As I’m building a web app to fight against scams and fake news related to cryptocurrency, I have got the chance to work with ceramic network. And I would like to share with you about this new web3 framework.
Ceramic Network what’s it?
Well, it can be seen as a P2P database, fully decentralized.
It’s based on DID and IPFS (DID stands for Decentralized IDentifier).
On ceramic network a user authenticate with his/her DID, and is the only one allowed to update his/her documents data while everyone can read it.
A DID is a public identifier associated with an asymmetric key.
Knowing your DID identifier, I can fetch and read what you put online into ceramic’s network and be sure you wrote it.
It’s kind of like a smart contract where only one address can write data into it.
Ceramic network under the hood
Ceramic rely on IPFS to duplicate data across nodes, and DIDs to inspect who holds what and is authorized to update content.
Documents on the ceramic network employ json-schema. It provides discoverability and ensures updates are valid.
While you don’t need tokens to store data onto this network in the end there is data anchoring occurring (currently with Ethereum).
But end users don’t even have to know about it!
Isn’t IPFS enough for web 3 Dapp?
IPFS is great, but the file identifiers change when you update a document (file hash is not the same anymore). It makes it hard to link data to a particular user.
Instead Ceramic uses DID and documents identifier (called Stream Id). Those identifier don’t change, data does. Its just like with good old URL.
To summarize
- Documents are discoverable, thanks to json-schema
- Data are owned by their creator
- Everything is cryptographically signed
- No token required
I’m betting big on ceramic’s framework, by building this new tool to make the web a little safer, it’s called swearby.io.
Ceramic is really promising and will give Web3 apps a proper decentralized database.
Thanks for bearing with me! Please tell me if you would be interested in a tutorial about developing with ceramic network (typescript+node).
