How to Easily Implement NFT Transaction Monitoring with NFTScan NFT API?
Tags: beginners, api, nft, webdev
Published: 2023-07-12 06:12:54

With the continuous development of the NFT space, NFTs, like any other asset, face risks of security and market volatility. Therefore, monitoring on-chain transactions of NFTs has become an industry standard. As a crucial component of the NFT ecosystem, monitoring on-chain NFT transactions is not only an important means of asset protection but also a key tool for gaining market insights and optimizing decisions. Whether you are an NFT holder, investor, or developer, the importance of monitoring on-chain NFT transactions is well recognized. Therefore, monitoring on-chain NFT transactions has become an essential step for users and developers.

## The Importance of Monitoring On-Chain NFT Transactions
Capturing Opportunities and Risks: Monitoring transaction data changes allows users to identify market opportunities, such as abnormal price movements, or risk signals, such as unusual trading activities by large holders. Users can adjust their asset allocation or trading strategies accordingly.
Assessing Project Popularity: Monitoring the number of transactions and changes in trading accounts for a project provides accurate insights into its activity and popularity. This serves as an important basis for users to assess the project's potential and vitality.

Identifying Key Signals: Monitoring the trading behavior of key accounts or significant changes in NFT holdings can uncover important signals released by project teams or investors. These signals often have an impact on the overall project performance.

Tracking Technological Developments: Monitoring changes in different types of transactions, such as sales, purchases, and mints, helps discover important updates and iterations at the project's technical level. This provides more comprehensive information for project research.

Analyzing Price Trends: Monitoring changes in transaction prices and volumes is fundamental for conducting technical analysis and trend predictions. This enables more accurate price forecasts and assessments.

Building Trading Strategies: Monitoring long-term changes in transaction data allows for an accurate understanding of market and user behavior patterns. This provides empirical support and references for building different trading strategies.

Enhancing User Interaction: Real-time monitoring of transaction data enables more engaging and interactive market displays and user experiences in applications. This improves user experience and engagement.

For developers and certain users, monitoring on-chain NFT transaction data is a crucial aspect. It not only enables better decision-making in investments and trading but also provides stronger functional support for their applications and tools. However, monitoring on-chain NFT transactions requires substantial technical and human resources. It involves frequent API calls, data processing, and significant time investment.

NFTScan Developer PlatformThis is where the advantages of NFT APIs come into play. By using NFT APIs, data can be automatically retrieved and processed, efficiently handling a large volume of transaction data without the need for complex manual operations and judgments. It reduces development costs by utilizing APIs to build monitoring tools and systems, which can save significant design and development expenses. High-frequency monitoring is achieved, as NFT APIs can fetch data every second that would be difficult to obtain manually, enabling near real-time monitoring and reducing corresponding manpower costs. Standardized data formats make it easier to develop and optimize monitoring tools and systems, reducing subsequent maintenance and iteration costs. Customized monitoring allows developers to flexibly set monitoring rules and parameters, building tailored solutions that not only improve monitoring accuracy but also reduce manual costs.
For developers, choosing a powerful, responsive, and data-standardized NFT trading API is the foundation for efficient monitoring. 

NFTScan, as a professional NFT browser and data infrastructure, strives to be the best gateway for accessing data in both Web 2.0 and Web 3.0. One of its services, the NFTScan Developer Platform, provides professional multi-chain NFT API data services to Web3 developers and fintech companies. By parsing and processing data from various NFT projects, NFTScan can provide consistent data formats and structures, eliminating the need for developers to handle and decipher complex data. This convenience enables developers to access and leverage NFT data more quickly, accelerating application development and innovation.

## To develop an NFT data analysis platform based on NFTScan
Follow these steps:

**Step 1: Register as an NFTScan developer account**
Before you can start using the NFTScan API, you need to visit the developer platform website and create an account. Go to the official NFTScan website at: https://developer.nftscan.com/user/signup, click on the "Sign Up" button for NFTScan API registration.

