Overview

More than 1000 applications and 30,000 of Ethereum's most active users rely on 3Box for profiles, identity management, and distributed data storage. As more developers have built on 3Box, the needs and requirements of the community have evolved. We have been working on a major update that will bring dramatically improved performance, complete decentralization, and far more flexibility: IDX protocol, built on Ceramic Network.

Ceramic is a brand new technology for managing verifiable, mutable information on the open web. Using the IDX library with Ceramic, it will be simple to manage accounts (crypto and social), user information (profiles, settings), distributed databases (OrbitDB, Textile, others), and other resources with far more power than 3Box previously allowed. It's a huge improvement to identity and data management for Web3.

At the end of 2020 we will begin migrating 3Box to Ceramic and IDX. In some cases this transition will be seamless, with basically no action required by developers or users. For others, some migration will be recommended. It will depend on the 3Box features you use, how you have implemented them, and how you want to prioritize data consistency versus a faster migration.

This FAQ is intended to help you understand how to plan for the migration and what to expect in the transition period.

Table of Contents


Where should I watch for more information?

Join the Ceramic community chat

Follow on twitter: @3boxdb, @ceramicnetwork, @IdentityIndex



Migration paths by product

Profiles: a straightforward migration

Profiles will migrate from 3Box infrastructure to IDX, which will offer far better performance, more flexibility, and new features.

User profiles (3box.io/hub)

If you have a 3Box profile today, you can safely keep using it and all data will be migrated to Ceramic automatically! The first time you use your profile after Ceramic goes live you will be prompted to sign a message to migrate the relevant data to IDX.

Profile integrations (API and JS)

Read-only (3Box API): we will update our profiles API to pull from Ceramic once the transition is underway. When we transition, you'll want to update any language on your application.

Writing profiles: If you are saving profile information in your application directly (rather than directing users to 3Box.io), you'll want to migrate from using 3box.js to using the IDX basic profile.

App specific profiles

If you are saving profile data to a Space to have an app-specific profile, you will likely want to migrate this data to a new profile definition on IDX. We're happy to chat about the best way to do this.

Data storage (Spaces)

We are working with a number of partners to offer encrypted data storage options that use IDX for identity, encryption and access control. This recreates the same functionality as today's 3Box Spaces (which bundled 3Box's 3ID identity, OrbitDB datastores, and 3Box-hosted pinning). This new model offers more flexibility in your choice of DB and infrastructure provider.

You can use IDX as the identity, management and access control provider with a number of our DB partners: