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API3 is a collaborative project to deliver traditional API services to smart contract platforms in a decentralized and trust-minimized way.
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It is governed by a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), namely the API3 DAO. Therefore, its code is open source and its operations are transparent.
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The vast majority of the external integrations that decentralized applications need are to commercial Web APIs that traditional businesses have built to monetize their data and services.
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Therefore, what is widely known as the oracle problem is in practice an API connectivity problem.
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Existing oracle solutions fall short because they fail to make this distinction, resulting in inferior solutions that depend on third-party oracles and ecosystems that exclude API providers.
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By refining the definition of the problem, API3 aims to provide a much more optimal solution.
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At its core, API3 brings the ability for API providers to easily run their own oracle nodes.
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This allows them to provide their data on-chain, without an intermediary, to any decentralized app (dApp) interested in their services.
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At the heart of this mechanism sits Airnode, an open-source oracle node.
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It's designed to be easily deployed by any API provider with almost no maintenance.
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Because of Airnode, dApp developers can write smart contracts to interact with the on-chain data of API providers.
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Airnode is designed with mechanisms to remove the on-chain or off-chain concerns of API providers.
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The set-and-forget framework of Airnode is all about ease of implementation.