NFTScan Developer PlatformAfter logging in, find your unique API KEY on the Dashboard. Copy the API KEY. Access the API documentation and enter your API KEY in the corresponding field. Follow the instructions in the documentation to start using the API service. In the API documentation, developers can find various interface modes to choose from. Select the most suitable interface based on your requirements.

In the Dashboard, developers can also view statistical data about their API usage, helping to track historical usage data. Additionally, NFTScan provides each registered developer with 10,000 free API calls per day.

Due to the lack of strict adherence to standardized underlying smart contract code and variations in metadata storage methods among different NFT projects, it becomes challenging for a single querying product to be compatible with all NFT projects. However, NFTScan addresses this issue by standardizing and presenting the data in a clear manner to users.

NFTScan achieves this by tracking new blocks packaged and validated in the blockchain network, parsing event data of each transaction, and building the most comprehensive and reliable NFT data system in the blockchain network. The NFTScan team also continuously analyzes and interprets various marketplace protocols and decentralized protocols in the NFT ecosystem, enhancing the depth and breadth of NFT data and maximizing its professional and practical value.

**Step2: Viewing the API Documentation**
After successfully registering as a developer and obtaining an API Key, you need to access the NFTScan API documentation. The API documentation contains all the available API endpoints and parameters, as well as detailed information on how to construct requests and handle responses. It is important to read the API documentation carefully and ensure that you understand how to use the API to retrieve the data you need. The NFTScan API service is designed to help developers improve their experience in obtaining and analyzing NFT data.

Currently, NFTScan has the largest and most comprehensive NFT Collection library across multiple blockchains, including Ethereum, Solana, BNBChain, Bitcoin, Polygon, Aptos, Avalanche, Arbitrum, Optimism, Fantom, Moonbeam, PlatON, Cronos, and Gnosis. It provides a wide range of interfaces to access the full data of ERC721 and ERC1155 assets, as well as transaction, project, and market statistics. NFTScan supports over 50 public interfaces for EVM-compatible chains, as well as a batch of interfaces with the same model for Solana, Aptos, and Bitcoin. This greatly satisfies the developers' needs in indexing various types of NFT data.

**NFTScan API documentationNFT On-Chain Transaction Monitoring APIs**
As of July 10th, NFTScan provides 14 mainstream blockchain data displays, with a total of 2,139,505,991 on-chain records. It offers 6 APIs for retrieving transaction data:
1. Get User Transactions (`/v2/transactions/account/{account_address}`): This API retrieves NFT transaction records for a specific account address.
2. Get Contract Transactions (`/v2/transactions/{contract_address}`): This API retrieves NFT transactions that occurred within a specific contract address.
3. Get Transactions for a Single NFT (`/v2/transactions/{contract_address}/{token_id}`): This API retrieves a list of NFT transactions for a specific NFT, requiring the NFT contract address and ID.
4. Filter Transactions (`/v2/transactions/filters`): This endpoint returns a list of NFT transactions by applying search filters in the request body. Transactions are sorted in descending order based on timestamps. (Note: When using only the block_number condition for data filtering, the range between block_number_start and block_number_end should not exceed 10,000).
5. Get Transactions by 'to' Address (`/v2/transactions/to/{to_address}`): This API filters and retrieves NFT transactions based on the 'to' address parameter.
6. Get Transactions by Transaction Hash (`/v2/transactions/txhash`): This API interface returns transaction records based on a list of transaction hashes queried.
Developers can choose the appropriate API service based on their specific needs to access the desired information from the data provided by NFTScan. These APIs offer various ways to retrieve transaction data, allowing developers to obtain accurate transaction data based on different query conditions and purposes.

**Step3: Build API Requests**
Once you have found the desired API endpoints and parameters in the NFTScan API documentation, you can write API request code using your chosen programming language. 

