Calimero Network is a decentralized peer-to-peer protocol for building self-sovereign networks of applications and sharing data in a completely secure and private way. Our purpose is to enable everybody to use our protocol to build networks of applications that do not require the involvement of any intermediaries, such as the established Big Tech Companies. This is important because the end users can finally truly own their data, and choose who they want to trust, rather than being forced to accept various Terms and Conditions that are not in their best interest.

The trap into which users fall is that these big companies often provide their service at no monetary cost, but users pay with their most precious asset - their data. What is worse, users often do not have an alternative. Calimero was built to create a credible and viable alternative to that. The network is designed in such a way that we purposefully made it impossible for us to ever infringe on our users’ privacy. 

Calimero 2.0 provides developers with tools for building Layer-0 protocols for private data, meaning that we are not a blockchain per se. For reference, Layer-0 protocols are foundational blockchain infrastructures that are designed to improve the scalability and interoperability of multiple layer-1 blockchains.

One of the downsides of building an application on blockchains is that they are not designed to be privacy preserving. Rather than that, blockchains are built to be transparency engines where all the data and state is known and verifiable by all parties involved. The side effect is that scaling data storage and execution is expensive and local state execution is not possible, meaning that everybody needs to agree on the current state of the network (global consensus). Sharding and side chains are exceptions to this rule, but within them, everybody participating in validation has to store data for their respective shard or network, and is able to see the data.

Blockchains are a perfect solution to many of the world’s problems - particularly the ones in finance. That is what Bitcoin resolved. Then came Ethereum and other layer-1 blockchains which enabled various computations within a blockchain network, on top of guaranteed consistency. All of a sudden, programmatic execution was possible, in a completely trustless manner. If a user wanted to make sure that somebody clicked a button and validated it online, Ethereum would allow them to do so. Unfortunately, this also meant that every single transaction of the past needed to be validated, as well as that every single action a user did, needed to be agreed on by every other user. This involves large amounts of compute and is not scalable.

As opposed to Bitcoin and Ethereum that have globalized consensus, Calimero 2.0 applications have a localized consensus. This means that the users only need to synchronize with participants of the context that they are operating within. With any interactions between n number of peers, only these n number of peers need to exchange data and reach consensus, as opposed to the whole network needing to reach consensus on what the n number of peers exchanged among themselves. This can obviously be expanded as more peers are participating in the data exchange, but the uniqueness comes from those exchanges not needing the global network consensus.

With Calimero 2.0, developers are empowered to build or enhance their applications to support private data no matter which ecosystem they are building on. A feature that allows this is Calimero 2.0 being fully chain agnostic. Calimero 2.0 itself provides a runtime and SDK which allow developers to define application protocols interfacing with any Layer-1 and Layer-2 blockchain protocols for both reading and writing data from them. For example, NFT gated applications or even the network participants executing payments on a layer-1 blockchain, based on a certain private data rule.