Why Web3 Needs a Real-Time Data Layer Now More Than Ever

Web3 is facing challenges due to its use as operational, analytic, or non-relational databases, which results in slow performance and inconsistent data. Blockchain technology offers a secure, immutable ledger but sacrifices speed and scalability. To overcome these issues, off-chain processing techniques are being employed, where dApps read data from off-chain databases and write data back to the chain minimally. This approach ensures data accuracy/currency for dApps while leveraging the strengths of existing database technologies and blockchain together. Apache Cassandra is one of the most capable systems as an operational database at this level of volume, scale, and performance. By minimizing dApp size, on-chain data storage, and blockchain writes with off-chain processing, operational costs will realign to Web 2.0 levels for most use cases.