Etherscan is great, but it’s also a fatal flaw of Ethereum

Author: Marco Worms, Hash Payments Translation: Shan Ouba, Golden Finance

This article reflects my views on Etherscan and is useful for any Ethereum user or developer It's a very convenient service for people, I use it frequently and am grateful to the people who deploy it. Today, Etherscan is the largest provider for exploring Ethereum transactions. This is a very convenient website, you can:

• Track any transaction in Ethereum.

• Track any contract interactions and their events.

• View the contract source code used in production.

• Interact with contract read and write functions .

One ​​of the great features of Etherscan is that it Suitable for both novice and advanced users:

• If you are new, you can easily view your wallet transactions and navigate interactions with smart contracts

• If you know what you are doing, you can do almost anything in Ethereum by using Etherscan and avoiding any other existing websites Things

Such a powerful function brings users So many conveniences come with it, making it one of the most used websites in the crypto ecosystem. Here is a quick comparison of usage between the Etherscan website and other popular DeFi websites over the past 3 months:

Etherscan How does Ethereum’s dominance put the Ethereum community at risk?

The biggest risk associated with Etherscan today is that the source code is closed, so other Users cannot replicate, which removes the "availability resiliency of server redundancy" factor we have in Ethereum and introduces the "security of obscurity" entity controlled by a single node.

The availability and resiliency of Ethereum services comes from a decentralized network of nodes, even though many of them The network can also execute transactions even when nodes are offline. Today, this can only be achieved by making open source code available to people, with financial incentives to build and maintain it.

If users of Ethereum continue to reuse most people use The same centralized entity, then we are on a path that harms decentralization, which is contrary to the cypherpunk spirit of Ethereum .

Side note: Advanced users will skip interacting with Etherscan and use ApeWorx Or tools such as Foundry for on-chain interaction. These are all open source and can skip the above risks. But many people won't learn how to use any of the open source CLI tools and will rely on the Etherscan website to read information and sometimes even write.

This is a doomsday scenario involving Etherscan: their DNS is hijacked and the website is reinstalled Directed to malicious wallet trainers (this happens all the time in the cryptocurrency space, even for teams with the best security measures). This can happen with any protocol website, which is why I think learning how to self-host is an important skill.

The more people rely on Etherscan and there are no good alternatives, malicious actors The more incentive there is to use it as an attack vector in the Ethereum community.

I'm not here to bash Etherscan. I believe their team is doing their best to improve, my experience with indie game development tells me that some marketplaces are very difficult to make money without repeating certain default marketplace tactics (ads, microtransactions), and it would be expected of them to open source And nothing is naive in return. So let’s talk about some alternatives!

Open source trading browser

Beaconchain

• Ethereum preview:< a href="https://beaconcha.in/" style="font-size: 18px; text-decoration: underline;">https://beaconcha.in /

• Source code:< /span>https://github.com/gobitfly/eth2-beaconchain-explorer

Blockscout: 

Ethereum preview:https://eth.blockscout.com/

< span style="font-size: 18px;">Source code:https://github.com/blockscout/blockscout

Otterscan 

• Optimism preview:https://otterscan.mainnet.testinprod. io/

• Source code: https://github.com/otterscan/otterscan

All of the above are alternatives to Etherscan. If you try them the next time you use a blockchain explorer, you're already participating in this part of the decentralized chain, and if you can host them yourself, even better! But we can't rely on altruism to maintain this, we've seen browsers shut down due to commercialization issues, which I think is one of the cores of our whole puzzle and why Etherscan was closed source in the first place!

Inspiration for explorers

It can be seen that transaction explorers have incentive problems. Let’s take a look at the Etherscan website:

Do you use other parts of the Ethereum infrastructure and see similar suspicious ads? No! Because other parts of the incentive structure are better developed than being an ad seller. Why don’t the websites of the Ethereum Foundation, AAVE, Yearn, Maker, Uniswap, centralized exchanges, and other important Ethereum applications show you any ads? Because the monetary incentives for these apps are aligned, displaying ads is a net negative because ads introduce another layer of risk to end users who are just trying to use a good financial product.

I'm not smart enough to come up with a solution for current blockchain explorers Actual system design, but I'm sure Ethereum could consider providing better incentives for people to run decentralized nodes that could serve as a replacement for Etherscan before we rely entirely on it as a community. This might start with incentivizing open source alternatives while incentivizing making them available for public use.

Ethereum's RPC node may have similar centralization issues, but it is different from the It is now easier to decentralize RPC than blockchain browsers because the best RPC clients are open source and easy to copy.

I invite anyone to join the discussion and come up with something we can test method!

Conversation Otterscan

To bring more perspective to the conversation, here's what happened when I asked Otterscan founder Willian Mitsuda  some questions and showed him this article Thoughts at the time:

Q: What inspired you to create Otterscan? How does it differ from Etherscan in terms of architecture and functionality?

Etherscan is already a great tool. I wanted to create something that would fill a gap and reach an audience that Etherscan couldn't reach: the ability to run your own browser at home, using your own nodes, running on consumer hardware rather than expensive cloud machines.

Everything is open source, so users can hack and modify it. We use open databases like Sourcify for contract verification, so even if the company behind it disappears, the important stuff doesn’t.

Etherscan is a closed source SaaS, so we cannot do a fair job at the architectural level Compare. But with Otterscan, our ultimate goal is to achieve the same functionality as Etherscan (we don’t have it yet, but we will) while testing the limits of regular Ethereum nodes.

To do this, Erigon (and all the technology they invented) is Base. Otterscan couldn't exist 3 years ago when Erigon got archive nodes to about 2TB (mainnet) and sync times of a few days.

Otterscan V1 is only possible because Erigon is enabled in consumer hardware Archive nodes are available and the data present within the node is easily exposed, but is not available via the standard JSON-RPC API.

Otterscan V2 (currently in alpha version) is only possible because of Erigon Evolution continues, and the new architecture of tx-based indexes in Erigon 3 (as opposed to block-based indexes) will allow us to build and enhance standard node functionality via derivation to efficiently get new data from it.

This will get us very close to generating most of the data that Etherscan provides to its users, But it doesn't require anything more than your node and some (affordable) extra disk space.

Q: What are your existing incentives for using and serving open source browsers? What do you think? Any thoughts on decentralized funding for explorers?

I think finding a business model for Explorer is as challenging as other web3 products . We are delighted to have been sponsored by Erigon, which allows us to continue researching this as an open source public good without any venture capital funding.

New grant schemes, such as Optimism’s retroactive public goods funding, are possible To enable similar products to survive in the long term.

Q: How can the community contribute to the development and improvement of Otterscan? What kind of contribution are you seeking?

Otterscan consists of 2 parts:

• UI is a React application.

• And the API implementation embedded within Erigon.

Therefore, those interested in contributing One could improve the UI itself, write new APIs and indexers in Erigon (which might be a good entry point for anyone interested in exploring the internals of the ETH client), or make some use of the Otterscan API Brand new things like a dedicated user interface.

Another interesting idea is to implement the Otterscan API in other clients. There is already an independent community plan to port it to Reth, and another community member implemented it within Anvil so you can point the Otterscan UI to it and browse your development network.

The following is an example of a community-made PR to add support for Otterscan on Reth JSON-RPC API extension support:

Q: For those interested in contributing to the Ethereum ecosystem What advice do you have for developers building open source projects?

Just keep building it. If you are skilled, there will be many opportunities, and if what you make can solve other people's problems, you will definitely be recognized.