# W3P: Helium for API access

By [Corbin Page](https://paragraph.com/@corbin) · 2022-09-12

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Let’s say you wanted to make an alternative UI to Twitter without them being able to cut off your developer API access. Instead of calling the API directly, you called a middleware service that rotated the API key with each request so you could still get access to all public data without a single point of failure. Private data and write endpoints aren’t supported. You pay a small amount of tokens per request.

On the other side of the market, anyone could sign up for a Twitter API key, “stake it” in a web app, and start earning tokens to their wallet. Alternatively, they can install a Chrome extension that does the same thing with your in-browser auth token.

It’s a protocol where anyone can run these API relay gateways or contribute their API key to help break the Big Data corporate silos! 💪

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_Web3 Pitches (W3P) are short product write-ups that describe an emerging problem or opportunity in the Web3 space and proposes a minimal-viable solution that could be tested and iterated with users. The pitches are presented in_ [_screenshot essay form_](https://www.screenshotessays.com/)_, which is meant to be short enough to be consumed on one page of a mobile screen. :-)_

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*Originally published on [Corbin Page](https://paragraph.com/@corbin/w3p-helium-for-api-access)*