> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.chaintable.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# What is Chaintable

> Chaintable: a data and compute platform for real-time onchain applications

<div className="overview-positioning">
  **Working to become the Databricks of Web3.**
</div>

## Chaintable’s vision

Rapid growth in blockchain users, assets, and business activity places greater technical demands on application development and infrastructure.

The core challenge is to combine blockchain-native support, large-scale processing, and explicit consistency constraints in one architecture. General-purpose infrastructure offers mature scaling but is a poor fit for blockchain use cases; native solutions fit better but still struggle to scale applications.

Chaintable aims to overcome this bottleneck and become blockchain’s next-generation data and compute infrastructure.

## Comparison with Databricks

<div className="overview-comparison">
  <Tabs>
    <Tab title="Similarities with Databricks">
      **1. A unified online platform for data development and applications**

      Both integrate data storage and management, compute development, task execution, and application services. Developers can work in one platform from data collection and storage through processing to application use.

      **2. Similar technical architectures**

      Both support applications through similar layers: a development environment, task orchestration, a compute engine, and data management.

      | Architecture layer | Chaintable | Databricks |
      | - | - | - |
      | Development environment | Chaintable Notebook | Databricks Notebook |
      | Task orchestration | Python SDK orchestration in Notebooks | Lakeflow Jobs |
      | Compute engine | BlockX | Spark |
      | Data management | BlockDB | Delta Lake |
      | Underlying storage | OLTP relational databases | Object storage |

      **3. Built on an open-source ecosystem**

      Databricks builds on Spark, Delta Lake, and their open-source ecosystems. Chaintable builds its developer ecosystem around three core open-source projects: BlockX for computation, BlockDB for data management, and Leafage for node state access.
    </Tab>

    <Tab title="Differences from Databricks">
      **1. Different computation paradigms**

      Databricks, exemplified by Spark, organizes computation around specific datasets and transformations; Chaintable organizes it around a specific world state.

      **2. Different scope of sharing**

      Databricks centers on data owned and governed by enterprises, with sharing defined by organizational permissions and collaboration. Chaintable starts with public onchain data, aiming to share upstream state and derived computation results across applications as data and compute infrastructure the entire ecosystem can reuse and extend.

      **3. Different application priorities**

      Databricks broadly supports enterprise data processing and applications. Chaintable prioritizes real-time, consumer-facing onchain development, using data and computation results directly in online services to support end-user interactions.
    </Tab>
  </Tabs>
</div>

## Core components

<Columns cols={3}>
  <Card title="BlockDB" icon="database" href="https://docs.blockdb.chaintable.com/" />

  <Card title="BlockX" icon="workflow" href="https://docs.blockx.chaintable.com/" />

  <Card title="Leafage" icon="blocks" href="https://docs.leafage.chaintable.com/" />
</Columns>


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