Power Tools for Blockchain UI Development: $3.5M Seed Round, An Innovative Revenue Model, and Open Access to Contract Data
Tags: ethereum, blockchain, polygon, javascript
Published: 2023-05-22 15:09:26

## Writing Decentralized Applications is Hard

Writing decentralized applications is incredibly difficult. Developers are dealing with low level blockchain decoding, building infrastructure, and managing servers instead of focusing on their core business. As developers moved to the cloud, more time was available to focus on their core product. We see the same bottleneck affecting Web3 development today.

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## Sort Seed Round: Let’s Make Decentralized Application Development Easy

We’re excited to announce the seed funding round for [Sort](https://sort.xyz), raising $3.5 million to build power tools for Blockchain UI development. 

[The General Partnership](https://www.thegp.com/) and [Lemniscap](https://lemniscap.com) led the round, with support from Alliance DAO, Punk DAO, Orange DAO, Blizzard Fund, Parasol, Primal Capital, Red Rooster Ventures, and a number of angels from Coinbase, Gemini, and Snyk. The funding will give us the runway to build our product suite and increase adoption.

**We’re focusing Sort’s roadmap on the following areas:**

1. Making data-rich UI components easy to integrate into decentralized applications
2. Giving users access to real-time contract data for transactions and contract events
3. Leveraging ChatGPT and LLMs to formulate SQL queries for populating UIs
4. Supporting off-chain data
5. Deploying end-to-end, full-stack blockchain applications

Read our [full vision on Sort.xyz](https://docs.sort.xyz/docs/our-vision).

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## Build an Application with Sort today

We want to make writing applications as easy as possible so we’re starting with a base set of React components and a [feature rich data API](https://docs.sort.xyz/reference/runquery). These are powerful tools that can be used to create beautiful blockchain applications with fast page load times.

Get started with just a few steps:

1. Choose an [available contract](https://sort.xyz/contracts) listed on Sort (or [add](https://sort.xyz/add-contract) your own)
2. Explore the [Sort API Reference Docs](https://docs.sort.xyz/reference/runquery), including two endpoints dedicated to ChatGPT requests (e.g. [Generate a Sort SQL Query from a text prompt](https://docs.sort.xyz/reference/generatesql) or [Generate and run a Sort SQL query from a text prompt.](https://docs.sort.xyz/reference/generateandrunsql))
3. Cut and paste React components into your application:

**[`<SQLQuery />`](https://docs.sort.xyz/docs/sql-query)** - display data from a Sort SQL query directly in an application:

```
<SQLQuery 
  query="select * from ethereum.transaction where to_address='0xdac17f958d2ee523a2206206994597c13d831ec7' order by block_id desc" 
  api_key="MY_API_KEY"
/>
```

**[`<PushNotifications />`](https://docs.sort.xyz/docs/push-notifications)** -  show real-time contract events, filtered by contract function

```
<PushNotifications 
  contract_address="0x6b175474e89094c44da98b954eedeac495271d0f"
  function_name="execute"
  height="200px"
  theme="light"
/>
```

**[`<LatestTransactions />`](https://docs.sort.xyz/docs/latest-transactions)** - display latest transactions for your contract

```
<LatestTransactions 
  contract_address="0x887f3909c14dabd9e9510128ca6cbb448e932d7f"
  api_key="MY_API_KEY"
  theme="dark"
  blockchain="ethereum"
/>
```

Our APIs and components are backed by Sort’s real time infrastructure allowing you to easily access contract data as soon as an event occurs.

---


## A New Business Model for Aligning Incentives: Sponsored Contracts

> Once a contract has been sponsored on Sort, it is free for anyone to access and use data produced by the contract.

We believe you get the best outcomes by aligning incentives. 
We are working together with contract authors to get builders using their contracts and driving transactions. By partnering with developers and protocols, we win together.

Sponsored contracts on Sort have the following benefits:

1. Sort can be used as a complete backend-as-a-service for decentralized applications, no additional infrastructure is needed.
2. Anyone in the community can build web applications on sponsored contracts for free. 

**Best of all, sponsoring a contract on Sort is only $9/month, or $99/year when paying with USDC or ETH.**


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## We need your feedback!

We’re just getting started and look forward to a roadmap shaped by the community. [Try Sort today](https://sort.xyz) and let us know what you think. 

Send us feedback on the [Sort API](https://docs.sort.xyz/docs) or [React components](https://docs.sort.xyz/docs/installation) and we'll send you a free Sort hoodie! **Just complete the [developer survey here](https://sort.xyz/survey).**


![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/a0vhhu7hl54nyfrl34n2.png)

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**Learn more about Sort**

- [Read our docs](https://docs.sort.xyz/docs/build-ethereum-and-polygon-applications-with-sort)
- [Join our Discord](https://discord.gg/sort)
- [Follow us on Twitter](https://twiter.com/sort_xyz)