We start into a new era: Tangany API Suite 2.0

The official Tangany recap of 2022 is now a few weeks past, and it's time to give you a preview of 2023 and what you can expect from our products.

At the end of Q1, we will release the new generation 2.0 of our API suite and, at the same time, announce discontinuing the current generation 1.0. Don't worry. We will give all partners enough time and support them with a professional migration concept during the transition.

The new generation focuses on the standardization of our product portfolio, offers numerous process and security improvements, and introduces the era of self-services to Tangany products.

Announcing the Tangany Partner Portal

With the Tangany Partner Portal, we enable direct access to administrative activities. With the first release, the main focus is on the secure creation of API accesses.

After registration, partners will be able to get started by creating workspaces. A workspace is an isolated data environment in which subscriptions are grouped. For example, you can create a workspace to separate sandboxes from productive environments. Workspaces may contain up to three subscriptions, one per API product.

In each workspace, you can create and manage your subscriptions, which define concrete configurations consisting of the product, its type, and the inherited data environment of the workspace. So a partner can subscribe to the Custody, Customers, or Settlement API and create API accesses for themselves.

That’s right! Through our Tangany Partner Portal, partners can create multiple workspaces for testing or productive purposes and manage their API access to Tangany products. With this in place, we maximize the security in providing API access.

Over the year, we will progressively expand the functionality of the Partner Portal. We will introduce multi-user support, implement self-service to the individual APIs, and offer various access restrictions to these use cases with a user-role concept.

Our long-term vision with the Tangany Partner Portal is to provide our partners with maximum support in using Tangany products, and, ultimately, to enable them to administer all relevant tasks, from onboarding to billing, via the portal with many different services.

Announcing Tangany API Suite 2.0

Together with the Tangany Partner Portal, we will release the new generation 2.0 of our Tangany APIs. This major release brings some breaking changes aiming to significantly improve standardization, processes, and security while maintaining a consistent customer experience.

First things first: What's new in 2.0?

The major change is the switch from subscription-based authentication to the OAuth2 authentication flow for all Tangany APIs.

In the following section, I will present further changes to our APIs.

Custody API

We have focused on core custody for version 2.0 of the Custody API, which was once our very first product. We took the feedback from our partners and tried to make the API more consistent and easier to understand.

There were some functionalities that weren’t related to the creation or use of blockchain wallets. We decided to remove those functionalities from the API and will offer them in a different form in the future, if necessary.

Specifically, this means:

• Removal of the monitoring feature
  We decided to remove the monitoring feature, firstly because it was hardly ever used and secondly because we obtained this functionality from an external provider who rarely satisfied our availability standards. We will not provide a substitute solution in the near future. Instead, we can refer you to other available offers for monitoring transactions on the market. This affects read operations like transaction history, contract events, and the monitor webhooks.

• Harmonization of protocol-specific transactions
  In the current version of the API, we have protocol-specific endpoints for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Tezos, such as Bitcoin sweep, Tezos view, or the endpoint to retrieve ERC20 token balances. We will bundle these into one endpoint per protocol and make them available via the request body.

We have also made numerous changes to standardize and harmonize our endpoints. You will get all the details in the changelog, which we will publish with the release.

A small excerpt in advance:

• Use of the async request pattern in all endpoints

• Restructuring & simplification of the paths: Wallets, Protocols, and Requests

• Unification of request and response bodies

• Removal of HEAD endpoints

In addition, we are also pushing regulatory automatisms with version 2.0. In the future, it will no longer be possible to create wallets without a reference to a customer in the Customers API. Migrated wallets must also have a relationship.

At the time of transaction execution, the system checks whether the link to a customer is still valid and whether the customer meets all regulatory conditions for the transaction to be executed. If this is not the case, transactions will be aborted.

Settlement API

In the Settlement API, we are implementing only a few improvements and hardenings in addition to the conversion to OAuth2. In particular, it is worth mentioning that, analogous to the Wallets in Custody API, there will be a strict check of the link between an account and a customer in the Customers API. Accounts with invalid or locked customers will not be allowed to perform transactions.

To make this information available in advance, we equip accounts with a status that must be queried before placing an order. If an account is locked, no orders may be placed or trades executed until the account is unlocked.

Customers API

In the Customers API, in addition to the switch to OAuth2, there is another breaking change: having considered our partners' feedback once again, we are removing the wallet links. Links to customers will take place in the products, i.e., in the Custody and Settlement API, from version 2.0 onwards.

Also removed is the PEP and Sanction status of entities, as we will populate these ourselves via an internal service in the future and update them daily. Only the option of PEP self-disclosure will remain.

A new feature will be the status of a customer. This will give you the opportunity to see if a customer is currently able to perform any activities in Tangany products or if he is locked for compliance reasons.

Migration & Schedule

As mentioned above, we will work out a migration plan with all partners who use our Custody API to enable them to benefit from the advantages of API Suite 2.0 as quickly as possible.

The Settlement & Customers API migration will also take place after consultation but is relatively easy to implement compared to the Custody API due to the small number of changes. Only the authentication is a breaking change. Everything else can be used as before.

We expect to publish a first release candidate at the beginning of March and start a public 4-week test phase, during which all functionalities will already be available, but only sandbox workspaces can be created. Meanwhile, we will make final optimizations and correct any possible bugs. The official go-live, including the productive environments, is planned for the end of March.

So if you're interested in joining our 4-week testing phase, please reach out to support@tangany.com.