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What's Chromia?

Why choose between a traditional database and a blockchain when you can have the best of both worlds? The Relational Blockchain is a new architecture that combines the power and flexibility of mature database systems with blockchain's disruptive potential. Chromia is a relational blockchain platform for decentralized applications (dapps).

Chromia is a blockchain platform that aims to solve the scalability problem for dapps. The platform consists of a network of relational blockchains. Dapps can be written in a way that is familiar to developers all over the world, whether they work on large enterprise applications, games, or smaller projects.

Our priorities are to:

  • Allow dapps to scale to millions of users.
  • Improve the user experience of dapps to achieve parity with centralized applications.
  • Allow developers to build secure applications using familiar paradigms.

Most dapp blockchain platforms use virtual machines of various kinds, but a traditional virtual machine architecture doesn't work very well with the Chromia relational data model, as we need a way to encode queries as well as operations. To enable this, we created a new language called Rell (Relational language) for dapp programming.

Benefits of using Chromia​

Chromia is a general-purpose platform capable of serving almost all kinds of dapps. It's particularly well suited to cases requiring high I/O capacity or managing complex data sets. At the same time, it offers the same level of openness, security, transparency, and decentralization as other public blockchains. To understand when Chromia blockchain is the best choice, you need to dive a bit deeper:

  • Real-time transactions: With Chromia's blockchain, transactions can be confirmed within ~1 second, enabling unparalleled performance. Each dapp on Chromia has its own blockchain run by a set of nodes using ePBFT consensus.
  • Relational blockchain: The unique architecture and relational blockchain enables flexibility, versatility, and consistency, which traditional relational databases are known for. In addition, it allows for traditional database operations, empowering developers to be productive in an already familiar design pattern.
  • Rell language: Rell is a relational language designed to be easy to learn and developer friendly. The language is deliberately like modern programming languages, and developers can use relational programming idioms they're already familiar with.