Latest News | Decentralized network storage protocol Ceramic launches Clay testnet

According to the latest news: Clay, the decentralized network storage protocol Ceramic test network, has officially launched. This is an important milestone for the project to go live on the mainnet in the future since the first proof-of-concept launch of the Ceramic protocol in early 2020. The Ceramic codebase has made more than 1,300 git commits and more than 650 versions, and dozens of top projects in the Web3 ecosystem have been working hard to test integration and provide feedback.

According to official news, the mainnet is scheduled to be put into use at the end of the first quarter or the beginning of the second quarter of 2021. Previously, the author interviewed Chris Cyphert, the founder of Kontext , and briefly introduced the project in Kontext: Unlocking Complete Personalization. This article will share the Ceramic project in detail for readers.

Ceramic is a permissionless protocol for creating tamper-proof, updatable documents, powered by autonomous identity, verifiable files, and interoperability between wallets, applications, databases, and service ecosystems. It is a permissionless network protocol that can be used to create documents that cannot be deleted and can become the foundation of an interoperable network.

Ceramic combines a range of cutting-edge web3 technologies including IPFS, libp2p, blockchain, DID, and standards for authenticating (signing/encrypting) data, enabling developers to build fully serverless applications using dynamic, verifiable, decentralized data.

Ceramic's public infrastructure will allow participants to create signed and tamper-proof documents that can serve as review tools and universal trusted sources of information for important information . Ceramic documents are stored in IPFS, encoded using IPLD, and anchored in multiple blockchain projects. Ceramic functions like a global, permissionless NoSQL document data store, but ensures strict ordering and data integrity of document updates without relying on database servers or trusted third parties to perform mutations and transformations on content.

Since Ceramic's universal document graph is public, permissionless and verifiable, it can be used for information acquisition and interoperability between platforms in the network, allowing participants to create and parse documents for any type of information without any centralized service. Therefore, Ceramic can unlock information interoperability between all platforms and services on the network. In other words, Ceramic is an ideal choice for storing information that requires trust, cross-platform interoperability, and multi-party consumption.

Despite the benefits of cloud services, SaaS tools, and API businesses, building a fully functional product or service remains extremely complex, fragile, and limited. Even simple applications require deploying and maintaining a backend, protecting and managing user identities and data, and orchestrating various APIs and services together. Choices made early on often prevent developers from building long-term relationships with technology providers that vendors leverage. Making the value-added of a product interoperate with other products and services is often difficult and unpredictable. All of this is because infrastructure, information, and access controls are unnecessarily duplicated and encumbered for each individual application.

1. To solve these duplication, fragmentation, and insecurity problems, the Internet needs a flexible public infrastructure where participants can store verifiable information that is universally discoverable and accessible in all applications. By keeping identifiers, their associated data, and services in the public domain rather than on isolated application servers, all participants on the network can access them. In this model, participants directly define and control their resources, share (or not share) these resources with others, and bring their identities and data into the experience.

2. In addition to providing users with more agency and control, this model greatly simplifies the developer experience. Instead of spending effort managing data and tying various services together, developers can focus on adding value to their products. Each application can simply query the identity to obtain the information and access rights it needs. Data can be easily shared between products without compromising privacy. Experiences can be combined in real time based on user preferences. Bilateral service contracting and agreements can be eliminated and replaced with frictionless service payment channels.

3. All of this frees products and services from the hassle of performing non-critical functions, coordinating services and data, worrying about user trust and responsibility, or attracting and retaining users through many frictions. Instead, developers can simply build a product that plugs into an existing ecosystem of users, data , and services that work seamlessly together. Over time, this will lead to the development of more targeted microservices and microapplications rather than the monoliths we see today.

Ceramic provides a universal graph of verifiable documents. Ceramic documents are signed, append-only, tamper-proof objects stored in IPFS, encoded using IPLD, and anchored in one or more blockchains. Due to its hybrid design based on IPFS/IPLD and various blockchains, Ceramic's document graph is interoperable, scalable, permissionless, and low-cost.

Ceramic documents are flexible entities that can be modeled to represent many things, but each document must conform to a specific document type supported by the protocol. Doctypes specify rules that govern what are valid updates to documents, such as signatures and state transitions. This allows Ceramic nodes to verify the state of a given document in a decentralized manner.

