Kwil v2 public alpha release – SQL databases built for Web3
Kwil – the team dedicated to building the first permissionless SQL database for Web3 on Arweave – has released its first public alpha version of Kwil v2.
This new and highly anticipated version sees Kwil unleash many new features after gathering feedback from their community of users and developers.
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Kwil v2
The internet is not suited for the digital age. As the world continues to move online, the physical public spaces of yesterday are migrating to virtual ones. Today marks a critical step in our mission to build a more free, open, and equitable digital world. – Brennan Lamey, Kwil Founder
Kwil is a permissionless, scalable, and decentralised relational database designed to enable developers to create dynamic, data-intensive user experiences that require decentralised structured data storage. Kwil v1 was a proof of concept that demonstrated the usefulness of such a decentralised relational solution for various decentralised applications (dApps) and protocols. Now, Kwil v2, which was completely rebuilt from the ground up, has been re-architected to function perfectly in a blockchain environment.
Some of the key differences between Kwil v1 and Kwil v2 are as follows, as seen in Luke Lamey’s (Co-Founder, Operations at Kwil) Medium post about the announcement:
- Permissionless Data Writes: Kwil v1 had limited functionality for community interaction and database usage. Kwil v2 allows dApp developers to define rules for interacting with databases, deploy their database on the Kwil network, and then allow any dApp user to permissionlessly interact with the database within the pre-defined rules. Kwil extends the same permissionless benefits first introduced by smart contracts to relational data.
- Web 3.0-native DB functionality: Kwil v1 focused on decentralised replication of Postgres logs and lacked many of the tools and features present in other Web 3.0 applications. Kwil v2 includes Web 3.0-native tools developers will find useful for decentralised applications. For example, Kwil v2 includes the “Caller” modifier, automatically calling a user’s wallet address and including it in the database.
- Query-Based Pricing: Kwil v2 introduces a query pricing system that is a logical equivalent to Ethereum’s opcode pricing system. By generating polynomial representations of a query’s computational complexity, Kwil prices users on a per-query basis, marking one of the first times this has been implemented for a relational database.
To start building on Kwil v2, developers require Kwil testnet tokens, which are already live on the Goerli testnet and can be obtained from the Kwil testnet faucet. The Kwil team has also released several other resources to help developers build on Kwil v2. These include the Kwil Javascript/Typescript SDK, which is the fastest way to get started, the Kwil Database Builder, which is an easy-to-use frontend, that allows anyone to deploy a database on Kwil, and the Kwil CLI, which is an easy-to-use command-line interface for interacting with the Kwil network.
As mentioned in Luke Lamey’s Medium post, the Kwil team is actively seeking feedback from developers who use the alpha release to guide the prioritisation of product features in the coming months. They also plan to offer incentivised testing programs for the Kwil Alpha Release in the near future. If you are an application developer looking to incorporate decentralised databases into your dApp, you can reach out to the Kwil team at help@kwil.com or join their Discord. They are also actively hiring across all roles.
In case you missed it
Last year in October, Kwil announced that it had raised $8.9 million in a seed funding round. The funds raised were intended to accelerate the development of the Kwil network and help Kwil create permissionless databases that will power the next generation of the decentralised web. The team mentioned that this funding will help them continue building the first permissionless and decentralised SQL database on Arweave, which is a critical infrastructure component that is needed in order for Web3 to reach its true potential.
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