Decentralized Applications Development Tutorials, Guides & Insights

• Rate Limits: Etherscan’s free tier limits the number of API requests per second (usually around 5 per second). This is fine for querying data but can be limiting for large-scale applications that need to process a lot of data quickly.
• Pricing: Etherscan offers paid tiers that increase the API request limits.

• Rate Limits: Infura’s free tier provides a generous number of requests (e.g., 100,000 requests per day) and supports more requests as you scale. This makes it more suitable for real-time dApps.
• Pricing: Infura’s paid plans offer higher limits and additional features like access to Layer 2 networks.

• Decentralized Exchanges (DEXs): Many decentralized exchanges (like Uniswap) require ERC-20 tokens for trading. WETH allows ETH holders to trade ETH just like any other ERC-20 token.
• DeFi Lending Platforms: Platforms such as Aave or Compound often require collateral in the form of ERC-20 tokens, making WETH essential for ETH holders who want to participate.
• Token Swaps: WETH allows for seamless token swaps between ETH and other ERC-20 tokens on platforms that support such swaps.

ETH and WETH serve different but complementary roles in the Ethereum ecosystem. While ETH is the native currency used to power the network, WETH enables ETH to interact with the growing number of decentralized applications and DeFi protocols that rely on the ERC-20 standard. By understanding how to wrap and unwrap ETH, you can effectively engage in the broader Ethereum DeFi ecosystem without leaving the native ETH environment.

Next, we'll add dependencies for the SPL programs we intend to use. For example, if we're working with the SPL Token Program, we'll add the spl-token crate.

Open your Cargo.toml file and add the following dependencies:

Example Workflow:

• Write your smart contract in Remix IDE, regularly checking the gas estimates.
• Deploy the contract on a test network using Truffle or Hardhat.
• Use Solidity Coverage to generate a gas report and identify optimization opportunities.

• Run truffle compile to compile the smart contract. This will generate the necessary ABI (Application Binary Interface) and bytecode.

• Start Ganache and configure Truffle to use it by editing the truffle-config.js file.
• Run truffle migrate to deploy the smart contract to the local blockchain provided by Ganache.