasons to Recommend:

One wallet managing multiple digital IDs will significantly lower the barrier to entry for web3 identities.

3.7 Nimieth

Brief:

Nimi is a decentralized social aggregator that lets anyone create, curate and share their web3 profile page and host it on their ENS domain. All your socials, NFTs, POAPs and more — hosted effortlessly on your ENS domain.

The basic idea behind Nimi was to make it easier for users to host content on their ENS domain. Currently Nimi could be thought of as a “Linktree for web3”.

Nimi combines ENS, IPFS, and Limo to let anyone host a decentralised profile page.

Reasons to Recommend:

Nimi is a decentralized social aggregator that lets anyone create, curate and share their web3 profile page

3.8 ETH.Limo

Brief:

LIMO is an ENS enabled IPFS gateway with a strong focus on user privacy and security. LIMO represents a shift in dweb adoption by providing an alternative means of accessing ENS resolvable domains. Prior to LIMO, Cloudflare’s eth.link service was the only public service for bridging web2 and web3. LIMO takes public gateway services a step further by enforcing strong privacy guarantees such as never logging IP addresses or engaging in TCP fingerprinting. Limo now actively blocks FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts, this is a Google developed algorithm that tracks and correlates users based on their browsing history. FLoC enables advanced fingerprinting capabilities and greatly undermines online privacy and anonymity.)

Reasons to Recommend:

Cloudflare for ENS, can help to build DNS to resolve ENS so that the browser can directly resolve any ENS domain name with .limo, and it can also be used to build a decentralized website, which is very useful in the ENS ecosystem’s infrastructure.

3.9 Jolocom

Brief:

Jolocom has been supporting and driving the mission of Self-sovereign Identity since 2014. Jolocom is a founding member of DWeb, INATBA, and Bundesblock, and he is also a long-time supporter and active member of DIF, the IIW and W3C.

Jolocom is committed to upholding the principles of SSI and has developed a fully open-source tech stack to that end, consisting of a library, an SDK and Smart Wallet for end users. Jolocom is also the selected technology provider in the German government’s 3/4 Secure Digital Identity showcase project. In the future, Jolocom expects to do a set of open-source, non-profit SSI (autonomous identity) standards that include web2 and web3 interactions.

Reasons to Recommend:

Self-sovereign identity is always an important concept, especially in the future, it is the key when it comes to the integration/merging of the web3 world and the traditional centralised society. To achieve that, it really requires a technical team that can settle down to working on the product in a relatively long period, while they could be recognized by centralized institutions, especially by the governments. So far, Jolocom has shown a very convincing capability in this area.

3.10 Aspecta Identity

Brief:

Aspecta has an AI solution for creating a new digital identity: Aspecta Identity, with web and on-chain data insights.

Our project is called Aspecta which serves as the identity infrastructure for web3 developers. Through our AI algorithm, we can quickly analyze a developer’s off-chain and on-chain data and evaluate how proficient the developer is in different coding languages and skill sets including solidity, rust, smart contract, etc. With the Aspecta identity, developers can quickly notice different aspects of skills the developer needs to keep improving. Aspecta identity would also serve as a credential for developers’ professional backgrounds. Through Aspecta identity, developers can quickly match with teammates in Hackathon to start building their project or use the identity as a new form of resume.

Reasons to Recommend:

Aspecta designs a brand new digital identity protocol based on the on-chain data using AI tech, which is a proof of ability for web3 users.

3.11 CryptoTribe

Brief:

Cryptotribe is a decentralized anonymous identity recognition network which solves the problem of identity uniqueness by creating and analyzing social relationships. It aims to create a fair digital world cornorstone for all netizens. Users can prove their identity to all kinds of applications via Cryptotribe with no need for approval from any ID collection agency or any centralized organizations, which protects all users’ privacy. Also, Cryptotribe is a Web3 identity system in which anyone can be a member. Users only need to fill up their personal information such as name, selfie, contact info, and home address. All identity information can be obtained from the registered Ethereum address through smart contracts. Last, As a Web3 identity authentication, cryptocube has the following functions and features:

  1. Without permission, anyone can start the project auction without any threshold and without any code base;
  2. Multi Chain deployment will be deployed on multiple chains. The project party can deploy on different chains according to its actual needs.

Reasons to Recommend:

Centralized anonymous identity solutions can balance efficiency and privacy in identity recognition, and are a secure foundation for identity aggregation implementation.

