Announcing Mininax: A minimal retro block explorer for Tezos!

Cryptonomic
The Cryptonomic Aperiodical
3 min readJul 12, 2019

Cryptonomic has noted recent concerns about the closed nature of existing Tezos block explorers. As committed open source enthusiasts, our longer term strategy has always been to roll out our powerful analytics tool, Arronax, and support great community-based efforts like TezBlock. However, Arronax is still in beta and will take some more time to reach its final state while solutions like TezBlock are still in development. To provide an immediate alternative, we are releasing a minimal retro block explorer called Mininax.

Mininax is a fun project we worked on for the past two weeks along with our designer friends at Bldgblox. It’s supposed to provide basic block explorer functionality to support wallet users and others looking for simple lookups. In contrast to Arronax, Mininax is opinionated about the data it presents and the form it presents it in. At the same time, Mininax also serves as a portal into Arronax, providing multiple links for people who need insightful data but are unsure about how to pull it out of Arronax. In the interest of time, the application was written in TypeScript but will shortly be redone in ReasonML.

The tool currently allows users to look at basic information about blocks, certain operation kinds and accounts from the Tezos mainnet and alphanet:

A mainnet block
An alphanet operation
A mainnet account with links to Arronax in white background

Clicking on, let’s say, the “All received transactions” link opens an appropriate report in Arronax:

An Arronax window spawned by Mininax giving more fine-grained details

In the coming days, we will add a text dashboard as a home screen which will provide a broad overview of the current status of the Tezos network (we plan to soon build a visual dashboard as a separate project). Mininax will also allow looking up basic information about protocol upgrade proposal and votes and add support for additional kinds of operations. Other than that, it is not meant to replace or compete with any other upcoming explorers, but serve more as a stopgap which ensures the Tezos community always has an open source option for all its everyday needs.

As always, we appreciate your feedback whether it’s by email or on Riot.

https://mininax.cryptonomic.tech/

Happy exploring!

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Cryptonomic
The Cryptonomic Aperiodical

NYC-based startup committed to decentralization and digital sovereignty.