Show HN: REST-Like API for Ethereum Smart Contracts | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: REST-Like API for Ethereum Smart Contracts

etherest.io

97 pointsjosephros17 comments

This is great and potentially solves a challenge i'm having right now working with geth. However, I'm not comfortable sending private keys to your API end point. Do you guys have a solution to solve this concern? I'm sure others would probably feel the same...

create a separate wallet on myEtherWallet and fund it with a little bit of eth to run the calls that you're making. you'd have to be stupid to send the private key of a wallet with a non-trivial amount of eth to an endpoint of a closed source, un-attributable API. which again limits the usefulness, imo.

Thanks! The private key concern is sensible. Our plan is to open source the code and make the hosted version auditable in real time to prove the code being run is 'honest'. Bit of work to do on this, still. I'll post an update when we get there.

Open source sounds great! Please post back here when its available as I really like your service.

There are many of these coming out. Mobius (https://mobius.network/) is one that provides very easy API to create smart contracts and apps, which you can choose to post on for their live DApp Store (https://mobius.network/store). It's based on Stellar but other ERC20 tokens like Credo/Bitbounce are using it now. Here's a link to the docs: https://mobius.network/docs/

you're being a little disingenuous about self promoting your ICO aren't you?

Reminds me of BlockCypher- they pitch themselves as the "AWS" of blockchains [0], and released an Ethereum API not too long ago [1].

This looks interesting, but we're talking about money here. If you're looking for something similar to this consider a solid infrastructure provider first. We built an app on Coinbase's shoddy early API, only to have it go down in the middle of a YC interview -_-

[0] https://www.blockcypher.com [1] https://www.blockcypher.com/dev/ethereum/#contract-api

Yeah BlockCypher have made some useful tools. Especially for Bitcoin. We're going to focus just on Ethereum because there's a lot of developer tools/infrastructure missing right now. Think infrastructure as a service, webhooks, data transport etc.

In the case of ETHEREST - it's just about being able to grab a contract address and call any method on it quickly and easily. Having to hook into a a node & provide an ABI gets frustrating really quickly, especially when you're testing.

On stability - it's definitely an MVP right now. Our plan is to open source the innards soon to a) make submitting transactions trustless and b) share some of the innovations we've made to make this scale well.

It certainly gets one thing right : what a fantastic name! Props

That is very cool

I need an endpoint that gets me all address holders of a contract, its fine if its a little slow

etherscan used to have one but they deprecated probably for the performance issue

Is it a REST API in a Server that accesses Ethereum or is it running on Ethereum?

It's a REST API in a server that accesses Ethereum. It's not a smart contract running directly on Ethereum. Rather it accesses smart contracts which themselves are 'on' Ethereum.

Is it open source?

Not yet. As other commenters have pointed out there's a trust issue some might have for submitting transactions via it so we plan on open sourcing soon to deal with that.

soon we will see graphql endpoints

I am already working on one. Its super early and only has a subset of features so far. shameless plug https://github.com/sogoiii/ethereum-to-graphql

I'm super happy there is more and more damn tooling.

Having it be able to be self hosted would be a very distinct advantage to the current Show HN. Keep up the good work!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com