HTTP Request/Response equivalent for crypto coins
2024-04-30 08:54:00 +07:00 by Mark Smith
I'm looking for a way to better understand crypto coins on a technical level. I've always felt that my understanding was on a superficial level, a combination of marketing and non-technical documention. That's been good enough until now, but Stripe's recent announcement of support for USDC on Etherium, Solana and Polygon has me very confused. How is it that a coin of a particular type can exist on multiple blockchains?
It's a great feature for sure, and I have since found some blurb about multi-chain stablecoins, which makes sense, but it's not technical enough. I want to really understand the difference between these coin types.
I'm from a web development background. In that realm, if you wanted to understand the difference between 2 APIs, one way to do that would be to compare the text of the HTTP requests that were transmitted over the wire. That way you could figure out very quickly the shape of the API because you could actually see the endpoint URLs, and any JSON data included. And of course you'd also be able get lots of clues to what the API was like through reading the HTTP Response received from the server.
I understand that crypto isn't web development, and this is perhaps a nieve question, but how would one compare two different crypto coins at a similarly technical level as the web API example?