Buy & Sell on The World’s First Decentralized API Marketplace
Selling APIs and API calls on Deco.Network
Deco.Network is building tools to help developers monetize their code — and today, we’re proud to release an alpha of our system that enables developers to sell API calls on the Ethereum Blockchain with just a few clicks.
What is an API?
API stands for “Application Programmer Interface” and is generally a way for a developer to interface with a given piece of software. Although the term API is broad, in this context we mean it to be the way to interface with a piece of software running somewhere remote.
For example, you can use the Coinbase API to programmatically get the current ETH/USD exchange rate on Coinbase.
Selling APIs
Traditionally, selling APIs involves two stages.
The first stage is creating the code that does the actual work for the API. In the Coinbase exchange rate API example mentioned above, this would be the code that actually calculates the exchange rate.
The second stage is the actual selling part. This involves building a user account management system, provisioning API keys to users, tracking their usage of the API, billing the users, and protecting the system from fraud and abuse.
I bet you can guess which stage Deconet helps with: the second, “selling” stage.
What we’ve built
We’ve created a platform that lets anyone sell access to an API with just a few clicks. Our platform handles every aspect of the “selling” stage so developers can focus on their passion — developing!
To list your API on our platform, you simply need to set how much you want to charge per API call, and list a documentation URL so users can understand how to use your API.
How it works
We utilize an API gateway system to track usage and prevent fraud. That means we issue a Deconet API key to API clients, and they use that to interface with any API listed on Deconet.
The entire system is powered by smart contracts running on the Ethereum blockchain. API clients deposit Ether into our smart contract. We periodically report API call usage which is logged into the smart contract. We then periodically pay the seller through a smart contract function that goes through all the usage reports and figures out the total owed from each client to the seller. The client’s credits (eth in the smart contract) are deducted and the Ether is sent to the API seller.
The really neat thing about all this is how much of it goes through the smart contract, which is decentralized. So technically, you can interface with the smart contracts directly, and eschew our dApp and API gateway entirely.
That means we’ve created the world’s first decentralized API marketplace.
Check out our videos below to learn how to buy and sell API calls.
Click here to try it today on the mainnet!
Getting started:
How to sell API calls on Deconet
How to buy API calls on Deconet
