Tatum's Architecture
Tatum is a combination of standard blockchain infrastructure with additional enterprise features. 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.
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.
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 off-chain steps in. Tatum has its own proprietary off-chain technology that enables you to perform instant, feeless transactions on all supported blockchains.
Not all information needs to be recorded on a blockchain. This is why Tatum introduces the concept of the private ledger. Essentially, it's a distributed yet centralized database. The private ledger is very similar to standard banking systems. It allows you to record FIAT accounts and transactions. To emulate blockchain, you can create virtual currencies.
Tatum Private Ledger - should I use it or not?
Did you know that over 95 % of apps built on Tatum use the private ledger?
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.
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.
This layer unifies access for developers to all blockchains and platform features like the private ledger, 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.
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.
You can access the Tatum platform via REST API. To help you access our infrastructure, we've built simple open-source developer libraries and tools. You can find all libraries and tools on our GitHub.
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