The Clay Testnet is now live. 🚀
Starting today you can officially experiment, prototype, and develop applications on top of the Ceramic protocol.
Get started:
- Read the docs: developers.ceramic.network
- Try the demo: playground.ceramic.dev
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Ceramic is a public, permissionless, censorship-resistant network for managing mutable information on the open internet.
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Ceramic functions like a global-scale, permissionless NoSQL document datastore, but ensures strict ordering of document updates and data integrity without relying on DB servers or trusted third-parties to host data and perform mutations on content.
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Since Ceramic is built on a completely peer-to-peer network, all documents are openly discoverable and can be queried by anyone in the world or referenced by other documents.
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In Ceramic all content is stored in *smart documents*, which are append-only logs where each commit (update) is signed by a decentralized identifier (DID) for verifiability and then subsequently anchored in a blockchain for consensus.
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Each smart document basically functions as its own independent doc-chain (a document blockchain).
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Smart documents are the most powerful way to manage information on the open internet. Let's dive into why...
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1. Mutable content: Store information in collections of mutable documents like your favorite NoSQL document database.
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2. Immutable identifiers: Every document gets a globally unique persistent identifier, called a DocID. This DocID will never change regardless of how many updates are made to the document.
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3. Verifiable signatures: Every update to a document must be signed by the DID of its owner, providing verifiability to its content.
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4. Schema-enforced content: Documents can have schemas which will be enforced by the protocol. This allows for data integrity and simple cross-platform interoperability.
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5. Strict versioning: Every update made to a document is anchored in a blockchain, so its commits follow a strict order. This allows the protocol to guarantee the state of a document at every commit and allows its content to be auditable and trusted at all times.
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6. Programmable logic: Define custom rules for state transitions to enforce who, how, and when your document is updated without centralized servers. Rules can react to direct events such as a signature from the owner, or indirect events such as an update in another document.
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7. Configurable persistence: Nodes can back up documents to any centralized cloud datastore or decentralized data storage platform including , , , etc.
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The Clay testnet is a fully-functioning public test network designed to simulate a future mainnet as closely as possible.
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Along with Clay, we launched a new documentation site that makes it much easier to get started building on the Ceramic network.
developers.ceramic.network/build/quick-st
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We're also excited to announce that , a cross-platform protocol for decentralized identity built on Ceramic, has entered beta. IDX is an easy entry point to get started and a great first use case for adding Ceramic to your application.
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We put together a simple demo application that lets you test out the full stack of Ceramic components in the browser without needing to install anything.
playground.ceramic.dev
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And lastly, we've created the Ceramic Anchor Service. CAS is a layer 2 solution that batches updates from many different documents and anchors them into a single blockchain transaction. This helps scalability and lowers gas costs, important given crypto prices.
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Clay didn't happen by accident. It was the result of the tireless commitment by many in the Web3 community to the mission of creating an open dataweb free of silos.
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Since we first debuted a proof of concept of the Ceramic protocol in early 2020, the Ceramic codebase has had 1300 git commits, 670 releases, and dozens of projects in the ecosystem have been hard at work testing integrations and providing feedback.
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Clay is not yet perfect, but we're getting very close.
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The Clay network is still *experimental* and should only be used for prototyping, development, and testing purposes. It's great for getting your application ready for mainnet.
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You may encounter a few bugs and/or performance issues. We've done our best to make things work as smoothly as possible, but this is still a testnet. Please report any issues by opening a ticket on Github so we can fix them as soon as possible.
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Where do we go from here?
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Now that Clay is live, our efforts will be 100% focused on releasing mainnet as quickly and safely as possible. We're targeting the end of Q1 or early Q2 2021.
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The Fire mainnet release will include additional performance optimizations, fully decentralized peer discovery, a dedicated pubsub topic, document anchoring on the mainnet, network monitoring, public analytics, bug fixes, and more.
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The community is also gearing up for mainnet with many announcements, launches, and partnerships to go live. We will be sharing more information on those as they are available.
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As always, we're available in Discord to answer questions and help you out along the way. We're excited to see what you build on Ceramic!
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