Why We Built a Solana Explorer
A Smarter Solana Explorer: Trading, Social Features & On-Chain Profiles
Etherscan, Blockchain.info, and Solana Explorer have all played vital roles in how people interact with each blockchain network. Whether you're a developer, trader, or just curious, you typically end up on one of these sites within your first few days of exploration.
Being able to read these sites is a legitimate skill. Not only because of the technical nature of the content but also because the UI / UX leaves a lot to be desired. These explorers often feel like they aren't surfacing the information most relevant to users.
From NFTs to Memecoins, it has constantly felt like the most popular explorers lag in features users want. Today, we’re announcing a new project, our Solana explorer, with trading and social features built in. This is all built on top of our social graph protocol, Tapestry, which makes bringing social features to your crypto app ultra simple.
You can create a profile, follow other users, and track their swaps, token holdings, and other on-chain social profiles. Beyond being an explorer for Solana tokens, wallets, and transactions - we also want this to be THE hub for Solana Social. If you have a @farcaster_xyz profile, a domain from @AllDomains_, or many other apps built on our protocol, you will see them on your wallet and profile page. If you are interested in a wallet that has yet to connect and create a profile, you can follow its address. The activities of these wallets will be displayed on the home page.
This is the alpha launch of our explorer, and we cannot wait to launch more features. Early feedback from the communities is that users want us to surface NFT and token communities, making it easier to find and track holders of your favorite memecoins.
As firm believers in open source, we've made this app fully available to the community. Anyone can fork it and create an improved version of Social Explorer - all you need is a @usetapestry API key and an RPC endpoint from @heliuslabs.
Less than a year ago, we released our Solana Social Program. Bringing follows, likes, and profiles on chains means we can begin to have better ownership of how we are all connected. Since then, we have helped teams launch social features faster, solve read layer issues, and bring profiles on chain.
If you are interested in learning more about how you can add SocialFi to your app please reach out to us at Tapestry. Want to add SocialFi to your app? Reach out to @usetapestry @thejodytu or @dgabeau to learn more.