About L2s and how some of them don't fund independent builders
AI summary of the linked articleRoutescan says it will shut down its Mantle-specific explorer, mantlescan.info, because Mantle never paid for the service and Etherscan was chosen instead. According to the post, Routescan offered a service contract in 2023, built requested features, and ran the explorer as a demo, but Mantle stopped responding in August 2023 and told Routescan on January 11, 2024 that it was going with Etherscan. The post says Routescan spent thousands of dollars keeping the indexing running and that Mantle declined to fund it through grants, while the explorer held about 10% of unique users in November 2024. Routescan says it will keep indexing Mantle, redirecting mantlescan.info traffic to its multichain routescan.io platform, and describes the move as a stand against chains not paying for explorers. |
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4 comments  If you wanna have my honest opinion, unless you had a mutually signed MoU at least, I just wouldn‘t have provided to them. And I also think you shouldn‘t write and publish this piece because now it sounds like you want money from them for a service they never agreed to be built and hosted. Your problem if you did this voluntarily and without written confirmation from them. and Yeah it‘s though, Etherscan is a monopoly. That said, other block explorers do try to „improve on the UI of Etherscan“ and so I just click away immediately because I need Etherscan‘s UI. I understand it can be frustrating to compete against them, but that‘s all you can do, I feel like Sad to hear that story, but to me it sounds as if Mantle team just followed their incentives. If you take a business risk by providing a demo service, sometimes you end up doing free work and not getting a contract. Lived through that in an agency - there were moments when we had such an amazing potential client with such rigid bureaucracy, that we took the risk of providing some services for free. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. I have to admit there were moments when the client didn't take the deal, but decided to override his incentives with virtues and found a way to pay us for the work being done anyway. But these were exceptions :) jaack.ethSubmitter I didn't write this because I wanted for us to get paid. It was an opportunity for everyone to see what the reality of building a block explorer is. Etherscan is good, but it's a liability because it's so centralized. It's the single most important point of failure in the ethereum ecosystem, if you ask me. And this is an isolated case, and we usually provide a free demo for the prospect to test the explorer. But they've been so "yes and no" over time, that it seemed like a joke. "Etherscan is good, but it's a liability because it's so centralized. It's the single most important point of failure in the ethereum ecosystem, if you ask me." I recall this point from some of your older blogposts. What do you think would be consequences of Etherscan being compromised or shut down? |