Interview: flowie, ChainCatcher
Guest: Eric, Co-founder of CocoCat
Compiled by: flowie, ChainCatcher
There are generally two major challenges in developing a Web3 application: one is how to truly decentralize and have privacy and security capabilities, and the other is how to make development easier and reduce costs.
Eric, co-founder of CocoCat, said that currently smart contracts can be simply implemented on the blockchain, but the front-end and back-end of the application are mostly deployed on cloud servers such as Amazon and Alibaba Cloud in a traditional way, which brings some centralized security risks and high cost issues to the project.
Based on this market pain point, CocoCat has created a more private and secure decentralized P2P network, Cat Network, and lowered the development threshold through two productivity tools, CocoAPP Framework and Self-Service Protocol, providing project parties with a cheaper and more decentralized application deployment method.
According to Eric, Cat Network can help developers reduce costs by more than 90%. It has currently attracted about 400 project parties in the fields of public chains, DeFi, and Web2.
In order to further verify and visualize Cat Network's decentralization and privacy protection capabilities, Eric's core team also created a Web3 social product, CocoCat. Compared with Telegram, it is completely decentralized and has stronger privacy protection. In addition, it has added more features for Web3 user needs. The iteration of CocoCat social applications will also feed back to the underlying network, providing developers or project parties with capabilities that are closer to market demand.
Create a more privacy-friendly decentralized version of "Telegram+TON"
1. ChainCatcher: How did you get into Web3? What important work experiences have you had?
Eric: I started paying attention to Bitcoin and blockchain in 2011. Before that, I worked in the traditional manufacturing industry for more than ten years in the field of information technology.
I started to conduct systematic research on the blockchain industry in 2014. In 2017, I spent more than half a year writing a book (Blockchain in Plain Language), and I am the first author of this book.
After that, we carried out in-depth practice of multiple engineering projects, covering the fields of public chain, DeFi, middleware, etc. It is on the basis of these technical accumulations that CocoCat has insight into the pain points of industry development, and through systematic thinking and innovation, it has incubated products with more user value.
2. ChainCatcher: What led you to start the CocoCat project?
Eric: In 2021, NFT is very popular, and many superstar projects such as Boring Ape have emerged. But I have a different view on NFT. I think it is a unit tool of productivity. What I am thinking about is whether it is possible to slice application elements into NFT, so that each NFT can become a productivity tool with scripting and synthesis capabilities, thereby solving problems such as application deployment, cost savings and privacy protection.
Based on this idea, we developed a protocol called "Particle", also known as the particle protocol. We spent more than a year on it, but found that this protocol was too abstract and difficult to promote.
In the fourth quarter of 2022, I saw a social product called Damus, which had a high degree of overlap in performance with the privacy social product model that I developed with my friends in 2016. This gave me an idea that overly abstract protocols are difficult to promote, and we need a visual product to present these technologies and capabilities.
Therefore, we decided to enter the Web3 social field and design such a product. During the design and construction process, our starting point was to form a productivity tool that could be oriented to Web3 applications and even Web2 applications, providing greater privacy protection, cheaper serverless deployment, domain name-free and link-free access, and natural resistance to DDoS attacks.
So, CocoCat looks like a social product, but its starting point is not for social interaction. Its initial purpose is to use social interaction as a visual product to reflect the infrastructure we want to promote - infrastructure for Web3 applications.
3. ChainCatcher: Specifically, what market pain points do the underlying network and underlying technology behind CocoCat solve?
Eric: Currently, all Layer2, ZK and other technologies are actually trying to solve the same problem: how to enable more applications to be deployed in a decentralized peer-to-peer network. However, the current situation is that smart contracts can be simply implemented on the blockchain, but the front-end and back-end of the application still need to be deployed on cloud servers in a traditional way, such as Alibaba Cloud and Amazon Cloud.
But this brings some centralized security risks and cost issues. First of all, whether it is purchasing a server or registering a domain name, it is a considerable expense, and it also requires a team to maintain it. In addition, there are many security issues, such as DDoS attacks, CC attacks, and phishing attacks. These problems have hindered the development of a richer application ecosystem.
For developers or project owners, they hope to find a cheaper and more centralized way to deploy applications, including front-end and back-end, not just smart contracts. At the same time, they also hope to obtain strong privacy protection, including identity privacy, data privacy, and social relationship privacy. In addition, they also hope to have effective protection capabilities for traditional attack methods.
However, the solutions currently available on the market are not satisfactory. Therefore, CocoCat's underlying network Cat Network attempts to solve these problems, aiming to provide a cheaper and more decentralized way to deploy applications while providing strong privacy protection and security capabilities.