3.12 Spot Wallet

Brief:

Spot is a multi-chain mobile wallet whose mission is to be the easiest & safest entry point for the next billion users into web3. Spot is a non-custodial wallet and you have entire control over your cryptos. Spot Wallet use the best technologies to ensure that your cryptos & NFTs are always safe. Spot is available on iOS and Android and makes self-custody a breeze with ultra safe wallet generation and advanced recovery systems.

Reasons to Recommend:

Secure and low threshold wallet can bring huge traffic to web3 in the future.

3.13 Soul Wallet

Brief:

We’re the first few wallet implementations of ERC 4337: account abstraction without Ethereum protocol changes. We’re building a plugin wallet that will enable users to:

  • Create the wallet without writing down the recovery phrase;
  • Keep the wallet by changing the signing keys;
  • 30% gas fee reduction via signature aggregation;
  • Pay the transaction with USDC;
  • Gasless transactions sponsored by third parties; 6. Bundle multip transactions into one.

Reasons to Recommend:

The first few wallet implementations of ERC 4337: account abstraction without Ethereum protocol changes.

3.14 BrightID

Brief:

BrightID is trying to build a social identity system in the Web3 era, it give you the ability to prove that this ID is the only one you use, which can effectively reduced the chances of sybil attack.

Reasons to Recommend:

A DID project which have been widely used. Similar to PoH, BrightID focus on real person verification with better privacy. Users have to pass a scheduled vedio verify meeting, before they can upgrade thier verification level by connect to other DID account. The advantage of BrightID model is that the can generate a high accuracy of verifyication, but with a very low efficiency and high labor costs.

3.15 Shil.me

Brief:

Shil.me is building meaningful interaction in Web3 by creating an Web3-native no-code page builder for all entities in Web3, collectors, collections, DAOs and dApps to interact, socialize and transact.

Reasons to Recommend:

The Linktree for NFTs.

4. Reputation data analytics and application

4.1 Ourspace

Brief:

Ourspace was shortlisted during GR14 for building a reputation system. As there is no suitable Web3 data provider, Ourspace will build an open data marketplace, and the reputation system will continue to be developed thereafter.

Reasons to Recommend:

A Project dedicated to build reputation system. Because there is no satisfied Web3 Data provider for Ourspace. So this project will build an open data marketplace itself.

4.2 Replabs

Brief:

Replabs is building tools for DAOs and communities on Twitter that can be used to determine contextual reputation.

This system can be forked by any DAO and used in their discord to help determine who is reputable in what area within it.Within the DAO space, legitimized is usually addressed with voting — quadratically weighted or not. Reputation systems could aid legitimation processes by offering a supplement to voting-based mechanisms. Reputation can be thought of as the collective judgment about a certain person or organization’s ability or trustworthiness on a certain topic within a certain context.

Reasons to Recommend:

Replabs is building tools for DAOs and communities on Twitter that can be used to determine contextual reputation.

4.3 Metopia

Brief:

Metopia is a Web3 tooling infrastructure that creates a data-based user reputation system for governance, reward, and launchpad applications. Motopia’s data sources include:

  • On-chain history of asset transactions & NFT collection ownership;
  • Off-chain venue data from Twitter, Discord & Gitcoin;
  • DAO governance history;
  • Credentials & identity tools such as POAP, SBT, OAT, etc.

Metopia serves as both the infrastructure to create a client reputation system and a use case provider that enables governance and credential use cases based on user reputation. The reputation system is a user profile that automatically aggregates Web 3 data from data protocols (RSS3, Ceramic, Moralis, The Graph, etc.);

Reasons to Recommend:

Building a user reputation system by acquiring data from multiple sources will be an important part of Web3 identity.

4.4 VESS

Brief:

VESS is a proprietary self-sovereign work credentials protocol built on top of the Ceramic Network, a decentralized data network protocol. Users can own and manage all of their work data (called “work credentials”) by attaching them to their DIDs and using them across platforms without being restricted to a specific platform, organization, or blockchain.

Each job data is visualized as a VOXEL — a three-dimensional cube with a different appearance and colour depending on the type of achievement (e.g., job title, rewards, deliverables, etc.). As these voxels accumulate, the user’s experiences and achievements are aggregated to form the user’s unique identity.

Reasons to Recommend:

The 3D effect intuitively displays the user’s past work experience and unique identity.

4.5 CoinsGuru

Brief:

CoinsGuru is a tool for research purposes of web3 and blockchain projects. The key feature of the service is Twitter Analytics through generating the Twitter Score for Twitter accounts based on the popularity of this account in the crypto space.

