Today, we are excited to announce Tableland, where we are building a novel protocol to enable relational tables and SQL in Web3.

In Tableland, we believe the new app stack is NFTs and DAOs. Apps are no longer user interfaces sitting on top of a pile of APIs. Now apps are human experiences that optimize for features like ownership, belonging, access control, and participation. Many of the people buying NFTs today are buying them for the experiences they confer.

As the creators of those experiences, we rely extensively on crafting the metadata accompanying the tokens. Metadata describes the assets that make up the artwork in your Pfp; metadata is what community channels you'll get access to; metadata is your NFT’s score in the game; metadata is how you decide which of your NFTs to show off in a gallery. And so on. When we look into how this metadata is created and exchanged, we find a disconnected system of on-chain storage, decentralized files, and centralized APIs.

How metadata is captured and served means a lot to the way we develop in Web3. If metadata is stored in smart contracts, it may be expensive and limit the scale of data. If metadata is stored as static files on a decentralized network, it limits the experiences we build and the user interactions we can enable. That decision between on-chain and costly or off-chain but static limits many creators that want to develop unique metaverse experiences, interoperable gaming data, or user-controlled worlds. The main goal of Tableland is to provide a permissionless protocol that allows creators to compose metadata for Web3.

The vision for Tableland is simple—a landscape of tables (rows and columns) that drive the metadata for NFTs or DAOs. By building the metadata layer for Web3, we want to give creators a decentralized system for storing structured data that can be queried, joined, and updated using a language they've used before, SQL. Tableland is here and we believe it will change the way we build the Internet.

Come say hi!

We're at EthDenver for the next couple of days. Come find our booth, say hi, and let us know what you are working on. We are looking for new partners and collaborators, so let's chat!

Join the creators.

The project is taking its first steps with the release of the Tableland gateway. While the protocol and network are still being built, the gateway is open to developers. We would love for you to join our Discord and follow the instructions to try it out.

Check out the docs here. Be sure to see our use-cases and playbooks for NFT metadata and key-value stores.

Become a builder.

The Tableland network will be owned by those who build and use it. We want that to be you and we need your help to get there. Come join our developer efforts, community efforts, or apply for one of our grants or bounties here.

Join our team.

We are hiring across all roles—join us!