4. ChainCatcher: Is CocoCat+Cat Network equivalent to a more decentralized and privacy-protected Telegram+TON?
Eric: You can understand it this way. There are obvious differences between "CocoCat+Cat Network" and "Telegram+TON" mainly in terms of architecture and concept. Regardless of Telegram's privacy protection capabilities, its centralized nature cannot be changed. Cat Network pursues greater decentralization and privacy protection, and the social product CocoCat is also completely decentralized.
Cat Network is not a blockchain network, but a P2P network. It has strong compatibility and carrying capacity, and can be compatible with and carry other blockchains or protocols. For example, taking Ethereum, Solana and other public chains as examples, Cat Network can be compatible and supported at the P2P message protocol level. Once compatible, the user's wallet does not need to be directly connected to the public chain node, but can interact with the public chain node by accessing any node in Cat Network. This provides users with a more convenient and secure access method, while enhancing the flexibility and scalability of the network.
Two productivity tools reduce development costs by more than 90%
5. ChainCatcher: What are the specific features of Cat Network? What efficiency or cost changes will it bring to developers?
Eric: Cat Network has three major characteristics. First, like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, etc., Cat Network is also based on a P2P network structure. Cat Network's P2P network has three major privacy indicators, namely identity privacy, data privacy, and social relationship privacy.
Identity privacy means that on Cat Network, the user identities of all applications are completely private. There is no need to register or log in, nor is there any need to provide identity information such as mobile phone numbers and email addresses.
Data privacy ensures that every message transmitted in the network is resistant to cracking and tracking, and it is even impossible to know who sent it. These messages have no fixed format, no characteristics or rules, so they cannot be blocked by firewalls and are resistant to quantum cracking.
Social relationship privacy is another major feature of Cat Network. It protects the privacy of relationships between people, between people and devices, between devices and between applications. Take CocoCat's add friend function as an example. When someone scans your QR code and adds you as a friend, Cat Network will ensure that it is impossible to analyze how many people have added you as a friend in the data structure, but will isolate each person's friend relationship.
In addition to the above-mentioned underlying network features, Cat Network also has two core productivity products for applications, namely the CocoAPP Framework and the Self-Service Protocol.
Both are designed based on Cat Network's highly privacy-protected peer-to-peer messaging network, and are oriented to the front-end and back-end of applications respectively. To support developers, these two tools provide corresponding development components, APIs and SDKs, as well as compilation and packaging tools.
Through the CocoApp framework, developers can convert Web3 applications into Bitcoin address indexes and deploy them to the Cat Network at near-zero cost, achieving fully decentralized deployment and distribution. In addition, CocoCat's self-service protocol can provide privacy protection for applications and significantly reduce server-related costs.
For example, if a project deploys an application on Amazon Cloud, the server cost may be 50,000 yuan a month. However, when they use Cat Network's technology, the cost can be reduced by more than 90%.
6. ChainCatcher: What types of projects or developers does Cat Network currently attract?
Eric: One is small public chain projects. Many small public chains need to deploy multiple nodes during the deployment process, but the project owners often cannot afford the deployment costs of a large number of nodes in the early stages. These nodes are vulnerable to DDoS attacks from hackers on cloud servers. Through Cat Network's Self-Service Protocol, project owners no longer need to deploy a large number of nodes. Instead, they only need to deploy a small number of nodes, and can use other nodes in Cat Network to broadcast and forward messages, ensuring security while reducing costs.
The second is DeFi applications, including mining pools, Dex, NFT, cross-chain bridges and other DeFi applications are also deployed on Cat Network. These applications can obtain better performance and security through Cat Network.
In addition, some individual developers or entrepreneurs' projects are also deployed on Cat Network. These projects are of various types, including small games, financial management, etc. Cat Network provides a low-cost, high-security deployment platform for these projects.
At the same time, we also strive to attract Web2 application projects because they have a strong demand for assetization.
Currently, there are nearly three or four hundred applications deployed on Cat Network. From an operational perspective, we are still actively introducing more project parties, public chains and developers, converting more existing applications into Cat Network, and cultivating developers.
7. ChainCatcher: What ecological incentive plans do you have to attract project parties and developers to join your network?
Eric: First, we will proactively organize events such as hackathons and provide incentives to encourage developers to master the development techniques and tools of our network.
Secondly, we will provide more tool functions for project parties and operations on platforms such as Cat Network. Most of the community tools on the market are not designed for Web3, and there are problems such as insufficient decentralization and lack of operational functions. We will launch special features such as group chat with complete decentralized privacy, and publish them to Cat Network as value-added functions to attract more project parties to join.
