HAL brings blockchain listening to Infura

Infura acquires HAL to bring no-code notifications and data streaming to blockchain developers.

Let’s face it: building dapps can be complex. Even for experienced web3 teams there are some DevOps processes that are a drag to innovation like listener scripts to filter raw block data.

Infura’s mission from the start has been to democratize and facilitate blockchain access and developer education. Infura powers web3 giants like Metamask and Uniswap, but has also empowered thousands of emerging web3 companies and new developers who’ve made the switch. But there’s always work to be done to ensure the Infura developer platform makes building in web3 as easy as possible with the best development tools. But we can’t always do it alone.

This is why today we’re thrilled to announce HAL, a robust, no-code notification and data streaming tool that aims to revolutionize the developer experience, has joined Infura.

What is HAL?

HAL’s mission to make blockchains more user-friendly is supported by a no-code, seamless user interface that easily queries and automates blockchain data flows. HAL’s precision targets on-chain events and pushes that data to developers through platforms like Discord or straight into a database.

The simple utility of HAL, coupled with its no-code, user-friendly interface has given rise to many use cases for builders and users of web3 including liquidity health factor alerts, price updates, smart contract monitoring, and DAO governance votes. And that HAL has joined Infura, their opportunity to make web3 easier to build on are even greater.

Webhooks, blockchain listening, and on-chain signaling with HAL

HAL currently serves two audiences: web3 users and web3 developers. One of the main pain points for web3 users right now is limited UX design. No one wants to constantly monitor a dapp’s dashboard or token. HAL solves this problem by letting a web3 end-user subscribe to an on-chain event and push the signal to them where they will actually see it. The HAL tool has been integrated into the likes of Aave, DeFiLlama, and Snapshot, providing developers teams with an “out-of-the-box” notification feature customized to their product.

Many web3 developer teams care about specific block data because that is the start of a process that impacts their protocol and end-user experience. Smart contract updates, blacklisted callers, failed transactions related to their protocol can all be used as a trigger for an automated process. But setting up the infrastructure to index, filter, and push that data is both repetitive and detracts from the really innovative work required to make a good product. To solve this, HAL filters relevant data from the blockchain to provide precision-selected data that gets pushed to Webhook, AWS, SQL, or MongoDB.

Here are a few examples of how developers can use HAL’s tools:

Digital Banks

Digital banks rely on blockchain APIs to access data and diversify their digital offerings. They need to understand the various capabilities of assets such as digital cash and CBDCs across various blockchains, and leverage data from blockchain APIs to do so. A digital bank could use a tool like HAL to programmatically add a new account address into their analysis engine, or even provide tracking to their end user, without having to update their own code base to perform that filter.

Crypto Liquidity Hubs and Portfolio Trackers

Users of AAVE, a leading digital asset liquidity provider, leverage HAL Notify to protect their positions from liquidations right on their website with rapid, automated notifications for liquidity events. Crypto portfolio trackers like CoinStats or Covey ingest decentralized data and perform automatic processes to produce value for their customers by helping traders track their moves and understand their profit and loss.This type of platform would ingest blockchain data such as wallet balances – the fiat equivalent value of a user’s cryptocurrency on multiple platforms’ trade history – the price of cryptocurrency at the moment of an event, and data that unifies insights across multiple chains for a single end user.

Boosting User Engagement

Most of Web3’s leading DAOs rely on Snapshot to facilitate governance votes. The reason is simple: gas fees make it cost-prohibitive for users to vote on-chain, and every dapp would have to create a custom front-end UI for average users to interact with the smart contracts. Snapshot solves this problem by providing a trusted off-chain voting platform without gas fees, plus a strong UI, with the security of signed messages to verify votes. Snapshot relies on user engagement with governance events to provide value to their customers. By integrating HAL’s notification tool into their website, Snapshot quickly gave users the ability to get updates on social media when their favorite DAOs governance events happened. This boosted the user engagement with Snapshot voting, all by providing a smoother UX to Web3 end users.

Scaling DevOps

For many younger projects in Web3, some features of their technology are not automated. An example of this is a lending platform that sends rewards every week to customers who stake on their dapp. Using HAL, the developers of this platform can automatically query the network to identify wallets who have staked in their contract, for what amount, and for how long, then push this data into a traditional web2 stack. From there, it is easy for the team to automate a calculation and prepare to dispatch rewards. Another example is monitoring a smart contract’s token balance and receiving an alert in your team’s Slack when it needs a refill. Use HAL to save time on setting on-to-off chain processes or cut down manual checks.

HAL x Infura

At Infura, we believe that a leading-edge web3 notification/automation tool should be a central component of any developer tech stack to ensure they can easily integrate it within their software through an intuitive SDK or API. HAL’s position as a crucial building block toward a low-code/no-code development solution will bolster the Infura product suite by extending its capabilities in higher order APIs, while offering a new level of composability for developers to create “recipes” for notifications, similar to IFTTT or Zapier.

HAL provides the Infura developer community with the full capability to implement effective blockchain automation and notification solutions – in 10 minutes or less – and we’re excited to offer you the substantial benefits this entails.

Sign up for a free Infura account today!