FAQ

Engine is a server that manages your backend wallets and how they interact with contracts. This difference unlocks capabilities that thirdweb and other web3 SDKs, including:

• Management of KMS backend wallets
• Fine-grained access control with access tokens
• Transaction parallelization to handle higher throughput per wallet
• Observability and retries on stuck transactions
• Webhooks on completed transactions to sync onchain and off-chain activity

Additionally, Engine is built on top of the thirdweb SDK and has the same capabilities.

Yes. Engine has intuitive interfaces to deploy prebuilt contracts, manage smart accounts, run a marketplace, and more.

Yes. Engine can read and write to any EVM contract with low-level API calls, including providing raw calldata. ERC-721 and ERC-1155 APIs can also be used for contracts imported to thirdweb.

Write calls to contracts do not block until they are mined. Instead they enqueue an async job and immediately return a reference to the job called queueId.

Here are three ways to determine when the job is mined:

• Use webhooks to notify your backend when a transaction event occurs.

• Poll the /transaction/status/<queue_id> endpoint.

• Use websockets:

  const socket = new WebSocket(
    "wss://<engine_url>/transaction/status/<queue_id>?token=<session_token>",
  );
  socket.onmessage = (event) => {
    const res = JSON.parse(event.data);
    console.log("Received data:", JSON.parse(res.result));
  };
  

Use Update Chain Configuration to override a chain's settings.

Here's an example snippet to provide your own RPC on Polygon.

Endpoint

POST /configuration/chains

Headers

Content-Type: application/json
Authorization: Bearer <access_token>

Body

[
	{
		"name": "Polygon Mainnet",
		"chain": "Polygon",
		"slug": "polygon",
		"chainId": 137,
		"rpc": ["https://<custom_rpc_url>"],
		"nativeCurrency": {
			"name": "MATIC",
			"symbol": "MATIC",
			"decimals": 18
		}
	}
]

Here are some common troubleshooting tips:

• Ensure the Postgres DB is running in Docker:
  • In same container, ensure the host in the POSTGRES_CONNECTION_URL is set to localhost.
  • In different container, ensure the host in the POSTGRES_CONNECTION_URL is set to host.docker.internal.
• Ensure the Postgres DB connection URL and credentials are correct.
• Ensure the database name exists on the Postgres DB.