Multicoin Capital Co-founder: Understanding the web3 Native SQL Project Tableland

Original Title: Web3-Native SQL

Author: Kyle Samani, Co-founder of Multicoin Capital

Translation: xiaozou, Jinse Finance

In the first wave of crypto innovation following Bitcoin, many developers forked the Bitcoin codebase, attempting to build other decentralized infrastructures and applications beyond digital gold. Among the earliest forks were attempts to create decentralized databases suitable for general application development. After the launch of Ethereum, teams began building BFT database engines in the wave of crypto innovation.

For various reasons, these earlier attempts struggled to gain attention. They started too early: there was insufficient decentralized financial infrastructure and not enough developers who understood the unique properties of decentralized systems. However, in the past few years, financial infrastructure has significantly improved, and web3 developers have begun to expand their vision from finance to general consumer applications.

Today, I am excited to announce that Multicoin has participated in an $8 million funding round for Tableland, which is a permissionless network of nodes providing a relational database (also known as web3-native SQL). This round was led by Coinfund, with participation from companies like Blueyard and Protocol Labs.

Web3 Native SQL

SQL is the most popular database language to date, and Tableland is focused on this aspect. The development of Tableland is based on the open-source SQLite engine.

Today, Tableland integrates with Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, and Polygon, and will soon add support for Filecoin FVM. This means developers can link any financial assets (both fungible and non-fungible tokens) stored on these asset ledgers to Tableland. A common use case is managing the metadata of NFTs or other mutable data.

Tableland makes SQL the preferred choice for web3 developers—high-performance and easy to use. Here are a few examples:

• DR/VRS is building a mutable NFT that leverages Tableland's customizable database to obtain control rules. This feature allows NFT owners to combine unique and immutable attributes with customizable attributes and add them to the traits.

• Hideout Labs is developing an NFT publishing platform. Unlike other platforms, they are creating a marketplace for attribute swapping, where users can write and exchange NFT attributes. By transferring these mutable attributes from the asset ledger to Tableland, they open up many new design spaces and greatly increase interactions between attributes.

Tableland Studio and Composability

We announced our investment in Ceramic a year ago. At that time, we saw explosive growth in developers building consumer experiences. For example:

Social— Over 100 teams are developing various decentralized social products. All these products can benefit from the ability to store certain elements (such as user-generated content) in a decentralized database.

Gaming— Hundreds of crypto games will be released this year, gradually decentralizing their content elements.

NFT— Dozens of major brands have announced NFT plans and are exploring how to build variable NFTs.

Ceramic offers noSQL and Graph databases, while Tableland focuses on SQL and relational databases. Each company is taking a customized approach to monopolize the market and has made the right trade-offs for composable database architectures. We ultimately hope both can thrive, as they serve developers who truly understand the importance of cross-application data composability.

In addition to the core database engine, the team will launch Tableland Studio later this year. Tableland Studio is a developer platform designed to simplify the rapid prototyping of feature-rich, data-driven web3 applications. The Studio will help developers create and manage new projects running on the Tableland network by connecting data with smart contracts, building alongside collaborators, and integrating other protocols like IPFS, Filecoin, and ENS into their applications.

As more applications provide more data to permissionless networks, developers will be able to discover, adjust, and reuse entire application architectures in minutes. The Studio will help developers act faster by opening a continuously expanding library of application architectures that developers can fork, modify, and reuse. These constitute "blueprints"—including database designs, smart contract code, queries, and even application code—to build everything from NFT games to AI model training markets.

The Studio will greatly accelerate the creative reassembly based on data composability.

We are thrilled to support Andrew and Sander in their pursuit of Tableland. We firmly believe in the importance of decentralized database infrastructure, and we are proud to support the entire Tableland team in building the future of web3-native SQL.