Last updated a month ago
Cardano's development landscape lacks a lightweight, open-source explorer offering customizable on-chain data visualizations. This forces developers to create bespoke tools, forcing repeated effort.
The discontinued Cardano Foundation explorer will be revived to become a lightweight, open-source tool. Its backend will be replaced with community APIs to enable custom on-chain data visualizations.
Please provide your proposal title
Phoenix Explorer: Reviving an Open-source Explorer
Enter the amount of funding you are requesting in ADA
30000
Please specify how many months you expect your project to last
8
Please indicate if your proposal has been auto-translated
No
Original Language
en
What is the problem you want to solve?
Cardano's development landscape lacks a lightweight, open-source explorer offering customizable on-chain data visualizations. This forces developers to create bespoke tools, forcing repeated effort.
Supporting links
Does your project have any dependencies on other organizations, technical or otherwise?
No
Describe any dependencies or write 'No dependencies'
No dependencies
Will your project's outputs be fully open source?
Yes
License and Additional Information
Apache License 2.0
Please choose the most relevant theme and tag related to the outcomes of your proposal
Developer Tools
Mention your open source license and describe your open source license rationale.
The Phoenix Explorer will be licensed under the Apache License 2.0. This permissive license is chosen to ensure maximum openness and freedom. It allows anyone to use, modify, and distribute the software for any purpose, including commercial applications, without significant restrictions. This fosters a collaborative environment and aligns with the open-source ethos of the Cardano community, encouraging widespread adoption and contribution.
How do you make sure your source code is accessible to the public from project start, and people are informed?
The project will be accessible from the start onwards via Github. To inform people about the current work packages, a GitHub Project will be used for project management. This way, others will always be informed about the current work-in-progress packages, which tasks are already finished, and what's on the roadmap.
How will you provide high quality documentation?
High-quality documentation will be hosted via GitHub Pages, ensuring it is as open and accessible as the code. This will include user guides, comprehensive developer documentation for the API and plugin system, and clear deployment instructions. This approach keeps documentation version-controlled alongside the code.
Please describe your proposed solution and how it addresses the problem
The core problem this proposal identifies is a critical gap in the Cardano developer ecosystem: the absence of a lightweight, open-source, and adaptable blockchain explorer. Developers currently face a choice between using closed-source explorers that don't meet their specific needs or undertaking the time-consuming task of building their own visualization tools from scratch. This slows down development, stifles innovation, and leads to duplicated efforts across the community.
The Phoenix Explorer directly addresses this problem with a multi-faceted solution:
1. Reviving a Foundation and Making It Lightweight
Instead of starting from nothing, the project will fork the existing, but discontinued, open-source explorer created by the Cardano Foundation. This provides a solid, professionally-built foundation to work from.
The most critical step is to aggressively strip out the original, complex, enterprise-focused backend. This is the primary action that makes the explorer "lightweight." By removing this heavy component, the project becomes significantly easier for individual developers and small teams to deploy, maintain, and contribute to.
2. Leveraging the Ecosystem with an API-First Approach
The removed backend will be replaced with a modular architecture that integrates with existing, community-trusted APIs. The initial version will connect to Blockfrost, with subsequent milestones adding support for other popular services like Yaci-store, Ogmios, and Kupo.
This API-first approach addresses the problem in several ways:
It keeps the explorer lean: The heavy lifting of indexing the blockchain is offloaded to these specialized services.
It promotes decentralization: By supporting multiple data providers, the explorer avoids being a single point of failure and gives users a choice.
It accelerates development: The project can focus on its core mission instead of reinventing data-indexing infrastructure.
3. Supporting Both Public and Private Networks
For many developers, enterprises, and research teams, private testnets are an essential part of their workflow. They allow experimentation with new smart contracts, metadata standards, or consensus mechanisms in a controlled, isolated environment without risking real funds or affecting public chains.
Unlike existing explorers, Phoenix Explorer will also work with private testnets throuh the API first, modulare and open architecture— a feature currently unavailable in the ecosystem. This makes it a valuable tool not only for public blockchain projects but also for teams testing smart contracts or applications in isolated environments before mainnet deployment.
4. Enabling True Customization with a Plugin System
The Phoenix Explorer will feature a plugin-based architecture for rendering on-chain data. This means that developers will be able to create and share their own custom "visualizers" for specific data types, most notably for different metadata standards and smart contract data. For example, a project focused on supply chain tracking could create a plugin that visualizes their specific metadata as a timeline or a map, directly within the explorer. This will unlock Innovation and will empower developers to create rich, meaningful, and context-specific data experiences, moving beyond the generic transaction and block views of traditional explorers.
Additionally instead of building a whole new front-end to showcase their on-chain data, projects can simply create a plugin for the Phoenix Explorer, saving time and effort.
In summary, the Phoenix Explorer provides a comprehensive solution by transforming an existing asset into a lean, adaptable, and community-driven tool. It solves the problem by lowering the barrier to entry for developers, fostering collaboration through its open-source nature, and enabling a new wave of innovation in on-chain data visualization.
