Calimero Console Overview
Calimero Console is the management frontend for your Calimero Private Shards, think of it as “AWS for Blockchain”. Similar to AWS, we are building and providing a comprehensive Private Shard computing platform that includes IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS offerings.
It provides the ability to interact with the Private Shard, as well as initiate actions which are not strictly blockchain related providing you with an out-of-the-box solution for managing your infrastructure, iterating quickly and allowing you to focus on building.
You can manage the nodes and indexer with a few button clicks, view the general status of your Private Shard, see details using the explorer, implement permissions on the endpoint gateways and bridge, deploy common smart contracts and applications from our Marketplace, manage the bridge and more. Let’s jump right in!
Private Shard at a glance
Your entry to the world of Private Shards is through the console dashboard which provides you all the information about nodes, indexers and services you are running. On top of that, it provides you with: the RPC and Indexer GraphQL URL endpoints for developers and all basic stats of the network itself: current block height, number of transactions, number of accounts. Through the dashboard the users are able to increase their infrastructure needs by scaling up the number of validators, RPCs and indexers running in the network.
If you want to know more about how our Private shards work you can check out our documentation.
Explorer
Due to the fact that transactions inside a Private Shard are only visible to the owners of the network, we have build an explorer which provides you with the ability to view all crypto transactions and information including: accounts, blocks, transactions and receipts, Fungible Tokens and Non-Fungible Tokens in detail.
It is by default a fully private explorer only available to the administrators of the network, but specific information can be shared via API endpoints or shared links through the permissions management service implemented inside the Console.
Bridge
We have implement what we call “The Realistic Bridge” — a bridge which is able to execute transfers and contract calls in “blockchain real time”, allowing you to move assets between NEAR public networks and your Private Shard, as well the ability to execute cross Shard contract calls to execute:
- private smart contracts calls inside the Shard from a public contract
- public smart contract calls from a contract inside the Private Shard.
Our bridge is the fastest and most cost efficient bridge implemented in Web3 space till now.
The Calimero Bridge page is a console by itself. It furnishes you with complete data concerning the associated contracts on both NEAR and Private Shard networks, linking to the explorer, as well as the list of transactions associated with the bridge, the status of all related services is also displayed (status of the relayer services and status of the connector service responsible for connector specific tasks).
The Bridge Permissions dashboard is available to give Private Shard owners the ability to set policies regarding which parties can communicate with the bridge and what type of interaction they are allowed to have, much like a firewall which controls incoming and outgoing connections.
Gateway
The gateway is a reverse proxy service that is used to route incoming requests from clients to the intended server. It acts as an intermediary layer between the client and the Private Shard infrastructure including the RPC and GraphQL Indexer endpoints. It provides additional security, privacy, and scalability. On top of that, the gateway is acting as a permissions management (“firewall”) service allowing users to filter between the public clients and the Private Shard. It is monitoring the traffic that comes into and out of the computer, and blocking any malicious or unauthorized activity.
At this moment in time we provide two endpoints for clients to connect:
- The RPC endpoint for sending transactions and fetching data directly from the Shard
- The Indexer GraphQL endpoint for fetching Indexer Private Shard off-chain stored inside data inside a Postgres database with a GraphQL reverse proxy in front
At this moment the clients are able to generate a variety of API keys with different policies on how the users can interact with the RPC and the Indexer endpoints. This includes anything from allowing all public users with a wallet to send transactions or fetch data to fine-grained permissions or fully disallowing any access.
Accounts
There are two main types of accounts inside the Private Shards:
- private accounts inside the Shard (generated through Console or CLI)
- public wallets synced into the Shard (NEAR wallets used on Mainnet or Testnet)
Public NEAR Wallets
Public wallet integrations which allows the user to sign transactions from their wallet and interact with the Shard (the public wallet account is synced into the shard providing a seamless experience to the user).
Currently we support MyNEARWallet and are working on the integration with the official NEAR wallet. This allows self-custody of the keys and enables users to interact with any Private Shard they have permissions to do so.
Calimero Key Management Service
Calimero’s Key Management Service which is a custody wallet where the sealed keys are stored inside a Vault, the users can send transactions to be signed in a secure way. This is used for all internal keys generated through the Console. Keys inside the Vault can be revoked and replaced with users non-custody keys if needed through the Console.
Dedicated articles about Calimero Wallet integrations and the Key Management Service, explaining the architecture and security aspects in detail, are coming up soon.
Applications & Marketplace
The Calimero Marketplace is a one-stop shop for customers to find, deploy, and manage third-party applications developed by our partners or internally. The goal is to provide developers with an easy to use toolbox to develop faster and focus on core product features without the need to reimplement all needed functionalities.
This includes anything from deploying Fungible or Non-Fungible tokens, DEXes, Oracles, alerts and events, Payment providers, streaming payments and much more.
For example, instead of building your own solution for managing streaming payments or crypto payroll inside the shard, just one-click install one of the providers from the Marketplace.
Right now, we are working on our own as well as partner companies to provide everything — from building blocks to complete solutions on the Marketplace. If you want to resell your product with us — please contact our sales team [CTA: mailto:sales@calimero.network].
What is coming next?
In our Roadmap we have several new features coming, two biggest solutions we are integrating into the console are:
Oracles as a Service
Oracles are services that connect blockchains to external systems, allowing smart contracts to execute based upon inputs and outputs from the real world. This provides the ability to write on-chain code while combining off-chain infrastructure to support advanced decentralized applications that react to real-world events and interoperate with traditional systems bridging the gap between two distinct data sources on a Private Shard.
This is opening up a set of new use cases for Calimero users including: feeding external data such as price feeds, weather data, and more into a blockchain network.
By using our Oracles as a Service we are streamlining the process of deployment, management and implementation of custom Oracle Services for our users.
Events as a Service
While on one hand, Oracles provide you with the ability to push off-chain data into the Shard, Events as a Service provides you to create triggers on specific on-chain actions inside the Shard to external off-chain services listening to events, allowing users to run automated tasks.
We are using an asynchronous and scalable messaging service that decouples indexers producing events inside the Shard from the services processing them. This provides us with the ability to build custom triggers on user or contract interactions inside the Shard, like: token transfers, contract execution outcomes, low balance alerts and many more.
On top of that users are allowed to build custom lambda actions which can be executed on any event including integrations with third party services like IFTTT, Sendgrid, Mailchimp, Pagerduty and others depending on their use case.
If you’re looking to learn more about Private Shards implementation, you can read Calimero documentation. Would you like to give our Console a try? Contact us to get access to a free trial!