Arkhia Use Case: Accelerating Development on Hedera with Hackathons
A common saying in the Web3 space is that a bear market is the time to build. Hedera has embodied this by harboring fantastic growth in key aspects such as github activity, use of the Smart Contract Service, the number of full-time developers, and more that show deeper developer involvement than ever before.
One initiative that welcomes new developers and educates them about what the network has to offer them are Hackathons. There have already been multiple Hedera Hackathons hosted this year. Arkhia has partnered with multiple companies to help host Hackathons and provide access to the Arkhia Suite which, with the additional workshops Arkhia gives, assist in growing the network’s reach.
The Challenges Facing Hackathons on Hedera
Many current Arkhia clients are in need of dedicated bandwidth to Hedera and guaranteed TPS, two services which Hedera does not directly offer to users. Considering that Hackathons involve a lot of building in a short period of time even from a relatively small crowd of a few dozen developers, more participation could mean exponentially more bandwidth demands.
While a Hackathon may be deemed an early success due to the level of participants who appear, requests for data during the events may be competing with outside network activity and create network congestion.
Another challenge is the availability of tooling needed for participants to feel that they have been given the opportunity to conclude Hackathons on a high note. Lacking the right number of tools or the right type of tools can have a detrimental impact on the sentiments participants have about a Hackathon and the hosts.
The Arkhia Suite as a Clear Solution
The Arkhia Suite is made up of infrastructure, APIs, and platform solutions, each of which bring different benefits to the applications using them. Like many of our clients, Swirlds Labs and the DSF have extracted value from all aspects of the suite to tackle the challenges they faced in their own Hackathons by improving the experience for participants.
View the image below to discover more about the Arkhia Suite’s broad range of functionality.
Infrastructure
Perhaps the clearest advantage that Arkhia provides to Hackathon participants is dedicated bandwidth to Hedera and guaranteed TPS on the network. Guaranteed throughput allows participants to build at their own pace and not be limited by insufficient infrastructure.
Arkhia’s dedicated bandwidth and guaranteed TPS services were battle tested during the Beyond Blockchain: Hackathon hosted by Swirlds Labs, Angel Hack, and Tribe.
During the first session, prior to partnering with Arkhia, the event saw a rapid influx of requests to the network which quickly overwhelmed its basic infrastructure. After reaching out to Arkhia, Swirlds was able to provide Hackathon participants with sufficient bandwidth and TPS so they could build without interruption. The DSF learned about the benefits of our infrastructure from events like the Beyond Blockchain Hackathon and became a client prior to their latest event which is currently ongoing.
APIs
Another core component of the Arkhia Suite is its APIs. Those with access to Arkhia have a plethora of ways to get data from the network. In addition to the workhorse REST API, Arkhia also offers a battle tested JSON RPC Relay that allows EVM-native developers to use the same methods of requesting data on Hedera as they would on their native networks.
Additionally, Arkhia hosts a WebSocket API (Watchtower) that allows developers to listen for Topic data instead of needing to repeatedly ask for it.
With 5 APIs and counting, Hackathons utilising Arkhia arm their participants with the most extensive arsenal of tools to efficiently extract the necessary data to build better applications.
Platform Solutions
The value of Arkhia infrastructure and APIs is further increased once combined with the final aspect of the Arkhia Suite, Platform Solutions. One component is our extensive repository of documentation. Replete with code snippets and start-to-finish application examples, the Arkhia docs provide developers unfamiliar with building on Hedera the resources they need to hit the ground running.
Another platform solution making the lives of developers easier is WorkBench. This tool allows developers to see the entire list of data available to request while also providing the code to copy-and-paste to execute the query. By supplying details on what data is available, WorkBench massively assists teams during the planning phase so they can determine the feasibility and capabilities of their application.
Other platform solutions include our network explorer, real-time metrics on Hedera transactions, comprehensive dashboards showing your project’s activity and usage, customer support, and more all contribute to what Arkhia offers developers.
Conclusion
With the infrastructure, APIs, and platform solutions all bundled within the Arkhia Suite, it makes sense why Hackathon hosts and those running educational initiatives choose to partner with Arkhia.
Outside of our tech, we’ve also hosted three workshops within the Beyond Blockchain: Hashgraph & Oracle Hackathon to discuss the needs of eager participants and help share best practices from what we’ve learned throughout our journey as developers and builders on Hedera.
It’s great to see Hedera continuing to attract attention from developers, and we’re committed to introducing them to the performance benefits of Hedera and giving them the tools to succeed in building reliable, scalable applications on the network.
About Arkhia
Arkhia is an enterprise-grade Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider for decentralised technologies. We are empowering organisations, teams, and individuals to build fast, modular, and scalable solutions in our high-availability environments for Web3 applications. Purposely built for reliability, resilience, and high throughput, the Arkhia API suite benefits anyone needing ultra-reliable network uptime for mission-critical applications. To learn more about how we provide enterprise-grade infrastructure, visit arkhia.io, subscribe to our newsletter, and follow us on Medium, Twitter (@arkhia_io), LinkedIn, and Reddit.
