Generally, APIs are known for easing and speeding-up the innovation across industries as they enable businesses to not begin from scratch and focus on enhancing the service rather than developing the backend that powers it. Mostly, various FinTech companies are either make use of APIs or moving towards implementation.
When it comes to talking about blockchain, it works like wide digital spreadsheets that shared by everyone in a decentralised network. Mainly, it is used to do things like confirming Bitcoin payments. The invention of blockchain technology is considered as important as the development of the Internet.
Today, a lot of developers are opting for this technology and developing feature-rich applications. But not all those developers are aware of the blockchain API providers as blockchain APIs can help them in developing top and feature-rich applications. Therefore, it would be good for them to know about the top blockchain API providers so that they can the APIs while developing.
To make it easy for them, I have listed 2017’s top 8 blockchain API providers, allowing developers to build next-generation applications:
Bitcore is the most powerful modular node for bitcoin and blockchain-based applications, enabling apps to run directly on the peer-to-peer network. Developers, who are looking forward to developing wallet application, some of the extra indexes have been added into Bitcoin for querying address balances, transaction history and unspent outputs.
It is a complete open source that powered by the time-tested and battle-hardened Bitcore Library. Applications that are developed on Bitcore benefit from the extensive testing and review enormous bitcoin companies and community contributors.
Tierion is another blockchain API provider that creates a verifiable record of any data or business process on the bitcoin blockchain by delivering top tools and API to anchor data in the blockchain.
It turns the blockchain into a complete global platform for verifying any data, file or process. Developers can make use of Tierion’s API and range of tools to anchor a permanent, timestamp proof of your data in the blockchain.
Recently, the company has developed an open-source standard that called ChainPoint for recording data in the blockchain and making receipts. Every single receipt comes with all the information that required to verify the data without the need of replying on a trusted third party.
Coinbase’s API has made it a lot simple to develop new bitcoin applications and integrate bitcoin into existing applications. They have made it easy, allowing different capabilities from simply gathering read-only data to develop something, which is never been done before.
The API of Coinbase enables developers to generate bitcoin wallets and addresses, purchase/sell and send/receive bitcoin, securely store bitcoin, etc. The company is well-known for offering a range of client libraries and mobile SDKs.
Using this API, you can generate bitcoin, litecoin and ethereum wallets and addresses. It becomes easily possible to accept and request bitcoin payments as a merchant.
Chromaway is a leading company that offers CromaWallet API and ChromaNode. ChromaNode is a high-performance open-source bitcoin data API that allows SPV and supports notifications through the WebSocket protocol. It also indexes the bitcoin blockchain and delivers data to clients.
Particularly, the API sends notifications about transactions and confirms blocks. In addition to this, ChromaNode is developed with a fully scalable architecture, enabling a distributed configuration where various servers cooperate to serve the data.
Colored Coin APIs is the new open source Colored Coins Protocol Implementation developed by Colu. It allows users to issue new assets, transfer assets between addresses and query for asset metadata and colored addresses, which hold an asset.
It can also be funded by a specific utxo or by any spendable utxo of the issuer address. In any case, if the assets are not specifically sent to other addresses from the issuance, the whole value of the issuance is considered to be sent to the last output of the transaction.
BlockChain is also popular for providing Blockchain APIs that will help you to start developing bitcoin applications. Using the APIs of the company, developers can send and receive payment from a blockchain wallet account.
Developers can also developers wallets for users with the ability to load and redeem funds. Moreover, the APIs are known for delivering access to currency data from the popular bitcoin exchanges.
Factom Alpha API enables developing different applications that mainly store data in the blockchain without the speed, cost and size limitations of writing data to the bitcoin blockchain.
The main aim of the company is to allow every single developer an ability to use the blockchain to develop new generation applications that users are expecting. Strictly believe in keeping private data private, the company is working to secure the world’s wealth as privacy and possession of the property are basic human rights.
The Insight REST API delivers you with a complete convenience and simple way to read complete data from the bitcoin network and develop your own services with it.
The company is offering a complete REST and Websocket API for querying blocks, transactions and addresses and receive live updates. It is the only front-end component of the block explorer and is packaged together with all the important components in Bitcore.
Conclusion
So, these are the top 8 blockchain API providers of 2017 that offer APIs for developers to help them in developing feature-rich applications. However, various blockchain development companies have started using these APIs to develop next-generation applications.
What do you think about these mentioned API providers? Is there any API provider that should be on the list? Share your views with me through comments.
