Published On - May 10, 2019
Chainlens at //build/
It’s been a busy few weeks at Web3 Labs. Following the launch of our Chainlens Blockchain Explorer on Azure last week, we also had the privilege of it being selected by Mark Russinovich , the CTO for Microsoft Azure for his demo at Build. Build is Microsoft’s premier developer conference, that took place earlier this week — check out the video Simplifying Blockchain Development from the event (we’re at 32:02).
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The Enterprise Blockchain Explorer
Supporting business users has always been a key consideration for us, one that could not be solved with engineering alone. Hence late last year we started work on a full revamp of our explorer user experience to support business users. The Chainlens Enterprise Blockchain Explorer is the end result and we’re really proud of what we’ve achieved.
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As you can see from the above, we’ve given the interface a complete overhaul. It has a fresh new look, that coincidentally matches our brand identity.
Simplicity
The new experience emphasises simplicity for our users, we don’t want to burden them with information they don’t need to regularly refer to. Of course, the details are still there if needed, but we want to ensure we’re providing sensible information defaults in our screens.
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(Business) User Experience
Business users want meaningful business metrics supporting the business problems that blockchains are helping to solve. A block and transaction are meaningless without a wider context. Hence, Chainlens prioritises a contract’s views over others.
Contract Registry
Chainlens provides a smart contract registry, which allows our users to register their contract ABI data. This greatly enhances the contract data visible in the explorer. Both contract method and event names along with their parameters become visible, allowing rich insight into what their applications are doing.
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Tokens
One of the other features we’re really stoked about is the ability to view details of all tokens deployed in the network, with separate labels for fungible or non-fungible tokens (ERC20 or ERC721).
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Considering how much interest there is in tokens in an enterprise setting (see the Enterprise Ethereum Alliances recent announcement on the Token Taxonomy Framework), we believe this will assist less technical users in making sense of token applications running on their networks.
Advanced Sorting and Filters
Another key feature is the addition of sorting and filters in Chainlens. This enables our users to find very active contracts by sorting their various views by key attributes. Contracts can be sorted by transaction date, transaction count or event contracts by transaction count.
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But that’s not all! The filters provided allow our users to view subsets of the available data, such as only displaying contract creation transactions or fungible tokens.
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Business Intelligence
We’re really proud of the new user experience. We understand that extracting business intelligence data for reporting is another crucial consideration in any business. Chainlens provides a RESTful API too, which can be used to extract all data you see in the interface. This, combined with the filtering functionality and the contract registry, enables our users to perform bespoke reporting on their applications, such as details of all transfer events associated with a specific token.
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Getting Started
Chainlens supports a number of different hosting options which all come with support from the Web3 Labs team. You can find it in the Azure Marketplace, with a free trial, and we also provide hosted SaaS versions with authenticated access.
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What’s Next
This is just the tip of the iceberg. We have grand plans for Chainlens that will provide even greater simplicity for business users and a more integrated experience for developers. Please get in touch if you want to find out more! Otherwise, stay tuned for more over the coming weeks!
