Kek.tools - The Fastest Decentralized Blockchain Explorer - Adding Harmony Support

Funding Proposals Grants
1

Name of Project / DAO / Company

dApp: https://kek.tools
Homepage: https://cryptokek.com
DAO governance is a mix of board upvoting and Snapshot.page token voting.

Application type

Harmony Infrastructure Expansion

Proposal overview

Every great blockchain needs a great data analytics toolset. The intent of this application and the hopeful grant money thereafter is to add support for Harmony Network inside of our dApp. We believe in this way our dapplication would be adding great value to the Harmony ecosystem. We capture blockdata faster than any of our competitors which gives Harmony users a unique advantage.


The More You Know: We use 0 third-party libraries. 0 forks. 0 third party APIs.
100% decentralized, 100% in-house, from scratch, dedicated Infrastructure. ✔️


Stage of product development: Current build is v1.9.2-beta. Version 2.0.0 is a non-beta release.

Active users: On a daily basis, we see about 15,000~ unique users.On a good month about 31,000~ unique daily users. (proofs in reply message)

dApplication Chain Support: Ethereum, Fantom, Avax, Polygon, and hopefully soon Harmony.

Previous Grants: Fantom Foundation, Polygon, and xDai which is now known as Gnosis Chain.

iFrame Chart Integration: We offer a completely free to integrate iframe with many configurable settings to fit your project. One line, copy and paste, charts anywhere on your project. Spookyswap, SpiritSwap, Tx-Street, & SoulSwap all utilize our free charts. (Enable pro modes on SpookySwap and SpiritSwap to see our charts.

iFrame chart support would naturally extend to the Harmony Ecosystem if added.

All iframe sources in reply message below

Marketing Routes: We are more than open to the idea of co-marketing with the Harmony team itself as well as any other projects within the Harmony ecosystem that are interested in our dApp.

Relaunch Plans: We understand the name has been a point of contention for a lot of people. In the near future, we are planning to completely relaunch the project. New homepage, token, name, and so on. Can’t go into too many details. :blush:

Milestones

  • Relaunch completion as mentioned above. Lots of work to be done there.
  • Consistent 1M unique monthly users
  • Harmony Integration :wink:
  • Portfolio Integration
  • Dedicated User Account System
  • Price alerts
  • dApp Gamification
  • Addtional chain support
  • Increase token utility
  • Live roadmap - See source list below.

Where We Need Help:
Marketing for sure. We’ve done practically zero marketing, focusing purely on the tech. We have the mentality of “if you build it, they will come”. That said, we need to spend more time on marketing, expanding chain support as well as token utility. Alas, we are in it for the tech. :nerd_face:

We also need more hands to help with our relaunch. Specifically smart contract development as well as some design stuff.

Team

Our team consists of 9 tightly woven members. Most of which have been working on the project since the inception back in June of 2020. We are a passion-based team that works hard, but also likes to have fun.

Linkedin Profiles + Titles:
Jayco Joerin - Founder & Visionary
Filip Sterba - Co-Founder & Project Ops
Iain Edminster - Lead Frontend Dev
Jeffrey Spencer - Lead Backend Dev
Peter Tiede - Marketing & Community Ops
Amrik Malhans - Backend Dev
Blazo Medenica - Frontend Dev
Sarah Bradford - Business Ops
William Good - Designer

Linkedin sources in reply message.

Proposal ask

$100,000

Justification

Primary cost factor: External Blockchain Node Manager / Ops. Currently, the external company that manages our nodes charges $20k per month to manage existing infrastructure. This cost scales with chains we add.

Secondary cost factor: While our block listeners have been refactored many times to heavily support EVM based chains, there’s still a good amount of leg work that needs to occur to support the Harmony network in our dApp.

To kick things off, the frontend team needs to add the visual side of things. The backend team has to make the necessary listener changes & then sync all historical data (price, liquidity, trades, and so on) from block to our database. Then, that data gets fed to our in-house API (which we built from scratch) which finally gets fed into our dApp. This process takes time, money, and resources to complete.

Additional Cost Factors For each chain we support, we run a primary full archive node and backup archive node. The hardware is top-of-the-line bare-metal servers costing about $250~/m per node. Disk cost expands based upon chaindata size and thus more disk is needed.

