With the launch of the Stacks 2.0 mainnet getting closer every day and the first phases of the Stacks 2.0 Testnet moving along (STX Mining implemented recently, Argon released today), we have been thinking about what an explorer for Stacks 2.0 would look like.
Today, we’re excited to share a developer preview of Explorer 2.0. Stacks 2.0 offers some key design changes and notable new features, making it necessary to replace the previous Explorer with something built from the ground up to serve the needs of Stacks 2.0.
We are asking you to provide feedback before it gets rolled out a s a general release!
This initial version of the Explorer has been built with a focus around Clarity smart contracts, helpful sandbox features, and a smooth UI—including dark mode support you simply have to try out!
The Stacks 2.0 Testnet offers great new capabilities that you can now easily explore in more detail. Clarity developers can review smart contract details, and Dapp users can see the status of their transactions.
The new Explorer comes with a clean and intuitive design, following the Blockstack design language you are already familiar with. We are particularly excited about some key features:
Smart Contract Details
With the introduction of Stacks 2.0 and our smart contract programming language Clarity, everyone can review the source code of any deployed contract. Clarity is interpreted and broadcasted on the blockchain as-is and is not compiled like many other languages. The new Explorer makes browsing the details of a contract a breeze.
The contract source code is formatted and the syntax is highlighted for better readability, allowing an easy audit of the implementation of each contract. You can also review any post conditions defined and evaluated for each transaction. For contract creation and contract call transactions, the Explorer will show all events generated as part of the execution.
Testnet Sandbox
Getting smart contracts to production can be difficult. After cycles in a local, test-driven development environment, developers will start experimenting with their contracts in a mainnet or testnet environment. To support developers with that, the following actions are just a click away in the sandbox view included with the new Explorer:
- Login with Blockstack and generate temporary keychains
- Use the faucet to obtain STX tokens
- Transfer STX tokens or broadcast raw transactions
- Deploy sample smart contracts (or your own!)
- Fetch and call public functions of deployed contracts
The Explorer and the Testnet are still in an early stage. You might experience instability issues and feature changes in the coming weeks. Keep in mind that the Testnet will reset every few days (as described in this forum post). This means your STX addresses, balances, contracts, and transactions will become unavailable after some days on the Testnet. We intend to announce any chain resets at least an hour ahead of time on Discord, in the stacks-2-testnet channel.
We hope you are as excited as we are about this release! The goal of this developer preview is to get your feedback. So please, take a minute and:
- Hit reply to this message - for general questions, please have a look at the FAQs
- Submit a bug report or feature request
- Connect with me directly