The advantage of being distributed and using IPFS is that you don't need to rely on Cedalio to be alive to access your data. You can spin up your own Cedalio ga

The advantage of being distributed and using IPFS is that you don't need to rely on Cedalio to be alive to access your data. You can spin up your own Cedalio gateway connect to the network where the smart-contract backing your data lives and recover the database. The advantage of using blockchain is that you can proove that the data being stored in the off-chain database hasn't been tampered with and by having the access control on-chain you have full controll on who can access the data. Also because the operation log is replicated on IPFS you can see who mutated the database. As for locally stored if you mean using a local database (or file) inside the app, e.g: SQLite, CoreData or IndexDB, that may be good enough for your local use case. But if third parties or other apps need to access data without having to rely on the application owner to be connected / available you need a database that can be accesed over the internet / network. If by local you mean a regular SQL database exposed over an web service, that may also be good enough for your use case. The benefit of using something like Cedalio, is that in cases where you need guarantees that the data hasn't been manipulated by users that shouldn't have then you have a trust-free setup to do so. We are talking with users where this is a requirement specially to avoid internal fraud (from the db admins for example). The last point of 'how do I get past "everything is on someone else's chain & machines that we don't control"?' this is the same trade-off that you currently have with any PaaS / SaaS tool. That being said, we plan to open source our gateway so you will be able to host your own infra and you will own the off-chain database. As for the data that's stored on chain, we only store the ACL and hashes of the committed operation in the operation log. The operation log currently is stored in plain text on IPFS but we are soon launching operation log encryption. We also plan to make the operation log storage configurable, if you don't care about data ownership / portability (meaning that you don't want to give an option to your users to migrate from your service without having to ask for it) then you could use AWS S3 or whatever storage that you see fit. Full disclosure I'm Cedalio's CTO