A PLATFORM BUILT BY DEVELOPERS, FOR DEVELOPERS, OWNED BY DEVELOPERS
As Web3 developers, we’ve gone through a lot of the pains of building end-user applications that interface with public blockchain networks. There are tens of companies and protocols that allow you to outsource user-key management, trading, lending, and data storage, for free or very cheap, rendering it easier than ever to build an end-user financial or media application without the responsibility of generating your own liquidity, developing your own private-key infrastructure, or constructing your own contract with AWS. These elements of Web3 application development make Web2 application development look like an overly complex obstacle course, lacking the open APIs we now have at our fingertips.
One element, however, remained increasingly difficult for us: reading blockchains themselves. No current solution proved robust and scalable for the handling of the billions of daily reads required by Web3 applications. How do we know what the current slippage of a trade will be? How do we know that our transaction was executed by the network? How do we know that our data is securely stored? We didn’t have a foolproof answer to these questions.
Thus, we built our own solution: the APIS network. APIS is built by developers, for developers, As we will announce in our next article on the APIS network, written by developers. It only makes sense that the global read & write solution be maximally-decentralized (and consequently maximally robust), scalable (not allowing decentralization to stand in the way of user experience), and owned by those who drive value to the protocol, the builders of tomorrow’s internet applications.
A GRADUALLY DECENTRALIZED, BUT ALWAYS USER-OWNED QUERY LAYER
How do you currently request and return data from public ledgers? Infura or Alchemy? TheGraph? While these two options attempt to grant developers frictionless access to blockchains, they either require A) an in-depth knowledge of how blockchains work, hindering the en-masse onboarding of non-Web3 developers, or B) are centralized in the hands of a for-profit entity, recreating the platform risk that so many Web3 developers seek to avoid. The ideal solution is one that has both A) frictionless for developers to learn and B) community-owned attributes with developers achieving ownership of the network through ‘proof of usage’ mining. APIS will be both architecturally decentralized and logically centralized — the epitome of a decentralized network. However, creating architectural decentralization takes time. Thus, we are initially decentralizing the network via protocol ownership while we decentralize the network architecturally. Our goal with our token design is to achieve parity between architectural decentralization and ownership decentralization, with both having low Gini coefficients.
INITIAL FOCUS
APIS will provide a developer-friendly platform that acts as a turn-key solution to indexing and querying public blockchains, namely Ethereum and Filecoin. Open-sourced, developers will be able to frictionlessly construct API packages that serve any category of blockchain applications — from DeFi to Oracles to File Storage. The APIS platform will not only ensure that current dApps are fully and reliably decentralized, but it will also expand developer access to public blockchains that can enable new dApps. APIS will initially ensure that third parties can obtain data from Ethereum, Filecoin, and all other relevant blockchains with uptime guarantees.
COMMUNITY FOCUSED TOKENOMICS
To encourage maximum community ownership and corresponding decentralization, participants will receive API tokens proportionate to their usage, with a system designed to mitigate wash-trading and encouraging further decentralization of APIS Nodes and Gateways. A tokenomics article which includes further utility details, allocation percentages, distribution method, and important timelines will be released shortly.
👋 About THE APIS:
The APIS is an indexing protocol for reading and writing to open networks. Making APIs open and accessible to power a decentralized world.
