I’ve spent the last few weekends trying to build a simple portfolio tracker that allows direct swaps in the UI. It's nothing fancy; I just wanted to learn Rust and experiment with some DeFi protocols.
But, honestly? The fragmentation right now is insane.
With all the talk of Web3 maturing last year, I thought we’d have standardised endpoints by now. Instead, I’m juggling 15 different SDKs just to bridge a stablecoin from Ethereum to Solana without losing 5% to slippage. Even asking AI to generate boilerplate code is hit and miss because half the documentation changed last month and the models are suggesting deprecated methods.
I’ve reached the stage where I’m just looking for middleware to handle the dirty work. I've been digging through the documentation for 1inch and ParaSwap, and I've recently stumbled upon the API documentation for a crypto exchange aggregator at LetsExchange. Honestly, their widgets seem cleaner than the custom solution I'm trying to build.
This makes me wonder: for those of you building dApps or bots right now, Are you still running your own nodes and interacting with contracts directly, or have you fully capitulated to using aggregators and third-party APIs?
Thoughts?
Top comments (1)
Felt this pain hard. The SDK sprawl is real — and half of them break silently when chain upgrades happen.
For what it's worth, if your use case is accepting crypto payments (not swaps), I've had good results going non-custodial with LNbits + direct wallet addresses instead of aggregators. You skip the middleware entirely — just webhook callbacks on confirmed txns.
There's an open-source npm package (
@profullstack/coinpay) that wraps this for Next.js/Node apps. BTC, ETH, SOL, LTC — no KYC, no custody, keys stay on your infra. Docs at coinpayportal.com.For swaps/bridging specifically though, yeah, aggregators are probably the least painful path right now. The cross-chain standard situation is a mess.