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DataStax on Wednesday said that it was launching a new cloud-based service, dubbed Astra Block, to support building Web3 applications.

Web3 is a decentralized version of the internet where content is registered on blockchains, tokenized, or managed and accessed on peer-to-peer distributed networks.

Astra Block, which is based on the Ethereum blockchain that can be used to program smart contracts, will be made available as part of the company’s Astra DB NoSQL database-as-a-service (DBaaS), which is built on Apache Cassandra.  

The new service can be used by developers to stream enhanced data from the Ethereum blockchain to build or scale Web3 experiences virtually on Astra DB, the company said.

Use cases include building applications to analyze any transaction within the blockchain history  for insights, DataStax added.

Enterprises adoption of blockchain has grown grow over the years and market research firm Gartner estimates that at least 25% of enterprises will interact with customers via Web3 by 2025.

The data within Astra Block that is used to create applications is decoded, enhanced and stored in human-readable format, accessible via standard Cassandra Query Language (CQL) database queries, the company said.

Astra Block can decode and store the data used to create applications in human-readable format, and the data is accessible via standard Cassandra Query Language (CQL) database queries, the company said.

In addition, applications made using Astra Block can take advantage of Astra DB’s change data capture (CDC) and streaming features, DataStax added.

In June last year, the company made its Astra Streaming service generally available in order to help enterprises deal with the challenge of becoming cloud-native and finding efficiencies around their existing infrastructure.

A version of Astra Block that offers a 20GB partial blockchain data set can be accessed through the free tier of Astra DB. The paid tier of Astra DB — based on pay-as-you-go usage and standard Astra DB pricing – includes the ability to clone the entire blockchain, updated as new blocks are added. Depending on user demand, DataStax will expand Astra Block to other blockchains.