Author: Liang
Overview
The capabilities and development experience of the Web3 infrastructure itself determine the adoption of developers and the prosperity of the corresponding application ecosystem. Without Bitcoin's omnilayer, there would be no USDT. Without infrastructure such as consensys (metamask, infura, etherscan), Ethereum would not have the prosperity of DeFi and NFT. Without Layer2 and new high-performance public chains, it would be difficult to achieve.
There are currently about 20,000 active Web3 developers in the world. In comparison, there are about 20 million active developers in the world. Therefore, there is huge potential and momentum to improve the Web3 developer experience, onboard more web2 developers, and create an incremental market.
From another perspective, the main limitation of existing developers is the scenario limits and possibilities that can be achieved by the current technical components of Web3. One of the biggest limitations is dynamic data storage. As the current mainstream decentralized mutable data storage method, smart contracts have obvious defects such as slow read and write performance and high prices, so that contract developers have to learn Solidity Gas Golfing. Static data storage such as Filecoin and Arweave are currently mainly used to store NFT metadata and pictures, which cannot meet the developers' needs for dynamic structured data reading and writing. In other words, there is currently no solution for decentralized dynamic data storage off-chain that has both good developer experience and functionality.
Firecaster vs Ceramic
The closest protocols on the market are Farcaster and Ceramic, which are similar to the Bitcoin network and Ethereum in terms of decentralized data networks.
Farcaster is a decentralized social protocol. In addition to the identity fid and username fname implemented through NFT on the chain, the protocol also implements an experience very close to the web2 social application experience through a decentralized node network (hubs) on the chain and 6 data types for specific social scenarios (CRDTs, a data structure that can merge different versions of data to achieve a consistent final state).
Farcaster also implements a decentralized off-chain data network, but the main difference is that Farcaster only supports 6 data types, and developers cannot define new, customized data types according to their own needs and scenarios. If developers want to develop new social protocols, it is very difficult to redevelop or fork the code to implement a whole new decentralized data network if they cannot reuse Farcaster's 6 data types (Farcaster has received 30 million US dollars in financing, and the decentralized node has not yet deployed the main network after two years of development).
Farcaster's advantage is that it currently has a very active community in the social scene and a stable network. These advantages have attracted many third-party developers to practice in the Farcaster protocol, taking advantage of the existing decentralized data storage capabilities and the network effects of existing users.
Ceramic is a decentralized off-chain data storage, with the advantages of high read and write performance and low cost (no gas) compared to on-chain. To achieve maximum versatility and data composability, Ceramic allows developers to create custom data types to cope with various application scenarios, such as social, tool, and content applications. The most important scenarios are mainly heavy data reading and writing, and are completely unsuitable for scenarios implemented on the chain, which of course cannot be without social scenarios.
As a general decentralized data storage layer that can define data types, Ceramic has the following features:
Data can be changed (mutable data), which is the difference from Filecoin and Arweave
Focus on structured data (e.g. JSON)
Supports flexible and freely definable data types (developers can define new data types based on scenarios, different from Farcaster)
However, Ceramic’s biggest problem at the moment is that the developer experience is relatively poor, and the stability of the system itself still has room for improvement, which is very similar to Ethereum in 2016 and 2017.
In summary, Farcaster has scenarios for C-end users and a stable system for developers, but its fatal flaw is that the data type is not extensible. Ceramic, as a general data layer, requires third-party developers to practice specific scenarios, but currently the developer experience is poor and the network is unstable.
catastrophe
In summary, to finally perfect the scenario of off-chain centralized data, two major challenges need to be solved:
Providing users with infrastructure applications makes the value of migrated data more obvious. Just like MetaMask, Etherscan is of great significance in the Ethereum ecosystem.
Improve developer experience and provide more stable protocol support
Currently, this field is still a blue ocean. Related projects include US3R Network invested by DHVC. This project is a development platform and DApps ecosystem. It is also the only open source data browser provider in the Ceramic ecosystem. It provides a complete set of integrated toolkits, including data wallets, data browsers and developer consoles as well as protocol enhancements, allowing developers to easily build applications on Ceramic.
There is still a long way to go to decentralize data on the chain, and it is also an essential tool for the development of Web2 to Web3. The development of this field will directly lay the foundation for the pattern of Web3 projects and pave the way for the return of data value.
