Named After a Jellyfish
Cyanea takes its name from Cyanea capillata, the lion’s mane jellyfish — one of the largest known organisms, with tentacles spanning over 30 meters. Like its namesake, Cyanea the platform is designed to extend its reach across a vast network while remaining a single, coherent organism.
What We’re Building
Cyanea is an open-source platform for bioinformatics — currently in public alpha. Think of it as what you’d get if HuggingFace, protocols.io, and Galaxy had an open-source baby built with modern tools.
The platform lets researchers share datasets, publish protocols, and run tools in the browser — with federation support so institutions can host their own instances while remaining part of a larger network.
Cyanea is a solo-founder project, actively developed and functional but still early. See the current status page for what’s live today.
How It’s Built
The platform runs on Elixir (Phoenix/LiveView) for the web layer and real-time collaboration, with a Rust crate ecosystem for high-performance bioinformatics computation. Browser-based tools are powered by WebAssembly, so they run at near-native speed without uploading data to any server.
- 15 Rust crates for sequence analysis, alignment, I/O, and more (3,700+ tests)
- Elixir/Phoenix for the platform layer and real-time collaboration
- WebAssembly for client-side bioinformatics tools (Notebooks, Spaces)
- Custom federation protocol for cross-instance sync with signed manifests and content addressing
Our Values
Open by default. Code, data, and protocols are shared openly. The platform itself is open source under a permissive license.
Federated, not centralized. Your data stays on your servers. You choose what to share and with whom. No vendor lock-in.
Community-driven. Built by and for the bioinformatics community. Contributions are welcome — from bug reports to new crates.
Performance matters. Rust and WebAssembly aren’t just buzzwords. They’re the right tools for processing gigabytes of genomic data efficiently.