Transthereum — Unibright’s Open-Source Blockchain Explorer for Developers
While developing components for our 360° Tokenization solution Freequity, our development team was looking for an easy way to monitor and explore blockchain transactions in a locally simulated Ethereum network. After spending some time on searching the internet, the team decided to create our own development blockchain Explorer “Transthereum”, to put it open source and additionally contribute it to the Baseline Protocol.
What is a Blockchain Explorer?
You can think of a blockchain explorer like a browser for blockchain transactions. Explorers like Etherscan allows you to explore and search the Ethereum blockchain for transactions, addresses, tokens, prices and other activities taking place on Ethereum.
There are other blockchain explorers for Ethereum, and also for other Blockchains like Bitcoin, Eos and so on.
What is Transthereum?
Transthereum is a blockchain explorer comparable to Etherscan, with a reduced feature set and targeting local development environments like Ganache. Ganache let’s you quickly fire up a personal Ethereum blockchain which you can use to run tests, execute commands, and inspect state while controlling how the chain operates.
While developing the Freequity Liquidity component, we were looking for a quick way to check the internal balances of different Ganache wallet addresses. As the development of a complex techstack (involving frontend, proxies, backend, service layers, persistence layers and blockchain interaction) includes a lot of tools, frameworks and software components, every tool that saves you time and effort while checking and debugging the current state of development is very welcomed. Especially blockchain debugging is hard, as we noticed that this was needed in Freequity development, we decided to spend some time on coding our own blockchain explorer.
We decided to build it because we could not find a good tool to help us visually track the transactions in ganache-cli. Transthereum is not optimized to be used against a real network (like Ropsten or Rinkeby) because of large number of blocks, as those network already have mature explorers. It contains functionalities Unibright developers need during development, examples of implementation of some key features needed when querying the blockchain and can serve as a playground for experimenting.
The project consists of a .NET-core backend and and Angular frontend and relies on the Nethereum library to talk to the blockchain.
With Transthereum you can:
- Get latest blocks
- Get block by height
- Get latest transactions
- Get transaction by hash
- Get address with transactions and token balances
- Parse transaction inputs: This was especially needed in our Freequity context, where we needed parsing of transaction inputs in order to get specific Unibright Freequity trade information. We implemented it as an easily implementable interface (
ITransactionParser) for different purposes.
Transthereum is Open Source
We decided to put it open source and also contribute it to the Baseline Protocol, to help developers building stuff around Baseline faster, which will help all of us in that Ecosystem.
You can find the Open Source Implementation of Transthereum here: https://github.com/unibrightIO/Transthereum
The fork for Baseline went into the init-core branch: https://github.com/ethereum-oasis/baseline/tree/init-core/baseline/lib/tools/transthereumBlockchainExplorer
We encourage everyone to check out Transthereum, and help building and improving it so the whole community to benefit from it. We strongly believe that we can create best progress within the blockchain space, if people and projects are teaming up and working together, like we for example do within the Baseline Protocol.
Unibright is a team of blockchain specialists, architects, developers and consultants with 20+ years of experience in business processes and integration. Unibright turns ideas into businesses, and improves processes with the help of blockchain technology.
Unibright develops enterprise solutions, invests in start-ups, builds process modelling tools and integration platforms and offers a 360° ecosystem around tokenized assets.
Learn more by visiting the Unibright website, Twitter and Medium.
