Using BuyCoins API

The easy way to integrate NGNT

As we highlighted in the last chapter, anybody can build on top of Ethereum to build applications with NGNT.

However, doing this directly comes with a decent amount of technical & monetary investment.

• The technical & monetary cost of hosting/maintaining a node (or the cost of paying a service that hosts nodes)

• Experience with Ethereum development paradigms & tools (smart contracts, web3 etc).

BuyCoins has a simple GraphQL API that lets you do a few things with NGNT (and more) without having to go through the thing listed above.

With the API you can:

• Generate receiving addresses & get webhook notifications whenever there are NGNT transfers to any of them.

• Send NGNT to any address.

• Deposit Naira via a bank transfer to fund your application's NGNT account.

There are also other thing you can do with the API that aren't directly related to NGNT. You can read the docs here.

The BuyCoins API is currently in closed beta but all Token Mint Partners will get access if they want to use it.

Should you use the BuyCoins API to integrate NGNT?

The answer to this question is very dependent on your team's current constraints. There are pros & cons to having to roll your own tech for this. We've listed some of the cons above (and they're especially true when development talent that know this stuff is scarce or when you're strapped for time).

There are also some benefits to building yourself, most especially control:

• You get to determine your own rate limits (or not have any at all).

• You aren't bound by any security limits with regards to withdrawing/sending out NGNT (BuyCoins API has limits).

• You can tailor the architecture and interface to fit your own use case much better than a "general purpose API" will fit.

This is the same question that all software development teams face every now and then. The good thing is that making a decision to build from scratch doesn't preclude using the BuyCoins API and vice versa.

In the next sections, we'll talk more about what it takes to build with NGNT without the BuyCoins API.