In the past, It’s never been easier to track down accounts massively followed by VCs, Crypto CEOs, and Web3 Influencers. Now, users/investors can rely on Guru to find genuine GEMs in the crypto space.

Features include:

  • Get insights based on influential Twitter followers
  • Discover ties and project partnerships that are invisible to others.
  • Compare the Twitter Score of projects you like, and analyze their most valuable followers to nail perfect investments.
  • If you come across a promising project with tokens on sale, but no one notable follows them — don’t fall for it…It is a typical red flag of a SCAM.

Reasons to Recommend:

crypto project research analytical tool, assist users doing deep project research.

4.6 Eden Protocol

Brief:

Eden will be the world’s opportunity protocol, providing a place where everyone can find work they love and grow. By creating a two-way person-project matching system, Eden can integrate with Discord, Telegram, and slack.

Reasons to Recommend:

The project Demo has implemented the two-way search matching function, and the endorsement function has also been completed. As such a bot-like tool, it is relatively easy to integrate into Discord, etc., and it is a good recruitment tool for the DAO community that has temporary staff recruitment needs.

4.7 DAOU

Brief:

DAOU uses Soulbound Token and Social Oracle to convert your activity data in DAOs (Discord activity and participation, Forum Q&A, Github contributions, roles, and connections) into on-chain verifiable data.

DAOU will give each member a score based on these verifiable data. This score can be considered as a form of reputation in the DAO, which can also be called by third parties. The data verified by Social Oracle will be released to Soulbound Token by the DAO, which can then be used externally. For example credit loans, airdrops, whitelist, preventing DDoS, etc.

Reasons to Recommend:

The collection of community credit can realize a credit scoring system, which can be expanded to more scenarios in the future, such as whitelisting, credit loans, etc.

4.8 Quest 3

Brief:

Quest3 is a Web3 quest and event platform. Users can earn tokens and NFT badges by participating in quests and events. Quest3 is committed to providing a variety of permissionless on-chain and off-chain quests for GameFi, DAOs, communities and projects, benefiting users continuously, and flourishing the propagation ecosystem.

Quest3’s user base is divided into two parts, B-end and C-end.

For B-end advertisers, Quest3 is committed to providing a variety of permissionless on-chain and off-chain quests as landing pages. The community will obtain loyal users through the situation of task release, and reward them in the form of NFTs.

For C-end users, they can obtain achievement rewards by participating in quests and events, and through the continuous accumulation of data on Quest3, they can enhance community reputation and unlock higher-level quests and rich rewards, benefitting from their own data.

Reasons to Recommend:

Quest3 can help project easily create a marketing campaign, while letting users obtain achievements and rewards.

4.9 GENKI

Brief:

Genki is a Web 3.0 community on-ramp platform where blockchain projects, channels, users and validators can build new connections in a trustless way.

Genki helps content creators, influencers and KOL to navigate their audience toward valuable experiences, in a decentralized way. Through performing simple social tasks and offering on-chain quests where the users can earn in the process, Genki is able to benefit projects, content creators, influencers and their audiences.

Reasons to Recommend:

Genki helps projects easily create a marketing campaign, match capable KOLs, and reduce customer acquisition costs.

4.10 Pyme

Brief:

Pyme is a web3 marketing platform allowing users to earn tokens, NFTs, and other on-chain and off-chain rewards by completing quests. With Pyme, we aim to onboard and empower the next billion users to web3 by providing everyone with opportunities.

Since our launch, we have offered over 70,000+ verified users the opportunity to use their data to earn over 220,000+ rewards through quests on Pyme alone.

Reasons to Recommend:

Pyme is a 70,000-user task platform whose scale effect will be reflected in the next bull market.

4.11 Adot

Brief:

Adot is a blockchain-based one-stop Web3 search engine, you can see Adot as Google in Web3. Through Adot, users can access the full amount of on-chain and off-chain Web3 data, sorted and aggregated. In addition, users can add the data sources they need to quickly build their own dapps through the developer tools provided by Adot, and are rewarded for their contributions whether they search, create or add data using Adot.

Reasons to Recommend:

Google in Web3.

4.12 Ceres

Brief:

Ceres wish to build an infrastructure for decentralized credit system, which mainly provides the functions of an oracle protocol and reputation evaluation models. Through the oracle protocol, user’s on-chain transaction data can be efficiently and accurately analyzed and estimated. Meanwhile, users/projects can use different evaluation models to analysis the social graph quality and influence index.

