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.
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/
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 -_-
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'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.
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.
