What is a Smart Contract ABI anyways? — A guide to understand client-blockchain communication
As you step into Smart Contract development for EVM-compatible chains such as Ethereum or Binance Smart Chain, one of the most difficult tasks to do is getting familiar with how things actually work, and while researching, one of the worst explained concepts and that carries a lot of questions are the Smart Contract’s ABIs.
This section is almost never explained because the fun thing is to create Smart Contracts in Solidity or to use Web3.js to connect an interface to it, but there’s a great reason for it to exist.
For Smart Contract and DApps development things are usually different from the well-known and hardly used client-server model, right? There are no API and database models. Also, you don’t have anywhere to call with a fetch call, isn’t it?
All you have to do is instantiate a Smart Contract using Web3 (or any equivalent) like this:
const Contract = require('web3-eth-contract');Contract.setProvider('http://localhost:8546');
const contract = new Contract(abi, address);
contract.methods.somFunc().send({from: ....})
Well, turns out things are not exactly the same, but, once you understood its principles, is more familiar than what you might think, and…
