Introducing Emerald Moonbeam for Polkadot

Working on the Emerald project, we understand the importance of having a whole picture of the network. It’s critical for the quality of the service to monitor what is happening, not only on-chain but also off-chain. And by off-chain we mean state of the network, nodes, traffic, and changes in the topology of the network. It allows predicting major changes, monitor forks, and of course, detect a 51% attack.

We already had that system built for the Ethereum network, with some public reports on our Emerald Insights page. But recently, as a part of our work on improving open infrastructure for the blockchain, we have released an open-source version of the crawler for Polkadot-based networks.

The work was possible with a grant from Web3 Foundation, and the current version targets the Kusama network. The project is Open Sourced under the Apache 2 license, and we invite everyone to try it out.

The current version is more like the first Beta. At this moment, the Kusama network consists of a few hundred nodes, and the crawler gathers all details in minutes. But we’re looking forward to the growth of Polkadot-based networks, and we hope that Moonbeam will be able to handle it well. Nevertheless, there are still many things that we want to improve or fix in the following months.

Technically, Moonbeam can be extended to support any network based on libp2p protocol, like Ethereum 2.0 is also planning to use. But at this moment, it’s targeting only Polkadot-based blockchains. And we are going to work on improving compatibility with other Polkadot networks.

We encourage you to try the current version, which can be found on https://github.com/emeraldpay/moonbeam And we would be happy to hear any feedback and receive bug reports. That will help us to improve the project. Just keep in mind that it’s in the early stage of development.