APIFee

Inspiration

Simplify the experience of API providers that want to monetize their APIs while removing the need of trust between API Provides and API Consumers.

What it does

Enables API providers to charge for access to their services, in ETH of course. API providers don't need to change their implementations, they just need to deploy an APIFee gateway and register it on the platform. APIFee takes care of the rest.

How we built it

We built:

• A smart contract that stores information of consumers subscriptions to providers APIs.
• A management service, APIFee, where providers can register their APIs and consumers discover and subscribe to them.
• A gateway that can be placed in front of the provider's API for the provider not to have to add custom logic to his API.
• An SDK that can be easily added into consumer applications.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges was to define the contract. The idea of designing a solution that would allow the consumer and the provide not to have to trust on each other was not easy.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to reduce to bare minimum the amount of work required by the provider to set monetize his API and of the consumer to set up his application.

And It works :)

What we learned

Greatest complexity resides not in developing the contract, but in defining it.

What's next for APIFee

• Extend the gateway capabilities to be able to support different costs for different endpoints.
• Deploy gateways on behalf of API Providers
• Set up a small fee from consumer's revenue
• Share state between multiple gateways for API Providers that need to scale
• Build SDKs for other languages.

Built With

• apis
• ethereum
• node.js
• openzeppelin
• react
• solidity
• web3