SaaS Blockchain API or Crypto Infrastructure Made Easy

BestRate
BestRate
Published in
4 min readMar 31, 2020

--

Introduction

While blockchain technologies are still fresh, businesses trying to adopt these technologies have a common stack of problems. In this article, we’ll try to depict these vulnerability points and explain our B2B SaaS Blockchain API product, which could be easily adopted by blockchain projects, crypto games or traditional businesses willing to start accepting crypto payments for their products and services.

How does business interact with blockchain?

Program interaction with the blockchain can be divided into three general functions:

  1. Transaction Publishing
  2. Transaction data retrieval (historical timeframe)
  3. Getting up-to-date data

Paragraphs 2 and 3, in fact, are not very different, but the requirements for the system are different. In case 2, you need to have all-all blocks from start to finish. In case 3 — only relevant blocks.

All these functions are usually combined in a certain programming interface, API. For Ethereum networks, this API is called web3.eth. However, not every blockchain provides such an interface.

Nodes

Moreover, to work with a certain blockchain, you need to find at least one of its nodes in the network. By itself, this node also “works with the blockchain”. And he also needs to find other nodes. Usually, a node maintains a connection with 20–50 of the same nodes. If the node you’re connected to stops responding, you need to be able to switch to another one rapidly, otherwise, your service might be at a big risk.

Public nodes

For programmatic interaction, it is necessary to find a node that implements a programming interface, API. The fact is that not all nodes are ready to provide such an API to a wide audience. There are several reasons: this creates an extra load on the node; this could be a potential vulnerability; it just might not be necessary for the node owner.

As a result, finding a node with an open API is not such a simple task. For popular blockchains, there are such open nodes as, for example, Infura for Ethereum. But not all blockchains have them. And their use has limitations and problems with reliability.

Deploying your own nodes

Another way is to deploy your own node. But in practice, this task converts into large time and financial costs. There are several reasons for this:

  1. Good specialists are needed to deploy and maintain the site software.
  2. The blockchains that have existed for several years or more have accumulated such a volume of data that downloading it will take weeks of time and a good Internet channel.
  3. For the operational processing of all these transactions, you need a productive server.
  4. And you need a fairly fast and capacious drive. For example, the size of the Ethereum has exceeded hundreds of gigabytes.

And now all this is multiplied by the number of blockchains if you need more than one blockchain to implement your project. This results in a big cost for both development, maintenance, and utilization.

Generalized API

The solution to such problems is a generalized blockchain access interface, a generalized API or GAPI BestRate. A generic interface allows you to publish transactions to different supported blockchains through a single access point and a common API. That is, you do not need to connect many libraries to work with different blockchains.

A generalized interface allows you to trace all stages of the transaction “life” up to the moment when the probability of a fork of the blockchain becomes negligible.

And also a generalized interface will allow you to subscribe to current events at given addresses or contracts.

How secure is it?

Data transmission is carried out strictly according to the encrypted HTTPS protocol. The data is signed with a secret key establishing their authenticity.

Which blockchains are supported?

In the first version, we support BTC, ETH, EOS, TRON, NEO, BNB, WAVES.

If you need access to another blockchain or token, please contact us at support@bestrate.org

How to start using it?

To start using the BestRate’s blockchain as a service generalized software interface, you must register on the site. Immediately after registration, a trial period will begin, allowing you to check the platform’s capabilities for free.

To work with GAPI, you need to implement the simplest web server with a web interface open for BestRate and one method. This method will be called by the BestRate system when events occur.

To receive information about events, you must either subscribe to “view” certain addresses or publish your transaction. With this action, BestRate expects to receive the identifier of a previously registered callback interface. It will be used to send information about events.

GAPI has methods for managing event subscriptions and managing callback endpoints.

Where can I see the API methods?

Please follow this link to learn more about Generalized blockchain API

Terms

Generalized API usage requires a “Crypto Gateway” plan(199$/month) with 30 days free trial.

If you have any questions, please contact us at support@bestrate.org

--

--