Why Ceramic?
Ceramic's decentralized data network provides Web3 developers with a collection of features that make it possible to build scalable Web3 applications with composable data that can be reused and shared across applications.
Overview
Ceramic compared to other popular Web3 infrastructure solutions.
| Ceramic | L2s | L1s | Web2 DB | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| UX | 🟢 | 🔴 | 🔴 | 🟢 |
| Low Cost | 🟢 | 🟡 | 🔴 | 🟢 |
| Web Scale | 🟢 | 🟡 | 🔴 | 🟡 |
| Composability | 🟢 | 🟡 | 🟢 | 🔴 |
| Verifiability | 🟢 | 🟢 | 🟢 | 🔴 |
| Permissionless | 🟢 | 🟢 | 🟢 | 🔴 |
| Designed for... | Decentralized data | Decentralized finance | Decentralized finance | Centralized data |
Key Benefits
Mutable data storage
Ceramic provides developers with a set of standard, open APIs for storing, updating, and retrieving data from the network. This helps to break down data silos, enabling all data to be openly accessible. Additionally, all data mutations on Ceramic are cryptographically verifiable and can provide auditability throughout all historical versions of a piece of data that has changed over time.
Data Composability
Data on Ceramic is structured and stored in data models, which can be easily reused by different applications to share data between them. Data models are created by developers in the community, and the ecosystem of data models is constantly expanding. Data models typically represent a single, logical application feature such as a user profile, a social graph, or a blog and developers typically combine multiple data models to create their application.
Developer Experience
Building composable applications with Web3 data on Ceramic is simple. Install Ceramic, browse the marketplace of data models, plug these models into your app, and automatically get access to all data stored on the network that conforms to those data models. The community is constantly creating new tooling that make it easier to build, and expand what's possible with composable data.
Sign in with Web3
Ceramic uses the decentralized identifier (DID) standard for user accounts, which are compatible with all blockchain wallets. When using Ceramic in your application, users can authenticate with the Web3 wallets they already have, and can even control the same Ceramic account from multiple different blockchain wallets (cross-chain) if they'd like. Data models are typically account-centric, meaning that every user is in control of their own data.
Decentralization
The Ceramic network is decentralized and permissionless, allowing anyone in the world to spin up a node to provide storage, compute, and bandwidth resources to users and applications built on the network. Today there are no tokenized incentives for running Ceramic, but the community is exploring options.
Scalability
Ceramic's data network infrastructure is highly-scalable and can service use cases where high amounts of data throughput is needed. On Ceramic, every data object maintains its own state and nodes independently process stream transactions, allowing unbounded parallelization. This enables Ceramic to operate at worldwide data scale, which is orders of magnitude greater than the scale needed for decentralized finance.