We’re excited to welcome in a new year with LOTS planned for 2024 including:

• Data center expansion: Did you know Blockscout has its very own data center? We’ve been gradually expanding out with state-of-the-art hardware and hardening the infrastructure to reduce our dependence on cloud-based providers and present new, fast hosting options and solutions for chains around the globe.
• Leading explorer for RaaS providers: We’ll continue developing services and solutions for Rollup-as-a-service providers, making Blockscout deployment easy and even more intuitive for all new zk Rollups and Optimistic Rollups entering the space. Blockscout is already used by many RaaS providers, and we are excited to bring more functionality to those providers and onboard additional ones.
• Extensive AI integration: We’ve been busy training an AI model that provides human-readable text for Blockscout transactions. In 2024 we’ll expand Blockscout’s AI capabilities to create a suite of smart search features to help everyone find information quickly and accurately.
• DAppscout marketplace: We aim to establish DAppscout as the go to place to discover and interact with DApps. We’re working on several fronts to improve functionality, incentivize usage, and expand the roster of accessible DApps on the marketplace.

To get the year started off right, we set the tone in January by accomplishing some major milestones! Here are highlights from a busy month.

🎉 Major Performance Upgrade with 6.0

Blockscout 6.0 was our first major release of the year primarily focused on performance improvements. Our recent blog post details the results of some of these improvements. Execution speed increased across the board (including one update that made a query 185,200 times faster 🤯) and DB size shrank considerably. Overall we saw a 78% speed increase for transaction queries.

Name Service Integration

We’ve been working to support name service integrations for some time and this month we announced our first integration with Roostock. The community was thrilled!

The same update allowed ENS to be added to the Blockscout Ethereum instance. To find and ENS name, you can search directly in the search bar of Blockscout.

1. Enter the full name (ie vitalik.eth).
2. Select the Addresses button.
3. Click through for the address page.

Now that the Rust microservice for name services is complete, projects can submit their own subgraphs to include name services for their chain! The instructions are in the Blockscout rs github repo at https://github.com/blockscout/blockscout-rs/tree/main/blockscout-ens#contribute

Front-End Customizations

One of the benefits of the new Blockscout UI is it’s written in React, making customizations much easier for networks and developers. We’re already starting to see new versions and interesting features added by self-hosted chains.

One such project is MXC, who integrated map views and the associated location transactions directly into their explorer. Read more here.

If your project has customized Blockscout with a new look and feel or enhanced functionality, let us know and we’ll feature your customizations in an upcoming newsletter!

New Instance: zkSync Sepolia

We're excited to support the zkSync Sepolia testnet with a new Blockscout instance available at https://zksync-sepolia.blockscout.com/. This compliments the Blockscout zkSync Era mainnet instance at https://zksync.blockscout.com/. Connect to either instance through the UI or with the API interface featuring both Rest API and RPC API options.

DAppscout Marketplace launched on Shibarium

The DAppscout marketplace was turned on for Shibarium this month and we immediately saw a big uptick in usage and interest. Shibarium is an L2 hosted by Blockscout that expands the Shiba Inu memecoin into an entire ecosystem including games, DEXs, staking and more. The chain is currently processing several million transactions daily.

✅ Mean Finance: DAppscout DApp of the Month

Mean Finance is a decentralized investing and swapping app available across multiple ecosystems (Ethereum, Optimism, Base, Gnosis, +more). Mean Finance has several unique DeFi offerings which are simple to use.

1. Automated dollar cost averaging (DCA). Easily add a DCA strategy with any ERC-20 tokens and capture value by investing automatically over a fixed time period.
2. Meta-aggregated swaps. A unique algorithm and access to dozens of DeFi exchanges gives you the best price for any swap, with no additional fees.

To access Mean Finance through Blockscout, simply search for Mean in the search bar or go to the Apps menu on your chain of choice and find Mean Finance. If your Blockscout global wallet is connected, you will be automatically connected to Mean Finance and can invest or swap immediately.

Lightlink Hackathon Ends Feb 4

Blockscout has been participating in the LightLink online hackathon throughout January. We've been excited to see projects using Blockscout as they develop their apps on Lightlink. The hackathon ends on Sunday, February 4. If you are participating, be sure to checkout the Blockscout-LightLink sponsored bounty and participate for your share of the prize pool!

ETHDenver next month

Speaking of hackathons we’ll see you next month at EthDenver. We'll be roaming the grounds with swag, POAPs and more, and would love to meet you and learn what you're working on in the web3 space! Look for our Blockscout shirts and be sure to say 👋

🙇 Get in Touch!

Thanks again friends for your ongoing support of Blockscout! If there are features you would like to see on the 2024 roadmap, don't hesitate to get in touch with us and submit it in the feature-requests channel on Discord, or submit a PR directly to our open-source Github repo.

The Blockscout monthly newsletter goes out to all MyAccount community users on supported chains. We would love to get your feedback on topics you'd like to see covered or any questions you have. Visit us on X or Discord to get your explorer questions answered or get your project added to our growing network list ⬇️