Driven by cryptocurrencies and NFTs, Web3 is one of the most talked about technology industry waves in the last several years. But even with all the money it’s generated and the media coverage received, Web3 hasn’t yet gained the mainstream acceptance that Web2 has achieved. One of the main reasons for this gap is that blockchain-based technology continues to be complex, requiring developers to learn new languages and development environments as well as gain expertise in concepts like cryptography, hashing, oracles, zero-knowledge proofs, proof of work, proof of stake and more. And even once users understand that they then need to figure out how these pieces all fit together. The required time and money investment has slowed adoption by developers—until now.
Web3 is finally coming into its own, thanks in part to the abstraction provided by SDKs and APIs. This technology is making it increasingly possible for all developers, not just Web3 developers, to participate and innovate on this new wave of technology disruption.
If you look at many of the providers in Web3 like Infura (ConsenSys), NFT Port and OpenSea, for example, and their growth, there’s been a significant movement from these providers over the past couple of years from simply providing nodes for underlying blockchains to now offering higher-level APIs. This translates into developers and companies no longer having to set up their own nodes to provide SDKs and higher-level APIs that rely on data indexers and pre-audited smart contracts to simplify token minting and reading from blockchains.
With the evolution of APIs and SDKs, developers using these programs no longer have to learn the intricacies of creating contracts on different blockchains, multiple developer tools, syntax and languages nor must they possess a deep understanding of these different blockchains. Instead, developers can rely on APIs that abstract the underlying complexity, easing the burden for developers who need only pass parameters like chain for indexing, token or smart contract IDs and other general-purpose information. These APIs will evolve into providing more low-code/no-code offerings with larger graphical UI components that developers can simply drag-and-drop to extract value as well as create DApps that can also be retrofitted into their existing applications or app infrastructure.
This evolution will be similar to the way the cloud evolved; look at AWS’ and Azure’s infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) as a current example. Existing apps could be lifted and shifted onto the cloud. This led to platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings with APIs that were cloud-ready; with developers’ latency, security and scalability needs augmented by low-code or no-code offerings. This is also similar to Microsoft’s Power Platform which used drag-and-drop operations on many cloud components, allowing integration and extensibility of the Microsoft platform in a short amount of time. This spawned a new generation of ecosystem players as the bar to participate and innovate in the cloud lowered; now every type of developer, no matter what their area of expertise, can take advantage. This also meant that the new technology was accessible for all developers to solve business challenges more quickly while significantly decreasing time-to-market.
You can already see this parallel in the Web3 world. A lot of the key players building developer tools are starting to target the business and technical decision-makers. They are talking about how easy it would be for Web2 developers to leverage their high-level APIs and SDKs (something that Web2 developers understand extremely well) to use Web3 technology to solve new business challenges. And they can do so without setting up expensive innovation organizations and looking for scarce (and expensive) Web3 developers. The next step in this evolution would be to extend these APIs for NFTs, analytics, streaming, MEVs, estimating gas and more to have no-code, automatically generated components that finally allow more Web2 developers to transition to Web3 and, as a result, bring Web3 into the mainstream.
