Astaria skipped building NFT data services in-house — and saved money while shipping faster

The Challenge

Astaria requires a wide variety of NFT-related data

Astaria is an NFT lending protocol. When they started building a front-end for their users, they realized that they needed a range of general NFT-related data and functionality beyond just NFT lending in order to build a rich experience. They needed to accurately display the latest NFT media, retrieve metadata, and track real-time ownership information. There are also other challenges inherent to NFTs — spammy collections, malicious NFT media, constantly evolving standards, and more. Properly indexing the blockchain, and making sure the latest blocks are captured in real-time, is a difficult problem that Astaria can’t afford to get wrong — users expect to see the assets they own, accurately, every single time they use the protocol.

Expensive, time-consuming and difficult to build the necessary infrastructure to retrieve this data in-house

To solve these problems themselves, Astaria would need to build complicated infrastructure and dedicate valuable engineering time to maintaining it. Even after doing that, there would likely be edge cases (like custom contracts or newly introduced standards) that would require ongoing engineering work. This would all take time away from their core focus: building the best NFT lending platform.

Solution

Astaria found Center, and realized that the Center API could solve all of these problems for them. Center allows Astaria to abstract away all of the complexity associated with NFT data, providing Astaria with:

• NFT Ownership: Astaria can see all NFTs owned by a particular address, updated within milliseconds of new blocks, with one query of the Center API.
• NFT Metadata: Astaria retrieves all metadata associated with any NFT using Center, including traits, rarity, verification flags, descriptions, social links, and more.
• NFT Rendering: Astaria renders NFT media with one call to the Center API — in any size or format. Center also provides “Safe Rendering”, which means Astaria can serve a rasterized image file that has any potential malicious content removed.
• NFT Search: Astaria provides powerful search functionality, for both collections and assets, to users using the Center Search API.
• Spam Detection: Center flags collections suspected to be spam, so that Astaria can filter those out from their UI.

Results

• Pristine data quality and lightning-fast load times at https://astaria.xyz/
• Astaria can launch new features powered by Center without having to invest any development time themselves — this allowed them to launch enhanced search functionality within days of Center’s new Search API release
• Astaria can focus on the things they are most interested in, like building the leading NFT lending platform