Introducing Cross API Beta for Binance Smart Chain, an API Spec for the Hot Cross Ecosystem
Grab information about Cross Bridge, Cross Pool, TVL, and LP Tokens Easily
Hot Cross is proud to announce the unveiling of the Cross API Beta endpoint for Binance Smart Chain and the Hot Cross Ecosystem, an API specification that allows developers and users to tap into useful information about Hot Cross products.
🔗 Quick Links: If you are itching to get started, then hop right into the following links:
Supply Endpoint: https://api.hotcross.com/supply
Cross API Docs and Endpoints: https://api.hotcross.com/docs
The reason we’re calling this Beta, as we do with most new products, is because it’s a proof of concept (or MVP), that we wish to ship immediately and see what happens with it. Other, more refined endpoints are under creation.
Currently, the majority of Hot Cross’ activity and $HOTCROSS BEP20 transactions occur on Binance Smart Chain. This is largely due to Cross Bridge (example), Cross Pool, and Cross Mint Beta (more), and other products that we intend to unveil soon.
As such, we’ve put quite a bit of work into the data and infrastructure side of the tools that we are building. When we run campaigns, subsidize pools for R&D, monitor bridge activity, and deploy new smart contracts out to new chains, most of that involves needing to interact with data in some form or fashion.
This involves, but is not limited to:
API;
Websocket;
Indexer;
and Analytics
While Cross Pool is advertised as the best way to stake on Binance Smart Chain (and more soon), and while Cross Mint is advertised as the easiest way to mint on multiple blockchains, and similarly while Cross Bridge is advertised as a trustless peg in peg out ERC20 to BEP20 solution, in fact, all products produce data that informs how we wish to proceed in our development. Cross API is part of a large data stack that we are building and barely scratches the surface of what we are capable of gathering and sharing with interested ecosystem participants. This is why we don’t make long roadmaps. The data rapidly changes and we adapt to those realities.
Grabbing Ecosystem TVL ($85M)
The easiest way to grab TVL for our ecosystem is to hop over to Swagger and simply execute a request that grabs the following type of information:
{
"bridgeTvl": 50891787.06928858,
"poolTvl": 33950571.81242932,
"total": 84842358.88171789
}What this tells us is that bridges we have deployed contain over $50M in assets bridged over to Binance Smart Chain and Cross Pool currently holds close to $34M in assets being staked for rewards. The upside of this kind of data is that is transparent, open, clear, and easy to understand.
The downside of this kind of data is that it’s debatable how important TVL is as a metric to a protocol, which we will dive into later. This is a good read that we neither endorse nor disagree with, but it’s good. For example, if a pool ends on Cross Pool then liquidity will shift depending on which pool has ended and when new pools are opening, so it’s possibly misleading to believe that 100M is better than 10M if the assets being staked do not inherently bring value to $HOTCROSS.
Grabbing Cross Pool Data
One of the questions that we continuously get is about Cross Pool “positions” or general platform information. While most of the heavy-hitting juice is in Cross Indexer, which we have alluded to many times, the API itself goes not come without its own benefits. Paw users need to do a simple API call and they have all the data they need about a pool that is relevant, including, but not limited to:
Rewards Pools and Staking Pools;
Information about the assets being rewarded;
Social links of pools;
Pool-specific TVL;
And pool-specific smart contract addresses.
