Blockchains are like living organisms.

There are tons of people interacting with blockchains. Everyone has their own approach to dealing with it and everyone has their own needs and expectations.

Blockchains perform thousands of tasks diligently every minute. This is predictable in the short-term. But how can we predict the blockchain behavior and reactions on a longer-term timeframe?

We believe well prepared on-chain data is the key to understand the health, risks and growth, as well as to make network-wide predictions.

In this light, Tezos with its innovative on-chain governance mechanism is an exciting protocol to watch, explore and dig into deeper.

With this article we will explain the value proposition and ambitions behind the project TzStats, the first Blockchain Analytics Explorer for Tezos.

Let’s start with a short overview of Tezos itself and point out some of the aspects why we decided to build this tool for Tezos and not any other blockchain.



Why Tezos?

Camel can survive without food and water long period of time. Most mammals would die if they lose 15% of their water, but camel can lose of 20-25% water without becoming dehydrated. (Photo: Zoe Tabary/Thomson Reuters Foundation)

The key value in Tezos is derived by its security, versatility, community, and unique blend between grassroots and institutional participation.

Tezos is initially developed with the needs of the financial industry in mind. It has strong emphasis on robust security and allows the automated verification of code.

Tezos' on-chain governance enables a predictable and streamlined evolution of the protocol. There is a clear structure and incentives model for all decisions made.

Tezos has overcome a lot of hurdles and legal issues with the power and unity of its worldwide community. In addition, the Tezos Foundation’s mission is to empower the Tezos community globally and to secure the long-term growth of the ecosystem.

Tezos allows true grassroots participation. Anyone can participate without having to ask for permission. The entry barrier to run a baking node is relatively low and even without the required funds, it is easy for anyone to delegate and participate in making governance decisions. A lot of baking services even allow their delegators to signal their votes directly.

What is TzStats?

TzStats is the first Blockchain Analytics Explorer for Tezos.

The platform offers all the functionalities of traditional block explorers and adds extra emphasis on analytics to gain deeper insight into what is happening on the blockchain.

We will display live and historic data and allow users to view current network status, health as well as consensus and governance related issues.

Global metrics will display and visualize supplies, delegations, consensus activity, account growth, balance distribution and centralization.

Graphs will be easy to read and interactive to click and allow exploration.

As Cycles play an important role for staking and governance, we plan to visualize these complex relations for better understanding.

TzStats will be an open-source community-driven project. It is designed to be easy for anyone to submit requests, feedback, or to get involved directly

If you would like to see any specific metric or would like us to focus on anything more detailed, please kindly reach out to us on Twitter or at info@tzstats.com

Why is TzStats needed?

Accessible and well structured on-chain data is a key element to research and evaluate blockchain protocols and projects running on top. We believe that on-chain analysis is an essential tool for complementing technical and fundamental investment analysis and will as such gain popularity and importance as the blockchain industry grows.

Current block explorers are mainly focused on individual accounts, blocks, and transactions. Data is often hidden in complex layouts, statistics are sometimes inaccurate or intransparent. As a result, people find it hard to grasp what is actually happening on the blockchain, let alone to comprehend value propositions and compare projects in the blockchain ecosystem from an outside perspective.

We believe that it’s too much to ask for people to understand all the details and nuances of blockchain protocols in order to make informed decisions. We also believe proper tooling can solve many of these issues and deliver better transparency.

TzStats will address the shortcomings of traditional block explorers by presenting macro-scale metrics on health, growth and risks across the Tezos blockchain network alongside the established data about individual accounts, blocks and operations.

Who we are?

TzStats is a collaboration between the teams behind KIDSTUNAMI and StakingRewards. We have been involved in the space for years and are long-term believers in Tezos and its mission.

Alex from KIDTSUNAMI has built Blockwatch.cc and is an OG guru of on-chain data.

Mirko is the founder of Stakingrewards.com and operated the Tezos Baking Service Hotstake, which got acquired by Stake Capital in April 2019.

Thanks to funding from the Tezos Foundation we have been able to team up and hire another UX designer and another software engineer to build TzStats.

We are all based in Berlin, Germany and are very active in the local community here.

How did we start the project?

The partnership between Blockwatch and Stakingrewards.com combines a unique set of curiosity and blockchain expertise that made us dig deep into the Tezos protocol. Alex has prior experience in developing proprietary blockchain crawlers and created a new crawler for Tezos in early 2019. Based on a custom and highly efficient database storage system, this crawler is able to track, categorize, and structure every data point and each monetary flow on the Tezos blockchain (remember, an operation can have up to 6 flows).

With this unique dataset we started making sense of Tezos on-chain activity in its entirety. We have found a lot of valuable insights, that have never been grasped before and we are excited to share them with the community. We are happy to say that the grant we received from the Tezos Foundation in summer 2019 enabled us to assemble a larger team and start building an open-source frontend to display all our data and insights at TzStats.com.

Our mission and core values?

We want to make it easy for everyone to understand historic and real-time activity on blockchains. Transparent and well-structured on-chain data is a key to deeper understanding, be it for business, application developers, investors, or enthusiasts of all kind. Accessibility of data will drive adoption of blockchain protocols and particularly Tezos in this case.

We are big fans of and believers in open-source technology and inclusive communities. By building TzStats we are happy to do our part in helping the Tezos ecosystem grow. We want to make Tezos data accessible to everyone!

What is our timeline and current development stage?

TzStats will initially make use of the Blockwatch API and services. These have been developed since the beginning of the year and are ready for production.

Currently, we are focusing on the UX/UI side of the project and aim to deliver a first beta release of our frontend in mid-July 2019. We are eager to make it accessible to the community for feedback and input as early as possible.

A final release of TzStats is planned to launch in September 2019.

If baking is any labor at all, it's a labor of love. A love that gets passed from generation to generation. (Photo: www.bestfoodfacts.org)

How can you get involved?

We are an open-source project and are happy for any kind of contributions.

We'd love to get your input on our first public beta, which is to be released very soon.

If you like to contribute to the project in any other way or if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us at any time.

Email us to info@tzstats.com!

Follow us on Twitter!

Join our Discord Server!

