The beauty of the blockchain technology is that all participants in blockchain networks trust the information on it, because the data on that blockchain is immutable, visible and accessible to everyone in real time. But web3 is currently far from perfect, as two major challenges exist: privacy of data and potential for businesses to scale using blockchain technology.
If all the data is publicly available and transparent, questions of privacy appear.
Preserving the privacy of personal and business data is a necessity, not a luxury. On the blockchain, it can be done through combining on-chain and off-chain data and interoperability. All of which is possible with Calimero private shards.
Let’s not jump into Calimero's explanation just yet. There is one more important question that needs to be addressed: scaling . Scalability is the ability of a blockchain network to support an increasing amount of transactions, by increasing the number of nodes/validators.
As the interest for using cryptocurrency and blockchain technology grew, many users and companies started issuing tokens, building Dapps and creating NFTs more and more each day. As a result, networks started getting congested, which as a result brought increasing gas costs for new and existing users, discouraging them from building more amazing products. This is where new scaling solutions came into being. A good example is NEAR , which uses sharding for scaling and supporting the increasing blockchain usage. But even with sharding, for some businesses that have a lot of network transactions on a daily basis, the costs can pile up.
This is where Calimero comes in - as you can spin off your own shard within which the transactions are free and private . You’re only required to pay a fixed amount per month based on the number of validators you’re running.
Calimero is a customizable sidechain built on top of NEAR protocol. It can be viewed as a network of networks. A solution for businesses to access privacy features and enable scaling. Calimero provides you with an infrastructure which shares all the best benefits of NEAR while being enhanced with multiple new features with emphasis on privacy.
Calimero enables you to:
By using Calimero private shards, among other things, users can enhance applications by interoperating with open source protocols and applications , from DeFi to NFTs. Users can hold and manage public assets and move them between private shards and other public chains seamlessly.
Furthermore, users are benefiting from cross shard transactions, which provide the ability to interact with third parties on the public chain or other permissioned enterprise shards. Private shards can interact with each other over encrypted channels.
With Calimero, possibilities are endless.
Calimero’s private shards have all the benefits of NEAR in terms of high performance, security and sustainability. But as an important distinction, shards are not using NEAR’s validators, execution and state storage, but rather you’re using your own. The main benefits include:
Calimero can be used:
There are countless use cases, as only the imagination is the limit. To provide some inspiration, we’ve listed a couple different industries where private shards achieve their full potential.
The possibilities are #NEAR endless! Contact our team if you want to learn more and try running your own private shard to access the countless sharding benefits. You can use Calimero for free while we’re in test mode. Our team can give you access to a private shard for your project. Follow us on Twitter to stay tuned for all the news surrounding private shards! If you want to learn more, you can listen to the lectures Calimero team members had at Nearcon in Lisbon (September, 2022).
Importance of privacy and scaling brought by Calimero - Sandi Fatić (CEO) - LINK
Building a bridge used for communication between NEAR and Calimero’s private shards - Igor Jerković (Core engineer) - LINK