A use case for this might be that someone wants to grab a list of all smart contracts ever deployed for Cross Pool, how long a staking pool will last or lasted, or the start and end times of pools. The following snippet, for example, returns a list of start blocks per pool regardless of the pool, which would then allow the caller to understand how frequently pools are deployed on the platform when combined with other information like pool duration time and allocations:
[
{
"chaindata": {
"startBlock": "7775683"
}
},
{
"chaindata": {
"startBlock": "8553095"
}
},
{
"chaindata": {
"startBlock": "9495159"
}
}
]All of this is possible via Swagger, as well. For example, grabbing information about a specific pool (this is still very much rate-limited):
[
{
"chaindata": {
"totalAllocationPoints": "1000",
"rewardVault": "0x9b0A9b2C6E1a18b0f65635468fc9D39Bd44D3AFd",
"timeLock": "8290337",
"currentBlock": 10179343,
"stakingPools": [
{
"participants": "426",
"apr": 0, // This now pulls from Cross Indexer
"stakingToken": "0x2FA5dAF6Fe0708fBD63b1A7D1592577284f52256",
"allocationPoints": "700",
"pid": 0,
"totalStaked": "107705563829001000000000"
},
{
"participants": "187",
"apr": 0, // This now pulls from Cross Indexer
"stakingToken": "0x4FA7163E153419E0E1064e418dd7A99314Ed27b6",
"allocationPoints": "300",
"pid": 1,
"totalStaked": "1776247908480000000000"
}
],
"farmingPeriod": 30,
"rewardToken": "0x2FA5dAF6Fe0708fBD63b1A7D1592577284f52256",
"totalReward": "132999999999999999840000",
"minimumAllocationPoint": 300,
"startBlock": "7887137",
"rewardPerBlock": "153935185185185185",
"endBlock": "8751137"
}
}
]The TLDR for this is that there is enough primitive data available via the Cross API Beta that should allow developers to play around with it and come up with solutions on how to contribute to the Hot Cross ecosystem through solutions that they develop on top of our information.
Final Example: Hot Cross Bridges
Even before many people knew about us we were spending a significant amount of time into cross-chain bridging over to Binance Smart Chain. It’s easy to pull the data about those bridge smart contracts now:
[
{
"ticker": "hot-cross",
"symbol": "HOTCROSS",
"name": "Hot Cross",
"ethBridgeAddress": "0xD99a9739Cf8b0Bf66a7c99d9E14510C3146358C6",
"bscBridgeAddress": "0xCb356E9Aa98335dc305C82b147461B02ff8E0767",
"erc20": "0x4297394c20800e8a38a619a243e9bbe7681ff24e",
"bep20": "0x4FA7163E153419E0E1064e418dd7A99314Ed27b6",
"decimals": 18
},
{
"ticker": "frontier-token",
"symbol": "FRONT",
"name": "Frontier Token",
"ethBridgeAddress": "0x164D636dd46DA96468357B1c351983Cc9C1f3e15",
"bscBridgeAddress": "0x0d07557f6cC813e2537D0137a00829e9E2518072",
"erc20": "0xf8C3527CC04340b208C854E985240c02F7B7793f",
"bep20": "0x928e55daB735aa8260AF3cEDadA18B5f70C72f1b",
"decimals": 18
}
]The above request snippet returns:
Token Ticker
Token Symbol
Token Name
The bridge address on Ethereum
The bridge address on Binance Smart Chain
The ERC20 canonical for the asset
The BEP20 canonical for the asset
And the decimals of the asset
Wrapping it Up
In terms of the data stack that Hot Cross is building, we’re only scratching the surface with the API. We teased out WSS a few weeks ago, have mentioned indexing often, and have the capability of running analytics on just about anything that happens within the ecosystem of products that we’re building.
We’ll document and share more as time presses on however for now we’re thrilled at the pace of infrastructure work that has gone into making real products on EVM networks like Binance Smart Chain possible. None of that is possible without heavy under-the-head data work and we look forward to shipping more as time progresses.
Ongoing Work at Hot Cross
The HOTCROSS Staker Sizzle Event and the Cross Pool Mystery Pool;
Ongoing feedback loop for the products we’re building, including the minter
📣 Tell a friend about @hotcross and @hotcrossann. It would really mean the world to us. We have been building since last year, but we work like it's still the beginning!
About Hot Cross
Hot Cross is an extensive multi-chain and cross-chain tool suite that enables blockchain teams and their communities to thrive. At its core, Hot Cross aims to be the best toolbox for ETH and EVM networks. Their development philosophy is agile, and they are a cohort of builders who aggressively seek out opportunities to meet the demands of the now for both B2B and B2C. The core thesis that Hot Cross presents is that users and teams will migrate in part to new networks that feel familiar when presented with sufficient tooling and freedom. Hot Cross is a company and an ecosystem in and of itself, and our goals are towards allowing communities to flourish using our technologies, whether or not they know we are the ones building them.
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