Secret's Explorer Strategy

Secret Governance
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Hello Secret Community!

As you may or may not have heard, CosmoStation has let us know that they will be shutting down support for Secret as of December 1. We only heard about this on November 12, so we’ve been discussing options with them and have come to a crossroads.

The total amount they are asking for is $120K per year to run the service as it stands. We’ve negotiated this to a minimum of $80K in stables and the rest in SCRT. They have declined to accept any delegation in lieu of payment.

In response, we have explored other options, including making PingPub more robust by hooking it up to our archive (loe tbd, feasibility tbd), using other explorers such as explorers.guru (feature set & quality tbd), and resurrecting Secret Nodes Explorer (feature set known, loe known, target date early December).

Given the looming deadline, SNF has already committed to funding Secret Nodes Explorer’s update. The original launch date for this was end of the year, but the team doing it has been working hard to pull this date in.

We would like to explore the community feeling about our options. First, a quick summary of what I know about the tech at this moment:

Mintscan: Main Cosmos explorer, covers most major chains in Cosmos. Decent feature set, saves historical information.

PingPub: doesn’t have cacheing, but is otherwise usable. Covers a large number of Cosmos chains. Less responsive - takes a couple of seconds to load.) No historical information earlier than a couple of weeks. Currently covers SCRT.

Explorers.guru: very responsive, no delay in loading. Covers many of the Cosmos chains that Mintscan doesn’t support.

Secretnodes Explorer: not currently live, covers only Secret chain, has historical information and cacheing, built by community members, has Secret Wallet Rank page.

For discussion:

Question 1: What features did you like/dislike about Secret Nodes Explorer? How does it compare to Mintscan in functionality?

Question 2: How do PingPub, Secret Nodes Explorer, and Explorers.guru compare in terms of functionality and usability?

Question 3: Would the community be willing to use the community fund for 50% of the Mintscan cost? (i.e. $60k) Labs is considering funding the other half of this explorer.

We look forward to hearing the community’s thoughts and continuing the discussion.

Lisa

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To answer the question about costs on SecretNodes, there’s an initial payment to get the Explorer up to date, basically to cover the work required to make basic changes.

Ongoing, the costs are $1000/month for maintenance.

If additional features are required, those will need to be negotiated.

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Personally I’m a big fan of the resurrection of Secretnodes, when it was discontinued it left a big hole in Secret.
Secret due to its specificity to the rest of Cosmos needs/wants its own specially designed explorer that will cover its features, I would like to see the community ( or rather the community fund ) focus on developing/funding something like that in the long term.

I would like to see features like:

  • The ability to connect a wallet and decrypt custom TXs
  • Network statistically regarding fees etc., which if I’m not mistaken explorer used to have ( btw Mintscan was really bad at this )
  • Validator tooling ( alternative to Keplr Validator dashboard )
  • in the future the possibility to decentralize a large part of the frontend, for example using Akash and Gitopia ( the instance could be owned directly by chain governance )
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While Mintscan has considerable value as the standard in the larger Cosmos ecosystem, I see the explorer space as being ripe for disruption here. I’d like to see a team step up to make this their project and turn it into a revenue-generating product. Maybe as part of the builder program we are running.

That is not what’s being proposed here, to be clear. We are just finding an immediate solution for Secret right now. Frankly, I don’t have enough data to know if the explorer space is profitable and if the unit economics actually work and more due diligence would be required. But given how much can be charged, it seems possible that there’s some margin here.

I also don’t know how many of the features Jiri listed are already supported by the Secret Nodes Explorer. This was a sudden circumstance and we had to act quickly given the current attention on our token to minimize the risk exposure. I’ll be catching up on history for the next few weeks.

It would be great to have Mintscan continue supporting Secret, imo, for many reasons. If there is a strong desire to make that happen within the community, I absolutely support it.

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On a technical level, these three things are certainly possible. Some of them we started on in the past or have done to some extent. Certain features that were inefficient will launch disabled like the tax feature, because our current highest priority is launching a stable version quickly. Happy to discuss these features and more. Feel free to leave suggestions in the thread.

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Most of these features Secretnodes didn’t have, they were more things I would like to see in the future, not to mention that if Secret has AI, it would be good to have some stats about it too, maybe we could also move Network stats from Secret Dashboard to Secretnodes to improve UX.

Anyway, given the amount Mintscan/Cosmos Station are asking for it really makes absolutely no sense to me to prefer them over a custom solution, I’d rather have a custom built solution + fund community members than pay 120K for a kinda basic explorer that has ads in it :smiley:

If Secretnodes is resurrected we will allocate 250K $ADMT as airdrop for scan validator within our Call to Action for Secret Validators: x.com

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After careful consideration, we decided to extend the Mintscan partnership for the coming 7 months. SCRT Labs will cover the costs. This will give us breathing space to calmly evaluate the strategy going forward.

Thanks a lot everyone for valuable comments and initiative.

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As I said privately, I certainly support this. Also wanted to clarify, this does not change anything regarding secretnodes explorer. Expect to see that explorer come back in December.

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Quick update - the agreement with Mintscan was executed, and we have Mintscan supporting us for the coming 7 months.

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WhisperNode also could have potential resources available to support block explorer creating if grants are a potential. We’ve merged with Liquify.io recently who does all ThorChain’s explorers/dashboards. Not to compete with @thenodefather here, but just saying we’d be interested and capable on development style work moving forward. This applies to any dashboards needed as well. A new rust developer is being hired as we speak.

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I think if mintscan is charging 10k a month to support the chain, we should ask them to remove the ads for our chain.