“We love using Scout to create dashboards of Livepeer data on Ethereum network and share with our community.”
— — Doug Petkanics, founder of Livepeer
In the early days of the Internet, the data on the web was very disorganized. Then search engines like Google came along. They crawled through all the hyperlinks, organized the open but messy web metadata and eventually turned the web into something more usable for ordinary people like me.
The data on the blockchain today is in a very similar state: It is open but disorganized. Here is an example of what a simple token transfer looks like on the Ethereum blockchain:
Daunting, right?
In the past year, a slew of Ethereum “Block Explorers” have emerged. EtherScan, Bloxy, Amber Data and few more others have started bringing more visibility to the data on the Ethereum. But until now, all the “Block Explorers” are designed for very technical people. Additionally, if you are looking for protocol specific data, the process becomes very tedious or sometimes even impossible.
In other words, whether you are a miner, protocol developer, validator, token investor or just a dapp user, you go to one single place, sift through tons of irrelevant data and hope to find insights. It reminds me of the time before AirBnb, Etsy, Uber were born. Everyone used Craigslist for almost anything. In the Blockchain world, everyone is interacting with the same “database”, therefore a tailored “lens” is crucial for interpreting the data in specific contexts. So we set out to build Scout seven months ago.
Scout enables Ethereum protocol teams to create dashboards and tables of their data on the blockchain and share them with the community. Think of Scout as your customized, user-friendly, internal “Block Explorer”. We believe this is a tool that your community has been asking for but you don’t need to build yourself.
It’s pretty simple to use Scout. Once you upload your smart contracts files and addresses to Scout, it will start aggregating transactions and states which are only relevant to your network. You can then use Scout’s self-service tools to start configuring dashboards that different stakeholders of your community are interested in. Early customers like Livepeer and Aragon have been using Scout to understand the economics of the entire network , performance of video transcoders and engagement of DAOs.
Google didn’t make the web more useable alone. Instead, it worked with hundreds of millions of websites owners by providing tools they need. We intend to do the same for the Ethereum blockchain community. Today, we would like to invite the teams which are building protocols on the Ethereum blockchain to try out our alpha version. You will get most value out of Scout if your protocol is already live on the Mainnet and you’ve been thinking about how to grow and measure the success of your network. So if that sounds interesting to you, please:
Join the waitlist here: https://scout.cool
Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/scout_cool
We’re backed by a group of early believers: Brayton@BoostVC, Toby@CRCM, Barry+Travis@Digital Currency Group, Greg@Ride Ventures, Jack Herrick, Yi@Pascal Capital, Niraj@Kilowatt Capital, Jordan Cooper, Eric Tang, Yi Sun, Grant Guerrero and Distributed Global.
