Introduction

So before we even wrote the first line of code, we ended up talking to 50 to 60 web3 developers. These were hour-long casual conversations we had with people across the industry. We saw developers building Defi, DAO tooling, and creator platforms and we found this common thread among them. They were using smart contracts for their tokens and payments, they were using IPFS, Filecoin, and Arweave for their file storage and then they were using centralized databases for their structured data storage.

That was a yellow flag to us. Why is this happening? As we researched deeper, we found that there was no good option for developers to store structured data in a decentralized way. That was the genesis of the idea behind Polybase. Based on a lot of the feedback we got from developers we talked to, we designed the feature set in this way that's like a drop-in replacement for existing databases.

So if you're using Firebase already, the API for Polybase is almost exactly the same. Concepts are very similar, so there's no learning curve and a drop in replacement.

Use cases

Developers are building DAO tooling, web3 SaaS apps, verifiable credentials, DIDs, and more with Polybase. We dive deeper into the use cases in this post on Polybase Use Cases.