Cardanoscan.io Upgrade

[IMPACT]

Cardanoscan.io already provides tons of technical insights into the Cardano blockchain, which has been of extreme use to core Cardano devs at IOHK and the huge Cardano ecosystem developers who extensively work on plutus smart contracts, dApps, plutus based NFTs and a lot more.

We want to build some of the core features as listed below and tons of improvements,

Babbage Upgrade

Cardano is going to hard fork soon to release the features of Babbage era. The new hard fork introduces many behind the scene improvements and upgrades for the developers building dApps. It is a required to add support for those hidden parameters of the transactions on the explorer for devs to validate their development.

Mempool Support

We will be adding support for viewing transactions in the mempool. The mempool holds the transactions that are yet to be confirmed on the chain. By being able to see the transaction currently in mempool, devs and user can almost quickly see their transaction status on the explorer. When the network is congested, a transaction can stay in mempool for a longer period, and users are not aware of its status, seeing the transaction on the explorer will make their lives easy.

Plutus Script Verification

Allowing devs to submit requests for verifying their plutus contracts on the explorer. Verifying plutus script is a complex task and requires us to maintain a different infrastructure. Once the scripts are verified, normal users can easily see the source code of the plutus contracts they are interacting with, overall opening up opportunities for transparency, accountability and forensics. The verified plutus scripts will be shown as verified badge on the site that user can see to feel comfortable when using the dApps.

In-Detail Plutus Data View

Cardanoscan currently being the only explorer showing the plutus smart contract interaction as it happens in a transaction. This view is a basic version and we can add additional data points to make it easy for devs to analyse the script execution. The upgrade will allow devs to see plutus data per inputs, outputs and redeemers being applied per input. The view will be as advanced and informative as it can be.

Public View Labelling

Adding labels, human readable names for the cardano blockchain user facing identifiers as below,

1. Plutus Scripts Address
2. Normal Address
3. PolicyId
4. Stake Keys

The labels will give user friendly identity to above items, for eg. A label can be given to an Address of an exchange Binance Wallet 1. A label can be given to plutus contracts eg. Minswap Batcher. The possibilities are limitless to make it easy for users to identify the different kinds of addresses, contracts and more.

Full Site Re-Design

Cardano blockchain has been though 3+ hard forks since Shelley (staking) launch. These hard forks brought many major and minor features to cardano blockchain, including the major smart contract feature. The website was designed as per the Shelley era, and had been accommodated since then for new features. We would like to re-design the full website, making it user friendly, giving it a modern look and make it even easier to navigate through the explorer.

This upgrade will also include improvements to search capabilities, different types of query possibilities and performance improvements. Making the explorer even faster.

The testnet version of the Cardanoscan is largely used by Cardano developers. The improvements defined in the Impact section above will largely benefit not just everyday users but extensively to devs building on Cardano. Developers always need to analyse the chain to debug, find issues, and continue building.

The upgrades specially for the mempool support, plutus smart contract view upgrade, are the key features developers use in their everyday development cycle. Having an advanced explorer view makes devs life and easy and will certainly be appreciated by new devs coming on board to build on top of Cardano, hence this upgrade is fit for this challenge.

We have built and running Cardanoscan since the start of Shelley, we have a great deal of experience with the cardano technology hence we do not see any risks for the aforementioned upgrades.

[FEASIBILITY]

More info about us

We are the core team building Cardanoscan.io. We have been previous funded for 5 catalyst proposals. Of which 3 proposals are successfully completed and delivered.

1. Testnet Cardanoscan.io (https://testnet.cardanoscan.io)
2. Bip32Ed25519 in pure js (https://github.com/StricaHQ/bip32ed25519)
3. Pure JS wallet library (https://github.com/StricaHQ/typhonjs)
4. Cardanoscan.io API service (in progress)
5. Ouroboros Networking lib in JS (delayed - about to be completed)

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There are many improvements proposed in this proposal, and we will deliver them as each of them are completed. The project will be delivered in an incremental cycle, meaning we will not hold on the delivery until everything is completed, but the explorer will received updates as they are ready.

We estimate to complete the full delivery in 6 months of timeline as detailed below,

1. Manual Labelling - April
2. Re-redesign - June
3. babbage upgarde - As soon as Cardano is hardforked to Babbage
4. Mempool support - July
5. Automated Labelling - August
6. Plutus Script verification - October
7. Plutus advanced View - November

Cardanoscan has revenue through the advertising, the revenue is just enough to pay our infrastructure bills. We are asking the funds to pay salaries to our devs, and also to hire a designer for UI/UX.

Total development months - 8 months

3 Devs - 3 x 40000 = 120,000

1 Designer - 1 x 8,000 = 8000

Total Cost - 128,000

Cardanoscan is built by 4 core members. The developers are pro cardano followers and enthusiasts from the beginning. The work of the devs speak itself in their existing work with the Cardanoscan.io explorer.

The development will be lead by Ashish - Twitter @ashisherc

[AUDITABILITY]

The development will be done incrementally, the progress will be tracked per upgrade item and shared via the progress reporting to Catalyst team. The progress of the proposal will also be seen on the explorer itself.

Cardanoscan.io serves 3+ million users currently on mainnet and serves about 10k+ users (mostly devs) on the testnet network. Even more users building on Cardano and utilising the explorer is a success for this project.

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