What is Polkascan?

Polkascan is the first multi-chain explorer designed to break down multi-chain data, making it understandable and accessible. The blockchain is filled with several pieces of information, and getting this information is frequently hard because it is often spread between numerous chains. Further, some of this information is hard to obtain on the chain as it involves technicalities like forensics, semantics, and artificial intelligence.

Polkascan is also a blockchain explorer for the Polkadot network, Kusama, and other related chains. Polkadot and Kusama are blockchain networks that champion interoperability between multiple chains, enabling cross-chain transfer of all data and asset classes.

Brief History of Polkascan

Polkascan is the brainchild of Web3Scan, an organization dedicated to making multi-chain data understandable and accessible. The idea of building a block explorer started in 2015 when Web3Scan CEO Emiel Sebastiaan took a keen interest in the block explorers on the Ethereum network. He noticed, however, that as advanced as those block explorers are, they are not available to everyone; instead, they are proprietary projects in the Ethereum ecosystem.

Web3Scan also believes the Blockchain industry will soon abound with several interoperable blockchains. Therefore, to navigate these chains, there will be a need for block explorers and experts who are skilled in operating them. This belief, thus, fuels their desire to be at the forefront when the need arises for this specialized service.

In April 2019, Polkascan was among the first projects to be included in the Web3 Foundation Grant. Web3 Foundation is an organization that funds research and projects related to the growth of decentralization. Further, all projects that benefit from this grant fund have to make their invention open-sourced, thereby helping the whole blockchain community.

Initially, due to the enormity of the project, the Polkascan team decided to build an explorer compatible with numerous chains. Then, as time goes on, combine the explorers on this chain into the Polkascan multi-chain explorer. Further, they designed it to be compatible with Substrate, a blockchain framework that enables the building of customizable Blockchains for all use cases. Therefore, Polkascan is compatible with all future-proof Blockchain built on the substrate ecosystem.

The Polkascan Team

Dave Hoogendorn, co-founder of Web3scan, is the founder of Polkascan. He has 30 years of experience in deploying information technology across a wide range of roles and markets. Further, Dave partners at OpenAware BV, a company based in the Netherlands.

Arjan Zijderveld serves as Co-founder of Polkascan. He co-founded Dynora B.V, a private company dedicated to web development in 2001, and also serves as CTO (chief technology officer) and co-founder of Web3scan. Arjan has over 20 years of experience in web development and specializes in Python, web applications, Django, Oracle, and Linux, to name a few.

Emiel Sebastiaan serves as the CEO of Web3scan and is one of the core team members behind Polkascan. Emiel’s goal for developing Web3scan is seen in the functionalities of Polkascan.

How Does Polkascan Work?

Polkascan harvests and decodes data from substrate nodes, and then the decoded data is stored in a relational database and circulated by an API for use on the explorers’ interface. Polkascan carries out the operation with the help of six software, five of which can function independently.

Python Harvester Application

The role of the harvester is to convert the raw substrate node data into relational data for various object classes. This includes blocks and extrinsic, as well as runtime metadata entities like time stamps, accounts, and balance. The Polkascan multi-chain explorer consists of one harvester application per blockchain. Further, the harvester operates with two clear-cut processes, which are the accumulator and the sequencer.

The accumulator harvests stateless data and does almost all the harvester’s work because it can parallelize tasks and execute them in any random order due to its high scalability. The sequencer, on the other hand, builds stateful data with the stateless data and performs only a few tasks. Further, the harvester applies a transaction-based commit strategy, enabling it to write all data of an entire block, ensuring the integrity of each block.

Python SCALE-Codec Library

The Scale-Codec encodes data in the substrate runtime. The job of the Python scale codec library is to decode this data and transform it into meaningful data. Polkascan also designed the scale codec to work independently and be helpful for the Polkadot ecosystem.

Python Substrate Interface Library

The role of the Library is to query the storage, composing extrinsic, encoding/decoding. Also, it provides supplementary convenience methods to deal with the features and metadata of the substrate runtime. The Polkascan team also designed the library to be useful not only for the Polkascan system but for the broader Polkadot ecosystem. Further, the substrate Interface creates a Python-based abstraction layer for repetitive tasks when querying substrate nodes for data.

Python Explorer API

Python Explorer API is a Falcon application that makes the data produced by the harvester application accessible to developers of various chains. The team has designed the Explorer API application to provide endpoints to all harvested data. The software may birth a whole new set of applications with different ranges that may not even be available on the substrate node.

