GetBlock – Blockchain Explorer for Harmony

Web3 Bounties
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Name of Project: GetBlock

Application type: Product Launch

Proposal overview

The GetBlock team would like to apply for the Harmony Grant to:

  • Deploy a custom block explorer designed for the Harmony blockchain.
  • Maintain and update the Harmony blockchain explorer in accordance with further developments.

Project Overview

GetBlock.io, a service that provides instant API connection to full nodes from many leading blockchain platforms, started its operations in 2019. The mission of the GetBlock project is to ensure cost-effective tools and infrastructure that will help enterprises and individual developers to build high-quality blockchain applications faster.

GetBlock is among the leaders of the Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) segment: its instruments are utilized daily by thousands of users worldwide. Their clients can get their wallets, DEXs, bots, games to 40+ blockchains via an intuitive API-powered dashboard.

Besides providing access to shared and dedicated nodes, GetBlock can empower businesses with other products, like custom development services for enterprises and startups or raw data for certain top blockchains. Also, the GetBlock team can create a customized explorer for every blockchain and dApp.

Motivation/Rationale

A blockchain explorer allows users to view the information contained in any block in the chain, from the genesis block all the way up to the most recently created block. It can be used to check transactions from any address, look at transaction history, and view and verify the contents of smart contracts. Block explorers are essential for blockchains because they allow users to navigate through a complex field of information that is unreadable in its raw form.

GetBlock will build a multi-chain block explorer that combines the most popular cryptocurrencies. Harmony will become one of the first projects that will have a block explorer built and promoted by the team.

Harmony Block Explorer by GetBlock will provide similar functionality to Etherscan (the most widely used block explorer in the Ethereum community), along with an improved user interface so that anyone can understand what information is being displayed. It will be built with a minimalistic design along with intuitive features with a comprehensive result of anything that is searched.

The real-time UI will provide updates as they happen on the chain. Actual information on balances, blocks, transactions, mempool size and so on will be displayed by interactive tables and schemes and can be easily analyzed.

The blockchain explorer will be powered by GetBlock nodes, which guarantees accurate and actual data.

Roadmap

The roadmap is split into three milestones and it takes about 5 months to complete the block explorer MVP. It can take up to 1-2 additional months for organisational moments and discussions.

Roadmap (Harmony)
Roadmap (Harmony)8187×1954 501 KB

Milestone 1 (2 months):

  • Researching the Harmony node API and documentation. Architecture planning;
  • Determining basic and extended data sets. Selection of tools for data processing;
  • Deployment of a cluster with an archive node;
  • Deployment of additional services, such as Cassandra, Nats, Redis, Clickhouse;
  • Preparation of mockups for frontend;
  • Planning and creation of tables in databases;
  • Building a service for data aggregation;
  • Interface prototyping;
  • Development of design layouts;
  • Layout.

Milestone 2 (2 months):

  • Development of services for parsing initial data from a node and loading it into a database;
  • API development for frontend;
  • Development and configuration of policies for autoscaling;
  • Configuration of applications included in the system;
  • Active testing of all system components;
  • Layout.

Milestone 3 (1 month):

  • Bug fixing;
  • Optimisation.

Team

The project team consists of:

  • DevOps department (2 developers)
  • BackEnd department (2 developers)
  • FrontEnd department (2 developers)
  • Design department (1 designer)
  • Administrative department (2 PM and 1 PO)

We are unable to disclose the names of our employees due to the NDA.

Proposal ask

50K in USD for deployment, operation and maintenance of the blockchain explorer for Harmony, including machine costs and human resources. GetBlock will continuously support the operation, maintenance and upgrade of the Harmony Blockchain Explorer.

Metrics for success

The launch of the blockchain explorer for Harmony will provide users with accurate and actual data contained in any block in the chain.

External links

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Thank you for submitting a proposal to Harmony’s $300M Ecosystem Fund. Assigning @giv to be your representative on behalf of the Grants committee. We are in the process of reviewing your proposal.

If you have more details to add, please do so by replying to this thread. We would also love :blue_heart: to have the Harmony community participate to ask questions and provide feedbacks.

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Hello @Jacksteroo and thank you for the reply!

I would be glad to communicate with @giv regarding our block explorer proposal. We will be able to show you more detailed information on the development process, although we prefer to do it via PM.

Also, if you need any special features to be implemented, please, let me know, we are open to discuss any proposals and work on the things that can empower the Harmony ecosystem together :raised_hands:

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please have a look at tronscan… as most people take etherscan as the industry leading explorer… I strongly believe that the Tron version is cleaner, more sophisticated and richer in information. Would be an amazing upgrade in comparison to our current (shitty) explorer.

just my 2 cents

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Sure, we will take a look at it, thank you :ok_hand:

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@Olivia_Kenney thank you for this proposal and I can confirm the community is excited and eager for a new explorer. There is some risk involved here given the length of this roadmap. Additionally, this product does not yet exist but given GetBlock’s existing foundation, I’m sure your team will deliver great results.

