With the newly announced development grant received by Blast – built by Bware Labs, from the Starkware Foundation, let’s take a closer look at the milestones we want to achieve through this enhanced collaboration!

Earlier this month, the team behind Blast, announced that a development grant has been received from the Starkware Foundation to enhance support for the Starknet blockchain within Blast. 

Blast integrated Starknet endpoints for developers back in September 2022. With a 99.9% service uptime, Blast currently supports the network with both dedicated RPC endpoints and a Public API for the Starknet Mainnet and Starknet Sepolia Testnet. On average, Blast handles 1.73 million requests per day via the Public API, and 3.4 million requests per day overall across all plans.

First Step: Multiversion Support and Increased Throughput

The first enhancement brought in Blast for Starknet builders is the addition of multi-version support for all Mainnet and Sepolia Testnet JSON RPC endpoints. Multiversion is currently live, with dashboards and user flows undergoing updates to display the multiple versions of the Starknet RPC API. 

The throughput for the free tier and the Starknet Public API was increased to 100 API calls/second, to account for the Starknet Feeder Gateway deprecation. Moreover, building Starknet dApps at scale is now possible as up to 10.000 API calls/second are available on Blast paid accounts. 

Second Step: Builder API Integration

Starting with December 18th, 2023, Starknet has been added to the list of blockchains supported by the Blast Builder API, a complex set of API methods, designed to provide builders with access to efficiently structured data models for a streamlined development process.

An interesting aspect to be noted about the expansion of the Builder API support for Starknet is that the differences in architecture between Starknet and other EVM-compatible chains have been taken into account and therefore the new set of builder methods was specifically developed for the Starknet ecosystem. 

All Starknet methods can be easily accessible in just a couple of steps:

• Go to the Blast API homepage and select “Consumer App”.
• Log in with your wallet or your email address and add a project to your dashboard (or choose a project that was previously set-up).
• Upon selecting your project, you’ll find two tabs: Core API and Builder API. Click on the Builder API tab, where you can choose Starknet.
• Once Activated you will have access to all Starknet-specific methods as well as in-place documentation and a sandbox environment experiment.. 

Next Steps: What’s To Come?

The blast team is working on the remaining milestones of the grant proposal described in a previous article here. Builders can look forward to the development of Starknet NFT APIs once the new year settles in, as well as many other cool features and improvements to be added. 

Bware Labs’s mission has always been to support blockchain developers in realizing their most ambitious Web3 projects. We have always collaborated with chains and builders as part of our commitment to provide the greatest resources available, and Starknet is one of the first such chains to join efforts with us towards a new era of blockchain building!