There are many ways you can get started with Ethereum. One way is to use the application programming interface(APIs )available online. There are many platforms that offer great APIs for developers to take advantage of their platform’s services.
One such platform is Etherscan. It is a Block Explorer, API, Search and Analytics Platform for Ethereum.
Etherscan also defines itself as a decentralized smart contracts platform. They are popular for their easy-to-use block explorer, but if you are a developer, then their APIs is what you should be interested in.
That’s why we are going to go through the Etherscan Ethereum Developers APIs tutorial. In this tutorial, we will go through its useful APIs. This will help you understand their APIs and use them in your Ethereum dApp.
H3xadecimal, in this project, “How to build your own Ethereum Network,” also advocates the use of APIs whenever possible. It improves your dApp functionality without re-inventing the wheel.
Before we get started with the small guide, let’s list the benefits of utilizing Etherscan Ethereum Developers APIs.
By using the APIs, you can easily access Ethereum blockchain data including balance, internal or external transactions, events and so on.
The APIs let you build dApps on Ethereum. This is extremely useful for a developer. As a developer, you can use the APIs to include the basic functionalities in your app.
You can verify contracts and help automate parts of your dApp.
The APIs is part of Etherscan’s community-driven effort. It doesn’t come with any warranty and that’s why as a developer, you should only use what you need.
Before you can start using the API, you need to create your own Free API-Key Token.
To do so, you need to go the register page and create a new account: https://etherscan.io/register
You also need to confirm your account before you can use it.
Once you login into the account, you can find a tab on the left which reads as “API-KEYs.”
Click on it, and you can see that you can create a maximum of three Api-Key Token. Next, click on the “Create a new API-KEY token” option.
After you click on it, a popup window will open up asking you for AppName.
You are now ready to use your API-Key Token.
To get the Ether Balance you need to use the following API. You can click on the link below to see the reply from the network.
Single Address
The above API offers the following parameters for use.
Module = account
Action = balance
Address = the address you want to infer information from
Tag = latest, so that you get the latest balance
Key = Your APIKeyToken that you generated just a while ago.
Multiple Address
In similar fashion, you can utilize also utilize the account API to get Ether balance. The API at the time of writing, it supports 20 accounts in one single query.
Each address, needs to be separated by a single comma.
If you need to know more about the Address transactions, then you also use the following API to get Normal transaction list.
Similarly, you can also get access to internal transactional list from a single Ether address.
In addition, you can also utilize optional parameters which is the startblock and the endblock.
It returns up to 10000 transactions only.
You can check more about the Accounts API here: https://etherscan.io/apis#accounts
If you work with contracts, then you can find the contracts API to be useful. Ethereum supports smart contracts. However, a smart contract contains different functions. As a dApp developer, you need to be sure which function to call.
Contract ABI ensure that you can specify a function and invoke it. The use of contract ABI also means that data return is guaranteed. ABI stands for application binary interface.
In technical terms, it acts as an interface between two program modules. Out of these two modules, one is at a machine code level. Through this interface, the data encoding/decoding is done.
The simple API for getting Contract ABI.
To learn more about the Contracts API, check here: https://etherscan.io/apis#contracts
Transactions API can be used for following purposes.
For contract execution status, you need can use the following API
It can return 0 or 1 value of isError variable. The 0 stands for pass and 1 for error.
If you are looking to check transaction receipt, then you need to use the API as below.
It returns 1 for pass and 0 for a loss.
The Etherescan Ethereum Developers API only offers on operation using their blocks API. It is as below.
It is used to know Uncle Rewards and Block by BlockNo
Events API is an important part of the whole API package. It also acts as the native eth_getLogs.
You can read more about the Events API here: https://etherscan.io/apis#logs
There are other types of APIs offered by the Etherscan Ethereum APIs. We recommend checking their official APIs list to know more about them.
Conclusion
This leads us to the end of the Etherscan Ethereum Developers APIs. So, what do you think about it? Comment below and let us know.
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Good read, thank you.