Given there are several months of development work required here, I’d like to treat this as a bounty and break up the payouts to match your 3 milestones:

$10k completion of milestone 1
$10k completion of milestone 2
$30k completion of milestone 3

How does that sound?

I understand you are working on a similar solution for another chain. Are there any early design mockups that you can share?

One of the main asks from the developer community has been the need for an Etherscan-like API. Is this on the roadmap? You have mentioned “API-powered dashboard” but I wanted to learn if this will be available to developers also. e.g. see Blockscout APIs.

Finally, even though Harmony is an EVM-compatible blockchain, there are a few differences that should be supported by the explorer. Sharding, staking, and toggle for one1... formatted addresses are currently included in the Harmony Explorer.

Thanks and I look forward to hearing from you.

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Given that Harmony needs a better explorer yesterday but it already has (somewhat) functioning explorer, and I can only imagine building a new explorer from scratch, even by best devs, is tremendous undertaking, I don’t see how this viable proposition.

If the team can show a product they already have, that’d be different story but they will have really hard time competing on current market seeing as their product is only on paper atm. If Harmony wants to support it nonetheless, it’s separate topic, but if so, I’d put it into research budget rather than launches within grants.

The options for Harmony to explore (sic) as far as explorer goes:

  • etherscan (problems)
  • tronscan
  • blockscout
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There’s definitely room for multiple block explorers on Harmony and users can use the ones they prefer.

As I’ve mentioned previously, the Etherscan team is not available to support Harmony anytime soon. We are working with the Blockscout team to run a hosted instance for us. We have also hired 2 dedicated developers to continue improving the current Harmony Explorer. Additionally, we are working on plans to create an Explorer DAO and give control of that product to the community. We have not looked into Tronscan but I will investigate, thanks!

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We agree with @giv there is room for multiple Explorers and we think definetly GetBlock product looks really promising. Will be fantastic to have multiple sources with different information / features to expand the truth on Harmony, that’s for everyone best interest!

Also we agree with @Sbae that even having multiple private solutions, the Harmony community has to guarantee itself a first-class Explorer that it’s open source and available for everyone. It’s important to avoid an escenario where a private solution is down or not interested in maintaining the service for business reasons and it leaves the community without any Explorer, being the main and most used source of truth.

From Peersyst we are working in a detailed roadmap on how to update , maintain and expand the actual software to a first-class Explorer in the Explorer DAO!

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Hello everyone!
I’m Alex - product manager at Getblock.io

Thank you for considering our proposal regarding the development of Harmony explorer. I want to answer a few questions above.

  1. We are interested in developing the Etherscan-like API, but for this we need to make sure that no legal norms will be violated. I also want to say that the development of API for developers is not included in the first 3 milestones. The development of the API and the addition of HRC20, HRC721 and HRC1155 tokens will be implemented later and will not be displayed on the current roadmap.
  2. We understand the difference in blockchains and will definitely take it into account. These differences exist in every blockchain and it is almost impossible to create a completely universal product, but this is not required.

Creating an Explorer DAO 1 is a great idea, but in order to avoid misunderstandings, I want to voice our position. We are developing a commercial explorer that will be part of the Getblock multichain explorer. We reserve the overall vision for the development and monetization of the product, while fulfilling all our obligations on which we will agree with you.

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Thank you @Alex_Hutton and @Olivia_Kenney for this proposal. It has been approved and we look forward to seeing the project take off :tada: Please keep us and the community updated on your progress by posting regular updates here.

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Thank you so much for your support!

We will start working on the project as soon as possible and will be glad to share the results with you and the Harmony community :raised_hands:

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funded: 0x4b85edf25a641f513fbe5568993828d3038220689b44060b3a5090be19ff014f

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Hello! I am glad to let you know that the first milestone has been reached.

Details of Milestone 1:

  • Researching the Harmony node API and documentation. Architecture planning;
  • Determining basic and extended data sets. Selection of tools for data processing;
  • Deployment of a cluster with an archive node;
  • Deployment of additional services, such as Cassandra, Nats, Redis, Clickhouse;
  • Preparation of mockups for frontend;
  • Planning and creation of tables in databases;
  • Building a service for data aggregation;
  • Interface prototyping;
  • Development of design layouts;
  • Layout.
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Funded: 0x990f89ca0d68401691c2220c70cba8431053f5e8d159f5f22f4381ba64d38410

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The second milestone to be reached (ETA - 1 month):

  • Transactions list
  • Transaction page
  • Accounts page
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The second milestone has been reached.
We have released the account pages and dashboard. We will be running tests and fixing bugs soon.

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