In addition, we will actively cooperate with leading projects. For example, applications such as UniSwap and MetaMask are currently facing security issues and regulatory challenges. Through Cat Network, we can help these applications deploy in a serverless manner to avoid some regulatory and security risks.
8. ChainCatcher: CocoCat once stated that it is also a DePIN project. In what aspects are its DepIN attributes mainly reflected?
Eric: Many DePIN projects provide different capabilities. Some of these projects provide storage capabilities, such as hardware storage boxes or storage products; some provide computing power such as GPUs and CPUs; and some provide network capabilities. For Cat Network, these DePIN projects can become one of its capabilities.
If a DePIN project provides decentralized storage, as long as Cat Network is compatible with its protocol, the capabilities of that storage product can be integrated into CocoCat. Similarly, DePIN projects that provide computing power can also be integrated in this way.
In addition, Cat Network itself also has hardware plans. When project parties want to deploy larger-scale, high-performance decentralized applications, they can choose to deploy relay nodes themselves. In order to facilitate these project parties, Cat Network may provide some node hardware in the future, including total systems and portable hardware. These hardware will be pre-installed with CocoApp Framework, Self-service Protocol, and network access functions, so that project parties can connect and deploy their applications in a more convenient way. This is equivalent to providing project parties with a total system of nodes.
A group chat feature customized for Web3 will be launched
9. ChainCatcher: Web3 social communication has always been a key area for large-scale application of Web3, but the network effect established by Web2 communication seems difficult to break. Past social communication products of Web3 are often short-lived. What do you think of this situation?
Eric: Why is it difficult for Web3 products to succeed? I think there are several reasons:
First, social products emphasize experience, which is difficult to make. Unlike games and other products, social products require users to use them frequently every day, not just occasionally. Therefore, the performance and smoothness of the product are crucial. However, traditional centralized architectures (such as WeChat and TG) require the purchase of a large number of servers, which is costly, and this is an insurmountable threshold for small and medium-sized development teams.
Second, the technical threshold is high. Social products face huge technical challenges in achieving decentralization. First, it is difficult to obtain a decentralized node scale, and it is also difficult to guarantee the performance and stability of message sending and receiving. These problems have caused many entrepreneurs and teams to hesitate in front of the technical threshold.
Third, it is difficult to build an economic model. It is difficult for social products to realize assetization and income through themselves. Unlike profit models such as hardware sales, mining or handling fee collection, the source of income for social products is unclear. The traditional pay-to-join model is also unattractive because users can choose to use existing centralized social tools. Therefore, how to build a reasonable economic model is another difficult problem facing social products.
However, although it is difficult, the ceiling of Web3 social products is very high. We are also trying to solve these problems. The first is to solve the technical threshold problem. We must ensure that there is no server involved in the entire product to achieve true decentralization.
Secondly, we can attract users by providing dedicated Web3 functions, such as sending, receiving and trading project tokens directly in the group. These functions can increase user stickiness and activity. Although Web3 and decentralization are popular, many communities still rely on Web2 tools such as WeChat.
In addition, Web3 social products can also gain revenue from supporting projects and applications. Since social products can mainly provide stickiness, they can gain revenue by cooperating with projects and providing them with promotion and display platforms. At the same time, open protocols and interfaces can also attract more developers and applications to settle in, further enriching the functions and ecology of the products.
10. ChainCatcher: What is the biggest challenge CocoCat is facing at the moment?
Eric: At present, our main goal is to introduce and attract more project parties and application ecosystems. This is our main task at the current stage and the key to promoting further development of the product.
On the technical level, we have overcome the most difficult part, and the existing CocoAPP Framework has reached 80% to 90% completion. Next, we will continue to optimize the product on this basis and gradually launch the envisioned functions.
11. ChainCatcher: What are CocoCat’s important plans in the near future? What is its roadmap for the next year?
Eric: In the coming period, our main goal is to launch a new version of the group chat function. This group chat will have fully decentralized privacy protection features and provide specific functions for Web3 projects. This is an important plan.
In addition to the group chat function, our future plans will focus on the support of development tools and development kits. Specifically, we will provide complete development tools and ecological tool support for the two core components of CocoCat APP framework and Self-Service Protocol. To this end, we will also carry out more hackathons and other activities to promote technological innovation and application.
In terms of operations and marketing, we will prioritize expansion into the Southeast Asian market next year and gradually advance. Our goal is to enter the North American market starting from the end of next year.
