Introducing Kabuto; An API & Explorer for developers, by developers
We at LaunchBadge have a special love for Hedera Hashgraph. Today we officially launch Kabuto, a suite of tools for developers to use Hedera. Our first two members of that suite are the Kabuto API and the Kabuto Explorer.
Let’s talk about the API
The Kabuto API is powerful and simple. At LaunchBadge, we use Kabuto for testing and proofs of concept with our clients. It gives us a full round-trip view of our app’s interactions with Hedera.
During planning and design we focused on a few key principles. Kabuto must:
- be simple to use
- be fast
- be powerful
We started with a very simple resource-oriented API that is familiar to developers. We’ve optimized the mirror node data parsing and database indexing for the fastest retrieval and delivery of query results. We’ve implemented a very advanced query language so developers can be precise about what groups or aggregates of resources they are querying.
Let’s talk about the Explorer
The Kabuto Explorer is really for everyone. We are developers first, but we are Hedera users as well. The Kabuto Explorer lets us casually look up the data that is important to us: account balances, transaction details, fees, failures.
Our guiding principles for the Explorer were that it must:
- be intuitive
- show only those things that are meaningful
The search bar of Kabuto Explorer is smart…like really smart. You can type in a full account ID(0.0.x), the last segment of an account ID, a transaction ID, or a transaction hash and you will get the exact data you are looking for.
Building the Explorer helped us validate our design decisions on the API itself. We found out where to optimize the API and what advanced queries would realistically look like. The Explorer is the ultimate demo of the power of the Kabuto API.
Let’s talk about the business
LaunchBadge is a software development company with world-class software engineering talent. We are objectively one of the top Hedera Hashgraph developers. Kabuto is both a tool and a product for LaunchBadge. Both the Kabuto Explorer and the API are currently in beta, and for the time being they are free. We will endeavor to make as much of Kabuto as free as possible, but we do have electricity bills and payrolls to pay. At some point in the near future, as we refine and validate Kabuto, we plan to add premium features and data scopes. This means that we will always strive to have free tiers of usage that are meaningful for developers. We haven’t finalized what those business components look like yet, but we anticipate that there will be certain levels of storage, notifications, monitoring, API throughput, and other features as part of a freemium model (free-to-premium tiers).
In the meantime, enjoy Kabuto! We look forward to your feedback.
LaunchBadge LLC and Kabuto are not affiliated with Hedera Hashgraph. They are independent from Hedera Hashgraph and self-funded. The views of LaunchBadge LLC or any official agent of LaunchBadge do not reflect the views or positions of Hedera Hashgraph.
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