Crypto has a bad standard: chainId. It’s this weird opaque universal standard for a chain. Values include 1, 137. 500, What are those, who knows.
So you might think, oh that standard sucks, it’s opaque. I’m going to make my devs lives better and make a human friendly version.
That’s what the devs who designed moralis did:
https://docs.moralis.com/web3-data-api/evm/reference/get-token-metadata
instead of 1 we have eth. eth, I know what that means!
instead of 137 we have polygon, I know what that means!
Except now to use their api with my data, I have to extract their custom list of chain names and map my standard list chain ids to their custom standard that nobody else supports.
And if every api did this, then I’d have to do a version of this for every api. O(n) dev time
If no api did this. I’d never do this. O(1) dev time
Chain ids might be a bad standard, but it is a universal standard and therefore better than any custom standard no matter how elegant. Use it because everyone supports it and then you don’t have to remap 137 all of the time to “polygon” or “poly” or whatever standard each api came up with.