Reasons to Recommend:

The actual product haven’t release yet. Overall product logic is trying to attract users to build a social graph through token incentives, but this kind of logic preety relies on BD ablity and the cooperation with famous KOLs. Despite that, the ideas of social graph quality & influence index analysis are very interesting.

5. DAO and DAO Tooling

5.1 HistoryDAO

Brief:

Web3 Social: HistoryDAO is a platform by the people, and for the people, where users record history as it unfolds by minting History NFTs.

Community: The HistoryDAO platform and ecosystem is built, governed, and curated by the community. It brings together historians, journalists, and organizations to record history and current events in Web3.

DAOs: DAO is in the name, and DAO is what we live and breathe. Built by, curated by, organized by, and voted on by the DAO community.

NFTs: Record history as it unfolds via HistoryNFTs and History NFT Series.

Education: HistoryDAO is where the worlds of Web3, crypto, and blockchain can learn about current events as they unfold across the globe. Immutably.

Reasons to Recommend:

HistoryDAO permanently records historical moments by minting NFT.

5.2 Neighborhood Market

Brief:

Neighborhood is a protocol that helps people launch their own membership pass into DAOs. Using the membership pass (or tickets, let’s say), users can build their own community and DAO system by managing the treasury and collaborating with it. Anyone can bid on the membership passes to get multiple passes with different tiers after the fundraising stage. After completing the fundraising stage, DAO supporters enable users to buy/sell tickets on NFT marketplaces. Initiators can grow DAO community by leveraging the NFT feature that enables all DAO members to earn royalties fees based on your share (Reputation Points) of the DAO.

Reasons to Recommend:

Web3 protocol that helps DAO members launch their own membership pass, support marketplace feature.

5.3 DAOlink

Brief:

DAOLink escalates the DAO building experience to a different level by providing a visualized game-like environment to the DAOs.

Reasons to Recommend:

Bring Gaming experience to DAO tasks. It creates a better interaction between individuals and DAO. This reminds me of Roblox where users can create their games, DAOlink can let DAOs create their task maps and present them to individuals.

5.4 AnyDAO

Brief:

AnyDAO is an ecosystem for creating and managing DAOs, currently built on the Ethereum blockchain, where both new and existing DAOs can bridge their communities together and oversee the lifecycle of a DAO through Web3.

AnyDAO lowers the entry barrier for DAOs, while facilitating the ability to scale communities, prolonging the life cycle of DAOs. By leveraging Web3, DAOs are able to connect with their communities, create bounties, distribute airdrops, initiate donations, and mint NFTs all while ensuring DAOs and community members have the ability to contribute-to-earn.

AnyDAO supports the DAO lifecycle from creation and growth to maturity, ensuring that every step along the way can be easily automated with Web3 support, reducing cumbersome manual tasks.

Reasons to Recommend:

The DAO as a service solution is provided so that anyone can set up a DAO without technical barriers

5.5 Governor DAO

Brief:

The Governor DAO is a Wyoming-based Decentralized Autonomous Organization positioned as the “DAO of DAOs”. The Governors provide a suite of products and services for projects that want to establish DAOs in their communities. Offerings include an industry-first Sybil-resistance product for one-voice-one-vote governance, and governance bootstraps for new communities, consultations, and smart contract porting.

By decentralizing project ownership, Governor Decentralized Autonomous Organization (GDAO) allows founders and core team members to hold less legal liabilities and provide more open-based “Sandbox-like’’ services within DeFi. Driven by its biometrically verified Proof-of-Existence token, GDAO aims to be a role model for other DAOs by offering its end-users the utmost security and anonymity in a true, decentralized governance community.

Reasons to Recommend:

The DAO can be run in a way that allows the core members of the DAO to have less legal liability while providing adequate security and anonymity.

5.6 Vocdoni

Brief:

Vocdoni is a verifiable, censorship-resistant, anonymous and secure voting protocol built on a decentralized infrastructure that has now reached hundreds of organizations around the world. Anonymous voting (using the Zkproofs and Bling Signatures), weighted voting, token-based voting etc. can be implemented. The Vocdoni protocol provides all the necessary attributes to ensure reliable and secure voting, including censorship resistance, universal verification, flexibility, and anonymity. Products include Vocdoni API and Vocdoni APP.

