TXain: Discover the Next Generation of Blockchain Exploration
Devcon 7 · 13 Nov 2024 · 7:08
Daniel and Joan Baylina present TXain, a blockchain explorer for Ethereum, at Devcon 7. A block explorer is a public tool for browsing a chain's transactions, blocks, and contract activity through indexed onchain data, without needing to run a full node yourself.
Speakers
Topics
From Devcon 7, hosted by Ethereum Foundation.
Transcript
[Music] all right so sorry holy okay good evening you all first of all I would like to thank the Devcon Organization for letting us Host this talk together and I shall start so my name is Daniel I am a
co-founder of chain chain is a it's a company that we decided to do a Blog Explorer as we call as we can all see a bunch of new blockchains are being spawned every day and this number is not slowing but the the but the currently offer for Block explorers is rather limited uh we believe the community needs new actors so that's why we decided to go for it as for today we are live on the ethereum ethereum mayet and and test net and on the polygon zbm and Cardona that it's its test net we support all the basic things that a user or a developer can can possibly uh need such as uh data
from the transactions interacting with verified smart contracts or verifying smart contracts so as you may know uh running a blogpress is not as easy as it seems it's not just connecting to an RPC and showing the data on a beautiful UI it actually involves a lot of interdisciplinary Technologies such as the Big Data uh being the part like the the guy before me H said that he indexed the whole blockchain on 10 hours being being having that available on a on a just a few clicks and on and on a couple of seconds it's very hard that being said let me you let me give you a quick overview of our of our
infrastructure what makes us different so what we pursue is the onboarding of any newer blockchain evm compatible blockchains and as S as simly and as easy as possible for that what we what we have done is that we have extracted all the e all the evm compatible um Cod the the stuff like the blocks the transactions the internal transactions all of this we have extracted on our core module and then we inherit from that and then we we build uh the The Primitives that are needed to index for example for the for the ethereum block we inherit from the base block the base evm compatible block
and then we top it up with specifics for the for the chain in ethereum would be all the consensus info the blobs Etc so that we have it that makes us able to index any newer evm compatible chain in no time this level of flexibility what we is what we believe what gives us an advantage here because we will uh sorry the level this level flexibility is what we believe is necessary for creating the tools that will help to on board new new new users to the blockchain we envision that the solution is to is to develop purpose build explorers more than one Fel solutions that it's what we have
right now different blockchains have different needs and different users therefore their explorers should be different now this is what they currently have now let's talk about the future we are exploring the idea of decentralizing the block Explorer as you may know blockchain technology is all is all about decentralization and trustless yet the irony is that most users get into the into this space using centralized explorers this creates a significant contradiction if we believe in the power of of blockchain and decentralization our tools should align with this centralized explorers are single points
of failure someone could tamper with data in introduce bias and never Sense on transactions what would happen if a main Explorer gets gets hacked and change the Avi of a of a really us smart contract this Reliance this Reliance on centralized party undermines the very values we stand for the blockchain in the blockchain community if our infrastructure is built on trustless then our our tools should reflect that we think the future lies in a decentralized open source and trustless data fits much like how chain link functions as a decentralized data Oracle imagine block exppress that
aggregate information from this from different validators it would be like as as as as chaining does with with some or with all the oracles to come up with a price we envision that the solution needs to grab data from different data sources and aggregate it on a on a one proof remember several races Rose by Oracle manipulation it hasn't happened yet that we had this data manipulation but it's something that can happen and we better be safe than sorry and I would and I will conclude now with my final statement that to truly embrace the blockchain revolution we need to align our tools with its
principles together we can build a future where the Explorers are decentralized transparent and open to all ensuring blockchain data remains a public good for everyone thank you very much all right so let's see we can take questions from the audience do we have any hands raised up no anybody oh we do have a Live question coming in do you have
differentiators from ether scan block Scout y as I said at the beginning uh our our infrastructure and our vision it's what it's different we we believe that the that the future are the are all the chains that are spawning up and being able to respond quickly to their needs is what differentiate that I mean we have a level of of personalization and a level of of um of giving the the the the layout that they that they that they want that our competitors doesn't have