Overview

➤ What is Canopy?

💡ELI5 with History

Imagine you're the boss in charge of making the best architecture for the new decentralized internet.

Engineer 1 wants to connect a bunch of blockchains together (e.g., Tendermint & Avalanche).

Engineer 2 realizes blockchains are really hard to launch and creates one 'builder chain' that makes new blockchain apps (e.g., Ethereum & Solana).

Engineer 3 realizes that just one 'builder chain' is fragile and makes each new blockchain app act as a builder chain too (e.g., Canopy).

Canopy is 2 things:

1. A recursive framework to build blockchains.

2. The seed chain that starts the recursive cycle.

Canopy offers developers the benefits of all blockchain layers in a single, easy to understand, template.

The peer-to-peer vision of Canopy is a network of utility-specific blockchains that serve as a decentralized launchpad for new chains. As these chains mature, they grow into fully independent peers, contributing back to the launchpad and strengthening the utility.

Want to dive deeper? Check out What is Canopy?

➤ Why use Canopy?

💡ELI5 with Web2

• Canopy is like bitTorrent for blockchain security. It enables blockchains to deploy and seed each other—creating an unstoppable mesh of connected chains that provide utility and security.

• Canopy is like react for blockchains. Simply fork the template at https://github.com/canopy-network/canopy, customize as needed, change the config file and have a blockchain 'out-of-the-box'.

• Canopy is like aws for blockchains. You can 'deploy' your blockchain on Canopy's mesh security network to have experienced node runners 'host' your chain while protecting it from hostile takeovers.

• Canopy is like kubernetes for blockchains. You can 'scale' your blockchain by spawning siblings or children chains.

• Canopy is like wordpress for blockchains. Canopy allows your blockchain to start simple like 'managed hosting' under a Security Root - but go fully independent like 'self hosting' any time.

• Canopy is like a smart rpc client for blockchains. Canopy hooks to the APIs of other blockchains to perform cross-chain functionality like token swaps without any update to the 3rd party.

• ✅ All the benefits of L2 / Rollup / dApp

  • Day 1 security

  • Quick to market

  • Immediate ecosystem

  • No funding required

• ✅ All the benefits of L0 / L1

  • Independent scalability

  • Native security

  • No dependencies

  • Self governance

• 🚀And some new stuff

  • No-code chain migration ( L3 → L2 → L1 → L0 )

  • Recursive L⁰ functionality (C1 → C2 → C3 → C1 )

  • Scale up, down and sideways ( expand parallel L1a ⫘ L1b | cross-layer L1 → L2 )

  • Permissionless interoperability with any chain ( C1 ↔ Eth, Cosmos, Avax, etc. )

  • + more ( instant liquidity | automatic portfolio diversification | enhanced chain security )

Want to learn about the benefits? Checkout Why Canopy?

➤ What to expect out of these docs?

• 📖 A single 'wiki' for all things Canopy

  • Learn about the 'what' and 'why' of Canopy

  • Learn how Canopy works

  • Learn how to get involved

    • Build a chain

    • Run a node

    • Participate with CNPY

New to blockchain? No problem! Start at Blockchain 101 👈