Zchain ZCash block explorer API - Introduction

Key Takeaways

in this video we're gonna discuss the z chain API now Z chain we saw in a previous video is a block explore for the Z cash blockchain in order to go ahead and look at their API we need to get to their website so that's gonna be at this location explore.va.gov the API tab and click so I've got that pulled up here now on this tab we see some details about the API and we see all of these entities down here these pieces of information this information makes up the API this is what the API actually is so each one of these little URL looking things is what they call this is a path to what they call an endpoint so each one of these is an endpoint and the each one of these things is a tool in the API toolbox so developers will use these tools to build apps now what kind of apps would be built using these tools that is one question that I want to kind of address here and what better way to address it then on this end point right here this says retrieve multiple accounts and then well let's look at this next one accounts with these curly braces and an address says retrieve a single account so what this endpoint will do for you if you're a developer a programmer it will allow you to use this URL and pull out and put an address right here an actual T address and then you will be able to retrieve the details for that T address for that account suppose that you're a developer and you're writing a wallet a cryptocurrency wallet that supports Z cash now you might go ahead and use the Z chain API to display back to your user the details of their account that those kind of details are like the balance the transactions the sent received in the next video we're just going to kind of touch on what the API is and kind of the details about it but in the next video we're gonna use this endpoint to write our own script that will actually retrieve the details of our account the same way that a wallet like the Jax wallet would do so each one of these each each one of these endpoints is just another kind of tool in the toolbox that a developer could use to add information to their app about the Z cash ball chain now see here there's some Network retrieved networking from retrieve the blocks retrieve a single block retrieve the transactions so all of this information if you wanted this to be in your app then you would use this this API to actually get that data to put in the app let's go ahead and look in Jack's and kind of take a look at the kind of information that you'd be getting from this API so here we see the balance so this this piece of information right here the actual balance the actual balance this one would definitely come from the accounts endpoint and then now we can see transaction history we we see here's a transaction ID we can get transactions or we can get more transactions to retrieve transactions for a single block retrieve multiple transactions and then retrieve a single transaction so if you look at an account and you would get for this particular one you would see this the receiving and the sent transactions for that account and then you would be able to get the details for any one of those transactions by using retrieve a single transaction and then all that data ultimately shows up in your wallet here and that's why when we click we click this link then we're going to be taken to the Z chain Explorer but all right so now let's go ahead now that we know about what the tools are inside of this API and API I don't know if I said this before but an API is the way you can think about it if you're not a if you're not technical if you don't know about programming an API is just a toolbox for developers making apps if you think of a toolbox as tools in it an API has tools in it and each one of these endpoints is a tool that a developer can use to get actual data that they need to just to put in their app so their end users can know know the things that they need to know ok let's just go ahead and take a take a look at a couple other things they say up here say Z chain the Z chain API is public no registration is necessary so that's nice if if you have the ability to to call this API then you can go ahead and call it you don't have to register you don't have to sign up you're good now the other thing they say is don't abuse it and they say don't call it too often so if you're calling it more than 10 times per second then you're gonna need to contact them to actually get the ability to do that they say if you abuse it so you call it too many times they're going the IP bans so that's the IP address to your computer they'll ban it so then when you try to make the call it'll fail it won't work so then down here they also say that attribution is appreciated but not required this just means if you're gonna use the API in your app then you should you know if you go ahead and say hey I'm using I'm using the Z chain I'm using a Z chain API for this then they're gonna appreciate it because you're kind of acknowledging you know all the work that the Z chain team does to make these available you're acknowledging that so this is an overview of the API what it does for developers making apps particularly a developer that's making a wallet or some type of it doesn't necessarily have to be a wallet but it can be any kind of app that needs this type of data from the blockchain all right so if you want to display that type of data then this is an option that you're gonna have available to you to use to get that data out from the blockchain and into your app for your users to see stay tuned for the next video we're gonna go ahead and make use of one of these endpoints to build our own little program to check the balance in our account hope this video is helpful please like the video subscribe and support this deep lizard Channel thank you