A Look Inside Web3’s Decentralized Data Solution
Introduction
This ecosystem map of the Ceramic ecosystem is the initial output of an ongoing collaboration between BlockScience and 3Box Labs, which we are sharing here to benefit the Ceramic community and other stakeholders of interest. This document serves as a Phase 0 output in the BlockScience Engineering process, which aims to understand system stakeholders, existing infrastructures, and the relations between them. This map serves as a starting point to understand the state of the current system and lay out stakeholder requirements, in order to inform further analysis and potential recommendations into mechanism design. A segment of the paper is discussed below, followed by the full report which can be viewed as a PDF.
Ceramic as a Data Storage & Compute Service for Web3
The current Web3 space has a distinct gap in its ability to provision distributed off-chain data to on-chain apps and this is where Ceramic offers a unique value-add over existing tools. Just as high-throughput, client-server streaming implementations such as Kafka provide efficient event-driven data ingestion functionality, the Ceramic streaming protocol provides an efficient peer-to-peer implementation of this important tooling. With the addition of Flink-like stream processing functionality through ComposeDB, Ceramic brings full-stack, stream-based data processing to peer-to-peer networks. Ceramic eschews the computationally expensive overhead of maintaining globally consistent state, as is done by decentralized, distributed ledgers. Instead, Ceramic favors responsiveness and economy by maintaining eventual, locally consistent state (i.e. on a per stream basis). The consensus mechanisms for individual streams are similarly biased in favor of liveness.
Check out the full Ceramic Ecosystem Mapping Report here.
Disclosure: BlockScience is an early supporter and investor in 3Box Labs, creators of the Ceramic protocol.
About BlockScience
BlockScience® is a complex systems engineering, R&D, and analytics firm. By integrating ethnography, applied mathematics, and computational science, we analyze and design safe and resilient socio-technical systems. With deep expertise in Market Design, Distributed Systems, and AI, we provide engineering, design, and analytics services to a wide range of clients including for-profit, non-profit, academic, and government organizations.
