Meet EthosConnect: Our APIs for Developers on Sui are Now Public
Today, we are launching our EthosConnect APIs to the public.
Thank you to our early developer design partners, including Sui Name Service, KeepSake, Kriya DEX, Clutchy, and others, for testing our API experience out and providing feedback ahead of this public launch. EthosConnect is currently live on the Sui developer network, and we hope you will use our open-sourced APIs to build on Sui.
Dig into EthosConnect and our APIs here: https://ethoswallet.xyz/dev
✨ Why We Built EthosConnect for Sui Developers
From day one, our mission at Ethos has always been to bring the benefits of the blockchain to more people. Early on, we recognized that the wallet experience is overwhelming for new crypto users.
For example, let’s say you’re new and learn about an NFT project and want to participate. You arrive at the project’s website, and are immediately confronted with a button that says “Connect Wallet”.
Already, this is an intimidating experience. You might not know what a wallet is, or if it’s safe to connect your wallet to the project site. If you don’t have a wallet, your first step is to leave the project site and go get and set up a new chain-compatible wallet, which is a steep learning curve. Once you have your wallet installed, you’ll need to understand how your seed phrase works and find a good way to safe-keep it — do you write it down and stuff it in a sock drawer? Take a screenshot?
The number of stressful, fragmented steps you’ve undertaken are significant — and you haven’t even been able to engage with the NFT project you found so interesting. With this current experience, many users churn before they even engage with a dApp or NFT asset.
Today, far more people who don’t have a crypto wallet than do. This will remain true if we don’t significantly improve this initial experience.
So we set out to improve the wallet and onboarding experience. We don’t want to completely hide the blockchain from new users, we just want to make it more accessible — and less intimidating. This might mean reducing the amount of web3 knowledge and jargon required to get started. Our goal is to help new-to-web3 users learn more about the blockchain and the options offered after they have started to find value in it.
Improving the status quo requires four critical puzzle pieces:
- 🔗A blockchain that supports great experiences at a reasonable cost
- 🚰A better onboarding experience for new users
- 🌊 More applications and experiences that people want to use
- 🏄♀️ A way to find and navigate those applications
1. 🔗 Sui: a chain that supports great experience at a reasonable cost
We believe the Sui blockchain meets criteria number one in a way no other chain can today — this is thanks to Sui Move, which we’ve written about before in our Why Build on Sui series (parts one, two, and three). We believe Sui has the potential to serve as the L1 foundation for a new wave of web3 applications and experiences that add value to more users.
So, our focus at Ethos is on providing better onboarding and dApp discovery through the wallet itself, building useful applications on Sui, and supporting other developers as they build.
2. EthosConnect: 🚰 A better onboarding experience for new users
Our EthosConnect APIs are the first part of how we will support developers building on Sui. We learned from products we loved using as builders on other chains, including RainbowKit on Ethereum. Our developer resources make it easy for a developer to plug into any wallet on the Sui blockchain. For most developers, this is a great place to start.
If you’re a developer, as you become more familiar with Sui Move, you might consider making your application or project more accessible to new users. When you’re ready for that, you can also use EthosConnect to turn on email sign login (with social login coming soon) with one line of code.
Nothing will change for the experienced web3 users who are using your site. They’ll continue to be able to use their wallet just as they were before. If a user does not yet have a wallet, though, then they will be presented with the option to either log in through email or install a wallet. We don’t want to push them down either path, we just want to make sure they have the options — and spend less time on getting started, and can instead dive right into your app or project.
3. Sui Move dApps: 🌊 More apps and experiences that people want to use
We hope that through EthosConnect, our Chrome extension and Wallet Explorer products, and our open-sourced dApp examples including the completely on-chain game Sui 8192 (and more to come!) we inspire and support other developers who are seeking to build creative, meaningful consumer experiences with Sui Move. We’re delighted by the creativity of experiences like the Capybara game from the core Mysten Labs team, and excited to see other Suinami riders and builders continue to push the limits of innovation forward in their dApps and projects.
4. Ethos Wallet Explorer: 🏄♀️ A way to find and navigate those applications
As new dApp users become more interested in the blockchain and what it has to offer, they can dig in further from our Ethos Wallet Explorer. As a dApp developer, you can list your application in the Wallet Explorer with deeper integration, in a way that might be akin to the concept of an xNFT on Solana or the Metamask Snaps that are coming soon. With Ethos, even new-to-web3 users can discover interesting applications and potentially engage with them directly from their trusted Wallet Explorer.
All of this is enabled with just a few lines of code. It takes minutes to set up and you’ll be able to offer your application to all wallets on Sui as well as any wallet-less user. We’ve included handy hooks for getting the connected wallet address and the contents of the wallet, as well as various widgets that you can drop into any React (other frameworks coming soon) application quickly and easily.
You can see the APIs in action with our Sui 8192 game or Wallet Explorer, which you can access through our Chrome extension wallet.
And you can get started integrating the APIs directly from our website.
