The Need for Speed: Preparing Blockscout for Solana Support
The quest for higher speeds and lower transaction fees has driven blockchain development in recent years. No chain has accomplished more in this realm than Solana. With an average block time of 400 ms and the potential for 65,000 transactions per second (TPS), Solana has seen rapid and widespread adoption from both developers and users.
While Blockscout has focused on development for EVM-based chains and rollups over the past several years, we’ve been simultaneously preparing the ground to support the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM). SVMs can reside as rollups on other chains (like Ethereum), and use these chains as a base layer for settlement. In addition, L2s/rollups on Ethereum may migrate their base layer chain from Ethereum to Solana to improve scalability. Blockscout is well positioned to assist with this development and transition process.
For the time being we are stepping up our research and development into Solana and various SVM implementations to optimize our architecture for future support. Now that Solana’s momentum is unstoppable, it’s time for Blockscout to usher in this expansion.
Why Blockscout for Solana? 4 reasons
- Experience: Over the past year we’ve worked with the Neon team on the Neon EVM, an EVM L2 built on top of Solana. This project has given us insight into Solana’s inner workings, providing the opportunity to develop customizations to support Solana transaction indexing, views and more. Neon leverages Solana’s throughput, and we’ve optimized Blockscout to support parallel processing, higher tps, and faster block times. We have additional custom work in queue for Neon which will further our understanding and lay the groundwork for our Solana expansion.
- Explorer diversity: Solana’s primary block explorer is Solscan, which was acquired by Etherscan in early 2024. There are several other available explorers, but none are open source or have much traction in the ecosystem. Similar to Ethereum several years ago, there is currently a centralized monopoly controlling the explorer infrastructure on Solana. It is essential for transparency, censorship resistance, decentralization, and checks-and-balances, that several full-featured explorer options are available for a chain at any given time. We’ve seen this with the Ethereum ecosystem, and need to provide the same level of open-source support for Solana.
- SVM L2s: EVM L2s and rollups are everywhere, and SVM L2s are the next big thing designed to supercharge blockchain scaling. Just like their EVM cousins, SVM L2s use a base layer chain for settlement, and each one requires a block explorer for their users. We are already seeing this in action, for example Eclipse is an L2 that leverages the SVM for execution, posts transaction data to Celestia, and settles transactions on Ethereum. More SVM L2s are planned for Bitcoin and other ecosystems in the future. Blockscout has proven to be the most effective and adopted explorer for rollups and L2s in Ethereum, and we will provide similar easy deployment, customization features, and support for SVM L2s across different networks, along with transition plans for rollups looking to move their base layer from Ethereum to Solana.
- Solana ecosystem: There’s no denying the Solana ecosystem is robust and will compete with Ethereum in the years to come as the premier “world computer”. Both ecosystems offer unique value propositions, and will push each other to advance and support the expanding user base. While Blockscout has focused exclusively on EVM support in the past, this has been based on utility, demand, and available resources. Blockscout is an explorer for all chains, and we welcome the opportunity to expand into a new and exciting ecosystem.
What’s next
We are still at the early stages of our expansion plan, and in the near term will continue with R&D and building out the roadmap for full SVM support. This will include support for:
- Transactions, tx details, block details, accounts
- Native programs
- Validators, vote accounts, stake accounts
- NFT explorer
- API endpoint support
- Advanced metadata and labelling support
- Filtering and CSV exports
- Integrated statistics
Solana’s parallelization and data load presents indexing challenges within our current architecture, and we are exploring ways to implement quick storage methods that will operate in tandem with a flexible archive. We are also cataloging differences between various SVM implementations to prioritize compatibility, modularity and customizable feature sets. Just as with EVM rollups, architectural design varies between different SVMs, and we will aim to support app-specific features and custom SVM integrations.
We plan to involve the Solana community to explore features users and developers would like to see in an explorer. What can be improved from the current explorers, what features are missing and what would be useful as we move forward? We plan to run several focus groups with developers and Solana users to gather feedback and help shape Blockscout on Solana. If you are interested in participating, please join our Discord channel.
Blockscout is the #1 explorer for chains and rollups in the EVM ecosystem, with over 1000 known deployments. We’ve learned a lot by supporting many different types of chains and making hundreds of customizations to EVM-based explorers. We can’t wait to bring these learnings to Solana as we develop a state-of-the-art, user-friendly, open-source explorer built for everyone within the Solana universe.