hntscan.io - an alternative helium transaction explorer

[dansku]

Project:

hntscan.io - brand new open-source helium transaction explorer

Elevator Pitch:

The website hntscan.io will be a lightweight, reliable, and open-sourced equivalent to etherscan.io, solscan.io, for reviewing and analyzing transactions on the Helium Blockchain. It will provide the necessary redundancy needed to facilitate the decentralization of public access to the Helium Blockchain data.

Total fiat ask:
$80k

Name:

Daniel Andrade (@spillere#2661 - @dansku) / Lisbon - Portugal
Maxime Goossens (@Max RS#7311 - @mugoosse) / Lisbon - Portugal
Alexis Argent (@peixeboi#8903 - @aargent) / Lisbon - Portugal

Team or Project website: hntscan.io
Team or projects social: twitter.com/hntscan

• https://github.com/dansku
• https://github.com/mugoosse
• https://github.com/aargent

Project Details:

hntscan.io will serve the purpose of decentralizing access to Blockchain data in a reliable, fast, and simple-to-use interface. Data will be served by ETL's that are not the same as the current official Helium explorer. This way, the community can still consult Blockchain transactions if the official Helium explorer is down/slow.

Our technical involvement with the Helium project dates back to the summer of 2020 with one of the first DIY miners in Europe. Since then we have covered entire cities with the people's network and subsequently launched hotspotty.net after thousands of dedicated engineering hours. We are confident that our experience can be leveraged to deliver hntscan.io to the community with success.

Roadmap:

• Open-Source Helium Explorer:
  • Setup the ETL server for the project, the more ETLs running on the network the more decentralized the network will be. In addition to server costs, the ETL also requires engineering time to maintain, but it's a very important part of the project. The explorer will be built on top of the current implementation of the blockchain-http and the ETL from blockchain-etl
  • After completing the ETL setup, an understanding of all the endpoints from the blockchain-http is required to build the explorer.
  • Implementation of all the functions of the old explorer (minus the map) in a lightweight view, but with more information that got stripped down from the current explorer due to server constraints.
  • Create a pending transactions page, so that users can check if the transactions got actually recorded on the blockchain but not yet completed. This is a major improvement to the current explorer, as users need to wait for multiple blocks until the transaction is actually completed.
  • A good way to analyze and track data-credit usage from LoRa network and 5G.
  • Build a validator explorer.

Milestone	Deliverable	Summary	Cost
Infrastructure Setup	Have the base infrastructure deployed and configured so that the website can live on top.	The ETL server consists of two servers, one server that runs solely the blockchain-etl software which communicates with other nodes on the network and syncs all the information for each new block. The second server is the "stronger" server that will actually hold the whole data of the blockchain using a PostgreSQL database and serve its information initially using the blockchain-http API server. Setup the server infrastructure that will host the front-end and back-end for hntscan.io, this will also include setting up the project on Github, setting up deployment flows, and anything else that is required for the explorer website. (Also creating the discord channel for the project, so that people can follow the development of the project and also contribute, it’s open-source, after all).	$30k
Design and feature set	Mockup website with all the end-point and pages planned and layed out	The wireframes are the initial step into having a good UX on any website. For hntscan, a study of similar projects will be required and a list of features will be implemented as part of this review. After having the wireframes defined, it's time to get started on the main design and build what was discussed and developed in the previous steps with a mock interface. The front-end will be implemented using ReactJS in Typescript.	$25k
Front-end and back-end	Website goes live 🎉	With the layout designed, at this stage we will start implementing the real data into the platform, where the front-end will actually pull real data from the blockchain. Besides the official helium-api software provided by the blockchain-http, we will also work on the development of our own API server to supplement the official API that will be written, most likely in Golang. This software will interface with the PostgreSQL database to process data efficiently and extract only the information needed to be shown by the front-end.	$25k

[jthiller]

Hey @dansku, This is aligned with the interests of the grants committee. I'd like to work with you to help tighten up the milestones and making clear deliverables. I'll reach out to you on Discord to get some time set up to share the thoughts.

[dansku]

@jthiller yessir!

[jthiller]

Hey @dansku, thanks for the edits. I'll bring this back to the committee. You should be hearing from us soon.

[jthiller]

Noting Milestone 2 done as of April 08, 2022

Excited to see this built! https://bit.ly/hnt-scan-design