IOTA: Tangle-as-a-Service with delion:api

After several months of study, design and testing, we are proud and excited to finally make delion:api public (Website: https://delion.io).

The delion API enables developers, startups and established companies to easily kick-start and prototype new business models based on the Next-Generation Distributed Ledger called “Tangle” (More information iota.org).

In 2011, we firstly recognized the blockchain technology as a decentralized distributed and public ledger. Although its primary use is a distributed ledger for cryptocurrencies, such as bitcoin, meanwhile there are several more use cases, such as smart contracts. We liked the concept of decentralization and started to experiment with the blockchain, which was not as easy as expected. Although we’ve had several years of professional software development experience, working on a blockchain application was somehow different.

Finally, we managed to send and receive transactions on the blockchain. But the next drawbacks started, when the blockchain started to be heavily used and transaction fees as well as processing times begun to raise, which rendered some of our use cases useless. Suddenly, we noticed a post on bitcointalk, talking about the IOTA Tangle, which promised fast, feeless and secure transactions. This caught our attention and we started to investigate how it works. The tangle is different from blockchain distributed ledgers, as they do not use blocks on a chain, but a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG). This concept seemed to us to be superior to the existing blockchain ledger. Furthermore, each transaction can carry up to x kilobytes of data, making it a practically feeless medium of exchange of data and information.

This advantages over the blockchain opens a wide range of use cases. But again, we needed to study documentations talk to the IOTA developers and asking questions on their developers channel on slack or now Discord. It was almost the same experience as working with the blockchain. After a lot of hassle work, trial & error and several weeks we also managed to make transactions on the tangle, it worked! But we still were not happy with the heavy road to this success and thought about to make working with the Tangle a breeze, so that other developers and startup can start faster and concentrate rather on business models than on trits and trytes, Proof-of-Work and Weight-Magnitude.

The idea of an easy to use API to interact with the Tangle was born. Its name is delion:api

Delion’s API is designed to facilitate the interaction with the tangle and significantly reduce both time-to-market and financial investment, so that developers can start right away to send and receive transactions over the tangle without even having knowledge of how the tangle works or meeting special hardware requirements.

As a startup or company, you want to focus and allocate your scarce resources rather on your business model than on a technical deep dive into distributed ledger technologies and their specifications. Furthermore, the IRI (Reference Implementation) Libraries of the Tangle are regularly updated, which requires a continuous development and new versions. This is where delion:api comes in.

There is no need any more to consider hardware requirements for the Proof-of-Work on small devices. Furthermore, with the use of delion you can open up multiple parallel queues for asynchonrous sending transactions to the tangle. This allows you to circumvent the current limitations of awaiting the finishing of one single PoW before the next transactions can be submitted. All you need to do is to signup and read through our comprehensible API Documentation.

We at delion offer you an easy to use and up-to-date restful API to support you on starting your next project based on the Tangle. The API settings can be managed via a simple to use web frontent, called delion management console.

Traction

We are currently running an alpha stage of delion:api and looking for interested developers and startups to help us improve this project. Our aim is to allocate our resources on features, which really help you to simplify your application development process.

Be sure to subscribe to our news to be on the edge of new information as we develop this API. For applications to our alpha please visit our website, follow us on Twitter or simply send us an email to: info@delion.io

We would love to hear your feedback and look forward to build great IOTA use cases together.

Disclaimer: delion:api is not affiliated or part of the IOTA Foundation. We are focused on establishing a useful service for the IOTA community to increase IOTA’s adoption.

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