Ankr Launches Specially Designed Advanced APIs

Published in

Ankr

5 min readMay 20, 2022

Introduction

Ankr’s Advanced APIs are designed to save developers time and money as they integrate Web3 capabilities into their projects. By indexing blockchain data and making it readily available to developers with efficient methods to request it, Web3 development has never been easier. Looking to integrate NFTs into your game? Search for an event across a huge block range? Get reliable token price feeds for your dApp? Ankr’s Advanced APIs can help with all that and so much more.

Why Web3 Developers Need APIs

The data that developers and their projects need — whether it’s checking an account balance on a marketplace, performing a token swap on a DEX, or verifying an NFT for use in a decentralized game — must be requested from blockchain nodes. Most Web3 developers don’t want to bother with node infrastructure, instead choosing to communicate with remote blockchain nodes via RPCs to get the data they need.

Oftentimes, this data can be complex and time-consuming to retrieve. Blockchain networks have built-in sets of RPC calls that are designed to facilitate data retrieval. But, as the Web3 industry has grown and blockchains have come to support all-new use cases, these RPC calls are often not getting the job done as well as they could.

Take, for example, the RPC call getBalance on the Ethereum blockchain. This call returns the account balance of an Ethereum wallet denominated in ether (ETH). But, it can’t recognize ERC-20 or ERC-721 tokens (those came later in Ethereum’s history). To find a token balance, you’ll have to get creative with RPC calls — layering and customizing them to find the data you need. Each call takes time, costs money, and adds an additional layer of complexity.

Application Programming Interfaces (or APIs) stand to make this process much faster, cheaper, and more efficient.

APIs: Save Time, Money, and Effort

Ankr’s Advanced API service is a collection of RPC methods that were created to simplify querying blockchain data of all types.

API services like Ankr’s Advanced APIs take blockchain data and optimize, index, cache, and store it to make it more readily accessible. And, to make things even better, Ankr’s Advanced APIs support all major blockchains so you can search once and get data from six different EVM-compatible blockchains.

With Ankr’s Advanced API service, the blockchain data you need is easier, quicker, and cheaper to retrieve. So, for example, if you’re looking to see the ERC-20 token balances an Ethereum address contains, Ankr’s Advanced APIs let you do that in one simple call: ankr_getAccountBalance.

Ankr’s Advanced APIs make your Web3 development experience more efficient by helping you:

Make fewer requests
Spend less on requests
Query multiple chains at once

Ankr Advanced APIs

To start, Ankr is debuting three powerful and purpose-built APIs: NFT API, Query API, and Token API. In the following sections, we’ll explore each one of these APIs and how they work.

Also of note, these APIs already work across six EVM-compatible blockchains, with more on the way:

Ethereum
Arbitrum
Polygon
Binance Smart Chain
Fantom
Avalanche

Multichain developers who are looking to deploy their projects across multiple blockchain ecosystems will greatly appreciate the added convenience of Ankr’s multichain RPC.

NFT API

As NFTs become more fundamentally integrated with Web3 than ever before, developers need new tools to work with them. Ankr’s NFT API enables developers to easily view, verify, and display NFTs — including their ownership, transaction history, and other metadata — across the six different blockchains supported by the API.

NFT API makes it easier than ever to find the details about which collection an NFT belongs to, when it was minted, its past transaction history, who currently owns the token, and so much more — across multiple blockchains at once.

Web3 projects that integrate NFTs (including virtual worlds, decentralized games, galleries, marketplaces, and more) need to be able to pull this information across a breadth of collections across chains, which is complex. Ankr’s NFT API makes it simple.

Query API

Query API is designed to enable developers to query huge sections of blockchains quickly and easily in one call, without needing to create custom fixes to call blockchains from scratch. By indexing blockchain data from all six of the currently supported chains, searching through large amounts of data is easier and faster than ever before.

For example, if you wanted to search for an event like “an NFT from ‘X’ collection was minted,” you could do so across a range of blocks with extreme efficiency. What might normally take hours of searching can be done nearly instantaneously thanks to Ankr’s key-value pairing schema.

Token API

Ankr’s Token API helps deliver information about tokens on any of the EVM-compatible blockchains currently supported. The Token API allows developers to query things like account balances, how many currencies exist on a given blockchain, how many token holders a given currency has, and a token’s current fair market value.

Notably, our Token API only uses on-chain data, leaving third parties behind. Ankr constantly scans for on-chain transactions coming from DEXs — flagging transactions and aggregating data into accurate token price feeds in real time. These tools are crucial for Web3 projects like marketplaces and exchanges looking for efficient ways to query accurate, on-chain data for tokenized assets.

Start Building Today

If you’re ready to power your dApps with the most efficient developer tools available, download the Advanced API SDK today to get started. This compact SDK is made for interacting with Ankr’s Advanced APIs — serving as a javascript library that wraps all these API endpoints into easy-to-use JS code. You can also use this endpoint directly: https://rpc.ankr.com/multichain. Ankr’s Advanced APIs are currently available for use as a free service, but will eventually become part of Ankr Protocol’s Premium Plan. Try them out today!

Stay Up-to-Date With All Ankr News!