Welcome, dapp developer! Let’s travel in time for a bit. If you started developing the blockchain event processor for your dapp 2 months ago, you’d be just getting to a decent product by now, (you’d still probably be missing some of the events) — blockchain is not for everybody, querying data from it is a pain in the neck!
As Jesus Rodriguez wrote in his Hackernoon article:
“Data access has played a prominent role in any technology trend in the history of software. Data access technologies such as databases, search engines or query APIs are so ubiquitous that we barely think about them when architecting software solutions. As Web 3.0, decentralized applications powered by blockchain technologies evolve, infrastructure blocks such as data access will become more relevant. However, solving data access in the blockchain have proven to be a very challenging endeavor that forces developers to spend significant amounts of time writing infrastructure code.”
But if you’re reading this, chances are you already know all this, and you’re looking for an alternative to the only solution (until now): TheGraph. So, let’s get to it!
Because querying the blockchain is such a nightmare, developers have come up with 3 different solutions:
- Spend 2 months writing code to properly query the blockchain, consider you might need to not only track present blocks but also past ones. Host your own node, or use Infura, scale your own infrastructure, but most importantly: maintain your event processor while developing all those features your users want you to release. ROI: Negative
- Use TheGraph, a solution that will let you query the blockchain, facilitating your work by letting you use “subgraphs” developed by other companies. You’ll still need to write code (to define your subgraph, and mappings), deploy your infrastructure, and again, maintenance is on your own. Yes, you still have to deal with keeping your event processor sharp and smooth while working on whatever you dapp does with all those events you queried. ROI: Neutral to negative
- Use Hookpad, a plug & play, fully-managed blockchain event processing solution for dapp developers. Yep! Just like you heard, you just input the ABI to your contract and define the events you need, and we start sending all your events, parsed and clean, to your dapp’s backend! We count with both: Webhooks and API. ROI: Positive
Feel free to sign up for Hookpad’s beta, and read more about why we created this product.
If you have any questions or doubts, our team will be happy to answer them on this Telegram group. To stay up to date, follow us on Twitter.
