How to Create an RPC Add-On for Marketplace

An RPC add-on is one that is primarily used inside of QuickNode’s platform and extends our capabilities by adding new JSON-RPC methods to our existing endpoints. RPC add-ons enable you to deploy and monetize custom methods on the QuickNode Marketplace. Approved add-ons will get placement in the QuickNode app and promotion from the QuickNode team.

In this guide, we’ll go over all of the steps needed to add an RPC add-on to QuickNode’s marketplace.

Creating a marketplace account is simple! From your QuickNode dashboard, click the “Developers” tab on the left nav bar, and then complete the marketplace account application. Here’s a preview of the form:

There is an approval process for new marketplace partners, so please be patient while we work through applications. You can typically expect a response in 5-10 business days at most.

The next step is to tell us about your add-on, which is a pretty straight forward process. This includes telling us about the add-on, providing icons, screenshots, a list of which chains and networks you support, where we can provision/update/de-provision your add on, where to send customer support requests, and your JWT secret for SSO. You’ll also need to tell us all about your RPC methods. It looks like this:

Once completed, your add-on will be in a pending state, read on for more information on how to get your add-on approved.

Marketplace Add-on Approval Criteria

The full details of the approval process are here, but we tend to approve add-ons that are high quality among one or more of these dimensions:

1. We have a high degree of confidence that the add-on can handle QuickNode's scale of traffic.
2. We believe customers would benefit from this add-on because it’s specialized.
3. We believe customers would benefit from this add-on because it’s innovative.
4. We believe customers would benefit from this add-on because it’s critical infrastructure for them.

If your add-on meets one or more of these requirements, there is a high likelihood we will reach out to learn more and fast-track your add-on.

We’ve written an extensive guide on how provisioning, updating, and de-provisioning your add-on works. We use authentication to do this, read the full guide here.

When it comes to testing, we highly recommend you install ngrok, so you can test the provisioning, update and de-provisioning steps of the process. To set up ngrok, if you’re using a Mac, run this:

brew install ngrok/ngrok/ngrok

brew install ngrok/ngrok/ngrok

On Windows:

choco install ngrok

choco install ngrok

On Linux:

curl -s https://ngrok-agent.s3.amazonaws.com/ngrok.asc | sudo tee /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/ngrok.asc >/dev/null && echo "deb https://ngrok-agent.s3.amazonaws.com buster main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ngrok.list && sudo apt update && sudo apt install ngrok

curl -s https://ngrok-agent.s3.amazonaws.com/ngrok.asc | sudo tee /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/ngrok.asc >/dev/null && echo "deb https://ngrok-agent.s3.amazonaws.com buster main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ngrok.list && sudo apt update && sudo apt install ngrok

Once you’re set-up, if you have your service running on your local machine, simply start ngrok and point it at a port; you’ll immediately get a hostname back that you can use. It will look like this:

Copy the ngrok forwarding address and paste it into the QuickNode provision testing software and it will allow you test example provisioning requests.

Once you successfully send a provisioning request, we will provide you a URL to test the proxy through to your servers. You can read all about how we proxy RPC requests here.

We’ve written an extensive guide on how to get customer details and log them into your systems with SSO: https://www.quicknode.com/guides/marketplace/how-sso-works-for-marketplace-partners.

After you’ve gone through the full approval process, we will get you live! You’ll get placement in app on the check out page, the add-ons tab for endpoints and the public website. We’ll help you promote your add-on and recommend it to customers when appropriate. We’ll work hard to be the best partner you have and help you whenever we can.

That's it! You've got all the tools you need to add an RPC Add-on to the QuickNode Marketplace! We're excited to see what you come up with. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out on Discord or Twitter.

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