Please define the positive impact your project will have on the wider Cardano community
The Phoenix Explorer will have a significant and lasting positive impact on the Cardano community by:
Promoting Open-Source Collaboration: By providing a truly open-source explorer, we will foster a collaborative environment where developers can contribute to a shared resource, reducing duplicated effort and accelerating innovation.
Empowering Developers: The Phoenix Explorer will provide developers with a powerful and flexible tool for on-chain data visualization, making it easier to build and debug decentralized applications even when working on private testnets.
Enhancing User Experience: We will provide an intuitive explorer that makes it easy for everyone to explore the Cardano blockchain, from seasoned developers to newcomers.
What is your capability to deliver your project with high levels of trust and accountability? How do you intend to validate if your approach is feasible?
Accountability is ensured through radical transparency. The project will be open-source on GitHub from day one. We will use GitHub Projects to create a public-facing project board, allowing anyone to track our progress on specific tasks in real-time. Each milestone is designed with clear, objective evidence of completion, and we will provide detailed regular reports to the community.
Our approach is designed to be highly feasible and low-risk.
Milestone Title
Initial Setup and MVP Development
Milestone Outputs
This foundational milestone focuses on transforming the original Cardano Foundation explorer into a lean and modern tool. The core task is to fork the existing codebase and perform a thorough cleanup, removing the cumbersome enterprise-focused backend and modernizing the frontend. This process will create a lightweight and modular architecture, making the explorer more accessible and easier to maintain for the community. The refactored frontend will then be integrated with the Blockfrost API, providing a reliable and efficient data source for the initial release. The culmination of this milestone will be the deployment of a publicly accessible Minimum Viable Product (MVP) of the Phoenix Explorer.
Acceptance Criteria
Evidence of Completion
Delivery Month
2
Cost
15000
Progress
50 %
Milestone Title
Implement the plugin system for custom on-chain data visualizations
Milestone Outputs
This milestone introduces a plugin system for custom metadata visualizations. The goal is to empower the community to create and share their own unique ways of displaying on-chain data. This will involve designing and implementing a flexible and extensible plugin architecture that allows developers to easily build and integrate their own visualization modules. To guide the community, a sample plugin will be developed and released, serving as a practical example and template. Comprehensive developer documentation for the plugin system will also be created and published.
Acceptance Criteria
Evidence of Completion
Delivery Month
4
Cost
5000
Progress
60 %
Milestone Title
Implementation of additional community services
Milestone Outputs
Building on the modular architecture established in the first milestone, this phase will focus on increasing the explorer's decentralization and versatility by integrating additional community-built data sources. This will involve adding support for popular services such as Yaci-store, Ogmios, and Kupo. A user-friendly interface will be developed to allow users to seamlessly switch between these different data providers, giving them greater control over their data sources and ensuring the explorer's resilience.
A majore gain will be the possibility to run the Pheonix Explorer in private testnet environments with the help of these services, giving developers a nice UI to debug/visualize their current work.
Acceptance Criteria
Evidence of Completion
Delivery Month
6
Cost
5000
Progress
70 %
Milestone Title
Infrastructure and maintenance for 6 Months
Milestone Outputs
This final milestone ensures the long-term viability and stability of the Phoenix Explorer. It covers the maintenance of the public infrastructure for a period of six months, guaranteeing a reliable and accessible service for the community. The explorer will be directly up and running after Milestone 1.
During this time, the project will provide ongoing support, including bug fixes, security updates, and performance improvements. Furthermore, community feedback will be actively solicited and incorporated, with at least 3 minor feature enhancement being implemented based on user suggestions.
Acceptance Criteria
Evidence of Completion
Delivery Month
8
Cost
5000
Progress
100 %
Please provide a cost breakdown of the proposed work and resources
All the required budget will be spent by developing or documenting the source code of the project and the infracture needed to run the public environment.
The project requests a total of 30,000 Ada. Based on a price of 0.62€ per Ada, this equates to a total budget of 18,600€. This budget is allocated transparently across development and operational costs.
This remaining budget funds approximately 175 hours of development at a rate of 100€/hour.
How does the cost of the project represent value for the Cardano ecosystem?
The Phoenix Explorer project offers exceptional value for money to the Cardano community. By leveraging an existing open-source codebase and integrating community-built services, we are able to deliver a high-impact project at a fraction of the cost of building an explorer from scratch.
The requested funding of 30,000 Ada will enable us to deliver a powerful and sustainable community resource that will benefit developers, users, and the entire Cardano ecosystem for years to come. The open-source nature of the project ensures that the community's investment will continue to generate value long after the initial development is complete.
Terms and Conditions:
Yes
Thomas Kammerlocher — Senior Full Stack Software Developer with over 10 years of experience delivering complex projects, including open-source, AI and blockchain-related solutions.
Github: https://github.com/Kammerlo
Please note that notwithstanding any association with the Cardano Foundation, this submission is made solely in my personal capacity and on my own behalf and account.