Tangle Blueprints: The Future of Modular Infrastructure
Introduction
Tangle Blueprints are an innovative way to build and monetize software, primarily due to their flexibility and expressivity in leveraging open source libraries as well as features from Tangle’s Blueprint SDK. A Blueprint is an infrastructure-as-code template that can be reused to provide a similar service for many different customers. It can be deployed to Tangle and hook into our restaking infrastructure – to leverage payments, operators, and security from Tangle – or even be modified to deploy to other networks such as Eigenlayer and Symbiotic or as a standalone system.
Tangle Blueprints are built primarily using the Tangle Blueprint SDK and CLI. Developers can create a new Blueprint easily from the CLI that deploys a simple hello world example to a local testnet. Developers can spawn p2p networks using the SDK and equip their nodes with a variety of different cryptographic keys for signing and encryption.
Modularity
Tangle Blueprints are built around the principle of modularity and composability. We’re continuing to improve the SDK and CLI so that new Blueprints are easier to build and compose with one another. A good example of this is rooted in our basic templates. Tangle Blueprints come equipped today with a library and binary component. The libraries can be reused in other projects, even other Blueprints, to build even more composable and rich services.
Blueprints are composed of a variety of components that are each responsible for building rich event driven services and applications. Blueprints are built as libraries and executed as binaries. Developers get started with our templates which provides them github actions, CI, and other utilities out of the box.
A Blueprint can be broken down into its discrete and continuous tasks. For discrete tasks we have the abstractions of event producers, consumers, and handlers. For continuous tasks, we have the background service abstraction. Together, these tasks can be run using our BlueprintRunner which provides a structured way to execute a node for these tasks. Our architecture is modelled after axum, a powerful HTTP server infrastructure, and with it as inspiration, we have built a general event driven system that can produce, filter, and consume events to be handled by generic functions. These functions can be leveraged to handle smart contract events, cron-jobs, and more for complex use cases ranging from zero-knowledge proof generation to multi-party computation to AI inferences.
Usage and CLI
To get started building Blueprints, head to our documentation site and download our CLI. This will provide you the tools to get started building blueprints.
To see a list of existing Blueprints to draw inspiration from and copy (because Blueprints are composable!) check out our list of use cases
- Use cases
- Add your Blueprint to our awesome-tangle-blueprints!