In 2022, Spain’s first official, fully digital referendum was held in the city of Bellpuig using Vocdoni’s technology.

Vocdoni’s vision is to build the best open source stack to ensure the health of democracies and societies, allowing any organisation around the world to organise censorship-resistant, low-cost, secure and anonymous voting.

Reasons to Recommend:

An anonymous security voting protocol used by the Spanish government.

5.7 DAO Crossing

Brief:

DAOCrossing is a Casual Social Game with On-Chain Data: It foster bonding connections between existing DAO communities through casual gaming as engaging social interactions.

A Credibility Platform for Web3 Contributors: It accumulates on-chain data between DAOs and contributors to build up a web3 contribution credibility for individuals and organizations.

A Metaverse for DAOs: A shared virtual space for current popular DAO spaces to connect, interact, and play together.

Reasons to Recommend:

DAOCrossing provides a shared virtual space for DAO to connect, interact and play, meanwhile establish a contributor reputation platform

5.8 Commubase

Brief:

Commubase is an open platform where users can launch a social token and build a token-driven community. It is a great tool for users who aim to to build and maintain DAO community engagement through concrete incentives. Our tools can also be used to airdrop tokens, design lockups & create quests.

Commubase makes it easy for creators to accomplish the following tasks (with some of the best tutorials in the web3 space):

  • How to mint a Personal/Community Token.
  • How to create a Token Reward / Bounty.
  • How to Airdrop tokens to Reward & Pay Contributors.

After you connect your wallet, Commubase walks you through the main task you need to do with a code-free environment by simply clicking on the task that you want to complete. Commubase will provide second-to-none user experiences.

Reasons to Recommend:

Commubase is an open platform where users can launch a social token and build a token-driven community

6. Creator Economy

6.1 Maven Foundation

Brief:

Maven Foundation is building Web 3.0 protocols, tools, and applications for the Creator Economy through building a decentralized Video Streaming Platform DeStreamLabs. DeStreamLabs is a Decentralized Video streaming Platform on Polygon for creators, gamers, music artists, and worldwide video content creators built with CyberConnect. Streamers can do Streaming to multiple platforms for Twitch, YouTube, or Facebook. Personalized stream with stream overlays for Twitch, YouTube, or Facebook.

Reasons to Recommend:

The value of content should be decided by the audience & not by the platform

6.2 Gummys

Brief:

Gummys is a WEB 3.0-powered video and streaming platform with a fully operable product allowing users to generate income by creating, owning and trading tokenized media content as NFT, watching videos and more engaging actions.

Gummy believes in decentralization and how communities can work together. Big social media platforms make billions of dollars but they never give anything back to the users. Gummy creates a place where people can talk freely about crypto, NFT and all building blocks that are part of the next generation of internet.

Gummys has several unique features like: wallet connect, watch-engage-to-earn, mint video as NFTs, crypto donations and more. Videos are stored on IPFS via FileCoin and the NFT are minted on Polygon.

Reasons to Recommend:

WEB 3.0-powered video and streaming platform allowing users to generate income by creating, owning and trading tokenized media content

6.3 Mojo

Brief:

Mojo is an audio/media streaming platform that empowers musicians, artists and content creators through web3 and blockchain technologies using IPFS and Filecoin. Its core concept is to create cross-chain NFT’s for any content type using Tableland. Creators will be able to manage their NFT’s metadata using Tableland’s relational metadata protocol for EVM chains, which gives the freedom of updating metadata.

Reasons to Recommend:

Audio/media streaming platform, can manage NFTs metadata using Tableland’s relational metadata protocol

6.4 SHE (Panvala League)

Brief:

A creator economic platform for sports enthusiasts and athletes, creators record their challenges highlight and mint as a NFT, where fans can purchase to support their favorite creator, and upgrade NFT through synthesis to increase the rarity.

Reasons to Recommend:

A very novel and fun project, although it faces many problems, such as the actual collection value of NFT, the high level of sports requirements, etc., but the challenge theme itself has a powerful event marketing attribute. If the threshold can be lowered, it may be better. The overall direction and mode of improving well know attributes are still very worthy of reference.

6.5 B4B

Brief:

B4B is a decentralized marketing platform for influencers and brand advertising. B4B has established a set of evaluation criteria for influencer reputation based on the influencer’s activities on the platform, the speed of advertising confirmation and quantity/ quality of the advertisements. Advertisers can directly access the influencer’s channel statistics to select their desired influencers, provide advertising descriptions and wait for the influencers to accept the orders via smart contracts. Influencers will receive payment and B4B Rating tokens after completing the advertisement. Concurrently, influencers will also receive up to 20% of advertising revenue in the form of B4B coins based on monthly B4B ratings.

