# BlockScout - The Ethereum Explorer by Andrew Cravenho (Devcon4) - Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon) - Date: 2019-10-09 - Duration: 06:26 - Topics: blockchain, smart contracts, distributed ledger, Science & Technology - Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-jxJopRj5LzQ - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxJopRj5LzQ ## Description Visit the https://archive.devcon.org/ to gain access to the entire library of Devcon talks with the ease of filtering, playlists, personalized suggestions, decentralized access on IPFS and more. https://archive.devcon.org/archive/watch/4/blockscout-the-ethereum-explorer Etherscan is a block explorer used and loved by many of us. One of the core features of Ethereum is the ability to verify, view, and interact with smart contracts through Etherscan. The problem is that this functionality is mostly closed source and end users have to trust a single entity that this information is valid.With the help of EthPrize (http://ethprize.io/) and the Ethereum Foundation, POA Network has been building an Open Source EVM block explorer to solve this issue. Our v1 release will take place very and soon and we would love the opportunity to show developers and the Ethereum community that there is another option other than Etherscan. Along with the standard blocks, transactions, internal transactions, tokens, and logs, our v1 release will include contract verification, contract read and write functionality, and exportable smart contracts for further verification from developers. Our plan is to support Ethereum, Kovan, Rinkeby, Ropsten, POA Network, and Sokol testnet in our first release. We've had the great opportunity to work with many developers in the space to build an open and accessible block explorer for the Ethereum community. Here is more info on the project: https://github.com/poanetwork/poa-explorer Speaker(s): Andrew Cravenho Skill level: Intermediate Track: Developer Infrastructure Keywords: POA, search Follow us: https://twitter.com/efdevcon, https://twitter.com/ethereum Learn more about devcon: https://www.devcon.org/ Learn more about ethereum: https://ethereum.org/ Devcon is the Ethereum conference for developers, researchers, thinkers, and makers. Devcon 4 was held in Prague, Czech Republic on Oct 30 - Nov 2, 2018. Devcon is organized and presented by the Ethereum Foundation, with the support of our sponsors. To find out more, please visit https://ethereum.foundation/ ## Transcript Hello everyone, I'm Andrew Cravino from POA Network. I'll talk about an app we're developing called BlockScout. BlockScout is an open source blockchain BlockScout is an open source blockchain explorer for EVM . It is currently available on blockscout.com. If you would like to contribute to the project, you can do so at github.com/poanetwork/blockscout. So, we currently support eight networks. The most important of these is the Ethereum mainnet. We also support three Ethereum testnets: Kovan, Ropsten, and Rinkeby. Rinkeby will be operational early next week. We had to make some adjustments there. We also support Ethereum Classic, POA Core, POA Sokol, and xDai Chain—one of our hardspuns of the Ethereum mainnet. We support Parity, Geth, and Ganache. We are working on internal transactions for Geth, so this should be up and running by the end of next week. So, why did we create BlockScout? As a sidechain, we do not have access to Etherscan. Everyone knows and loves Etherscan. So we needed to change that. We support sidechain forks, private networks, and we wanted to give users of the Ethereum ecosystem the ability to run their own full-featured blockchain browser connected to their node so they can check their address balances. We considered this very important for decentralization. Here are some of the features of BlockScout. You have the typical blocks, transactions, everything you would expect from a regular blockchain regular blockchain browser. The fun begins when it comes to reorganizing the blocks reorganizing the blocks . We have support for ERC-20 and ERC-721 tokens. We have a contract verification function. You will also be able to query these verified smart verified smart contracts directly from BlockScout. Real-time API. So, we have a RESTful API compatible with Etherscan. So you can migrate your application from the Etherscan API to BlockScout if you wish. And what's really exciting is that yesterday we added GraphQL support to the master branch. These are several GraphQL API endpoints that also include webhooks. We will also be building out this functionality over the next few weeks. For our development stack, we use Elixir on an Erlang virtual machine with a Postgres database. Erlang is great for building fault-tolerant systems. Other applications that use Erlang include WhatsApp and Heroku. Therefore, we considered it a great choice for BlockScout. I want to talk a little about where we are going and what we are doing now. We launched BlockScout just a few weeks ago. So, we are still indexing the Ethereum mainnet and want to provide a better user experience, such as faster page loading and faster indexing times. When a block is mined, we want it to be immediately available and imported into BlockScout. So we are working on it. A big part of the problem now is that we are actually carrying out a DDoS are actually carrying out a DDoS attack on our own node. Therefore, we are building more nodes on the backend so that we can work more intensively. Our performance has dropped by 90% because we are constantly overloading our node with all the data from the mainnet. So we're working on that right now. Regarding our indexer, we have received many requests from users to identify a set of blocks on any EVM network and index only those. This is useful for analyzing certain data sets. Also, our best engineer is working on geth's internal transactions. So , this should be available by the end of next week. And, as I mentioned earlier, we are working on accelerating indexing. BlockScout has many customizable features, but if you are not familiar with the application not familiar with the application , it can be difficult to find in the files where these settings are located. So we create an admin panel. In fact, the admin panel is already ready, but over the next few weeks we will add all these configuration options: for example, when deploying BlockScout, you will be able to change the CSS colors, logo, and also configure the amount of memory the application will use. It will simply reduce reduce any processes that are too large. This is just a small part of the available configuration options that you can change. We will also offer data export, so you can download your transactions, tokens, coins, and token balance history. So token balance history. So , soon you will be able to do this in CSV format. Another thing that excites us is our GraphQL. We think it will be great for the Ethereum ecosystem to be able to use webhooks and other types of endpoints, and to use our data to build great applications. We will also continue to develop around ERC-721 data attributes so that users can better analyze non-fungible ERC-721 tokens directly on the blockchain. And finally, now we're working on, um, internal, sorry, input data and logs, um, decoding them, um, using the ABI contract. So, this should be completed by the end of next week. But I also want to thank Eth Prize for both their financial contribution and their community support. If you have any questions, I will be around after the speech and will be happy to answer them. Thank you.