Web3 Actions: A Serverless Backend for Development Efficiency

From an engineering perspective, Web3 development is completely different than anything else: the gas abstraction turns compute on its head, security is more important than ever, and every problem is a distributed system problem from day one.

Developing an application in Web3 is harder and more expensive than developing it in Web2. It’s costly and time-consuming to build and maintain your own reliable infrastructure that allows you to make a complete integration of your Smart Contracts with other on-chain or off-chain resources.

To facilitate this process for Web3 engineers and help them overcome these challenges, we’re releasing Web3 Actions to the public: the serverless backend for your Web3 application.

What are Web3 Actions?

Web3 Actions are a low-setup, low-maintenance, low-cost, and highly reliable serverless backend for your Web3 applications. In essence, Web3 Actions take away the repetitive and time-consuming infrastructural work, allowing you to focus your time and energy on what’s really important – writing the code to respond when on-chain circumstances or certain off-chain events change.

This full-suite solution binds your code (functions) to specific events (triggers) happening on one or more than 20+ Tenderly-supported networks. Web3 Actions automatically execute your ready-to-go code, ensuring no time is wasted monitoring events or running the code manually. Additionally, they allow you to choose between different triggers and configure them to create your own custom scenarios.

How Web3 Actions boost the development process

One important aspect of a comprehensive Web3 application is the ability to respond timely when something meaningful (good or bad) happens on-chain. In such situations, the response entails executing a piece of code.

This typically involves two important components:

1. Connecting to Smart Contracts with your custom code using reliable infrastructure. This is an essential step and building the infrastructure from scratch involves reinventing several wheels, requiring a team that has experience in complex distributed systems.
2. Thoughtfully designing and writing the code that brings about the core value of your product. Your code is an essential part of your product that will bring value to your users and its quality is the primary focus of a development team.

A well-developed system should also ensure more than a few important traits, including zero-downtime deployments, autoscaling, consuming data from multiple sources, retry mechanisms, re-organization support, and various subscriptions.

The solution: With strong infrastructure already in place, you don’t have to make compromises in quality and reliability, but focus on developing foolproof Web3 products. Web3 Actions allow you to pay more attention to the creative part and core values of your product in a more cost-effective way.

What’s in the box?

Another great advantage of Web3 Actions is that they come with a range of other essential features that can help you optimize your development process. Your custom business logic and other important tools are easily accessible from the Tenderly dashboard and enable a full integration for optimal results.

Here’s what you can expect from the Web3 Action experience:

• Zero-downtime deployments: Just because you’re upgrading your Web3 Action, it doesn’t mean that the whole blockchain stopped. Zero-downtime deployments ensure your serverless backend is always running, even when pushing new code to production. This means you’ll never miss any events that your application depends on.
• Unparalleled speed: With this time-saving feature, Actions execute as soon as they’re triggered, which takes less than a second. Additionally, you can immediately start implementing your solutions without wasting time on setting up infrastructure on your own.
• Triggers: Just tell Tenderly what to monitor and everything else is handled for you. Subscribe to emitted events, new blocks, certain times of day, function calls, and any other transaction information. Web3 Actions will ensure that only the events you care about trigger your code, in the correct order, without missing anything.

• Multiple blockchains: Web3 Actions allow you to follow events on any of the networks supported by Tenderly. Let’s say you’d like your Action to be triggered when a new block is mined on multiple chains important for your project. You can easily do this by configuring a block trigger through our UI.
• Starter packs: Web3 Actions come with multiple user-friendly tutorials that can help you get started and make the most out of this feature. The tutorials guide you through dealing with on-chain events, setting up your own oracle services, or even making the Web3 Action testing more efficient.
• All the Tenderly tooling: Tenderly is a fully integrated, all-in-one Web3 development platform. So, you can use Web3 Actions along with other features to further streamline your development process. Set up a custom Alert for your Action, have your code automatically executed, and even debug an error in the event of a failed transaction. Alternatively, dry run your Action and see what would happen if a given set of conditions were met.
• World-class support: If you come across any issue or simply have a suggestion on how to make this Tenderly feature even more powerful, you can reach out to our customer care team and get help from Web3 experts directly.

The Tenderly story behind Web3 Actions

The core reason why we built Web3 Actions is to improve developer experience and reduce the complexity and costs of setting up a connective layer between Smart Contracts and other components in your system.

With the Simulation platform, we opened up our custom Virtual Machine so everyone can test out transactions with complete confidence. Now, with Web3 Actions, we’re opening up a doorway for the execution of your business logic: tell us what you want to respond to, give us the code, and let Tenderly watch over everything that happens and execute your code with confidence.

What's next?

The right tooling can turn time-consuming and tedious endeavors into easy and effective tasks. This is why we’re constantly addressing friction by streamlining repetitive and inefficient processes. In the near future, you can expect to achieve even more with Web3 Actions, including:

• Incident management
• Applying more trigger/filter/database types
• Running Web3 Actions over historical data
• Running Web3 Actions on a Tenderly Fork
• Running Web3 Actions on pending transaction simulations

At Tenderly, we created diverse solutions that make blockchain development more accessible. We make this possible by offering easier and comprehensible high-level concepts so developers don’t have to deal with tedious low-level bits. This way, we’re lowering the barrier to entry and helping developers be successful in Web3 development. And we’re not stopping.