@nearblocks.near [Posted on Developer DAO Board](https://near.social/#/devgovgigs.near/widget/Post?id=635) ## Idea: Transition Pagoda’s Near Explorer to NearBlocks by Invoker Labs **Problem** NearBlocks (https://nearblocks.io/ | https://testnet.nearblocks.io/) was launched in March 2022 by Invoker Labs as a feature rich alternative to Near Explorer (http://explorer.near.org) that is now used by the top companies in the Near ecosystem including Binance, Huobi, Ref, Sweat, Metapool, Few and Far, Mintbase, Coinmarketcap, and many more. NearBlocks gained popularity due to the familiar user experience users have come to expect within the ecosystem. Along with additional features like token tracking, pagination, trend charts, NFT explorer, CSV exports, simple REST API and many more. With over 100,000 monthly active users and 450,000 daily API hits, NearBlocks has become the neutral source of truth for checking wallet balances, exploring execution plans, and debugging NEP contracts. Despite NearBlocks’ success in building and growing the most-used Near explorer, its paid API plans and display ads have not generated enough revenue to pay for the product besides cover server costs. Meanwhile, Pagoda allocates valuable human capital and pays expensive server costs to maintain Near Explorer - despite its simultaneous efforts to decentralise ownership of other infrastructure-related products it managed like Near Wallet, MyNearWallet, and AstroDAO. Transitioning the explorer infrastructure to the ecosystem would be another huge win for the Pagoda team as it would reduce development and maintenance overhead, improve ecosystem decentralisation, and consolidate feature development for more efficient resource management. **Solution** The NearBlocks team is requesting $600,000 over two years ($300,000 / yr or $25,000 / mo) to consolidate Near Explorer and NearBlocks into one product while building new features, providing customer support, and actively maintaining the best explorer in the Near ecosystem. The expected outcomes from this proposal include: **Explorer Transition / Consolidation** 1. Merge explorer codebase with NearBlocks codebase. 2. Get explorer.near.org to redirect to NearBlocks.io. Including 301 redirects to relevant nearblocks pages (eg. tx, account pages/links). 3. Hand off any legal or operational tasks needed for transition. 4. Pagoda will decommission servers for Near Explorer and hand off maintenance to Invoker Labs. **Explorer Feature Improvements** - Integration with BOS ecosystem (providing components, providing additional API - ie. stitching/remote graphql schema) - Quickly implement all future NEPs and legacy tokens. - Increase uptime, despite our servers not having any downtime since our last major upgrade. We have recently cut costs on backups, redundancy and high availability. - Fix and provide additional data points like token holder lists, price feeds. Additional other data points which are previously not available. - Build deeper integrations with Aurora and private shards (Calimero) to show transactions happening across the whole ecosystem. - Improve and provide better support for contract interactions. - Add time series data analytics and charts to analyse trends. Trading charts and activities. - Index and display additional NFT data. - Build tools such as verify contract, scam check, contract search, contract diff checker, compilers, etc. **Developer Tooling Enhancements** - Enhance REST based API for easier development usage. - Build time Series charts for trend analysis. - Ensure scalability to support the growing ecosystem. - Build smart contract tools such as contract verification, spam checker, contract search, contract diff checker). **Maintenance and DevOps of Explorer** - Ensure 99.95% uptime of 99.95 %.Have proper backup and high availability implementation, currently NearBlocks does not have this due to budget limitations. - Upgrade database servers and storage capacity. We currently depend on a primary database server with 16 cores, 128gb memory and 10TB storage. With the chain constantly growing. We need to have HA failovers/read replicas and backups in place to continue to scale. **Marketing / Near User Acquisition** Thanks to our proactive outreach and long-lasting relationships across the blockchain industry, we have been able to provide data to distinguished companies : - Forbes (link) ; Cryptoslate (link) ; - Tether (link) ; Binance (deposits/withdrawals) ; - OKX (deposits/withdrawals) ; - Huobi (deposits/withdrawals) ; - Crypto.com (deposits/withdrawals) ; - CoinMarketCap (link) ; - CoinGecko (link) ; - MarketBeat (link). Within the Near ecosystem, almost all dApps point to NearBlocks. Some of these teams include: Sweatcoin, Ref Finance, Paras, Few n Far, Mintbase, Meteor Wallet, xDEFI Wallet, Tonic, Spin, Coinhall, Verdex, Loozr, SafePal, Onto Wallet, Cuvar Wallet and Nightly Wallet. With this transition we can further support Near ecosystem projects and grow awareness, by supporting programs such as Near Horizon. The goal is to be able to offer free exposure to projects within Near on NearBlocks. Examples include non-intrusive product suggestions, display ads, how-to guides, ecosystem updates, and more. **Path Towards Sustainability** In the case this proposal gets approved, we would save our profits generated from our paid API and ad revenue to continue running NearBlocks after the two year grant expires. The transition from explorer.near.org to nearblocks.io will facilitate an increase in MAU and allow the nearblocks.io team to charge more for display and non-intrusive ads, as it will become a more attractive platform for the publishers to advertise on. **Budget & Financing** Yearly breakdown as follows : 1. Server Hosting, Database, High Availability, Backups - $60,000 / year 2. SaaS - $6,000 / year - SEMrush - SEO Optimisation ($229/mo) - Freshdesk - Help Center & Customer Service ($49/mo) - Google Suite - Communication ($80/mo) - Calendly - Communication ($49/mo) - Cloudflare - Infra ($25/mo) - Adobe Suite - Tools ($30/mo) - GitHub Co-pilot - Dev Tools ($40/mo) 3. Team - $258,000 / year The team consists of 4 engineering roles, 1 design role and 1 business development role. The team has been working together since 2020 and are all based in Jakarta, Indonesia. Below salaries include 13th-month wages, local tax and corporate taxes. NearBlocks does not rent or own an office. With this transition, each team member will be able to work full-time on Nearblocks. - Co-Founders ($3,000/mo) - Lead Engineer ($6,500/mo) - Senior Full Stack ($4,000/mo) - Sys/Devops ($3,500/mo) - Front-end ($2,500/mo) - Web Designer ($2,000/mo) - Business Developer ($2,000/mo) **Technical & Feature Timeline** - Milestone 1 (0-6 months) – Fixing outdated bugs, re-indexing missing tokens and infrastructure upgrades (backups, high availability) ; - Milestone 2 (6-12 months) – New feature update: support new NEPs, time series data (charts, analytics tools) , improved contract integrations (eg. additional tools like contract verification, spam checker, contract search, contract diff checker); - Milestone 3 (12-18 months) – Support for Aurora (native frontend integration) and shards such as Calimero. Continued support of new NEPs. - Milestone 4 (18-24 months) – Deeper integration with shards like potential EVM data display/explorer. Continued support of new NEPs. **Reporting Structure & Payment Schedule** To ensure Invoker Labs meets the expectations of DevHub, we propose to break up the proposed funding into milestones that are paid out before the start of a new milestone and on a half-year basis (per 6 months). - Milestone 1 ($150,000): June 2023 - Milestone 2 ($150,000): January 2024 - Milestone 3 ($150,000): June 2024 - Milestone 4 ($150,000): January 2025