Making Ethereum More Usable: EthAlarm
Our gift to the community, following an awesome DevCon
One of the things that make me uncomfortable when dealing with Ethereum smart contracts is the lack of overall visibility into what’s going on “under the hood”. One example is how inconvenient it is to easily get information about what happens to smart contracts that you are interested in, without coding.
Etherscan, an outlier in the space, is an incredibly useful tool. It has evolved to be quite reliable and powerful, both for technical and non-technical users alike. However, we need more ways for the average user to extract information from the blockchain. To this end, we are open-sourcing a tool we believe will help advance this aspect of the Ethereum ecosystem.
Push, not pull
EthAlarm is a simple application to get notifications of events triggered by Ethereum smart contracts. It requires just three inputs:
- The address of the contract you’re interested in.
- The events that you want to be notified of.
- The way in which you'd like to be notified (e.g., an email or a web hook).
And that’s it. The next time an event is triggered on your contract, you will receive an email or an HTTP POST request to the URL you provided.
Public Service (beta) and Open Source
The service is now live at ethalarm.com. Please take note that we’re still working on improving its reliability — let us know if you run into any issues when using it. The source code is here in our GitHub for anyone to extend it or run it themselves.
Given that privacy is one of the biggest concerns in the crypto space, data control is of paramount importance. That’s one key reason why you may want to spin your own instance of EthAlarm, rather than using our publicly available one.
Community effort
We’d like to thank the following contributors for their comments, code, designs and/or reviews: Patricio Palladino, Nico Santangelo, Daniel Kelly, Diego Paez, Fran Crespi, and Federico Bond.
One in a series of open source projects from Decentraland
The maturity of the Ethereum ecosystem is crucial for the success of Decentraland. As such, this project represents the first in a series of general-purpose tools that we will be releasing to the community as our platform is developed.
Stay in touch with us through:
- The Decentraland chat.
- Subscribing to email updates on our mailing list.
- Following us on Twitter.
- Subscribing to our subreddit.