External links

Linktree source below.

Thank you for reading our grant application. We hope it finds both the team and community well.
We are excited to add support for Harmony inside of our dApp. :star_struck:

2

Source List 1
15k daily users proof: https://imgur.com/6095d8b5-c294-4172-b389-b034262720af
31k daily user proof: https://i.imgur.com/ZvgNJp9.jpg
iframe source: Cryptokek | Kek.tools | 🐸 Powered
SpookySwap iframe source: SpookySwap

3

Source List 2
SpiritSwap iframe source: SpiritSwap
TxStreet source: Blockchain Transaction Visualizer - TxStreet.com
SoulSwap source: https://exchange.soulswap.finance/en/swap
Live Roadmap source: Cryptokek

4

Source List 3
Jayco Joerin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayco-joerin-5a1b9663/
Filip Sterba: https://www.linkedin.com/in/filipsterba/
Iain Edminster: https://www.linkedin.com/in/iainedminster/
Amrik Mahlhans: Sign Up | LinkedIn

5

Source List 4
Peter Tiede: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peter-tiede-903b82202/
Jeffrey Spencer: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffrey-spencer-448822b8/
Blazo Medenica: https://www.linkedin.com/in/blazo-medenica-5063451a8/
Sarah Bradford: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahebradford/

6

Source List 5
William Good: https://williamsvault.com/
Linktree: Kek.tools | Linktree

1 Like
7

What is the percentage of tokens that the team currently owns?

If relying exclusively on self-funding, how long can this project run for?

8

That’s a fair question. I appreciate you asking.

Our Gnosis multisig vault holds about 28%~ of the total supply which is utilized to pay our contributors. When the project went public back in December of 2020, we reserved 30% of the total supply. We have only burned through a small portion of that nearly 2 years later. Keep in mind that token inflation, aka mint function was destroyed as a result of a community vote.

With all that said, based on our previous token consumption, we have a pretty long runway ahead of us. That also doesn’t account for our token price going up, which I’m betting it will :slight_smile:

9

How is kek tools 1) decentralised and 2) explorer?

I used to use kek a lot on Fantom, then dexscreener came and I haven’t used anything else on any other chain since.

Obviously, competition is good and it’d be nice to see analytics tools that are known in other places expand to Harmony.

I would like however answer to my two questions because I don’t think kek is an explorer (I think of etherscan or blockscout when I hear explorer) and neither do I think kek is decentralised? Unless I am missing something.

10

Great questions.

Probably one of the most underrated aspects of a project in the crypto world is how truly decentralized it is. If you look at our competitors they typically utilize third-party API providers, third-party libraries, and oftentimes you see forked repositories. There are loads of node/api providers such as: Quicknode, Covalvent, Ankr, Getblock, and so on.

Relying on third-party providers is not decentralized. That is a single point of failure.

We’re proud to say that we’ve built all of our infrastructure, both backend, and frontend–completely from scratch. The key difference is that we pull directly from our dedicated bare-metal archive nodes hooked into these different blockchains. That block data is coming straight from the chain itself straight into our application within 1s.

Not many analytics platforms can say they’ve achieved this level of decentralization, much less at the speed we do. Compare the speed at which our trades come in kek.tools versus Dexscreener.

Keep in mind that Dexscreener, as well as Dextools both have some pretty serious data issues.

We are substantially faster because of the reasons I stated prior. We capture block data at the speed of centralized exchanges which have practically no latency as everything is under one roof.

The analogy we like to use is that we’re building horizontally. We’re thinking about the future. Sure, we could build a fancy frontend and point to third-party API providers. Sure, we could add a bunch of new chains (albeit relatively expensive in our case) we’ve chosen to focus on the underlying technology itself. If we received proper funding/grants we could add many other networks.

As far as “block explorer” that’s in the eye of the beholder. We have mutiple tools that let you explore the crypto world to find the latest tokens. Latest pairs page, trending page, most viewed tokens (in sidebar), and we plan to a very unique tool that will let you track and sift through transactions :wink:

11

Did some research and we’d need about 24TB of nvme ssd space in order to have an optimal node. Hoping this grant can get pushed through sometime in the near future.

