Serving data to smart contracts is a new and lucrative way of monetizing APIs. For API providers, Honeycomb offers the easiest way to do this, with zero technical effort required by the provider. By listing your API on the Honeycomb marketplace, you immediately make its data available for purchase by thousands of customer nodes in the Chainlink network. Simply choose the per-call price of your API and we will do the rest, creating the external adapter and marketing the API to Chainlink node operators.

By connecting to authenticated APIs through the Honeycomb marketplace, nodes will be able to pay for the data required by smart contracts on a per-call basis. This removes the need for node operators to purchase expensive annual API keys without guarantee of data demand from smart contracts. In addition, since the external adapter is bundled with the API, there will be no need to develop your own, drastically reducing the risk and effort required by Chainlink nodes to connect to paid API data.

For smart contract developers, Honeycomb will act as a catalog of authenticated APIs available on the Chainlink network, as well as a wiki for all useful free APIs that smart contracts can connect to. In addition, the wiki will map correlating APIs to reduce the risk of contracts connecting to mirrored API data. With these features, our goal is to reduce the amount of time smart contract developers spend searching for viable data sources, and increase the amount of time they can spend actually building smart contracts.