What is Calimero
What is Calimero​
Calimero Network is a framework that enables building and running peer-to-peer Self-Sovereign applications focusing on data ownership and harnessing the power of verified off-chain computing
Calimero vs X​
Calimero vs Blockchain​
By virtue of blockchain principles, there's a couple of issues that arise. The major one being that everyone has to agree on the state of the canonical chain, and therefore there can be only one network actor at any given time. Different chains implement different strategies for electing this actor to alleviate the risk of compromise, but the fundamental issue remains, and hence, the long-standing problem of scalability.
Calimero fundamentally rethinks the problem and offers an alternative approach, local-first execution with eventual consistency. This means that each actor can independently drive their own local state, and the network will eventually reconcile to the same state. Essentially pegging the scalability threshold to the number of actors in the network, and executions are practically instantaneous.
State reconciliation is context-aware, meaning that all activity revolves around an instance of an app. This means that participants of a context only have to synchronize with each other, and not the entire network. This is in stark contrast to blockchains, where everyone is forced to synchronize with everyone else and this competition is reflected in gas fees. Calimero doesn't have gas fees, and the cost of execution is directly borne by the actor.
Blockchains achieve integrity through transparency, which is a double-edged sword, essentially precluding you from using it in private environments. Calimero however, leverages the direct-actor relationship to encrypt all network traffic between them, and therefore, the network is inherently private.
Calimero is also designed to be embeddable, meaning that client apps themselves become the network actors, and the network is the app itself. This is in stark contrast to blockchains, where the network is a separate entity from the client apps.
Calimero vs IPFS​
IPFS is a storage solution, it's not designed for generic compute.
Calimero is designed to be a general-purpose compute engine that can be used to build a wide variety of applications. Also worth noting that Calimero does offer a way to store encrypted data, effectively making it a storage solution as well.
Calimero vs ZK​
Zero-Knowledge (ZK) solutions focus on enhancing privacy and reducing the need to reveal data during synchronization, but they don't eliminate the need for synchronization itself.
Calimero offers a fundamentally different approach with local-first execution and eventual consistency, minimizing synchronization overhead. Additionally, ZK solutions can complement Calimero by providing enhanced privacy features within its framework, offering the best of both worlds without inheriting the synchronization complexities of traditional ZK implementations.