A Conversation with Eva Zhang: Blockscout’s New CEO

We recently welcomed Eva Zhang, former CEO of Alipay UK, as Blockscout’s new Chief Executive Officer. To give our community a chance to get to know her, we sat down for a quick Q&A, covering her journey, and what’s in store for Blockscout.

Getting to Know Eva

Q: Eva, welcome to Blockscout! You’ve had a fascinating career across fintech, payments, and cloud. What made you want to join Blockscout?

Eva: Thank you! What drew me to Blockscout is its unique position in Web3. Block explorers started as simple lookup tools, but today they’re much more: they’re the first stop for discovering what’s happening onchain. I’ve spent my career helping people access and use complex technology in intuitive ways, whether that was payments at Alipay or infrastructure at Alibaba Cloud. Blockscout is doing the same for blockchain data, and I’m excited to help take it to the next stage.

Q: You’ve worked in some of the biggest fintech and cloud organizations in the world. How do those experiences shape your approach here?

Eva: At Alipay, we were always thinking about scale, how to make a product work for millions of users in dozens of markets, while still staying user-friendly. At Alibaba Cloud, the focus was on building reliable, enterprise-grade infrastructure. Those lessons are very relevant here. Blockscout is open source and community-driven, but also needs to serve institutions, enterprises, and developers at scale. My background helps bridge those worlds.

Blockscout’s Next Chapter

Q: What’s next for Blockscout under your leadership?

Eva: The next chapter is about making explorers smarter. Right now, explorers do a great job showing you transactions and balances, but it’s still up to you to piece together the story. We want Blockscout to help with that, to make it easier to understand what happened, spot risks, or even get a quick explanation of a contract upgrade without digging through raw data. That applies not just to people, but also to AI assistants that are starting to use blockchain data. We’ve already built an early integration that lets models like Claude pull verified data from Blockscout, and that’s just the first step. Over time, both users and AI will be able to rely on Blockscout as a source of truth, and a place to act on that data.

Q: So how does AI fit into Blockscout’s plans?

Eva: AI is becoming a new kind of blockchain user, but right now it can’t natively access balances, tokens, transaction histories, or contract metadata. We’re adapting Blockscout APIs to be AI-friendly: structured, predictable, and easy for models to consume. The goal is to make blockchain data as accessible to AI as it is to humans.

Q: What are some practical use cases you see coming out of this AI+blockchain work?

Eva: There are so many. Compliance teams could automate contract and transaction reviews. DeFi platforms could set up AI-driven risk monitoring for pools and upgrades. Customer support agents could instantly check balances or explain transaction statuses. Developers could use AI copilots to fetch ABIs, source code, or interaction histories while building. It’s about making blockchain data not only transparent, but actionable.

Q; We’re so excited for this next phase in Blockscout’s evolution. Will anything change for users in the near term?

Not immediately, though we are researching ways chains, dapps, and users can get more out of our APIs, so expect some updates there. We’re also working on add-ons that will make exploration and payments easier and more intuitive - designed specifically for new web3 projects onboarding from traditional fintech platforms.

We’ll continue optimizing for speed and data coverage to leverage our position as the #1 block explorer for L2s, L3s, and institutional blockchain networks.

Explorers, Enterprises, and Onboarding

Q: What role do you think explorers play in onboarding the next wave of users to Web3?

Eva: A big one. Explorers are often the first touchpoint when someone wants to see “what happened” onchain. If we make that experience intuitive, trustworthy, and even enhanced by AI assistance, we lower the barrier for everyone: users, developers, and enterprises. I see explorers as the universal search engines of Web3.

Q: And what about enterprises and fintechs? How do you see explorers supporting them as they move from Web2 into Web3?

Eva: Institutions are realizing that blockchains aren’t just about crypto trading, they’re a programmable, global settlement layer. Banks are testing tokenized deposits, asset managers are exploring tokenized funds, and fintechs are embedding stablecoin rails into everyday products. What all of them need is trustworthy, accessible data. That’s where Blockscout comes in: block explorers provide the foundation that enterprises can build on.

Q: So data transparency really becomes a bridge?

Eva: Exactly. Traditional finance runs on legacy systems that are opaque and fragmented. By contrast, blockchains are transparent by design, but only if you have the right tools to make sense of the data. Explorers turn raw transactions into usable intelligence.

For a fintech building global remittance products, that means being able to track flows in real time. For an asset manager tokenizing a fund, it means giving investors confidence in settlement and reserves. Explorers are the connective tissue that makes blockchain data usable across both crypto-native and traditional industries.

Thank you Eva! We look forward to what’s next!

Thank you! I’m excited to join the team and position Blockscout strategically as more institutions and enterprises participate onchain.