Guides
Introduction

Polybase is a privacy preserving decentralized database, built on zk-STARKs. We use a zk-rollup combined with native indexing to allow decentralized database rules, fast queries and scalable writes.

At a high level, Polybase is a NoSQL-like database, with validation rules written in a JavaScript like language. The SDK is similar to Firestore and Supabase.

Polybase is better than using a centralized database like Firebase, Postgres or Supabase because it has built-in web3 permissions. You can do row-level token gating and wallet-based permissions. Additionally, you can encrypt data using wallets for “self sovereign data” and verifiably query Polybase from smart collections (coming soon).

Polybase is better than storing data on-chain because it’s 1000 to a million times cheaper than on-chain storage. For example, storing 1MB on Ethereum costs around $10,000.

Blockchains are not built for scalable structured data storage so we built Polybase to combine the best attributes of web2 databases and blockchains.

You can get started in under 5 minutes.