Coinbase launches toolkit ‘Rosetta’ to simplify blockchain interaction

The crypto exchange has developed a framework to enable simpler, faster and more reliable blockchain integration

Coinbase has announced the launch of Rosetta, an open-source toolkit designed to simplify blockchain deployment and interaction. The San Francisco based crypto exchange rolled out the open-source technical framework yesterday. It is aimed at simplifying token integration for developers by providing a blueprint for what projects need to provide.

According to a blog post by Coinbase, Rosetta will be available for both blockchain developers and virtual currency exchanges.

The past few years have seen a dramatic rise in the number of blockchains – each with their unique specifications. This has led to the multiple challenges that come with handling a proliferation of different nodes and wallet APIs.

Thus, Rosetta is designed to offer standardisation in blockchain interactions. “The goal of Rosetta is to standardize how to interact with blockchains, making it easy for anyone to build on top of a blockchain for a variety of different use cases,” the blog stated.

The Rosetta interface handles compatibility issues for exchanges that use the framework and speeds up the time required for exchanges to integrate with new blockchains. It also protects customer funds by ensuring that security conditions are met.

Rosetta makes the process of building cross-blockchain applications easier for crypto developers: “Instead of writing custom parsing for every supported blockchain, applications can use a blockchain project’s Rosetta implementation to read on-chain data and construct transactions in a standard format,” the blog explained. This will also simplify maintenance and enable the minimization of code.

Since its inception, Rosetta was deemed as a middleware that can allow hassle-free and secure integration of blockchains, the blog revealed: “Each blockchain has a node software. They’re all custom and they all have different APIs that you use, and so integration to them can often be very customized, [require] a lot of manual effort,” product manager Nemil Dalal explained. “So, what Coinbase built was some type of middleware that we use to be able to integrate with these blockchains,” he added.

Projects teams of Filecoin, Celo, Near, Oasis, Coda, Ontology, Kadena and Handshake have already begun to experiment with the tools. Being an open-source network, anyone can contribute and provide feedback, the blog added.

“Rosetta is an exciting development in the cryptocurrency space that helps establish a standard API for integrating and building applications on blockchain networks. The cLabs team is excited to see applications use a common interface via Rosetta to build not only on Celo but on other blockchains as well, opening up the potential for new developers and businesses to join our growing industry,” said Marek Olszewski, Co-Founder of Celo in his feedback.