Assets native to public blockchains will prove to be the de facto units of exchange for all goods and services, both digital and physical. Mainstream consumers will invest, save and pay using public blockchains; decentralized finance will take over centralized finance. Consumers will also leverage public blockchains for personal data management (i.e. file storage), IoT data transmission, and others that are still in their nascency.
It is imperative that the next generation of blockchain tools cater to a global developer base, such that any developer can seamlessly leverage the building blocks of the new web. The most popular Dapps capture billions of dollars in smart contracts, which require accurate and timely transactions to maintain liquidity pools and engage in automated yield-generation strategies.
It is more important now than ever that there exists a decentralized and reliable toolset available not just to a few elite skilled developers but users at all levels. In 2020, over $600M was spent at the blockchain query layer alone and this activity will continue to grow as public ledgers capture more value from the traditional finance world.
Current solutions such as TheGraph, Infura, Alchemy and others are limited in their scope as read-only tool suites geared towards a specific blockchain and prohibitively complicated for most entrepreneurs and casual users to implement. The existing class of Application Programming Interface (API) kits are inadequate for the next generation of blockchain projects which span multiple blockchains and require a framework providing read AND write functionality among different ledgers.
Our platform is a powerful turnkey solution providing read/write access in an easy-to-use command line platform that facilitates communication and signed transactions across Ethereum, Bitcoin, Solana, Polkdot and Binance Smart Chain,etc. In the future, it will support Filecoin, Helium, Noodle, and other use cases we cannot yet think of. By lowering the adoption barrier for global developers and focusing on distributing network responsibilities, as APIS gains more users, we hope to enable more developers to build applications on blockchain. In addition to this, APIS will focus on providing higher level APIs for projects to abstract complicated code away and perform complex on-chain write functions.
How do you currently request and return data from public ledgers?
Data structures which comprise the internet as we know it — the Web 2.0 — are vast and require thoroughly complex software architecture and transmission protocols in order to query and create new layers of information. The easily accessible infrastructure we see today is the culmination of decades of engineering solutions designed to address diverse user needs. For example, Twilio enables software developers to programmatically make and receive phone calls, send and receive text messages, and perform other communication management functions from thousands of accounts using web service APIs to simplify the data indexing and query process. Just like Twilio has streamlined the field of digital voice and placed many management tools under one roof for Web 2.0 telephony needs, The APIS will aim to do the same for the multiple blockchain information layers by developing and releasing a comprehensive Web 3.0 distribution suite to includes both read and write operations for the most complex functions.
Current Web 2.0 APIs require a running local service, which is then able to connect to the web and ask a series of questions that fit a standard format. While calls are typically programmatic and trustworthy in nature, there are innumerable shortcomings in today’s current landscape, namely that these Web 2.0 APIs query a centralized data source that is stored on an AWS server or cloud computing network.
Web 3.0 queries have their own problems. The next generation of layer 1 solutions, such as the Solana blockchain, update and verify all transactions in less than half a second (<0.1 seconds), while most Ethereum blocks are more than 15 seconds. In practice, some high-end market making firms and larger organizations are given preferential access vis-a-vis existing API frameworks and can frontrun other traders through nepotism alone. We seek to provide developers with real-time access to this extremely complicated public data set, such that they can provide the best user experiences on the web, whether it is a blockchain-centric service or simply legacy platform looking to begin supporting cryptocurrency price feeds.
Open-source and open-ended: The APIS as a solution
The APIS toolkit will initially ensure that third parties can obtain data from Bitcoin, Ethereum, and all other relevant blockchains with uptime guarantees and economic incentives for all participants. Users will be able to easily construct API packages that serve any category of blockchain applications — from DeFi to price oracles to file storage. The APIS platform will not only ensure that current Dapps are fully and reliably decentralized by providing alternatives to current data pipelines, but it will also expand developer access to public blockchains that can enable new Dapps.
While current publicly available options for handling massive blockchain data structures attempt to grant developers frictionless access to blockchains, they require either one of the following:
A) an in-depth knowledge of how blockchains work in addition to a local hosted node, hindering the en-masse onboarding of non-Web3 developers, or
B) centralized data structures 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. The APIS will launch with an open-source developer-friendly user interface for indexing and querying public ledgers.
Sophisticated DApps can also be built with relative ease using APIS-Unified and APIS-Core. APIS-Core is on the roadmap to be decentralized and will be more resilient than the centralized providers.
Our Mission
Our goal with our token design is to achieve parity between architectural decentralization and ownership decentralization. We are initially decentralizing the network via protocol ownership while we decentralize the network architecturally. TheAPIS has a progressive decentralization plan as we will run all our nodes at first. As features are completed, tested and deployed we will start packaging and allow 3rd parties to run nodes, like other blockchain projects, and making the APIS truly decentralized and community-owned.
We believe that public blockchains will lead to the ownership economy, as communities will trust companies and protocols significantly more if they have ownership. The community will receive 79% of token distribution in our initial generation event, with subsections allocated to a usage mining algorithm, subjective application partnership, and strategic investors.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.
About THE APIS
APIS offers a developer-friendly platform that serves as a turn-key solution for indexing and read/write operations for public blockchains, namely Ethereum and Bitcoin. Open-sourced, developers will create API packages that serve every category of blockchain applications — from DeFi to Oracle to File Storage.
👋 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.
