Etherscan for the Year 2019
2019 was a fruitful year, we managed to push out many useful features for our users. Many of these features were released without any fanfare and there are features that we built throughout the year that are less known to Etherscan’s users. Kindly allow us to provide you with a quick year-end wrap up of features that you might or might not know.
In Etherscan, our core value is to provide equitable access to blockchain information to anyone, and we will continue to hold this value to heart when building out Etherscan and its features.
Other than minor improvement that we do on the day to day basis, below are the added features and enhancements that ensure a pleasant and informative experience to our users and developers alike.
UI / UX
The most significant change to Etherscan earlier this year was the website revamp. As the old site focused on displaying as much of the blockchain information possible, the new design sets us up on a path to add better user experiences. The modern minimalist design of the site enables us to add features like “Preferences” which allows users to toggle between several customizations of the website:
- Advanced Mode: Show transactions and block details in full. Useful for developers to debug in a single view
- Disqus Comments: Enabling comments features on Etherscan
- Language: Support up to 5 languages including English, Chinese, Korean, Russian and Japanese
- Currency: Enables viewing values in the preferred currency
- Dark Mode: Switching to and from Dark Mode
Address
Analytic for Address
In terms of showing better information on Individual Address and Contact Address alike, we have added Analytics for Address. The Analytics tab can be found on any address page and shows the break down of statistics and time-series data for the address’s ether balance, transaction, and token transfers. Users can obtain information such as the address’s highest and lowest ether balance, and also in USD value. Both charts for the incoming and outgoing transactions and token transfers are shown as well.
My Name Tag
To help the readability and management of different addresses, Etherscan introduced My Name Tag, a private tagging feature introduced to Etherscan’s users. When logged into Etherscan, the user will be able to add a private name tag to any address to identify them better. The tagged address will appear as a user-defined tag instead of the hexadecimal address while looking at transaction interactions. The user can also include a short description for the address, which is viewable as a summary under the user dashboard.
Token
ERC-721 Inventory
Non-Fungible Tokens (ERC-721) was on the rise in 2018, with projects coming out with graphically cute Kittens and Heros. Naturally, Supporting ERC-721 inventory is one of the fun things to do. This would allow users to view the collectibles images they owned on Etherscan. The images are displayed under the Inventory tab on the ERC-721 token page. Below is an example of an inventory display for Flower NFT.
Dapp Page & Tracker
With the growing number of Dapps on Ethereum, Etherscan added a Dapp Page for any contract address. The Dapp Page acts as a new front-end interface for any smart contract where developers can freely customize the page with relevant information, banner image, and function description.
The Dapp Page helps developers save time by providing a minimal front end for their users to interact with their dapp and also act as a fallback page where users can still interact with the contract in an unfortunate event where the Project’s Dapp website is down. Users can simply connect with a web3 wallet and interact with the Dapp via Read and Write contract tab.
To view, browse, and track all of your favorite Dapps, we introduce the Dapp Tracker. The Dapp Tracker allows users to explore many of the decentralized application that has their information updated on Etherscan.
Verify Address Ownership
The provided signed message for the token information update is a security step to ensure only the owner/creator of a contract address can update the token information of the contract itself.
For every information update submitted to Etherscan, a signed message would need to be provided by the owner of the smart contract to prove ownership of the information and address on the blockchain. This process creates too many fictions for users who are frequently updating their token information.
Thus we introduced Verify Address Ownership, a process that involves verifying the ownership of a smart contract address with the Ethereum address used to create the smart contract and linking the contract address to the owner’s Etherscan account. The owner would need only to sign and verify that they owned the address once for any future information update submission.
Smart Contract
Source Code
Ethereum is not Ethereum if it’s not for the Smart Contract, which a part of Etherscan is dedicated to building, supporting, and providing transparency in these “digital” contracts.
In the effort to promote transparency to a smart contract, Etherscan provides source code verification, which matches the deployed bytecode to the provided bytecode from the smart contract owner.
Below are some features introduced on Etherscan to improve the development productivity of the smart contract for developers and making sure the contract is the source of truth/doing what it is intended to do.
- Multi-part solidity source code verifier: Allow contract verification for non-flattened source code
- Proxy contract support: Enable support and interaction for proxy contracts.
- Vyper source code verification and online compiler: Source code verification for Vyper smart contract (a pythonic programming language that targets the EVM)
- Sol2UML: Enable translation from Solidity to Unified Modelling Language (UML)
- Licensing: Enable licensing and distribution right of the Smart Contract
- Decompiler: Smart Contract bytecode decompiler
Others
DEFI Loan Tracker
The year 2019 observed the growth of decentralized finance. To help with better tracking of borrowing and lendings, Etherscan introduced the Loan Tracker, a tool that provides a lens that shows you the macro/micro view of a user’s loan.
Maker and Compound are supported on Etherscan at this point. For more details of the Loan Tracker, we have a Medium article dedicated to the specific of the latest addition on Etherscan.
Label Word Cloud
We have also been actively curating, tagging, and categorizing addresses and tokens listed on Etherscan through our label word cloud.
We’re thankful that this has become a source of reference in research articles and analysis throughout 2019. Our label word cloud helps to group project addresses and categorizing similar tokens for easier searchability. If you would like to label a public address, feel free to reach out to us on Label Tagging.
Transaction State Changes
In a simple value transfer, it is a balance update (state change) of 2 single accounts. However, in most of the transactions in Ethereum, there are many state changes that could have happened in the same transaction. With this, we have introduced a new feature, Transaction State Changes.
Information like the decrease and increase of Ether in an address or the changes of the storage of a contract are listed in detail under the State Changes tab on the transaction info page of any transaction hash.
We would like to thank all our users, developers, supporters, and the Ethereum ecosystem for your continuous support in making 2019 a great year. We are looking forward to an exciting 2020.
Etherscan is always open to feedback, comments or suggestions.
“ We listen and we just build”
