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Author: Marco Worms, Hash Payments Translation: Shan Ouba, Bit Chain Vision World
About ten years ago,The Ethereum community starts to eliminate all weak links that provide global access to financial services worldwideIn many ways, it has achieved success.Our progress depends on our ability to reflect on the fault point and deploy open source for them and can be audited.
This article reflects my view of Etherscan. For any Ethereum user or developer, this is a very convenient service. I often use this service and thank those who deploy it.Today, Etherscan is the largest provider to explore Ethereum transactions.This is a very convenient website, you can::
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Track any transactions in Ethereum.
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Track any contract interaction and its incident.
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Check the contract source code used in production.
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Interact with contract reading and writing functions.
One of EtherScan’s powerful features is that it is suitable for novice users and high -level users:
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If you are a novice, you can easily view your wallet transaction and navigate your interaction with smart contracts
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If you know what you are doing, then you can do almost anything in Ethereum by using E
Such a powerful feature brings so many convenience to users, making it one of the most used websites in the encrypted ecosystem.The following are the rapid comparison of the use of the EtherScan website and other popular DEFI websites in the past 3 months:
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How can EtherScan’s dominant position make the Ethereum community risk?
Today, the biggest risk related to EtherScan is closed by the source code, so other users cannot copy it. This eliminates the “availability elasticity of the server redundant” in Ethereum, and introduces the “silent obscurity controlled by a single node.”Safety” entity.
The availability and elasticity of Ethereum services come from decentralized node networks. Even if many nodes are offline, the network can also execute transactions.Today, this can only be achieved by providing open source code to people, which have economic incentives to establish and maintain.
If users in Ethereum are constantly reusing the same centralized entity used by most people, then we will walk on the road of damage to decentralizationThis is the opposite of the Ethereum password punk spirit.
Note: Senior users will skip the interaction with EtherScan and use tools such as ApeWorx or Foundry for chain interaction. These are open source and can skip the above risks.But many people do not learn how to use any open source CLI tools. They rely on the Etherscan website to read information, sometimes even writing.
This is the doomsday scene involving EtherScan: their DNS is hijacked, and the website redires to a malicious wallet trainer (this situation often occurs in the cryptocurrency field, and even for teams with the best security measures).This situation may occur on any agreement website, which is why I think learning how to custody is an important skill.
The more people rely on Etherscan and have no good alternative, the more motivated the malicious actors will use it as the attack medium of the Ethereum community.
I’m not here to attack EtherScan.I believe their team is doing their best to improve. My experience in independent game development tells me that if some default market strategies (advertisements, micro -transactions) are not repeated, some markets are difficult to make profitable, and it will expect them to open source source.And no return is naive.So let’s talk about some alternatives!
Open source transaction browser
Beaconchain
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Ethereum Preview:https://beaconcha.in/
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source code:https://github.com/gobitfly/eth2-Beaconchain-Explorerr
Blockscout:
Ethereum Preview:
source code:>”>> “>>”>> “>>”>> “>https://github.com/blockscout/blockscout
Otterscan
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Optimism preview:
>”>> “>>”>> “>>”>> “>https://otterscan.mainnet.testinprod.io/ -
source code:
>”>> “>>”>https://github.com/otterscan/otterscan
All of the above are alternatives of EtherScan.If you try them when you use the blockchain browser next time, you are already participating in the part of the decentralized chain, and if you can host them by yourself, it is even better!But we cannot rely on Richeliism to maintain this. We have seen the browser closed due to commercial problems. I think this is one of the cores of our entire problem, and it is why Etherscan was originally closed!
Incentives to explorators
It can be seen that there is a problem with the incentive of trading explorators. Let’s take a look at the Etherscan website:
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Do you use other parts of the Ethereum infrastructure and see similar suspicious advertisements?No!Because compared with becoming an advertising seller, the incentive mechanism of other parts has developed better.Why does the Ethereum Foundation, AAVE, Yearn, Maker, Uniswap, centralized exchanges, and other important Ethereum applications not show you any advertisements?Because the currency incentives of these applications are consistent, and showing advertising is a kind of negative behavior, because advertisements introduce another layer of risks for end users, and these users just want to use a good financial product.
I am not smart enough to propose a practical system design that can solve the current blockchain browser, but I am convinced that Ethereum can consider providing better incentives for people to run decentralized nodes. These nodes can be used as alternatives of EtherScan.Relying on it as before as the community.This may start with inspiration open source alternatives, and at the same time inspire them to use them to the public.
Ethereum’s RPC node may have similar centralized problems, but compared with the blockchain browser, it is now easier to decentralized RPC, because the best RPC client is open source and easy to copy.
I invite anyone to participate in the discussion and come up with some methods we can test!
Talk to Otterscan
In order to bring more views to the dialogue, the following is the idea of asking some questions to the founder of OTTERSCAN WILLIAN MITSUDA and showing him this article:
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Q: What prompts you to create OTERSCAN?How is it different from Etherscan in architecture and function?
Etherscan is already a great tool.I want to create something to fill the blank and attract the audience that Etherscan cannot cover: I can run my browser at home, use their own nodes, and run on consumer hardware, rather than running on expensive cloud machines.
Everything is open source, so users can crack and modify it.We use open databases such as Sourcify for contract verification, so even if the company behind it disappears, important things will not disappear.
EtherScan is a closed source SaaS, so we cannot make a fair comparison at the architecture level.But for Otterscan, our ultimate goal is to achieve the same features as Etherscan (we do not, but we will), and at the same time test the restrictions of routine Ethereum nodes.
To do this, Ericon (and all the technologies they invented) are the foundation.Three years ago, when Ericon reached about 2TB (main network) and a few days of synchronization time, Otterscan could not exist.
The reason why OTTERSCAN V1 is possible is because Ericon enables archive nodes in consumer hardware, and it is easy to disclose data in the node, but it cannot be obtained through standard JSON-RPC API.
OTTERSCAN V2 (currently in the Alpha version) is possible because Ericon is constantly developing, and ERIGON 3 -based newly indexed architecture (rather than block -based index) will allow us to build and enhance standard node functions through derivativeEffectively get new data from it.
This will make us very close to most of the data provided by EtherScan to users, but there is no other thing except your node and some (affordable) extra disk space.
Question: What do you think of the existing incentives for the use and service open source browser?Do you think about providing decentralized funds for explorers?
I think finding a business model for explorers is as challenging as other web3 products.We are glad to be sponsored by Ericon, which enables us to continue using it as an open source public product without any venture capital.
The new gift plan, such as Optimism’s retrospective public product funds, may make similar products survive for a long time.
Question: How does the community contribute to the development and improvement of Otterscan?What kind of contribution are you looking for?
OTTERSCAN consists of 2 parts:
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UI is a React application.
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And API implementation inside Ericon.
Therefore, those who are interested in making contributions can improve the UI itself and compile new APIs and indexes in Eric (for anyone who is interested in exploring the internal structure of ETH clients, this may be a good entry point), Or use the Otterscan API to do some new things, such as a special user interface.
Another interesting idea is to implement the Otterscan API in other clients.One independent community plans to transplant it into RetH, and another community member has implemented it in ANVIL, so you can point OTERSCAN UI to it and browse your development network.
The following is a PR example made by the community. It is used to add support to the extension of the OTTERSCAN JSON-RPC API on RETH:
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Q: For developers who are interested in building open source projects for Ethereum ecosystems, do you have any suggestions?
Just continue to build it.If you have superb skills, there will be a lot of opportunities. If you make things to solve the problems of others, you will definitely be recognized.