Most production systems and applications using Ceramic will combine these simple primitives (DID, Account Linking, and Tile) to enjoy the simplicity, interoperability, and extensibility that are only possible when identities, resources, and services are unbundled from wallets or application silos. Ceramic currently supports three standard document types: 3IDs, Account Linking, and Tile.

1. 3ID identity

On Ceramic, the first and most widely used DID method is 3ID. There are over 15,000 3IDs already in use in production. Additional DID methods that conform to the W3C DID specification may be added to the network as additional document types.

Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) are globally unique identities used to sign documents on the Ceramic Network and can also interact with arbitrary off-chain services and data. More specifically, they are abstract, key-agnostic interfaces used to uniquely identify entities, interoperably sign and encrypt information, authorize authentication/access control to services, and store mappings to other resources. Ceramic makes no assumptions about the type of entity a DID represents, so they can be users, organizations, applications, services, devices, etc. DIDs can be controlled by one or more private keys, providing flexibility and interoperability across wallets and platforms.

2. Account Linking

Account Links are the second document type supported by Ceramic. Account Links are verifiable public mappings that allow a DID to prove that it owns a different public cryptographic identity that can also sign, such as a public key, a smart contract, or another DID.

3. Tile

Tile is the third document type supported by Ceramic. It is the most general form of document and can be used to represent almost any type of information. Tiles are a way to implement verifiable statements through one or more DIDs. Tiles can be independent objects or reference other tiles. This allows for composition between different tiles to create a verifiable, mutable graph of information.

In Ceramic, everything is stored in Smart Documents, which are append-only IPFS logs where each commit (update) is signed by a decentralized identifier (DID) for verification and then anchored in the blockchain for consensus. Each Smart Document essentially acts as its own independent document chain (document blockchain), and here are some key features of Smart Documents:

1. Mutable content: Store information in a collection of mutable documents, such as your favorite NoSQL document database.

2. Immutable identifier: Each document has a globally unique permanent identifier called DocID. No matter how many times the document is updated, this DocID will never change.

3. Verifiable Signatures: Every update to a document must be signed by its owner’s DID to provide verifiability of its contents.

4. Schema-enforced content: Documents can have a schema that will be enforced by the protocol. This allows data integrity and easy cross-platform interoperability.

5. Strict version control: Every update made to a document is anchored in the blockchain, so its submission follows a strict order. This allows the protocol to guarantee the state of the document at each submission and allows its content to always be auditable and trusted.

6. Programmable Logic: Define custom rules for state transitions to enforce who, how, and when documents are updated without a centralized server. Rules can react to direct events (such as a signature from an owner) or indirect events (such as an update in another document).

7. Configurable persistence: Nodes can back up documents to any centralized or decentralized data storage platform.

Clay, as Ceramic's test network, will be a live, fully functional public test network that simulates the main network as much as possible. Specifically, it mainly shows the following aspects: 1. Three JavaScript clients will be run: Core client, HTTP client and CLI. 2. A large number of new protocol features, improvements and performance optimizations. 3. The final disruptive API changes before the main network. 4. Anchor the document on Ethereum's Ropsten (EIP155:3) and Rinkeby (EIP155:4) test networks using the libp2p theme of the dedicated peer-to-peer network /ceramic/testnet-clay.

The Clay network is experimental and should only be used for prototyping, development, and testing purposes. This is useful for getting your application ready for mainnet. Documents created on Clay will not be portable to the mainnet. These are independent networks, similar to Ethereum's testnet and mainnet. Clay does not yet have a purely decentralized peer discovery mechanism for nodes, but instead uses a curated peerlist node discovery mechanism. This is because the DHT functionality js-libp2p is not yet production-ready, but will be ready by the time the mainnet launches.

The emergence of Ceramic relieves pressure for all parties. By storing a mapping to data resources in the user's DID, it provides a way for applications to efficiently discover where information is, whether on a specific server or on the public network.

Likewise, by allowing Ceramic DIDs to define access control policies for their data resources through tiles, it provides an identity-centric way for users to access their information regardless of where they are. Rather than having access control on the server, access control is done directly on the user. Finally, Ceramic allows applications to define a schema for any data to be saved so that data consumers know in advance the shape of the data that will be returned, even if it is encrypted.

We believe these features combined allow users to effortlessly control and share their data across various applications and server silos, while also allowing developers to work with richer, higher-quality datasets than ever before, without having to store any of the datasets.