“Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no man has gone before!”

Photo from https://airandspace.si.edu/file/54082

Growing up as a kid in the late 80’s, one of my favorite pastimes used to be watching old re-runs of Star Trek on our family’s 14 inch CRT television set. The gist of this early TV series revolved around the interstellar adventures of Captain James T. Kirk and his crew aboard the starship USS Enterprise.

For us (etherscanners), inspired by the early stories of space travel in a lot of ways exploring the Blockchain is like exploring deep space. To fit in this context, each Blockchain platform is analogous to its own solar system and the dc/Apps* within these systems are like the planets that orbit the sun. And different Blockchains out there are like the other solar systems that make up our Milky way. And in the context of space exploration, block explorers are like star ships and one of their core missions is to log their journey and to report back their findings to the home planet.

At Etherscan one of our core goals was to explore, log and make available all transactions on the Ethereum blockchain to users in way that had the least amount of friction. The least amount of friction here means that the information provided should be done in a way which does not require downloading a special app, gigabytes of data, require a special browser, access to your private keys or that you had be a techie/geek to operate. Nor should it require users to purchase/participate in an ICO in order to acquire custom ERC20 tokens which would then allow access to premium content. Instead, all one should need is a standard web browser to access this content for free.

But more than that, it was important for us that the information we curated was provided on an equal access basis to all users within the Ethereum ecosystem. Which is why you will find that till this day, we do not offer a premium content service because we believe that everyone should have equal access to information on the Ethereum blockchain and not only because you can afford it or that you were part of an elite group.

So when we were building an explorer for Ethereum in the beginning of 2015, we looked at the various options on how to technically structure the product, store this data, allow access to content in a way that was fast, secure, seamless and offered the least amount of friction for regular users. But at the same time, to also build an economically sustainable product that would allow us to continue our quest for blockchain exploration. Etherscan was built on these founding principles.

Monetization

From an economic viewpoint, at the moment we make money by placing small sponsored links (which are clearly marked as such) on the site. While monetisation through advertisements might not look like an ideal strategy for the decentralized economy, it is important to remember that a lot of the distributed infrastructure we use today was built from advertisement revenue.

And from a friction and equal access view point, advertisements allow a friction-less way to access content while providing equitable access (the more content you consume the more ads (pain) you see and feel). It does not discriminate one over the other. All users are treated equally.

Having said that, we do strongly value data privacy and security. As such while browsing the Mainnet site :

We do try our best to filter out advertisers so that the obvious (i.e Free Ether) scams are not part of these. And at the same time we have a zero tracking policy (no invisible tracker gifs) for all adverts placed on the site. Advertisers have zero access to your data such as IP, demographics or even impressions on the site. We do not use 3rd party publishing systems due to potential data leakage but have instead created our own internal systems to minimize any potential data leakage. No off chain user data is (ever) sold to anyone.

We have often been asked, why not run affiliate links instead ? (i.e links to hardware wallets, digital asset exchanges, etc) which can be extremely profitable. The sole reason I have refused to do this is because unlike adverts this is a zero sum game.

Affiliates cannot be paid twice for the same sale vs. advert impressions where both parties can be paid for seeing the same ad multiple times. Running the same affiliate links which other essential infrastructure providers (i.e MyCrypto, Mew, Metamask, wallets, etc) rely on as their revenue stream will be akin to taking away money from projects that need these funds to offset their own operating expenses.

Community Involvement

Explorers play a critical role for providing Blockchain transparency. And we do this by best trying to remain impartial. Which is why you will notice that we rarely make any public statements or tweets outside of product announcements but instead focus on providing provable curated information.

However, often at times this same lack of public interaction can be misconstrued as a lack of community involvement. I would like to assure you that nothing concerns us more than the well being of the Ethereum Blockchain and its ecosystem.

We continue to work behind scenes lending support where we have been called to assist, making connections, providing support to users who might have general questions through our free ticketing system, tagging phishing scams, providing free public API data points, hosting 3 free public Testnets explorers (and API) and advocating the use of Ethereum.

Decentralization — The new Yin-Yang

One of the reasons, that i was attracted to Blockchain technology in the middle of 2011 was because of its aspects of political decentralization (no one controls them) and the permission less structure (no one needs to be an approved actor).

The merits of these qualities extend beyond just politics and consensus in that it allows individuals/organizations/companies to act in a decentralized manner (regardless of their technical architecture — open or closed) without coercion or control. Decentralization is more than just running free open source software but also in thought, actions and deliverables.

At the same time i also believe in the concept of Yin & Yang (in that two halves together complete the wholeness) and that too much of a good thing is a bad thing. There are many aspects of today’s world that can be further improved through decentralization to name a few— trust, accountability, governance and finance.

But at the same time it’s important not to forget that modern society was built on centralized structures and as much as we might want to rid the world of all centralized entities today, i strongly feel that a more sustainable approach is a system of checks and balances. It is one where centralized and decentralized systems can coexists, and are instead adopted to keep in check the different stakeholders for a more balanced ecosystem.

Moving Forward

At Etherscan we will continue to keep our heads down while #BUIDling humbly. Over the next few months we will also be working on new open source low friction tools that will allow end users to independently check and verify transactions on the Ethereum Blockchain.

And lastly, we want to take this opportunity to thank the community for the support that we have received. We want you to know that we are here to stay regardless of whether Ethereum is priced at a $1 (as when we first started this project) or $10k** (in 5 years time or so) and that we will continue pushing forward in hopes that we can play our part, no matter how small it may be, towards building and making a positive change.

Signing off…. and in the words of Mr. Spock “Live Long and Prosper”.

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Glossary:

* dc/Apps = Decentralized/Centralized Blockchain Apps

Disclaimer:

** Price prediction is not financial advice