This is a guest post from the Graffle team.
TLDR: Graffle is a powerful service that allows developers to read, write, and historically access data off the Flow blockchain with any language and the tools they already know and love, like REST APIs and Webhooks. Applications can use the search APIs (Graffle Search) instead of a dedicated backend, and existing backends can use the power of webhooks to feed databases, including extended functionality like replayability.
In short, Graffle provides a powerful middle layer that makes developing on Flow easier, faster and more secure.
How new applications beget new infrastructure
At Graffle, we subscribe to the notion that successful applications beget new infrastructure. The pioneering applications built on Flow highlighted the huge demand for blockchain-enabled experiences and the assets that power them; still today, the number of teams building and shipping consumer-grade applications on Flow increases vastly day-by-day.
More applications result in a higher demand for accessing, mutating and searching on-chain data in a flexible manner. A whole new layer between the blockchain and end-user applications was needed that could be integrated into any architecture, language or framework conveniently and securely.
Enter: Graffle.
No matter if you’re an individual developer, a team of builders or a large brand looking to create blockchain-enabled experiences on Flow, Graffle will expedite your journey to launching on mainnet. Our solution allows developers to read, write, and historically access data off the chain with any language and the tools they already know and love like REST APIs and Webhooks.
To truly understand what makes Graffle such a game-changer, we need to turn back the clocks to the beginning — to a time when Graffle wasn’t yet a solution, but an answer to a problem people didn’t know they would have.
Graffle: Building Flow’s powerful middle layer
In autumn of 2020, we had set out to build a Flow-based analytics tool that ideally would resemble the likes of Dune analytics. We wanted to interact with the chain in a programming language we had deep knowledge in, so we settled on our strongest, C#.
In order for our analytics service to work, it had to observe, collect and aggregate events emitted by the Flow blockchain. A dedicated event-sourcing system had to be built from the ground up, and we embraced the challenge head on.
As we architected and developed our application, we stumbled upon many other developers and teams that were looking for precisely such an event-sourcing system, and the topic was heavily discussed on Flow’s Discord server and beyond.
After many one-on-one conversations with other developers and teams, we quickly realized we could turn our indexers into a solution that would benefit everyone building on Flow. We developed our service in close interaction with the Flow community, and as Graffle continued getting positive feedback, we learned the different ways developers wanted to interact with their data.
Since those early days, Graffle has evolved into a robust middle layer for building consumer applications on Flow, and many developers and teams already power their applications with our services today.
Graffle’s services: an extensible solution
Currently, there are three ways Graffle lets you interact with your data:
- Graffle Search
- Webhooks
- Websockets
SODAs (serverless on-chain data distributed applications) can use our search APIs (Graffle Search), enabling you to launch consumer applications without building your own backend. For example Versus is a SODA that is leveraging Graffle to build a completely serverless marketplace.
For those with an existing backend, Graffle also has the ability to feed your database through webhooks with additional features like replayability. That way, even if your application goes down, we will have your events ready to be resent. This is incredibly important especially given Flow's execution range limit of roughly the last 200 blocks.
As for what’s in store for Graffle, Reading is just the first step in our middle layer for consumer applications. Next, we’ll be focused on incorporating State (historical access) and Write into the platform. We’ll also be completely revamping our Search APIs to be backed by our relational graphing. That way, the second you sign up for Graffle, you’ll have all your historical data.
Join the Beta
Graffle is still in closed beta, but we are accepting more and more projects into our platform every day. And while Graffle is still in closed beta, over 40 projects are already in line to integrate solutions and features our team offers within the Flow ecosystem.
Want to accelerate your journey to mainnet? Whether you're just interested in building or building on Flow already, see what our indexers can do for you. Head to Graffle.io, fill out our form for a beta invite, and we'll contact you shortly.
What’s next?
Graffle is in the middle of our fundraising round! If you are an investor with deep roots in blockchain or entertainment ecosystems, please contact us at investor@graffle.com.
We are also hiring! Please reach out to jobs@graffle.com if you are interested in building the future of NFTs.
