Introducing Introducing Fate
December 9th 2025 by Christoph Nakazawa
I'm excited to announce the initial alpha release of fate, a modern data client for React & tRPC. fate combines view composition, normalized caching, data masking, Async React features, and tRPC's type safety.
A modern data client for React & tRPC
fate is designed to make data fetching and state management in React applications more composable, declarative, and predictable. The framework has a minimal API, no DSL, and no magic—it's just JavaScript.
GraphQL and Relay introduced several novel ideas: fragments co‑located with components, a normalized cache keyed by global identifiers, and a compiler that hoists fragments into a single network request. These innovations made it possible to build large applications where data requirements are modular and self‑contained.
Nakazawa Tech builds apps and games primarily with GraphQL and Relay. We advocate for these technologies in talks and provide templates (server, client) to help developers get started quickly.
However, GraphQL comes with its own type system and query language. If you are already using tRPC or another type‑safe RPC framework, it's a significant investment to adopt and implement GraphQL on the backend. This investment often prevents teams from adopting Relay on the frontend.
Many React data frameworks lack Relay's ergonomics, especially fragment composition, co-located data requirements, predictable caching, and deep integration with modern React features. Optimistic updates usually require manually managing keys and imperative data updates, which is error-prone and tedious.
fate takes the great ideas from Relay and puts them on top of tRPC. You get the best of both worlds: type safety between the client and server, and GraphQL-like ergonomics for data fetching. Using fate usually looks like this:
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