Blocksee provides web3 customer relationship management (CRM) and user engagement solutions that deliver actionable insights for non-fungible token (NFT) and crypto marketers. Blocksee allows web3 product marketers to easily embed code snippets on their websites or access APIs to capture first-party data from users interested in digital memberships, event ticketing, and promotional assets. Powered by AWS services such as Amazon Managed Blockchain (AMB), Blocksee helps enable a seamless transition for brands looking to deliver loyalty programs, token-gated content, and dynamic customer journeys powered by blockchain with tools ranging from automated wallet creation using traditional email login to payment onramps that help users more easily claim digital goods like NFTs.

In order to service data-driven insights about digital assets and user interaction with Web3 applications, Blocksee must ingest and analyze large volumes of on-chain data from multiple public blockchains like Ethereum. This data includes but is not limited to current and historical ownership information (balances) for digital assets like fungible and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and user transactions / interactions with Web3 applications and the smart contracts that underpin them. To retrieve and process this data, Blocksee evaluated several technical solutions ranging from self-managed blockchain infrastructure to third-party blockchain data providers. Due to the high cost of compute, storage, and networking resources required to manage blockchain nodes for extract, transform and load (ETL) workflows and indexing blockchain data, Blocksee determined a self-managed data architecture would not meet cost efficiency requirements. Blockchain node operations, data indexing and ETL processes are not heavily differentiated, and building them in-house diverts resources from delivering key customer facing features.

Blocksee then evaluated third-party providers who could serve the required data to their application, building a minimum-viable product (MVP) using multiple third-party providers for their data needs. However, Blocksee experienced reliability, cost–performance, and data quality issues that necessitated further analysis into alternatives for their blockchain data needs. Blocksee switched from using aggregated inputs from multiple third-party data provider solutions to using AMB Query, a unified blockchain data API for multiple public blockchains, for performant and reliable blockchain data. With AMB Query, Blocksee was able to accelerate their time to market by reducing developer cycles on complex, multi-provider APIs, and improve cost efficiency by using a single API with predictable pricing for their data needs.

“Our workflow before using AWS’s Amazon Managed Blockchain services required our team to piece together data feeds from numerous RPC providers, which led to complicated API setups and monitoring. This led to increased development timelines and prolonged feedback loops with vendors and stakeholders. Additionally, the fact that we needed to pay for multiple services to get complete data sets meant inefficient use of our runway and an over-reliance on startups that didn’t always have the resources to deliver the quality and reliability we needed for our clients. With Amazon Managed Blockchain, we were able to change all of that. Having reliable and quick access to blockchain data created a more manageable and consolidated tech stack for our company.”  

– Eric Forst, Co-founder & CEO at Blocksee

When a marketer or project admin opens the Blocksee CRM tool, token balance data pertaining to blockchain addresses (users) is populated on-screen to be utilized in tandem with additional contextual data such as AI-driven user behavior analysis. The following screenshot from Blocksee’s tool shows an example of the data and insights available to users.

Blocksee uses the AMB Query ListTokenBalances API to populate ER20 and ERC721 token balances for blockchain addresses, which enables Blocksee to query all tokens created by a given contract. The ListTokenBalances API can be used in a variety of different ways, including:

• Listing all token balances owned by an address (either a contract address or a wallet address).
• Listing all owners and balances for all tokens created by a contract.
• Listing all owners balances for a given token (for example an ERC-20 token).

Using this single API to populate token balances for multiple token types for each address in a list provides a significant 25% improvement to performance and an estimated 50% cost savings compared to Blocksee’s previous mechanisms for retrieving and aggregating this data.

Matt Kotnik, Co-founder & CTO at Blocksee shared insight about the impact AMB Query had in the implementation of their application:

We’re already seeing a tremendous boost in load speeds by using the ListTokenBalances API where we were able to improve our load times by more than 25% relative to [our previous provider]. AMB is also helping us expand to support additional blockchains as Amazon’s offering compliments our chain-agnostic system architecture. This has allowed us to shift a more significant focus toward our core product and customer relationships with the peace of mind that comes from partnering with one of the most trusted names in digital infrastructure.

The standardized REST API interface for data queries on AMB Query also enables Blocksee to easily onboard new blockchains as they are supported on AMB Query, as the syntax of the request remains largely static even as one queries data for one or multiple blockchains at a time.

Conclusion

AMB Query is generally available in the US East (N. Virginia) Region, making it easier than ever to access blockchain data such as historical balances and transactions with sub-second latency without the need for specialized infrastructure. Customers of AMB Query get blockchain data from the most popular networks delivered at scale and speed to meet the performance needs of real-world applications. Customers pay only for the API calls made with simple and predictable pricing. To learn more about AMB Query, see the user documentation. To learn more about other AMB offerings, see Amazon Managed Blockchain.

About the authors

AJ Park is a product manager on the Amazon Managed Blockchain team at AWS and is passionate about building blockchain and Web3 solutions for customers. Prior to that, AJ was innovating in the data protection and storage space for over 20 years as a software developer and a product manager.

Forrest Colyer manages the Web3/Blockchain Specialist Solutions Architecture team that supports the Amazon Managed Blockchain (AMB) service. Forrest and his team support customers at every stage of their adoption journey, from proof of concept to production, providing deep technical expertise and strategic guidance to help bring blockchain workloads to life. Through his experience with private blockchain solutions led by consortia and public blockchain use cases like NFTs and DeFi, Forrest helps enable customers to identify and implement high-impact blockchain solutions.