[markhenderson]

OrbitDB works with a CRDT stored in IPFS. In order to calculate the state of the database, it does need to reduce the CRDT oplog which requires fetching all the entries. This was indeed very time consuming, particularly for remote requests, since we used a "nexts" list of addresses to load.

HOWEVER! Our latest release, 0.23.0, mitigated this by using a power-of-2 skiplist to load things in parallel, which gave us a nice 4-5x boost there.

[aboodman]

Does this mean that in order to initialize the database, the entire version history must be synced and reduced, to get the current values?

(Is there a design doc for OrbitDB anywhere?)