One of the most common questions we get asked about developing on ElectricSQL and local-first in general is how to do secure, confirmed transactions like bookings and payments.

Local-first software is the future. It's the natural evolution of state-transfer. It enables a modern, realtime multi-user experience, with built in offline support, resilience, privacy and data ownership. You get instant reactivity and a network-free interaction path. Plus it's much cheaper to operate and scale.

Web development has been progressing through an evolution of state transfer. Local-first is the natural endgame and the vision we're working towards with Electric.

In this post we explore the assumptions that distributed databases are based on and investigate how causal consistency fits the reality of a relativistic universe.

Rich-CRDTs are conflict-free data types (“CRDTs”) extended to provide additional (“Rich”) database guarantees. These guarantees, such as constraints and referential integrity, make building local-first applications much simpler.