Cardano Foundation’s Open Beta Phase of New Cardano Explorer

The Cardano Foundation launches the open beta phase of a new Cardano explorer today. The beta comes as a first step to develop an explorer that will address the needs of blockchain-native users as well as those of enterprises and regulatory entities interacting with blockchain.

Explorers act as gateways to navigate information. Applied to blockchain, this generally entails seeing and verifying activity related to native tokens, stake pools, and smart contracts amongst others. Different explorers tend to have specific features. As the Foundation aims to showcase the Cardano blockchain’s chief properties and how they work, the open beta introduces two key features:

• Staking Lifecycle – a novel characteristic using live data to provide a visual illustration of core blockchain concepts.
• Compose Report – a way to generate a downloadable report about the activity of either stake addresses or stake pools.

These reports cover various parameters, including rewards received, and will play an important role for auditors, supervisors, and end users who, for example, must detail the rewards received from delegated stake or authenticate such information. The feature appears as part of the Staking Lifecycle view and is available for signed-in users, whether they do so anonymously via a Cardano wallet or with an email log-in.

Simultaneously, the other aspects of the Staking Lifecycle component create a window into the Cardano blockchain itself, helping to demystify some of its inner workings. By adding this educational layer, the Foundation intends the explorer to facilitate a clearer understanding of Cardano.

Built primarily in Java, the explorer also looks to attract a broad developer community more accustomed to languages such as Java. This approach might not only lower the barriers to entry to Cardano from a technical standpoint, but actually incentivize more developers to make code contributions to the project. Likewise, the code itself will become open source in the following months as a way to encourage input from developers and furnish the community with further resources.

The explorer’s support button—signaled by a question mark on the lower right corner of the screen—allows anyone to report bugs, make suggestions, or submit questions. As the Cardano Foundation’s teams continue to work on the next steps of this explorer, we welcome feedback from the Cardano community as well as any interested developers.

Sebastian Bode 
Director of Engineering