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NEAR Explorer Update: Decentralizing the NEAR Ecosystem
Recorded: Oct. 17, 2023 Duration: 0:12:58Space Recording
Full Transcription
Hey Luke, just while we're waiting for him to trickle in, do you want to request to be a speaker as well?
I think I'm the host, so I should be able to.
You have to join from your phone.
Hi, everyone.
Hey.
Can you hear me?
Yes.
Thanks for joining.
We'll give everyone a few, a couple more minutes just to trickle in.
I'll see you next time.
All right. Cool. It looks like we've got quite a few people here on the call. So I'll just go ahead and I'll get us started. So, hey, thanks so much, everyone, for joining today.
I appreciate that. This is probably in response to the blog that we posted and the tweets that went out. So thanks, everybody, for getting those live.
And I just want to start off by just sort of reiterating what was in those blogs.
And then I'm going to pass it over to Luke from Near Blogs to say hello and to give everyone solace that there's still an Explorer that will continue to be supported.
And then we'll just open it up to questions. So please, please just feel free to jump in at any time and we'll make sure that you can get on stage.
So just to reiterate from the blog, explore.near.org will be transitioned to the Explorer Selector by the end of November.
So essentially what that looks like is if you go to explore.near.org, after we do this transition, you'll be greeted by an experience that looks a lot like the Wallet Selector.
Well, you'll just be able to choose which of the community-built Explorers that you want to continue on to for your experience.
One of the great things for developers is that links will continue to work.
So, like, let's say in your application you have, like, some transaction that goes through, like, you're in an exchange or something,
and you want to put that transaction in front of your user, and that link is explorer.near.org.
When they click on that link, they'll just go to that Wallet Selector or the Explorer Selector screen in between
and then be able to continue on to whichever Explorer that they want to in the future.
So you shouldn't have to update any links there, and we'll be doing that shortly.
The second big piece is that public access to ExploreDB will be turned off on November 30th.
So it's important to make sure that any dependencies that you have on the public ExploreDBs and the read replicas there,
there's a set of alternatives that you can use with other indexers in order to get that same data.
And then the final thing is that the legacy Near Explorer will be turned off at the end of January.
So this just comes for us focusing, and we want to just create, like, a thriving ecosystem where everyone isn't relying on just the Pagoda-built Explorer,
because ultimately that was built many, many years ago when there were no other Explorers.
But now there are potential to be many Explorers built by the community.
So with that, I just want to pause really quickly and pass it over to Luke from NearBlox just to chat through.
NearBlox is live, so Explorer needs are still going to be met.
And maybe, Luke, do you want to just take over and just talk about your commitment to the Near ecosystem?
Yeah, sure.
Can you hear me well?
I can hear you.
Okay, cool.
Yeah, I'm Luke.
For those that don't know, I'm one of the co-founders of NearBlox.
We, just for a bit of context and history, we started in March 2022, so March last year.
Essentially, we thought that Near deserved a better Explorer, and that's why we kind of started building it.
And then, I guess, we didn't necessarily think it would go that far and maybe just be used by a few people.
But then it picked off.
We started getting a lot of feedback and feature requests, and people started to, I guess, enjoy using it.
So we've been twodling along, I guess, over the past year.
It's not the easiest, I guess, products, because, I mean, it's been a slow market over the past couple of months.
We were able to, I guess, keep the lights on, thanks to, and most recently, yeah, thanks to the Near dev hub who's supporting us.
So, yeah, I mean, we're happy to, more than happy to continue running the Explorer.
We have, I guess, a bit of a hefty roadmap now.
We've brought back on a few team members.
So I think there's currently seven people that are working on NearBlox full-time now.
We recently open-sourced, so you can actually check out GitHub.
And if there's, like, feature requests that you want to put or issues, then we're more than happy to accommodate them and work on them.
I think, yeah, it might be worth, like, laying out in the short future what we're planning.
Everything that we've been working on over the past two months now is on GitHub as an, oh, you can check out, like, the open-source roadmap.
But, yeah, we've been receiving a lot of, I guess, like, feedback and support from the foundation, from the dev hub.
And, yeah, looking to continue in that direction.
I think it is good to have, like, this transition phase.
I mean, we obviously welcome other Explorers to come on and provide, I guess, like, alternative sources of truth.
We don't necessarily think it's a good idea to be the single point of failure as well.
So, if there's any other, I guess, like, community-built Explorers, then we'd be happy to include them on the wallet selector.
Sorry, the Explorer selector.
But, yeah, I mean, as Austin was saying, like, user experience is key.
We don't necessarily want people to have, like, 404 results.
So, any link that you, I guess, like, click on, whether it be on one of the wallets or a dApp, if that goes to explorer.near.org and then, like, transaction XYZ, and then you select, that will send you to the wallet, the Explorer selector.
And then if you select one of the Explorers, so currently either Nearblocks or the Legacy Explorer, then you'll be directed to that web app.
I think we may be adding some kind of cookies there.
So, for example, if you don't want to go through the selector, then it can save your result, and then you'll be automatically directed to the Explorer that you previously selected.
Besides that, we're available mostly on Telegram.
There's a support and contact by email as well.
We're very accessible, so I think we have, like, I don't know, maybe 50 different groups with other builders in the ecosystem, with the foundation, with various departments of the foundation as well.
Me and Andrew, my co-founder and CTO, we try to be as active as possible, take into account every request or bug.
Would it be, like, from the APIs, from feature requests or UX perspective?
We're trying to accommodate for everyone.
What we are focusing on now, and that will come out in the coming weeks, is putting the entire Explorer on BOSS.
So, would it be all the transaction tables, wallets, any data that you can really see on NearBlocks will be in the form of a BOSS widget.
So, we hope that that will allow other dApps to piggyback off that UI, and, yeah, an easier setup, I guess, for any other builder in the ecosystem.
That's, I guess, a bit of a summary slash, I guess, what we have in store.
There's obviously a lot of things that we're forgetting.
A few obstacles as well, like, we previously had NearBlocks in 17 different languages.
Doing that on BOSS is a bit more complicated than what it would seem, but, yeah, we're aiming to tackle these over the coming months.
Awesome. Thank you so much for the overview, and I just wanted to underscore Explorer Selector.
There will be a path for getting other Explorers listed in the Explorer Selector, so that will be clarified and communicated and just underscoring what Luke said.
Like, clearly, we would want many Explorers, just purely for redundancy at minimum, but also just to provide different user experiences.
So, that's a commitment that we can make to the community.
But I think we can just pause there.
Does anybody have any questions about the sort of Explore transition?
What Explorers that you can use right now?
Explore DB.
Happy to just pause and take any questions that are coming from anyone in the community here.
I haven't hosted a space, so I see some comments.
I'm not sure if they're exactly relevant to this conversation.
All right.
If you do have any questions, just request to speak, and we'll get you up on the stage.
Otherwise, we might be able to call this one a little bit short.
Okay.
Okay, great.
Was there anything else that anybody wanted to mention before we wrap up?
Cool.
Thanks again.
And if anybody does have any questions that come up afterwards, if you look through the recent tweets from NIR Foundation, there'll be a blog that was posted, and there's a version of that blog that's right on NIR.org that you can comment on.
So, if you do have questions, just jump in the discussion there.
Otherwise, there's also our Telegram channels, so our developer channels, where you can grab any feedback directly.
And Pavel specifically mentioned, if there's any questions about Explore public replicas, there's an Indexer builders group on Telegram that I would just direct everybody to if you have any questions about that directly.
So, cool.
Thanks so much.
Thanks for joining, Luke.
We'll talk soon, everybody.
Pleasure.
Bye.
Bye.
