ETHPrize Bounty

And the winner is….

… Explorer by POA Network!

On March 10th, at the ETHCC conference, the winners of the ETHCC Bounty were announced. Along with ETHPM, an Ethereum package manager, Explorer by POA Network was the other receiver for the prize!

“Sidechains are not usable without a block explorer.” Griff Green, Giveth (source: Web3 Foudation Presentation ECC Paris)

Sina Habiban presenting introducing ETHPrize

What is ETHPrize

ETHPrize is an initiative and project that identifies the most critical issues facing Ethereum and organizes bounties to solve them. The project was started by TrueBit, L4Ventures and Web3foundation. The bounty is a $250,000 funding commitment to lead the development of our open source Ethereum explorer.

Explorer by POA

It’s at this time that we want to discuss our project, Explorer by POA. When we started creating it, we wanted it to overcome all the shortcomings of the current Explorers out there.

The table above shows our ambitious set of features that we plan to have as a part of our project. For us, as developers, it is very important to have something that is fully open source and transparent. On top of that, two of the other important features we desire are the ability to export data into a CSV or other file formats, and also to interact with Smart Contracts, Read, and Write functions. We spoke with Andrew Cravenho, our project lead for Explorer by POA, about the features he is excited about:

“The POA Block Explorer will have features that will benefit both POA Network as well as the Ethereum Ecosystem. This is what excites me the most about building this block explorer. With so many new and old projects being built around Ethereum, this block explorer will allow them to spin up a new explorer in minutes featuring full transaction history, data export, token support, and full developer tools. These are the types of projects that push a community forward to tackle the real obstacles that are standing in it’s way.

To be more specific about the features I’m excited about, I would first like to talk about the features that will be included in this explorer. In order to build a successful product, we must first outperform the best product on the market. In our case this would be Etherscan. Our block explorer will include every feature of Etherscan and much more. While V1.0 is nearly upon us, it will not include developer tools. These tools are what I’m most excited about. While I was disappointed not being able to bring some developer tools to V1.0, we’ve decided to hire two other teams to work on this project so the Ethereum Community can receive V2.0 within a few months.

Many Ethereum Forks and Sidechains face the same problem, there is no explorer that currently supports verifying and interacting of smart contracts. This is a crucial step in pushing the industry forward.”

Progress and roadmap

The table above shows our roadmap and progress so far. Our first release should be in the next few months. The first version contains a feature set similar to Etherchain Light in which it will include the ability for viewing and browsing blocks, accounts, contracts and transactions. By our third version, codenamed Seattle, Explorer by POA will support new token types, Plasma, Polkadot, and more.

After Seattle, our next version’s feature set will not be decided by us, but rather by the Ethereum community, experts, and advisors. We think that it is very important that the community has a hand in what they want to see in this project. Andrew explains below:

“As the Project Lead on the POA Block Explorer, I see a very long roadmap for this project. Our goals include supporting current and future EIPs (Ethereum Improvement Proposals) and all token types. We will also be accepting pull requests from the community to add features that the community would like to see. Ethereum in it’s entirety is very new and anticipating the future is very difficult. The community is the best resource of judgement for new features for a specific tool such as a block explorer. With the current state of explorers, there is no way to request new features or interact with it’s developers. This needs to change.”

As for the Technology stack behind Explorer by POA, We have chosen to go with Erlang/OTP 20.2+, Elixir 1.5+ and Postgres 10.0. Andrew explains Elixir as…

“… a new, dynamic, and scalable language which is very similar to that of Ethereum. With the growing and thriving community behind Elixir, we knew we could find developers eager to work on this project. We look forward to sharing and developing our code with the Elixir community.”

To find out more about ETHPrize and the bounty, check out the full video below and be on the lookout for a sneak peek at Explorer by POA over the next few weeks.

Connect with us:

Website: https://poa.network/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/poanetwork

Medium: https://medium.com/poa-network

Forum: https://forum.poa.network/

Reddit: https://reddit.com/r/poa

Telegram: https://t.me/poa_network/