When building for web3 it helps to have many developmental instruments at your disposal. You’ll hear the term “Node providers” and “SDK’s” a lot when you start writing smart contracts. Today I’ll discuss one of the best resources out there in this area of web3 production. Here’s Alchemy in 2 minutes.
Hey, my name is Anthony. At Eat The Blocks we help teach web3 development.
While creating smart contracts, without wasting too much time and energy you’ll want easy access to blockchain data. The volume of data on blockchains can be overwhelming if you don’t have the right tools to sort through all of the transactions. This is where Alchemy can cut through the noise and return the exact data that you’re looking for, eliminating the need for rigorous manual searches.
Alchemy is a web3 platform that can streamline your calls and events. Today I want to highlight the data analytical features that their SDK can offer. For example, say you want to create a dapp that tracks all of the owners of a specific NFT. Instead of having to manually search all of the transactions yourself on a block explorer. With Alchemy, you can just call the blockchain of your choice and retrieve a cache of real-time data about the state of the NFT. What this means is that at any moment you can immediately retrieve an up to date list of owners of the NFT without having to search a single block manually for those wallet addresses. Once you install Alchemy into your project, you can start implementing these functions immediately.
This is great because with Alchemy you can build powerful dapps that show current block time analytics to your clients which makes for a better user experience overall. Obviously this is just one example but the list goes on with what you could use this data for.
To get started with Alchemy, simply create a free account with them and navigate here to set up your first dapp. After you create one, Alchemy supplies you with some RPC credentials that you can copy into your project framework. Once you set your variables and compile your contract, your dapp should deploy successfully and be visible on a block explorer, here’s mine on Etherscan. Their nodes are very fast and reliable so the possibility of product downtime is not something that I would worry about. This is definitely a valuable instrument and I believe it has a meaningful place in web3 development. I hope this video has helped you learn about the Alchemy SDK and has inspired you to stay creative when building cool dapps for web3.
