Ceramic Protocol¶

Ceramic is a decentralized event streaming protocol that enables developers to build decentralized databases, distributed compute pipelines, and authenticated data feeds, etc. Ceramic nodes can subscribe to subsets of streams forgoing the need of a global network state. This makes Ceramic an eventually consistent system (as opposed to strongly consistent like L1 blockchains), enabling web scale applications to be built reliably.

The protocol doesn't prescribe how to interpret events found within streams; this is left to the applications consuming the streams. One example of this type of application is ComposeDB.

Core Components¶

The Ceramic protocol consists of the following components:

Specification Status¶

Section	State
1. Streams	Draft/WIP
1.1. Event Log	Reliable
1.2. URI Scheme	Reliable
1.3. Consensus	Draft/WIP
1.4. Lifecycle	Reliable
2. Accounts	Draft/WIP
2.1. Decentralized Identifiers	Draft/WIP
2.2. Authorizations	Reliable
2.3. Object-Capabilities	Draft/WIP
3. Networking	Draft/WIP
3.1. Tip Gossip	Reliable
3.2. Tip Queries	Reliable
3.3. Event Fetching	Reliable
3.4. Network Identifiers	Reliable
4. API	Missing
5. Nodes	Draft/WIP

Legend¶

Spec state	Label
Unlikely to change in the foreseeable future.	Stable
All content is correct. Important details are covered.	Reliable
All content is correct. Details are being worked on.	Draft/WIP
Do not follow. Important things have changed.	Incorrect
No work has been done yet.	Missing

Next Steps¶

Start learning about Streams, the core data structures used in the Ceramic protocol.