In October 2017, after the Tezos ICO, OCamlPro started to work on a block explorer for Tezos. For us, it was the most important software that we could contribute to the community, after the node itself, of course. We used it internally to monitor the Tezos alphanet, until its official public release in February 2018, as TzScan. One of TzScan main goals was to make the complex DPOS consensus algorithm of Tezos easier to understand, to follow, especially for bakers who will contribute to it. Since its creation, we have been improving it every day, rushing for the Betanet in June 2018, and still now, monitoring all the Tezos networks, Mainnet, Alphanet and Zeronet.

So we are pleased today to announce the first release of TzScan OS, the open-source version of TzScan!

The sources are available on Gitlab:https://gitlab.com/tzscan/tzscan

The code, mostly OCaml, is distributed under GNU GPL v3.

The project contains:

The blockchain crawler, used to monitor the blockchain, and fill a PostgreSQL database

The web interface, requesting information using a REST API

The API server, using the PostgreSQL database to reply to API requests

It can be used in two different modes:

Remote Use: if you are not running a Tezos node, you might want to only run the web interface, using the official TzScan API server

Local Use: if you are running a Tezos node, you can use the crawler and the API server to serve information on your node, to a locally running web interface

Contribute

If you are interested in contributing to TzScan OS, a first step could be to translate TzScan in your language : check the file lang-en.json for a list of strings to translate, and lang-fr.json for a partial translation!

OCamlPro’s services around TzScan

TzScan OS can be used to monitor private/enterprise deployments of Tezos. OCamlPro is available to help and support such deployments.

Acknowledgments

We are thankful to the Tezos Foundation and Ryan Jesperson for their support!

All feedback is welcome!

Fabrice Le Fessant: Fabrice is the founder of OCamlPro, and a member of the TzScan development team. Fabrice contributed to multiple projects around Tezos, in particular the first version of Liquidity, and its Michelson-to-Liquidity decompiler. Fabrice is a former researcher at INRIA, in peer-to-peer systems and programming languages, and developed several open-source projects, such as MLdonkey, JOCaml or the LAMP movie player.