NEAR partners with Ceramic on cross-chain identity and dynamic data storage
COMMUNITY
May 28, 2021
Partnership with Ceramic brings streaming data and cross-chain identity protocols to NEAR developers.
Developers building on NEAR Protocol now have a powerful way to manage user identities and dynamic off-chain data in their applications. Ceramic, the decentralized network for data stream processing, now supports NEAR wallets.

NEAR is currently hosting an Open Web Community Hackathon with a prize for integrating IDX profiles on Ceramic with a NEAR Sputnik DAO. To participate, check out the hackathon prize!

Blockchain, Data, & Identity: a full stack for Web3 developers
NEAR offers developers the most dev-friendly and end-user accessible infrastructure for building decentralized apps and services. Great Web3 and DeFi apps require more than a smart contract platform. They also need sophisticated, scalable, and dependable data management infrastructure for app builders using smart contracts. Ceramic provides advanced database-like features such as mutability, version control, access control, and programmable logic. It is also the foundation for IDX, Web3’s first cross-chain identity model.

With the integration of Ceramic on NEAR Protocol, developers on NEAR can: 

Build data-rich user experiences and social features on fully decentralized tech
Give users cloud-like backup, sync, and recovery without running a centralized server
Publish content on the open web without the need to anchor IPFS hashes on-chain
Leverage interoperable profiles, social graphs and reputations across the Web3 ecosystem
Ceramic now supports NEAR wallets
Starting today, developers building applications on NEAR can easily add support for Ceramic and IDX in their application with a seamless user experience. NEAR key pairs have been added as a supported signing and authentication method for Ceramic’s data streams, so users can now perform transactions on Ceramic with their existing NEAR wallets. 

Developers have already started combining NEAR and Ceramic to create new applications such as NEAR Personas, which links a NEAR wallet to a DID.


About Ceramic: Decentralized data streams
Ceramic provides developers with database-like functionality for storing all kinds of dynamic, mutable content. This finally gives developers a Web3 native way to add critical features like rich identities (profiles, reputation, social graphs), user-generated content (posts, interactions), dynamic application-data, and much more.

Ceramic’s unique stream-based architecture is designed to handle any type of data model at web-scale volume and latency. Built on top of open standards including IPFS, libp2p, and DIDs and compatible with any raw storage protocol like Filecoin or Arweave, all information stored on Ceramic exists within a permissionless cross-chain network that lets developers tap into an ever growing library of identities and data while using their preferred stack.

IDX: Cross-chain identity and user-centric data
Identity is the first use case enabled by Ceramic’s building blocks for open source information. IDX (identity index) is a cross-chain identity protocol that inherits Ceramic’s properties to provide developers with a user-centric replacement for server-siloed user tables. By making it easy to structure and associate data to a user’s personal index, IDX lets applications save, discover, and route to users’ data.

The IDX SDK makes it simple to manage users and deliver great data-driven experiences using the same NEAR keys and wallets as developers and users are already relying on. Users can also link multiple keys, from any wallet and multiple blockchains, to the same identity. This is essential to developers who want to serve users over time, as it enables key rotation, data interoperability across accounts, and rich cross-chain profiles, reputations and experiences.

Getting started with Ceramic on NEAR
NEAR is currently hosting an Open Web Community hackathon! There is a prize for integrating IDX profiles on Ceramic with theSputnik DAO platform, built on NEAR. For more information, head to the NEAR Forum.
To install NEAR, start with our documentation.
To add IDX to your project, follow this installation guide.
To use Ceramic for streams without IDX, follow this installation guide.
Regardless of which option you choose, you should also select 3ID Connect as your DID wallet during the authentication process which handles the integration with NEAR wallets.
For questions or support, join the Ceramic Discord and the NEAR Discord.