Introduction

Canvas applications are built on a programmable multi-writer relational database. They're easy to configure and automatically have several useful properties:

• Real-time. Nodes connect and sync directly with each other over WebSockets, and optionally can use GossipSub to broadcast actions over an open mesh of servers.
• Convergent. Actions can freely read and write to a relational database with strong eventual consistency. Every peer's database state will converge to the same state, regardless of the order in which the actions are received.
• Self-authenticating. Every action is signed with a cryptographically verifiable user identity, and attributable to a user's DID. The entire action history of an application can be replayed and verified.
• Lock-free. Any number of peers can concurrently execute new actions, without waiting for consensus.
• Cross-platform. Canvas apps run in the browser, desktop, or React Native, persisting data with IndexedDB, SQLite in WASM, native SQLite, or Postgres.