CodeFaster

CodeFaster

Use bad standards

Tyler Adams's avatar
Tyler Adams
Nov 28, 2024
∙ Paid
Share

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:

CodeFaster is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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 …

This post is for paid subscribers

Already a paid subscriber? Sign in
© 2025 Tyler Adams
Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice
Start writingGet the app
Substack is the home for great culture