Blockchains may be transparent, but Solana’s data-heavy ledger is better described as translucent. A new block explorer called Quantum aims to change that.
Built by the team behind SolanaFM, the overhauled block explorer prioritizes simplicity in presenting what’s happening on the Solana blockchain, the developers say. That’s a notable difference from many other Solana ecosystem explorers, many of which (including SolanaFM) are detailed at the expense of easy readability.
The service, which already has 53,000 signups, is debuting as the entire Solana ecosystem emerges from a long-term downtrend led by the rising price of SOL itself. At the time of writing, it is trading at $59, compared to $19 during the depths of the bear market.
For users who want to understand the data on the chain, these transaction browsers help people parse the mountains of crucial but imperceptible data that proves that X token went to Y address.
“You don’t want to have to have a sophisticated computer system to understand a blockchain,” said former FTX chief Sam Bankman-Fried at his recent trial (the judge had asked him to explain what block explorers are). Are). “So there are several providers that have created websites that listed all transfers on the Blockchains in a centralized but easy-to-view way.”
SolanaFM is one of the few companies building these websites for the Solana blockchain, whose transactions are notoriously not ‘easy to view’. The fast blockchain creates massive amounts of unstandardized data that explorers find difficult to present in an intuitive way. Solana ecosystem explorers are not nearly as streamlined as Ethereum’s Etherscan.
By SolanaFM’s own count, the eponymous block explorer is the third most popular of the Solana ecosystem, behind the Solana Foundation’s first-to-market portal and another from a third-party service called SolScan.
“We realize that our explorer was overbranded” because newcomers thought it was a podcast, said SolanaFM CEO Nicholas Chen.
He’s trying to eat away at the incumbents’ “massive market share” by changing the name of his explorer to Quantum, but perhaps more importantly by improving the user experience: essentially the presentation of all that amazing data.
“Users generally get a less detailed user interface, but it gets straight to the point and provides information that is ESSENTIAL to understanding what they are reading in less than three seconds,” he says.