Automated Real Time Notifications For On-Chain Events

Keeping track on blockchain transactions has become one of the crucial elements for staying on top of your funds management, regardless if you are an individual or a corporate user. The reasons for monitoring can be various, including bookkeeping, confirmation on incoming and outgoing transactions, tracking all types of assets supported on a particular blockchain such as coins, tokens, NFTs, for analytics purposes, theft prevention, for security measures, prevention of transactions duplication, regulatory compliance monitoring and many others. 

Very often, especially business users who operate with multiple аddresses and place a large volume of transactions, are facing the challenge to track all underlying activities and get notified for the blockchain events they would like to be updated on time. The blockchain events service, one of Crypto API`s leading and most popular solutions, is solving these issues through automation, which saves very hectic and time-consuming manual work. Our users can subscribe to different events such as new confirmed transfers, tokens/coins/NFTs transactions, and new blocks. Once subscribed, our APIs return webhooks providing on-chain instant data with a minimum delay of under 100 milliseconds. 

Challenges that users face when tracking events manually

Decentralization of blockchain networks and their immutability are creating many obstacles for users in regards to manual tracking of blockchain events. Lack of a central authority functioning as a regulator is preventing exercising control over data and verifying it, which is valid especially for users who do not have direct access to the blockchains. 

As we mentioned above, in a business environment where organizations are committed to managing high volume transactions and operate with various wallets, it is near impossible to track all blockchain events and the reason for this is twofold:

First, an organization needs to have sufficient resources to assign the task to members of their team, who will make constant on-going checks. At times, this could require 24/7 support. To complicate the situation even further, it must be noted that blockchains generate enormous amounts of data. This data is not unified due to the different specifics between all blockchains, making it very difficult to work with. Crypto API`s blockchain events are addressing this through an automated solution, returning unified data, regardless of the utilized blockchain network(s), making it extremely easy to sift through data and update your system.

Second, this is a time-consuming activity which is guaranteed to result in delays which are several times higher than the time needed to return callbacks on requests made from Crypto APIs. Additional delays could come from the lack of technical knowledge about blockchains` specifics, inability to understand and interpret data and the possibility of human errors in data analysis. 

Another challenge for businesses could be to comply with regulations and detect on time potential money laundering or other illegal activities happening on chain. Manual checks, as already discussed, could be a burden instead of optimizing the corporate`s financial management processes. 
The complexity and sluggishness of manual monitoring can also affect the organizational performance and result in inability to adapt to specific trends and user behaviour. In turn, this results in poor strategic planning and can affect the overall performance of an organization, limiting their ability to gain insights on time. 

Crypto APIs Blockchain Events & Webhooks 

Now that we are aware of the challenges that users face when performing manual checks, it is important to focus on webhooks which can be combined with our blockchain events service and are an integral part of our automated solutions. In simple terms, webhooks are the real-time notifications that users receive аnd are a functionality that the blockchain events service provides. Webhooks work by following a push-based model, which saves numerous unnecessary requests - this is the exact opposite of what polling-based methods do. As a result, webhooks not only deliver instant notifications for the events for which users are subscribed to, but they also reduce network traffic.

The traffic reduction comes from the source application which sends a webhook request to the registered callback URL only when particular events or updates take place. We have a previous article, explaining in detail how webhooks work and what needs to be done to configure them correctly. 

The blockchain events services in general allows users to track аny addresses not only in Crypto APIs, for which they would like to stay up to date. As soon as a particular event occurs on the blockchain, the user will receive an instant notification with delay of no more than 100 milliseconds. Some of the events to which subscriptions can be made are confirmations on transfers, transactions of different digital assets supported by the blockchain networks, new blocks and others. Through our automation solutions, users can keep track of both their incoming and outgoing transactions and balances. 

We also have mechanisms to prevent double spending in place. Through nodes all transactions can be verified, allowing each transaction to go into a block. The combination of blockchain events and webhooks not only addresses all challenges that arise from manual work and monitoring, but they also create a synergy, allowing developers to construct event-driven architectures and create applications that dynamically respond to real-time changes occurring on the blockchain. 

More information on our blockchain events - create events subscriptions, manage subscriptions, and callback data is available in our technical documentation. If you require additional information on blockchain events and webhooks, or business use cases to which this service is applicable, do not hesitate to reach out to our team.