Introduction

Canvas is a framework for real-time distributed and decentralized applications.

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

• Lock-free and off-chain. No transaction fees or confirmation wait times. Any number of peers can concurrently execute new actions, without waiting for consensus.
• 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 users.
• Eventually consistent. Actions can freely read and write to a relational database. Every peer's database state will deterministically converge regardless of the order in which the actions are received.
• Self-authenticating. Every action is signed by a session key authorized by an end user identity. The entire action log can be verified and replayed by anyone at any time; applications are trustless and portable.
• Cross-platform. Canvas apps run in the browser or on NodeJS, persisting data with IndexedDB, SQLite in WASM, SQLite with LMDB, or Postgres.