DAG Scan

A block explorer for the HGTP ecosystem that is inspired by the existing DAG explorer but enhanced with additional features and utility.

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Inspiration

I felt that there was a lack of alternative block explorers for the HGTP ecosystem and missed some features in the official explorer, which is why I decided to create dagscan. I took inspiration of the existing dagexplorer and added several new features to it.

Some features (wallet richlist and reward tracker) were already built by me previously on https://constellation.nebula-tech.io/, so I was already familiar with the network APIs, but I wanted to have a more unified block explorer that incorporates everything in one app and makes it easier to onboard new metagraphs. I completely rebuilt the indexing engine from scratch to make it more reliable, extendable, opensource and deployable through container apps.

What it does

Explore and visualize on-chain data from HGTP and Metagraphs. The main additional features are:

  • Enhanced network statistics
  • Wallet richlist
  • Cross Metagraph reward explorer
  • Snapshot data viewer
  • Node explorer that includes on-chain uptime statistics. This can be useful for people that want to delegate DAG and helps them in choosing a reliable node.

How we built it

The web interface is built using nextjs 14 and shadcn UI component library. The backend is built using the .NET 8 framework and runs as container apps. All resources are deployed in the Microsoft Azure cloud environment and are deployed using github actions.

Challenges we ran into

I needed to use a combination of the block explorer API and the hypergraph nodes API to retrieve the data I need to index it into my own data store. Not all history is present through the nodes API, so I couldn't use the existing snapshot streaming process to build out my own (historic complete) datastore that way (as it could only start indexing data from a certain ordinal), which might have simplified things. But that also would have required a lot of time to look into, so might be something for a future hackathon :-)

So currently, I'm using a mixture of the existing block explorer and my own datastore (for reward tracking, wallet balances, node uptime tracking and statistics). I'll need to do further load tests and see if a relational SQL datastore is the optimal solution for this app.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The on-chain node uptime tracking and cross-metagraph reward explorer are the features that I'm proud of the most. More things can be done around this, like creating a ranking for nodes with most uptime and alerting systems when nodes go offline.

What we learned

This is my first web application written in react nextjs 14. I didn't have much experience with any javascript frameworks, so figured the hackathon was a great way to expand my knowledge in that field.

I also learned about the CQRS pattern in the backend for the indexer and use a transactional pipeline for every database transaction to ensure consistency of data.

What's next for DAG Scan

Further enhancing the site and validating the integrity of the data. I also plan on building additional tools around it, like forking it into a more simplified standalone app for metagraphs (so they can use it as a starting point for a custom metagraph explorer/indexer) and creating tools for node operators (like a telegram bot where operators can subscribe to monitor their node and get alerts if it goes offline)

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