1 Like
12

Thanks for your proposal, it has been assigned and the team will review and respond shortly :blue_heart:

1 Like
13

We appreciate the response as well as the review. If you guys have any questions, feel free to ask.

On a side note, I wanted to go back and clean up my sources list and insert the hyperlinks directly in the article, however, I believe the edit period has lapsed. Sorry for the sloppy source list.

*Correction on Amrik’s Linkedin profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amrik-malhans-11a150193/

14

Happy Monday! Just circling back to this :slight_smile:

16

  1. I worry that $100K won’t be sustainable as you mentioned $20K/month for running nodes, what’s the estimated breakdown for running Harmony archive nodes? With the current integration of Covalent (for indexing) and Chainstack & Pocket Networks (for RPC availability), how does that reduce the scope and cost?

  2. If there are users facing issues, where do they go to get support, seeing that this is a decentralized group?

  3. How are the response times of the API compare to Paraswap or 1Inch?

  4. For the DAU numbers,
    a. how are you collecting them?
    b. Is it across all the 3rd party integrations (like iFrames) across all chains plus from the main website?
    c. What’s the main chain with the highest number of the users?

  5. This proposal fits best to a Port grant based on the guidelines at Apply for Grants or DAO. Can we set some milestones such as volumes of swaps?

17

So wait, you’re saying that instead of relying on 3rd party’s api and infrastructure you’ve built your own and that’s what makes you decentralised? How does this make sense? I think I am missing common definition of decentralisation here.

Not to mention that you moved the point of failure from 3rd party, like let’s say Ankr to your own. The single point of failure is still there unless redundancy measures are introduced.

Usually outsourcing what is not your core business to someone who’s proficient at it and can scale more is cost beneficial

If you need high end drives to run your platform, I’d also like to see how those will be utilised for Harmony specifically

1 Like
18

Thanks for the questions guys. I’m Jeff, the lead backend engineer at Cryptokek.

@Jacksteroo

  1. See below for more details, but that number is technically incorrect. We currently spend $5000/m for our own nodes and ~$900/m for Ankr. Our in-house nodes are soon to be completely deprecated.

  2. We have a Telegram/Discord channel which pretty much always have at least one team member active. We are also currently building out a chat system which will likely have a dedicated support option.

  3. Significantly faster (for paraswap anyway, haven’t tested 1inch). Pre-cached response times cut more than 50% for a lot of endpoints. We haven’t really focused on an external API yet though, so I’m not sure how comparable this is.

  4. –

  • A: Google Analytics, Algolia(which was also just removed as an unnecessary expense), and our in house tracking.
  • B: Yes, users are tracked across all instances of the app, including iframes.
  • C: We don’t currently track active users based on chain(though we could probably figure it out with the data in analytics…). Though based on views/general activity, Fantom is the most active.
  1. Setting up some milestones wouldn’t be an issue at all for us. We can discuss the specifics of this if you’d like to move forward.

@Sbae

To clarify, we previously utilized our own in-house nodes in an attempt to address the consistent downtime and inaccurate data we were experiencing with third party providers.

We also paid a third party to manage these nodes and handle any necessary scaling moving forward. As our project grew, we quickly realized the cost of these nodes were not sustainable long term, especially as we continue to add new chains to our platform.

Luckily, a lot of the third party providers we used previously had improved their infrastructure dramatically and the previous downtime/data issues had mostly been resolved. So the majority of data is actually currently sourced from Ankr, with our old nodes downgraded and serving as a backup. (reduced to $5000/month for ours, $900month for Ankr). We will be slowly deprecating these older nodes over time.

The word decentralization probably doesn’t fit in this context, though a good portion of the app we are building out right now will have decentralized features. Which may be where the confusion came in. But preventing too many third party dependencies where possible is pretty crucial for us as well.

In regards to your question about high end drives, we would likely also be using Ankr for Harmony.

If you have any additional questions or would like me to expand on any of the above, please don’t hesitate to ask. Thanks again for your time and consideration.

19

@Jacksteroo Hope things are going well! Just wanted to circle back and see if there has been any discussion regarding this?

20

We won’t be moving forward with this grant. Stepping back to look at this, it’s neither decentralized nor an explorer. It’s a trading dashboard and it’s misrepresented. Thank you for choosing Harmony.

1 Like