1.5 API integrations

There is a chicken-and-egg problem when it comes to integrating APIs to oracles. If there is no existing demand for an API in an oracle ecosystem, nobody is incentivized to do the integration. If the API is not available due to a lack of integration, nobody develops applications that will create the demand.

Honeycomb uses a universal external adapter and a novel method to integrate APIs to OracleMesh oracles in a declarative way, without requiring any code to be written.This method is superior to developing an external adapter for each API opera- tion in that its integrations are faster, less error-prone, and can be done by non- experts. Using these proprietary tools, Honeycomb was able to integrate hundreds of unique API operations in a few months, which dwarfs the closest competition by an order of magnitude.

For OracleMesh to reach its full potential, it will need hundreds, if not thousands of first- party oracles so that it can easily set up new dAPIs or recompose existing ones. This can only be achieved if APIs can be integrated to Airnode in an even more scalable way. To this end, an improved version of the proprietary integration tools described above will be open sourced for Airnode. Borrowing from the OpenAPI Specification format, Oracle Integration Specifications (OIS) define the operations of an API, the endpoints of an oracle, and how the two map to each other. An Airnode user will be able to serve an API over their oracle simply by providing its OIS to their node. Integrations made in this standardized format will be very easy to collect, version and distribute.

OIS is a JSON file, primarily designed to describe the integration specifications for Airnode to use. This means that it does not aim to be human-readable first and creating it manually to specify an integration would be difficult. This problem will be solved by ChainAPI, an integration platform that will allow users to generate OIS for their APIs through an easy-to-use graphical interface. This will be accompanied by other quality of life improvements for Airnode users, such as a node dashboard and a marketplace to list their endpoints. As a result, OracleMesh will have a wide selection of first-party oracles to compose dAPIs from and ecosystem growth will no longer be bottlenecked by integration capacity.