Wunderbar Network is focused on building data ownership tools and privacy technology. Our mission is to empower individuals to own their data and helping businesses to build data trust through transparency with their customers.

Founding Story and Progress:

Our project started when we entered the Polkadot Hackathon APAC Edition. We called our project Pocket Dimension (pocketdimension.xyz). Using the Substrate framework and IPFS protocol, our project allowed an individual or business to create a record of ownership over a data asset, like a file, and keep a record of the data asset’s lifecycle (e.g. creation or deletion).

It was a global hackathon with hundreds of teams. As far as we could tell, we were the only New Zealand team to enter. We won third place! From there, we meet with investors to raise a seed round to develop this data technology further and explore commercialisation opportunities.

After the hackathon, we created Wunderbar Network. We were accepted into the Substrate Builders Program (SBP) to develop our ideas further and build custom blockchains. Supported by Web3 Foundation, SBP provided us with technical support, networking opportunities and a dynamic community.

The Wunderbar Blockchain provides an immutable record of ownership over data assets and keeps a record of the asset’s lifecycle. Essentially our blockchain is a distributed CDN (Content Delivery Network) with independent data ownership management.

Wunderbar Network consists of two products that use the Wunderbar Blockchain: Wallet Bound & Mini Digital.

WalletBound – Content and Brand Asset Protection Technology

WalletBound is a decentralised content manager app designed for content creatives and teams who manage brand and IP assets to have a new way of protecting the authenticity of their digital content when it’s published online. With WalletBound, users add an NFT-based digital certificate of authenticity and digital watermark to content assets. The certificate is publicly accessible that allows anyone online to view documentation about the asset – like author details, licensing, copyright, metadata, and anything else important. WalletBound is suitable for any digital assets: logos, badges, photography, marketing material, PDFs, etc.

Once the asset is minted through WalletBound, users can publish the asset on any website or share a link to the asset. Each asset also collects analytics data on the number of views, clicks, and which website is loading the asset to allow users to measure content performance and ROI (return on investment). WalletBound analytics doesn’t use cookies for tracking.

Mini Digital – Privacy-Focused Product Tracking for Web3 and SaaS

Mini Digital is your all-in-one solution for Web3 and SaaS product tracking. This lightweight, flexible library allows you to collect event data for product analytics from your websites, web apps, mobile, backend services and decentralised apps, including sub-domains. Once your data is collected, it's your business data, we can pipeline the data to any other system or data warehouse.

We are committed to user privacy by having anonymous tracking by default and no IP address tracking, keeping your privacy policy minimal. You won’t need a cookie banner when you use Mini Digital.

Flexibility is built in: Mini Digital is compatible with tracking wallet addresses and decentralised identities (DIDs) as well as traditional user identifiers. With pre-built event schemas and compact design, after 3 easy steps, start to gain insights and empower your product team to build better experiences.

We built Mini Digital because we found a need for a more flexible and privacy-focused data collection service that could track from our decentralised app (WalletBound) from our marketing website all the way through to our IPFS and blockchain services. Thankfully, we have plenty of experience in product analytics, so we built a solution that's designed with web3 product development in mind.

A way to think about it, Mini Digital is an alternative to Google Analytics and Segment, with features that are more aligned with web3 product demands and nd no heavy weight or complex privacy policies.

Mini Digital is live and ready for SMB and Enterprise data needs. 🚀

The next exciting step for Mini Digital is making it easier for businesses to be transparent with their customers about what data is being collected and staying compliant with privacy laws. We’re developing a Data Pocket feature where data collected by Mini Digital is encrypted and securely transferred to a verified user. The Wunderbar Blockchain is used to record the lifecycle of Data Pockets – when a data set is created, shared with a user and deleted by a business.

Progress & Traction

Over the next two quarters of 2023, we are launching more products and growing our community.

Mini Digital just launched, and we’re working on onboarding our first customers who are across web2 and web3 in New Zealand, Europe and the US.

WalletBound’s beta sign-ups are currently open! We aim to release WalletBound in September alongside the Wunderbar Blockchain – we aim to bid for a parachain slot on Kusama. As we submitted our third and final milestone for the Substrate Builders Program, we are ready move on to the parachain-prepareness stage of the program and make it result in more benefits to our consumers.

Next Steps on Product Market Fit

Our current focus is on product market fit – we’ve set ambitious goals for the next six months. We’ve just hired a Developer Relations Engineer who is perfectly positioned to drive our content marketing strategy and grow a community around Wunderbar Network.

Wunderbars Biggest Challenge!

Many businesses we have talked to are privacy-focused but don’t consider web3 solutions. We are focused on creating a range of accessible educational content and make sure our product’s UX is friendly for people who are new to web3.

On the other hand, a lot of web3 products are extremely conscious of user privacy, data security and data ownership, so many web3 products don’t have internal product tracking (beyond their marketing website) because the current analytics tools either don’t align with their privacy-levels or are not flexible enough to track end-to-end. We are committed to make sure that our blockchain and products like Mini Digital satisfy their analytics needs.

Wunderbar Network is also committed into provide not only a quality service but also an outstanding outcome. We noticed that one of the biggest challenges that our customers experience is not knowing where to start with analytics. To resolve this issue and make sure our consumers will gain the best insights possible to empower their teams, we offer Product Analytics Strategy workshops that guide them through the process.

We’re a small team, so we need to be extremely focused on our time and resources. The biggest challenge so far is shifting from the building phase to the go-to-market phase. We’re now much more focused on our marketing strategy and contributing to web3 and SaaS communities with our knowledge of privacy technology, product analytics and web3 tech.

Where Wunderbar sees their biggest wins

Now that AI tools are widely used, data collection is only going to increase and auditing data authenticity will become a necessity, so it’s most likely that web3 technology will be used to dispute ownership and rights over data.

We have visionary and ambitious plans for our next steps by implementing a rewarding system that will be offered to individuals tracked by Mini Digital. Data is extremely valuable to any business, so we want to develop a way to reward individuals for their data. We’re working on a pilot project with a few web3 companies that are interested in designing this reward program with us.

What do they see as New Zealand's super power in setting up a Web3 business?

Our government has much friendlier and more favourable regulations towards cryptocurrency and blockchain technology than other countries like the US. The fact that Callaghan Innovation is also focusing on web3 and doing the mahi to educate the government on web3 and bring web3 solutions is going to allow New Zealand to adapt to technology advances at a competitive rate.

A lot of web3 is related to data, so having the three major cloud providers (AWS, GCS, Azure) set up in NZ will significantly boost benefits for more software businesses to establish in NZ.

Regarding the web3 ecosystem, New Zealand needs more community events! There are so many hackathon/project teams, individuals and startups that are based in New Zealand and serve web3 to global users, we believe it is crucial to have more opportunities for everyone to share what they are creating and solving. My team would love to contribute to a New Zealand web3 conference to attract people from APAC. I think it would be a really successful event.

Looking to get involved in the joyride of learning and building in Web3?

Whether you are a founder, creator or a curious soul wondering what Web3 has to offer, the Web3NZ community is a peer to peer learning platform and connection ecosystem that encourages and supports anyone who would like to learn, collaborate and innovate in Web3 🚀

Dan & Mila after coming 3rd place in the Polkadot Hackathon APAC edition - Jan 2022

Co Founder, Miloš Ranđelovi.