What is Blockscout and why is it a public good?
Blockscout is an open-source explorer serving the Ethereum community. Blockscout has been active since 2018 and has made considerable improvements to the product over the past 1 1/2 years to support the vast array of chains entering the ecosytem. Any project can fork Blockscout and use it as a block explorer for their network free of charge. This includes optimistic rollups, zk rollups, L3s, Bitcoin L2s, appchains - all shapes and sizes of EVM-compatible chain.
Blockscout runs Ethereum instances as a public good (including Mainnet , Sepolia and Holesky) without ongoing compensation. This is paramount for transparency and redundancy and provides many useful tools for developers (APIs, contract verification) as well as transaction tracking capabilities for the blockchain public.
Paid hosting services are offered for networks who want to offload archive node and explorer hosting, customizations, maintenance and upgrades to our team of experts and optimized infrastructure. At any given time projects who choose the EaaS or RaaS services may have access to alpha features in development (such as an advanced admin panel and transaction interpreter). However, once new features are thoroughly tested they are released to the open-source community for unlimited use. Currently, all features that have undergone the required QA process are available to the public.
Primary funding sources
Grant funding, user support and donations, and our EaaS offering are our primary revenue sources.
These include previous grants with approximate funding amounts from the EthPrize Foundation (250K), the Ethereum Foundation (80K), Gitcoin (80K), Optimism RetroPGF (265 OP), ETC DAO (50K), Gnosis DAO (300K), and many projects who we’ve collaborated with to provide EaaS and/or development services.
Any additional funding we receive from this campaign will go towards defraying infrastructure costs for our public goods instances and developing new features to support open-source exploration.
Project milestones and roadmap
We have achieved many milestones in the past year, notably a large push towards feature parity with Etherscan, support for all EIPs (including 4844), a standalone smart contract verification service, major UI upgrades and major performance optimizations. We will continue developing features as required and requested to support developers and blockchain users.
We are working on a more defined roadmap for the remainder of the year which will be published soon and include items such as: Account Abstraction (AA) support, Advanced ENS support, Admin panel improvements for projects, Additional DA support ( EigenDA, Celestia), DAppscout marketplace upgrades and more developer tooling additions and improvements.
Our current roadmap is available here: Roadmap | Blockscout
Additional Projects
We are also founding members of the Verifier Alliance, an ecosystem collective aiming for easy, unified, and open access to the source-code of EVM smart contracts. We are committed to continued growth of this collective to provide universal smart contract transparency and availability. Learn more.
Blockscout team:
- 25+ Developers & Researchers: Our team is heavily focused on development and research and is primarily made up of developers working to support new features (like DA, AA, all EIPs etc). Please see our github for more insights into this amazing group of builders.
In addition, Blockscout’s team includes the following individuals:
- Igor Barinov, Founder: Igor has been implementing novel solutions for Ethereum-based projects for the past 8+ years. He’s led devops and strategy for multiple organizations and is currently focused on multi-chain functionality and post-merge implications for data exploration.
- Ulyana Skladchikova, Head of Product: With a background in software development and blockchain technology, Ulyana manages all aspects of the Blockscout ecosystem to prioritize features, create a streamlined workflow, and ensure timely delivery.
- Victor Baranov, Principal Architect: Victor has been the principal architect on Blockscout for more than 5 years. He manages the core development team and leads all development efforts.
- Kirill Fedoseev, Head of Research: Kirill is responsible for researching new features and implementing novel design mechanisms as they relate to specific chain requirements (ie zk, DA etc).
- Tatyana Gladilina, Head of Design: Tatyana is the lead designer for Blockscout. She is currently working on an updated UI, designed from the ground up to greatly improve the user experience and create a clean, modern interface.
- Mike Krupin, DAppscout senior product manager: Mike is in charge of growing the new DAppscout marketplace, a comprehensive platform within Blockscout for viewing and interacting with on-chain applications.
- Andrew Gross, Head of Technical Comms: Andrew oversees technical documentation for Blockscout and heads the technical marketing and content creation teams.
- Mojmir Racak, Head of Business Development: Mojmir interfaces with projects and the community to coordinate teams, educate users and bring on new networks. He is the primary point of contact for questions and concerns and the go-to resource for all things Blockscout.
Social Credibility (development progress, awards, notable GitHub commits, referrals)
Blockscout is used by nearly 600 networks that we are aware of. We constantly find new instances in the wild and are the go-to explorer for RaaS providers including Conduit, Gelato, Caldera, Altlayer and more. Current list of known networks
The importance of open-source explorers
Public blockchains are decentralized and available to everyone, and blockchain data access and tooling should also meet this standard! Blockchain explorers are not meant to be siloed in gated, closed-source environments, but transparent and available to all. They are meant to serve vital information quickly and effectively, be auditable and customizable by the community, and provide much needed infrastructure redundancy when required. Just like we need multiple clients for Ethereum, we need multiple explorers and tooling diversity for the Ethereum ecosystem. If one goes down or contains inaccuracies, others are there to step in and support.
We appreciate your support of this and other vital infrastructure for a decentralized future!!
Project Llinks
- Twitter: x.com
- Github: Blockscout · GitHub
- Discord: Blockscout - Discord Contact (.mojmir)
- Website: https://www.blockscout.com/
providing a short-term update here as we provided a similar one in August in anticipation of Epoch 5 (though the project was not selected for the round, the updates remain applicable). Our focus still remains on building out a multichain explorer which we are making slow progress on already. Funding from the Octant community would help us radically speed up the process and add additional features as well.