F9: Building (on) Blockfrost

Blockfrost is an instant, public and freely accessible API that removes infrastructure obstacles for developers so that everyone can start building (d)apps on Cardano. With Blockfrost, developers can start doing what they love ❤️, without the need for running and maintaining additional infrastructure and tooling themselves. At the moment, we have more than 10,000 developers already onboarded in our Blockfrost.io hosted platform.

We are also working on open-sourcing Blockfrost API backend, making it possible for the community to further build and provide the service.

This challenge is set to create a thriving developer ecosystem around Blockfrost, encouraging not only more developers to build on Blockfrost but also build the Blockfrost ecosystem as well.

Guiding questions:

• How can we drive new developers to Cardano with Blockfrost?
• Can we acquire already existing developers from the Crypto space?
• How can we make Blockfrost more decentralized and robust?
• Can we provide guidance to existing developers on how to build more secure applications on Cardano?

Possible directions:

• Development of new frameworks 
• Research of new concepts
• Educational material
• Contributing to blockfrost.dev documentation portal
• Blog posts, articles and tutorials
• SDKs for NFT minting and NFT management
• Dashboard and UI alternatives
• Auditing of existing code base
• Incentive schemes for developers and providers
• Collaboration to improve interoperability within existing tools in the ecosystem
• Hackathons

Open-source solutions are strongly preferred.

The Blockfrost team will provide technical support and guidance as well as free developer subscriptions to all winners of this challenge.

Why is it important?

It is important to create a thriving developer ecosystem around critical infrastructure components such as Blockfrost.

How does success looks like?

Different open-source initiatives building an active ecosystem around Blockfrost, from tooling to frameworks.

Key Metrics to measure

We suggest the following metrics for the submitted proposals:

• Number of developers and/or users
• Number of newly acquired developers and/or users (new to the ecosystem)
• Number of forks, downloads or stars on GitHub
• Number of contributors