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 :)

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?