The Web3 Connectivity Problem | API3 | Dave Connor & Ashar Shahid | Polygon Alpha Podcast

API3

• API3 is a collaborative project to deliver traditional API services to smart contract platforms in a decentralized and trust-minimized way.

• It is governed by a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), namely the API3 DAO. Therefore, its code is open source and its operations are transparent.

• The vast majority of the external integrations that decentralized applications need are to commercial Web APIs that traditional businesses have built to monetize their data and services.

• Therefore, what is widely known as the oracle problem is in practice an API connectivity problem.

• Existing oracle solutions fall short because they fail to make this distinction, resulting in inferior solutions that depend on third-party oracles and ecosystems that exclude API providers.

• By refining the definition of the problem, API3 aims to provide a much more optimal solution.

• At its core, API3 brings the ability for API providers to easily run their own oracle nodes.

• This allows them to provide their data on-chain, without an intermediary, to any decentralized app (dApp) interested in their services.

• At the heart of this mechanism sits Airnode, an open-source oracle node.

• It's designed to be easily deployed by any API provider with almost no maintenance.

• Because of Airnode, dApp developers can write smart contracts to interact with the on-chain data of API providers.

• Airnode is designed with mechanisms to remove the on-chain or off-chain concerns of API providers.

• The set-and-forget framework of Airnode is all about ease of implementation.