B4B is a dual token system. One token is B4B Rating, which is a non-transferable reputation measure, and the other token is B4B coins, which can be traded and regularly distribute income to holders.

Reasons to Recommend:

B4B has built a data intelligence center of decentralized KOLs. Advertisers can directly screen the KOLs they want to contact and make collaboration offers, thus reducing the role of intermediaries in the Web2 world. Additionally, having ratings also incentivises the KOLs to cherish their reputation more.

6.6 NFT Track

Brief:

NFTrack is a marketplace where users can mint, trade and list NFTs with core features.The NFTrack marketplace will launch an NFT launchpad that is capable of minting collections in a range of styles from Dutch auctions to Flat mints.

  • Mint : Launchpad will support the most common minting method, ‘Flat Mints’. Collections will go on sale at a fixed price and continue until all NFTs are sold out.
  • White list: Launched collections will have the option of whitelisting the wallet addresses of valued community members for exclusive launch perks e.g. price discounts.
  • Batch Reveal: NFT projects are allowed to delay collection reveals until some certain date. This feature will support price floors in the short term and contribute to a great launch-day atmosphere.
  • Collection Tiers: NFTrack will reserve a section of the marketplace for ‘verified’ collections, with visible collection pages. This will highlight premium collections in the Avalanche ecosystem, promoting excellence and stimulating friendly competition.

Reasons to Recommend:

NFTrack is a marketplace where users can mint, trade and list NFTs with core features

6.7 Sonorus

Brief:

Sonorus is a Web3 protocol to revolutionize how music and all sorts of other content forms are published, distributed, and monetized. Musicians and listeners can earn money through uploading, listening to, and promoting music. In the future, Sonorus is planning to launch music streaming developer SDKs and Sonorus database to further benefit developers and broader users.

Reasons to Recommend:

A web3 ecological transformation for traditional music streaming media platforms.

7. Metaverse/Gaming Identity

7.1 My Meta Farm

Brief:

My Meta Farm is a Web3 Socializing Platform — an Metaverse world, powered by blockchain technology. In this open world, players are able to socialize, express manners, become creative, and entertain. On top of that, the creativity is encouraged via house design, land design, and fashion design. Inspired by successful projects like The SandBox, Decentraland, Animal Crossing, the project theme is becoming a colourful unlimited map with excellent 3D Graphic. Users are provided with design tools, marketplace, and other support to transform creativity into digital assets. Besides, there are various interesting games, events, exhibitions in this virtual world, which keep players stay in Metaverse.

Reasons to Recommend:

My Meta Farm is a Web3 Socializing Platform — an Metaverse world, powered by blockchain technology

7.2 GirogiroAI

Brief:

GiroGiroAI offers interactive AI solutions to dApps (including Metaverse, GameFi, and SocialFi), enabling in-app NFTs to become conversational AI beings that can chat and interact with players. These AI bots help to increase the interactivity between NFTs/NPCs with holders and boost playability by creating additional activities in dapps.

Besides the AI solutions for dApps, Girogiro is building an NFT infrastructure platform that empowers NFT to transform from simply being a PFP to an AI artist who can output generative artworks (supported by its unique AI models, granted by GiroGiroAI).

Reasons to Recommend:

GiroGiroAI offers interactive AI solutions to dApps (including Metaverse, GameFi, and SocialFi), enabling in-app NFTs to become conversational AI beings

7.3 Atlantis World

Brief:

Atlantis World is building the Web3 social metaverse by connecting Web3 with social, gaming and education in one lightweight virtual world that’s accessible to everybody.

Reasons to Recommend:

Create a lightweight virtual world, allowing users to experience the interaction of Web3 intuitively. Through the game experience of the virtual world, ordinary users can experience Web3 social interaction more interestingly and intuitively. A mobile-ready pixel metaverse selection also requires minor hardware performance requirements.

7.4 Echoverse

Brief:

EchoVerse is a social simulation game to farm, decorate, craft, social, and earn. Third-person browser game, with a social component and a unique healing 3D art style. Has web3 influencers from Google, Columbia, and NUS, and a game studio of 30+ people.

Reasons to Recommend:

Lightweight social mini-games will increase web3 user interaction in social relationships for better user retention

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