Permissionless Relational Database Leverages SQL And Composable Metadata To Create Reusable Dapp Blueprints

Tableland, a permissionless relational database for web3 applications, announced a $8M Series A round led by CoinFund with participation from Multicoin Capital, Blueyard and A Capital, bringing the company’s total financing to $10.4M. The new funds will be used to launch Tableland on mainnet, release new developer tools, and roll out Tableland Studio later this year. This comes as NFT and game creators are demanding easier and cost effective ways to work in Web3 with the world’s most popular programming language Structured Query Language (SQL).

“The talented and ambitious Tableland team is solving this problem by bringing the familiarity of serverless relational databases and SQL to web3, thus paving the way for a new era of data-centric applications to emerge.”

Tableland is a permissionless relational database built on the SQLite engine that enables developers to build complex relational data models for decentralized games, apps, and NFTs. Models are distributed and stored on the Tableland Network, a decentralized network of validators governed by the Tableland Protocol. The Tableland Network is currently available in beta on Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum and Optimism and plans an incentivized testnet in Q4 2023 followed by a production mainnet in early 2024.

“SQL is by far and away the most popular programming language in the world for relational databases, yet it is practically non-existent in web3; instead, developers are forced to choose between limited query languages and simpler, static data on decentralized networks or SQL and richer, dynamic data on centralized databases,” Alex Felix, Founder & CIO, CoinFund. “The talented and ambitious Tableland team is solving this problem by bringing the familiarity of serverless relational databases and SQL to web3, thus paving the way for a new era of data-centric applications to emerge.”

In Tableland, tables are on-chain assets (ERC-721) that can be grouped into data models controlled by wallet-based authentication, row-level permissions, or smart-contract integration. Developers can create tables, insert or query data, and grant write access to their databases with other NFTs, access tokens, or address-based rules. The combination of these features makes the database layer of applications more composable and web3 native.

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Tableland Studio, a new developer platform for designing and reusing relational database models, helps developers build apps faster by providing a directory of pre-built data models, easy connectors for smart contracts, collaboration tools, and a suite of pre-built integrations with other protocols, such as IPFS, Filecoin and ENS. Tableland Studio is making exciting progress and approaching its initial release for beta testers. Join the waitlist here to secure your early access.

“Tableland integrates a battle-tested database into EVM-based smart contracts for the first time,” said Andrew Hill, Co-founder, Tableland. “The ease and familiarity of SQL combined with a network of pre-built, composable data models will make it possible for developers to turn ideas into dapps faster than ever before.”

For NFT creators, Tableland offers an efficient and structured alternative to storing data on chain, and works alongside decentralized storage protocols like Filecoin or Arweave to enable mutability that is secured by the host chain. For game creators, Tableland makes “crafting NFTs” (ie, combining NFTs to generate a new NFT) easier due to the composability of each NFT’s metadata. It also makes creating Lootboxes (claiming tokens by opening a randomized box) cheaper by moving state mutations offchain. Tableland can be used to model any structured metadata for a wide variety of applications—from apps, to games, to social, analytics, AI/ML, and more.

“Until now, it’s been practically impossible to build a consumer-grade application that requires a complex data architecture due to the limitation of decentralized databases,” said Kyle Samani, Managing Partner, Multicoin Capital. “Tableland fixes this, and makes data itself composable. Data composability will be one of the biggest force multipliers in application development. When hundreds of apps read and write to the same model, the time it takes to build an application will drop dramatically.”

Tableland currently supports Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, and Optimism, and is set to announce Filecoin FVM integration in the coming weeks. Further plans are in place to support zkEVMs later this year.

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