Tatum's Architecture
Now that we've made our first app, it's time to dive deeper into how Tatum works.
Tatum is a combination of blockchain infrastructure and advanced developer tools. Tatum's architecture consists of three main parts.
- Blockchain Infrastructure
- Tatum Platform (Cloud)
- Developer Libraries and Tools
Please have a look at the picture below. We'll walk you through the architecture and all of Tatum's layers to help you develop blockchain apps much more quickly and easily. Let's start from the bottom.
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To build and run blockchain apps, you need access to the blockchain's infrastructure. In other words, If you want to read data from the Ethereum blockchain or submit a new transaction, you definitely need access to the Ethereum node. Now you can install your own node, but you'll soon find out that it's very difficult and expensive to manage. So to make things easier, we run all nodes for you. You don't need to install anything!
The Tatum platform connects blockchain infrastructure with enterprise features. We run both the platform and the blockchain infrastructure for you. To get access to the platform, you need to register and get an API key. You'll get unlimited development and production API keys.
Virtual Accounts
Blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum are not exactly scalable. Bitcoin can send around 7 transactions per second (tps), and Ethereum can do about 15 tps globally. But what if you need to scale past the blockchain's limitations? That's where virtual accounts come in. They allow you to perform instant, feeless transactions separately from the blockchain, and periodically synchronize with it. It ensures minimal transaction fees and limitless scalability, even on older blockchains.
Virtual accounts also allow you to work with fiat and virtual currencies and have a comprehensive suite of advanced developer tools built-in and ready.
Metadata Layer
This part of Tatum is quite interesting. It's very important, yet you'll most likely never work with it directly. The metadata layer stores or enhances information that cannot be stored in a blockchain. It runs on autopilot, and you don't need to do anything.
The metadata layer in action
Imagine you're developing a crypto payment gateway. One of the features you would like to introduce to your users is a payment note. However, in most cases, you cannot save a payment note into a blockchain. That's where the metadata layer steps in and saves it for you. All you have to do is to include a payment note field when sending a payment using Tatum.
Compliance Engine
The compliance engine helps you in four areas:
- Global regulations
- Local regulations
- Accounting standards
- Freezing digital assets
Again, everything is running on autopilot and you don't have to do anything. You always have the ability to override the compliance engine if necessary.
Abstraction Layer
This layer unifies access for developers to all blockchains and platform features like virtual accounts, off-chain, etc. Abstraction is the key layer that simplifies everything and enables developers to build blockchain apps so quickly and without any blockchain expertise.
API Security
Your access to the API is secured with an SSL certificate and API key. To learn more about security, please go to the security section.
Data location
Tatum stores data in the European Union and the United States. Data associated with an EU API key are stored in the EU, data associated with a US API key are stored in the US.
You can access the Tatum platform via our SDKs or REST API. You can find all libraries and tools on our GitHub, and all available API calls in our API documentation.
Tatum offers the following pricing plans:
- Free
- Start
- Basic
- Enterprise
They differ in pricing, number of API calls, and request per second (rq/s).
For a full breakdown of our plans and the number of credits per month for each plan, visit our pricing page.