Angular Explorer GUI

The Explorer GUI application’s role is to make the data produced by the harvester application and circulated by the Explorer API accessible to day-to-day end-users of the respective blockchain networks. Explorer GUI provides an interface to the Explorer API to inform developers of the decentralized applications they can build on the Explorer API for a wider audience of everyday users.

Docker Compose

Dockers assist in scaling up service management. Dealing artifacts with docker containers leaves the stack hardware agnostic, providing room for scaling.

Polkascan Staking And Governance

The Polkascan network classifies various accounts according to their on-chain activity and their roles on the network. They are validators, nominators, council members, technical committee members, and the treasury.

Validators

Validators are individuals or groups who stake a large amount of their tokens to secure the network. They evaluate and confirm the legitimacy of every transaction proposed before adding it to the blockchain. Whenever a new block is submitted, a subset of validators checks the validity of the transaction in the block before giving it attestation. Also, the block is only added to the blockchain if it obtains enough attestation from the validators.

Validators are required to be always online and are penalized when they fail to do so. However, the height of penalties is subject to the number of validators online when the validator goes offline. There is a lighter penalty with ⅔ validators and a more severe one when only ⅓ are online. Further, for the job they do, validators receive block rewards.

Nominators

Nominators nominate validators based on their n-chain activity performance and trustworthiness. Like validators, nominators stake many tokens and receive block rewards for their honest participation in the network.

Council Members

Users on the platform elect council members, and their job is to propose, vote, and dismiss council motions. They are also tasked with selecting the technical committee. However, each council member serves a council time, and an election is held to vote for another set of council members.

Technical Committee Members

The technical committee comprises teams successfully implementing or specifying a Polkadot Host or Runtime. Their job is to protect the platform from malicious referenda, add new battle-tested features, fix bugs, and reverse faulty runtime updates. The technical committee, however, can not make proposals but can fast-track already-made ones.

Treasury

The treasury is a culmination of funds gotten from transaction fees, slashing, block rewards, and staking inefficiencies. The funds are held in a system account accessible only to the system’s internal logic system. To spend it, account holders must make a Spend proposal to the council and, if approved, will enter into a waiting period known as the spend period. The waiting period ends when the money is distributed to all approved Spend proposals. In addition, the duration of the waiting period is subject to change by governance.

Slashing

Slashing occurs when a nominator or validator is punished for acting maliciously on-chain to serve as a deterrent for other validators. The validator’s total stake, plus that of their nominators, can be slashed from as low as 0.01% to as high as 100%. Further validators lose nominators during a slashing event.

Functions of Polkascan

Polkascan, for more clarity, divides the data on blockchain into two sections: easy to get and Hard. According to them, the data in each section is what everyday users want to know about the blockchain. The data on the easy-to-get section are the most available and accessible information on-chain.

The Hard section, which includes reverse lookups, semantics, indices, machine learning, and Artificial intelligence, is challenging to source on-chain. Now, for everyday users on polkaScan, sourcing these data will not be difficult. Further, they will be able to understand this data and get a sense of it, as any complexities surrounding it will be broken down into simpler bits.

Parity Technologies-Substrate

Substrate is a blockchain framework that enables the building of future-proof blockchain for all use cases. The platform was developed by Parity Technologies, an organization founded in 2015 by Gavin Woods. Their goal is to build open-source secure software for the decentralized web.

Polkascan developers leveraged Substrate’s excellent functionalities to build the multi-blockchain explorer. Therefore, all substrate-based blockchains can seamlessly connect with Polkascan, granting them access to its functionalities. Also, they are compatible with Polkadot, enabling them to tap into the world of parallel transactions and cross-chain transfer of all asset classes.

The Polkascan Foundation

Polkascan Foundation is dedicated to making blockchain data easily accessible and understandable. The organization is based in the Netherlands, and it plans to achieve its aim by developing software that includes data analytics, data extraction, and various libraries.

These software applications are designed to interface with Substrate and operate as open-sourced, benefiting the whole blockchain community. The Polkascan Foundation is also actively involved in the governance of both Polkascan and Polkadot blockchain.

Conclusion

Polkascan aims to make blockchain data more accessible and understandable to all in the blockchain community. To achieve their aim, they have employed substrate, a next-level blockchain infrastructure, to create a multi-chain explorer. This explorer enables the blockchain community to source information even into the deepest part of the distributed ledger system. Also at the core of Polkascan is the Polkascan Foundation, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the growth of Polkadot and making on-chain data easy to understand.