Envisioning tomorrow: Evolution of blockchain explorers

Transcript

[Music] uh hi everyone my name is Eliana and I'm a product manager at blog Scout uh blog Scout is an open source blockchain Explorer and today we're going to talk about blockchain explorers and how they evolve with the increasing needs of web3 users so blockchains are designed to be transparent and you have access to all the information about any transaction and however there is no information that is sometimes um however there is so much information that sometimes it's really difficult to um

find what you're looking for and sometimes you don't even know what you're looking for and this problem is not new actually look at what happened to the internet for example we thought that Wikipedia Global connectivity and Google would end era of illiteracy and everyone would be able to get a degree online and everyone will get knowledge of every information available for the humans and yet by now we see the rise of Flat Earth series anti-vaxxer movements and conspiracy theories of all kinds uh but get let's get back to the blockchain explorers and ask ourselves why do we even need them uh so blockchains are designed to be

transparent uh but raw blockchain data is often difficult to understand and blockchain explorers make it easier for the users to view and verify transactions addresses and any other data on the blockchain next blockchain continuously generate new data and access to that data is critical to Traders investors and developers who must monitor in the real-time what is going on in the blockchains and their in the applications next blockchain explorers allow users to search for specific transactions addresses or blocks making it simple to track and analyze blockchain activity and last but not least the security blockchain explorers can

actually enhance the security or by providing information on all budgets involved in the transaction so blockchain data is complex and requires a lot of technical knowledge just see here you can see the transaction receipt which is really hard to understand and even read so when we build blockchain explorers it's not just a problem of availability of information we need to solve it's what is the right amount of information and what is the right information we need to show thankfully over time explorers have evolved a lot in terms of U.S experience

known usability heuristics and approaches have been implemented to allow users to easily find and explore specific data in the blockchain blockchain Explorers now organize all the information in a way that makes it easier for users to find what they need here your concerned script screenshot from blockchain and you can see that all the necessary fields are grouped together and it's really simple to focus on something specific in addition to that data became more graphical graphs charts and other images are now used to make complex data easier to understand and more user-friendly here you can see a screenshot from the

feature we've built in blog Scout that helps to visualize what's going on in specific transaction you can see the path of the tokens within the uni swap swap operation and a lot of explorers have that as well makes it really easy to see the token flows comparing to what you can usually see in the token transfers in the block Explorer tab a lot of information has been simplified for example transaction actions were added in many explorers the better match what user did in the protocol with what is shown in the Explorer uh in the first screenshot you can see how it looked

before now you can just easily understand what a user actually did in the protocol here someone added liquidity in lighter tokens to unit swap with 3 and nft token that represents this position was minted instead of that before that it was really hard to understand the outcome of the transaction you could see the data but you didn't know what happened eventually but at the same time explorers become more and more complex in terms of functionality they started offering additional data analysis tools Bridges contract verification in build depth and much more here you can see the

screenshot from zappar XYZ and you can see that they have swap they have Bridge they have nft tools defy tools and even you can explore dials here however the core function of blockchain explorers remain the same and that is ability to discover relevant blockchain data and show it user in the user-friendly form and just as we see in the evolution of search engines the same is happening in the realm of blockchains the first generation of search engines as you all know such as Altavista and Yahoo were information retrieval engines and this means that they provided basic websites website indexing based on

keywords submitted by the users but later Google completely changed the game by introducing page ranking they used an algorithm to decide which websites were most relevant based on things like how often who has appeared and how many other sites linked to them and this new way of doing things meant that search engines stopped just giving you a list of websites and started giving you a list of websites that might actually have the answers you were looking for and currently we are witnessing the emergence of generative engines mostly in the form of AI assistance where search engines not only look up relevant answers but also

generate information on user requests and exactly the same is happening with blockchain explorers we first went from unranked research results to the outputs enriched by ranking reputation and other metadata with explorers now delivering much more relevant results here you can see in the first screenshot user was probably looking for Punk nft and we can assume that he was looking for the original Punk nft contract or specific token but instead blockchain Explorer gave him a list of tokens with Punk naming it not really valuable in the second screenshot we've added the

ranking to the search and user was able to find the die token based on the market cap and we assume that this is the most relevant result and now Technologies like Ai and machine learning have begun to play a big role in the evolution of the explorers and the complexity of blockchain networks grows and the use of this Technologies become even more crucial AI powered explorers Now understand user questions written in just everyday language it makes possible for users to search for blockchain data using just words and entities and phrases they already know

uh AI helps to analyze a lot of blockchain data and summarize complex data and AI can actually help to find some patterns and Trends in blockchain data and explorers now can show useful insights and analytics with users and they even can spot any unusual activity on the Chain which makes security and fraud detection button in this screenshot you can see the air stack this is a web 3 developer platform that provides apis and integrates a lot of chain and on-chain data they recently

introduced AI assistant you can just write your search query in a natural everyday language like you can ask AI assistant to find all Pops that are owned by vitalik and it will convert that query into API call and show you the results in this screenshot we played a bit with charge GPT on the transaction receipt and managed to go even further with the transaction actions converting the structured answer to the just simple explanation what happened in that transaction it works out of the box and we can integrate that already into the

blockchain Explorers etherscan recently announce the AI code reader that helps to um understand what's going on in a specific smart contract it and even chat with that and we at blog Scout continue building as well we just recently launched a Blog Scout portal which is a multifunctional homepage for any evm chain it's open source and evm chain can set it up and we are planning to add AI tooling to the UI as well and in a way that it is available for the evm chains to use not only for the mainnet instance that we

host but also for any other chain that will use blocks code uh and yeah if you have any questions you can follow ask me in Telegram and I will have some time for the questions as well unfortunately we don't have time for questions okay just use Telegram [Music]