Get Connected to the POA and xDai networks in under a minute

We’re thrilled to announce we’ve partnered with the POA Network team. We’ll be providing developers with reliable access to the POA Core, xDai Chain, and POA Sokol networks.

At Nodesmith, our specialty is providing the most reliable and scalable API access to decentralized networks, freeing developers up to focus on the unique and interesting features of their applications. The APIs we provide are the same interfaces you’d use when interacting with a local node, meaning switching between a local node and Nodesmith is as simple as a config update.

Check out the partnership announcement from the POA team for the details, and read on for a brief walkthrough on using Nodesmith to connect to the POA networks.

The following walkthrough will get you quickly connected to the xDai network. The same steps will apply for connecting to POA Core or Sokol. After finishing each step in this walkthrough, you’ll be able to send a request to the xDai network and read live data about the state of the network.

Step 1: Visit https://console.nodesmith.io. Sign up with a username and password or your GitHub account.

Step 2: After signing up, you’ll be brought to the main console page of Nodesmith, where a project will be automatically created for you. Select the “POA” option on the left navigation pane.

Step 3: You’ll now find yourself on the dedicated POA section of your project. You’ll use the API key listed on this page to issue requests to the xDai network. Copy or take note of your API key.

Step 4: Use the interactive bash interpreter below and make sure to update the section that reads YOUR_API_KEY_HERE to use your own API Key from the previous step. This command will request and print out the latest block from the network using the eth_getBlockByNumber JSON RPC API. You can also use any existing web3 client library with Nodesmith using the same URL.

(NOTE: if the results don’t show up correctly, click the ‘Open in repl.it’ button below and try it in a separate tab).

That’s it! But you can do a lot more than reading data from the network. Check out the full documentation https://nodesmith.io/docs for details.

Here are some other things you can do with the Nodesmith x POA integration:

• Since Nodesmith uses the same compliant JSON RPC APIs that the underlying network node uses, you can use Nodesmith with any SDK you’re familiar with.
• You can use WSS endpoints instead of HTTP.
• You can set up filters and subscriptions and respond to changes in the network.
• You can sleep easy knowing your blockchain infrastructure will be available 24/7 and keep up with any traffic surges your application experiences.

Let us know what you think! We’d love to hear from you. And keep up with the latest Nodesmith news by following us here or on Twitter.