I really wish APIs were as just having a free tier that you can just use, and if you want more, just POST $10 worth of Solana to some endpoint and the API gives your IP 10000 more requests. No accounts, no keys, just simple.
I'm not a cryptocurrency fanatic but making APIs easier to access is one really good use case for it. It makes paying for an API as easy as paying for a lemonade at a street stand with cash. No accounts, no billing addresses, no subscriptions, just POST over a nickel along with your API request and get a response, and API owner gets paid.
IP-based requests seems very restrictive. I'd rather post some sort of payment to an endpoint then get some arbitrary secret back that I could use/save/distribute. Maybe you could choose the mode you wanted though, so if you were confident your IP would remain stable and not be shared with anyone else, you could choose that mode.
- Where there is an "API key" and a "secret key" when in reality the idiot maintainers could have just concatenated the two and called it a "key". The customer doesn't need to know the abstraction on the server side
- Where one needs to create an "account" and then a "project" before one can even create a "key". WTF is a project
- Where one needs to do a dumb SMS 2FA to even get an API key
- Where one needs to do multiple steps and try/except blocks to get a result in a plain format