1. Choose a Programming Language: Select a programming language that you are familiar with or prefer, such as Python, JavaScript, Java, etc.
2. Install Required Libraries or Dependencies: Depending on your chosen programming language and HTTP request library, install the necessary libraries or dependencies to be able to send HTTP requests.
3. Build API Requests: Use your chosen programming language and library to construct HTTP requests that comply with the specified request format in the NFTScan API documentation. This may include specifying the API endpoint, request method (e.g., GET or POST), request parameters, etc.
4. Send API Requests: Use the HTTP request library to send the constructed API requests to the NFTScan API endpoint. Make sure to include the required parameters in the request to retrieve the desired data.
5. Process API Responses: Retrieve the API response and parse and handle it according to the response format, typically JSON or XML. Extract the desired data for further processing or display.

For example, to build a request to query NFT transactions for a specific user, you can refer to the NFTScan NFT API documentation or reference guide and use the NFTScan NFT API to send a GET request to retrieve the transaction history for a particular user address. Here, we will retrieve the transaction records for the user address "wilcox.eth" with the Ethereum address "0xa25803ab86a327786bb59395fc0164d826b98298" from the following URL:
https://www.nftscan.com/0xa25803ab86a327786bb59395fc0164d826b98298
The API endpoint to use is "/v2/transactions/account/{account_address}" to retrieve the transaction list for a user address. Here is an example Python code using the requests library to send a GET request and retrieve the transaction records for a specific user address:

In the above code, we used the user's address as a path parameter to construct the complete API request URL and sent a GET request. Then, we checked the response's status code to determine if the request was successful. If the response status code is 200, we can extract the transaction list from the response's JSON data and perform further processing.
However, please note that this is just an example code, and actual requests may require additional parameters, error handling, and data parsing. Make sure to refer to the documentation or reference guide of the NFTScan NFT API for a complete understanding of the request parameters and data structure.

For another example, to query the transactions for a specific contract address using the NFTScan NFT API, you can use the API endpoint "/v2/transactions/{contract_address}" to retrieve the entire transaction history for the Azuki contract address from the following URL:
https://www.nftscan.com/0xed5af388653567af2f388e6224dc7c4b3241c544

You can access the NFTScan API endpoint and pass the required parameters using an HTTP GET request. Here's how you can construct the request using the requests library in Python:
First, make sure that the requests library is imported: At the beginning of the code, developers need to import the requests library, which is a commonly used HTTP request library for sending HTTP requests and handling responses. Then, the contract_address variable is used to specify the contract address to be queried.

Next, we can build the API request: Developers can construct the complete API request URL by adding the contract address to the API endpoint. Here, we use string interpolation (f-string) to dynamically build the URL. By calling the requests.get() method, we send an HTTP GET request using the constructed API request URL and store the response in the response variable.

Then, we handle the API response result by checking if the response status code is 200, which indicates a successful request. Here, we use the .json() method to parse the JSON data from the response into a Python object and save the transaction records in the transactions variable. We can further process the transaction records based on specific requirements. For example, developers can print detailed information for each transaction or extract values from specific fields, and so on.

## Conclusion
NFTScan NFT API offers rich NFT data resources and provides powerful support for developers to build various NFT-related applications and solutions. Whether it's creating a simple NFT trading marketplace, NFT asset management tools, or complex NFT ecosystems, the NFTScan NFT API can provide comprehensive NFT data, enabling developers to quickly access and analyze information about NFTs on the blockchain. Developers can leverage this data to implement various creative and application scenarios, ranging from simple applications to complex ecosystems, and provide users with a rich, innovative, and valuable NFT experience.

## About NFTScan
NFTScan is the world's largest NFT data infrastructure, including a professional NFT explorer and NFT developer platform, supporting the complete amount of NFT data for 14 blockchains including Ethereum, Solana, BNBChain, Arbitrum, Optimism, and other major networks, providing NFT API for developers on various blockchains.
Official Links:
NFTScan: https://nftscan.com
Developer: https://developer.nftscan.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/nftscan_com
Discord: https://discord.gg/nftscan