Urkel Explained

A Quick Overview of What We’re Building

Published in

Urkel

3 min readDec 13, 2018

Our objective at Urkel is simple: We want to help bootstrap the greater crypto ecosystem and to help aid in improving its chances for continued global adoption. In order to do that, there are some key services and infrastructure needs that must be satisfied to ensure that the HNS community matures and prospers accordingly to enable us to provide those improvements.

We see the ecosystem reaching global adoption at a much faster pace if it knows what to focus on, and can remain focused on removing the complexity and barriers to entry still present in UX across the industry.

The Problems

While working on other crypto projects, our team realized that building MVPs on decentralized platforms is NOT easy. First, you have to analyze the space of platforms and weigh the pros and cons of each. Next, you have to essentially lock yourself into that platform by learning the platform specific language and interactions that allow you to utilize it. You have to have the technical competency to run your own infrastructure, and then hope that the platform has enough traction so that people actually use your application.

At Urkel, we don’t think this is a recipe for global adoption. The crypto space needs to be able to support fast iteration, and low barriers to entry.

Our Solution

Urkel’s solution to this problem is a set of APIs that wrap all functionalities of various decentralized platforms. We want non-Dapp developers to be able to plug Ethereum or FOAM into their application with as little as one line of code. If their FOAM integration isn’t popular, then they can remove it with no wasted time and no sunk costs. Our goal is to open crypto integrations to every single developer in the world as simply as integrating email is today.

We are the interface that allows current businesses to discover quickly whether decentralized technologies are right for them, without having to invest massive sums of capital.

We want to help bridge Handshake into real applications, quickly and securely

Essentially, we wrap the functionality of each chain in 3 layers of APIs that enables us to provide robust support for developers building applications on Handshake, who want to build and iterate quickly.

Layer 1 — Chain Analytics

The Chain Analytics Layer allows users to read data from the blockchain, making it easier for developers to confirm transactions, check address balances, and analyze coin movements on the chain.

Layer 2 — Interaction

The Interaction Layer allows users to implement the unique functions specific to each blockchain. In the case of Handshake, this will allow users to bid and renew domains as well as send and receive HNS.

Layer 3 — Custody

The Custody Layer allows users to securely store cryptocurrency and crypto assets without having to worry about securing their private keys. Developers can focus on building applications worry free of handling large transactions and potential threats.

We’re going to keep building, so expect more announcements and content from us soon as we continually ramp up to help make the launch of Handshake a success. We look forward to working with all of you and helping you get your first Handshake project off the ground!