Transpose: A suite of APIs

We often talk about how the Web3 revolution opened up new possibilities to everyone, but we hardly talk about the challenges that come with it. The Web3 ecosystem is still fresh and changing as you are reading this. The blockchain is not in its perfect state, and we are still working on making it more accessible and understandable to everyone.

When we say everyone, this includes blockchain developers as well. The majority of blockchain developers have joined the industry in the recent past. Learning Web3 and building products at the same time is an exhausting task. There are hundreds of tools, systems, architectures, and jargon to take care of while building apps. And often, it is likely for some developers to find it challenging to work with a complex part of the blockchain ecosystem.

In this article, we will explore one of such problems and a product that works to solve the same!

The Complexity of Low Level Blockchain Data

When you perform transactions on the blockchain, the information is cryptographically encrypted and stored on the block. Hence if you retrieve the same block, it looks gibberish. Converting this encrypted data into a usual human readable format is a real pain.

Pull a transaction from a blockchain node, RPC network, or blockchain explorer if you want to see this yourself. You would see a bunch of random alphanumeric characters. Something like this:

If you dig deep into the same transaction and search for its smart contract, you can split this hash into three pieces: buy, sell, and price.

It looks somewhat better. The above transaction looks like a sell transaction. But still, the information is minimal and doesn't tell much about the transaction itself. Questions like who performed the sale, what was sold, and what it was about remain unanswered. We must further process the data and use existing information and logs. And then, can get the detailed information about the transaction in a human readable format, something like this:

This is not a cup of tea for everyone! You need experience, access to the smart contract, and additional computation power to get decoded data.

Building Apps with Low Level Data

While building apps for the blockchain, we usually have to work with specific parts of the dataset, not the whole data. This requires mixing multiple APIs, resolving several data models, data aggregation, domain knowledge, and experience.

Suppose you have to convert large scale low level data into a human readable format. In that case, you must invest your money, resources, and infrastructure into it or keep your application simple with limited scope and services. Neither of these is feasible.

Introducing: Transpose API!

Transpose aims to solve the difficulty of converting low level blockchain data into human readable form. Transpose provides APIs to directly use such data in your Web3 applications without any hassle discussed in the previous section.

Transpose simplifies your work of building data heavy applications by providing a bunch of APIs to get data from a blockchain. With Transpose, you can fetch all types of data stored in the block, Token swaps, wallet balance, NFT images, logs, and symbols, to name a few.

The Transpose API Suite

Transpose has recently launched its Open Alpha with four APIs as of now. You can integrate any API that satisfies the needs and requirements of your project.

Block API

The Block API provides endpoints for directly accessing blockchain data. Block API allows queries with a related index, enabling you to fetch data from the blockchain flexibly.

The API supports four groups of endpoints, each focusing on a particular part of the low level data.

Account Endpoints **help you retrieve any account, including externally-owned accounts and smart contracts, along with essential account metadata.

Block Endpoints allow you to retrieve every block with smart fee calculations and flexible query parameters.

Transaction Endpoints deal with transactions that happen in the blockchain. These can retrieve every transaction created with influential query parameters that let you filter by block number, transaction hash, involved addresses, transfer value, target contract, target contract method, and more.

And finally, to fetch historical logs filtered by accounts, topics, contracts, and such categories, you can use Log Endpoints.

You can fetch the historical data of the block or a specific part of the block. This includes account balances, transactions, logs, and so on. Thanks to pagination, apps can consume a large quantity of such data at lightening fast speed. On top of all, Block API provides categorized transaction data with comprehensive gas fees.

NFT API

This is for all of you NFT enthusiasts! The NFT API provides endpoints for fetching any collection and NFT on the blockchain. This suite exposes five endpoints to the user. It supports ERC-721 and ERC-1155 NFTs, so you can work to fetch any NFT data you wish.

These five endpoints give detailed historical information about the NFT since its birth. The Collection endpoints send a set of the entire collection along with its metadata and images. NFT Endpoints do something similar, but only for NFTs. To have data about all owners of a particular NFT or a collection, you can use Owner Endpoints, which allow you to do the same and support the fungible balances for ERC-1555s.

Transfer endpoints help you with mints, sends, and burns any collection or an individual NFT.

The sale endpoint sends back NFT sales based on the account, collection, or date range you choose. It checks many decentralized exchanges and sends a single response back, saving your time manually querying different exchanges.

Token API

The Token API works with historical trades, prices and balances for fungible tokens. It includes endpoints for getting every token, token balance, transfer, and symbol currently in existence. It also supports token owners, DEX swaps, DEX liquidity, and native token transfers and balances.

The main feature that Token API provides is Cross DEX pricing. It instantly retrieves historical tick or bar price data for any token pair across all decentralized exchanges like Uniswap or Sushiswap. You can fetch the entire history of token balances and trades for any account across any platform.

The Token API supports the following groups of endpoints:

• Token Info Endpoints: Retrieve any token created using flexible queries, along with token metadata and symbols.
• Owner Endpoints: Retrieve all owners and owner balances for a token (ordered by balance).
• Transfer Endpoints: Retrieve all transfers, including mints, sends, and burns, for any token or individual account.
• Swap Endpoints: Retrieve all swaps for any token, account, or date range across all decentralized exchanges.
• Native Token Endpoints: Retrieve historical native token transfers and balances for any account or time range.

ENS API

The ENS API offers endpoints for tracking ENS transfers and sales, resolving ENS names and records, and looking up ENS names. This would be useful while monitoring ENS transfers and sales.

ENS records have massive data, including registration and expiry dates, grace periods and more. With the help of ENS API, you can search for primary ENS names by contact address and do the exact opposite. This search is flexible like any other search provided by any Transpose API.

The endpoint provides two groups of APIs: Record and transfer. The record endpoint group helps you retrieve ENS records that ever existed on the blockchain, whereas the Transfer endpoint retrieves historical and live ENS transfers and registrations.

Custom APIs

Transpose also provides custom APIs to meet your requirements if you require other types of data for your product. Custom APIs will provide you with the same web3 data you need.

With these custom APIs, Transpose provides functions, snapshots, and indexers. The API will support Webhooks very soon. Backend functions are supposed to run with parameterized aggregations. Snapshots enable lightning-fast queries against cached aggregations, whereas Indexers aid in the conversion of on-chain data into off-chain storage solutions.

Developer Tooling

With Transpose's recent changes, managing your account, controlling your team or plans, and monitoring API key usage and limits have never been easier. In addition, the Python SDK can integrate blockchain data into various programming environments with just a few lines of code.

Wrapping Up!

Transpose aims to simplify the process of interacting with low level blockchain data. The API suite is available on their website now, so you can test it out! However, if your requirements are not satisfied by the API suite, Transpose also provides custom solutions to meet your needs. Similarly, they provide 24/7 help and community support through Discord, so you don't have to wait while building your cool product! For more information, hop on to Transpose, or connect with them on Twitter, Discord, or LinkedIn!