A non-profit Stellar Development Foundation is on a mission to develop the new world economy with a blockchain-based infrastructure designed for natural integration with traditional banks and payment systems. It’s based on a fast, consensus-based protocol that doesn’t involve resource-draining mining and solves the problem of transaction speeds, something that is becoming more and more of an issue in the world of Bitcoin. An integrated distributed exchange makes it easier to trade third-party currencies, including the so-called stable coins that are backed by real currency reserves (one example is the USDC).
With a focus on the real economy, Stellar becomes more and more appealing to financial institutions and large corporations that are looking into ways to move money across borders at high speeds and low costs.
After working on commercial Stellar-based solutions, we contributed to the ecosystem by co-authoring a Stellar Web Authentication proposal. Now we see an even bigger opportunity to give back to the community.
Meet Astrograph, a GraphQL interface to Stellar blockchain.
With this first beta release, we’re open sourcing a research project that we’ve been working on for the past few months. We believe that this new tool will make Stellar even more appealing to developers and lower the barrier for entry into its ecosystem.
You can experiment with GraphQL access to Stellar network by using Astrograph’s playground or by running test requests from your client applications against the API that is publicly available at https://pubnet.astrograph.io/graphql/.
Just keep in mind: this schema is still a work in progress and is subject to change, so we don’t recommend relying on this endpoint in production.
A GraphQL alternative to Horizon
The promise of any blockchain is full accountability, and Stellar is no exception: anything that happens on a network, be it the creation of a new account, a transfer of an asset, or a token offering, is baked into the ledger. Everything that’s ever happened on the network can be scrutinized, and if you swear by the REST philosophy, Stellar has already got you covered.
While stellar-core implements the blockchain itself, a service called Horizon allows clients to explore the network by sending HTTP requests to a selection of REST API endpoints: one for accounts, one for operations, one for assets, and so on. You can also stream information from certain endpoints by subscribing to Server-Sent Events.
