Space and Time Beta is Here

At the beginning of this year, I shared an overview of our roadmap for the Space and Time project in 2023, stating our plans to move from controlled release to beta launch in the first half of the year. Yesterday, we announced the official release of our beta, making Space and Time available to the community. To stay up-to-date with our product announcements, make sure to keep an eye on the Space and Time blog, follow us on Twitter, and join our Discord.

Why this matters

The beta launch of Space and Time is not just exciting news for our team and community, it’s also a critical step forward in creating a world that goes beyond just trust. Decentralized applications have a database problem. Nearly all dapps are leveraging a centralized database and backend data services—which means that most dapps aren’t actually decentralized. With breaches of centralized databases at an all-time high, Web3 developers are beginning to understand the risks in building dapps on top of centralized infrastructure. 

Space and Time is delivering a novel solution to the market: the first verifiable data warehouse that packages a full suite of developer tools in a decentralized deployment for simplified building of end-to-end decentralized applications, smarter smart contracts, and verifiable AI. 

Data accessibility for all

We believe that blockchain data, APIs, dashboards, and data storage should be freely available for anyone to use. Web3 created a new, transparent data economy, but it was built in silos, requiring developers to thread together various point-solutions to build on the blockchain. Space and Time is imagining a data economy where edge functions and solutions don’t prevent you from accessing and operating your business. Space and Time’s suite of data services is provided at no cost to our users. When you use Space and Time, all you pay for is compute. 

“Space and Time makes blockchain data universally available in a free, open, and accessible database built for the community.”

The future of data warehousing starts today

Space and Time has been in controlled release since the data warehouse launched at the end of 2022. Throughout the controlled release, we’ve onboarded technology trailblazers that have started building on Space and Time. Our beta marks the next step in our roadmap, as Space and Time becomes available for broader use. Below is a list of features that developers can expect to see as we progress through beta. 

API gateway

In order to solve the dapp decentralization problem, Space and Time provides a built-in decentralized API gateway with pre-built REST APIs for blockchain data and Kafka instances for data streaming, so you can build fully decentralized applications directly on top of the platform. Publish datasets and queries directly to APIs and build scalable, data-driven dapps on top of Space and Time. Space and Time is both a database and a decentralized, serverless backend for dapps. 

Indexed blockchain data

Blockchain data should be available to everyone with unfettered access. Space and Time has developed a verifiable blockchain indexing service, provided for free as a service to our users. Customers have access to real-time and historical data from major blockchains, which currently include Ethereum, Polygon, BNB Chain, Sui, and Avalanche. We're continually adding support for more chains, so if you would like Space and Time to consider adding a new chain to our indexing solution, please contact us at info@spaceandtime.io.

Private off-chain data

We know that seamlessly connecting data between business systems is critical to enterprise operations and a requirement for any business or consumer leveraging data. We’ve partnered with Chainlink, a pioneer in connecting off-chain data to the blockchain, to provide developers with a native integration for publishing query results on-chain.

We also believe that you shouldn’t have to pay to connect your off-chain data systems. Space and Time lets you load your own off-chain data into the platform via API or Kafka streaming for free. You can join this data with the provided indexed blockchain data in a single query.

While we encourage data sharing, we also recognize that some use cases, such as healthcare, require data to remain private. You can easily encrypt private data and manage access through an innovative decentralized authorization solution.

Decentralized HTAP data warehouse

Space and Time is, first and foremost, a hybrid transactional and analytic data warehouse. You can easily run SQL queries against both on-chain and off-chain data to generate insights and power applications. Space and Time supports transactions and analytics in a single cluster. 

Transactions: Power your applications with blockchain data and off-chain data.

Analytics: Run scalable analytics against blockchain data and off-chain data.

No ETL Required: Running your transactions and analytics in a single cluster eliminates the need for ETL tools, minimizing cost and latency.

Proof of SQL℠  

Proof of SQL is a novel zk-circuit that allows the data warehouse to generate a SNARK cryptographic guarantee of a SQL query, proving that query computation was done accurately and that both the query and the data are verifiably tamperpoof. 

Proof of SQL aims to enable smart contracts to directly request tamperproof queries against both on-chain and off-chain data. With Proof of SQL, you don’t have to trust that your smart contract is getting the right data—it’s cryptographically guaranteed. 

Dapp frontend and dashboards

One of the most exciting components of the beta is the release of the Space and Time dapp frontend. The dapp provides a comprehensive interface for interacting with Space and Time. Users can explore and visualize Space and Time’s indexed blockchain data and generate queries and dashboards from simple natural-language inputs with the Open-AI powered chatbot. There are more exciting new features coming with the Space and Time dapp, so make sure to stay tuned into our product announcements on Twitter and Discord to learn more.

OpenAI automation

Space and Time is the first data warehouse that automates building a high-performance app backend in seconds, made possible by our integration with OpenAI. The OpenAI-powered chatbot on our dapp frontend allows a user to generate pipelines with Python, SQL, APIs, streams, oracles, and smart contracts, as well as publish queries to APIs, dashboards, applications, blockchains, and other databases, all with simple natural language inputs. With Space and Time, you can write a query without knowing any SQL, with prompts like “show me all wallets that purchased an NFT from my collection.”

Tamperproof Python

One of the hallmark downfalls of legacy data systems is that businesses are required to spend on a separate transactional database and analytic data warehouse, plus ETL tools to move data between them. Not only does Space and Time support transactions and analytics in a single cluster, we also provide a Tamperproof Python service for extracting, transforming, and loading data into the platform from any source. Developers can write Python scripts (or generate them with our OpenAI-powered chatbot) to transform and mold data before inserting it into Space and Time. The service also enables a user to run complex calculations against data stored in Space and Time and publish the results of the computation on-chain or into a new Space and Time table.

Get plugged in

We are excited to launch Space and Time to the public and take a major step toward a decentralized future. Keep an eye out for future announcements, and get plugged into the community to be the first to know when new product features are available. To join the Space and Time community, follow us on Twitter and join our Discord.