Blockfrost

Instant and scalable APIs for those looking for a trusted source of data points from the Cardano blockchain. Also offering numerous SDKs for developers.

Consumers can interact with the tools provided by Blockfrost through four monthly payment plans, each with its own ceiling limits on three factors:

Pull Requests
IPFS Storage Space
Quantity of unique project one can have

End users are limited to 10 requests per second, and can send bursts of up to 500 requests at a time; but these still “cool off” at 10 requests per second, taking 50 seconds to process them all. Larger request quantities can be accommodated but need to be discussed with the company directly.

Blockfrost offers numerous SDKs, including a Javascript SDK and an iOS SDK.

Blockfrosts APIs work on the Cardano mainnet, testnet, and with the IPFS. When a user signs up they receive a unique project_id token which must be used to authenticate the user’s request against Blockfrost’s server. This token can only be used for one network of the users choosing.

Blockfrost has numerous APIs in their database allowing users to pull multiple data points on each of the following elements of the Cardano blockchain: accounts, addresses, assets, blocks, epochs, ledger, metadata, network, pools, and transactions. They have APIs built to interact with the IPFS and also facilitate access to nut.link oracles.

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Javascript

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API

SDK

Oracle

Storage

IOS

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Glossary

SDK

SDK stands for Software Development Kit.

A SDK is a specific set or package of tool designed to jump start a developer's journey or development in a certain area. SDKs are often used to create applications with advanced functions and can also include:

Informational or educational content
Programing libraries
APIs

SDKs are used by developers of all levels to assist them in their goals and developers on Cardano can find multiple SDKs created and open sourced by members of the community.

Oracle

In the ancient world oracles were people through whom the Gods spoke directly to the inhabitants of earth. In the blockchain and crypto world oracles are a service that provides off-chain data to smart contracts running on a blockchain.

On-chain functions, i.e. smart contracts, cannot access real world data on their own. This is problematic when a smart contract is trying to provide the real-time price of financial assets to users, or when it needs to determine the outcome of a sporting event for a gambling protocol, or even when it has been asked to use something measurable in the real world, such as the temperature or quantity of snowfall, in its calculations. Oracles can feed any real world data onto the blockchain for use by smart contracts.

Data is collect it in a variety of ways: APIs, websites, sensors, etc, and can be manual input by humans. This data is collect by nodes and is then passed on to the oracle service that then supplies the smart contract with the data. Having one node supplying data means a central point of failure, and a high potential for manipulation of the data. As a result oracle services usually use a network of nodes to build a consensus of the correct data point and to prevent the data from being manipulated, thereby helping to ensure trust in the data they supply.

Metadata

Metadata is an element of a Cardano transaction that can be inputed by the user or automatically generated. It is stored on the blockchain with the transaction that it was sent with. This means that, just like the transactions themselves, metadata is immutable, i.e. unchangeable, and stored forever on the Cardano blockchain.

Anyone can add metadata into a transaction and that metadata is then stored on the blockchain. Many wallets allow you to add custom metadata to a transaction.

Metadata can only be made up of characters i.e. numbers, letters and punctuation, and cannot be a file type, i.e. you cannot unload files like PDFs or MP3s to the blockchain. The size of the metadata you can add to a transactions is limited to 16KB, and a character is, typically, 1 Byte, so that means you can add up to 1600 characters as metadata with any transaction.

Metadata can be used for many purposes the most common is to give some form of context to the transaction. Metadata has been used to store supply chain data, to send arbitrary message to be stored on the blockchain, and to store the hash of a document (allowing the blockchain to be used for proof-of-existence). People have used metadata, on the testnet, to immortalize the Cardano whitepaper, by writing it onto the blockchain as transactions across multiple transactions.

Many block explorers allow users to view and search transaction metadata. Remember, anything you add as metadata to a transaction will always be publicly available on the blockchain.

API

API stands for Application Programming Interface.

An API is an intermediary or go-between that allows computers or computer programs to talk to each other and pass information back and forth. APIs act as the messengers that take the request from the computer or computer program to the source that can provide the answer to that request, retrieves the answer, and then bringing it back to the computer or program that initiated the request.

In the blockchain space APIs are mainly used to query the blockchain. This is to say, that an API can be used to abstract specific data points from the blockchain so that a computer or program can use those data points to inform its user or its actions.

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