May 1, 2022 7:00 AM
Announcing Tezos Smart Contract dashboards
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May 3, 2022 | Today, The Stack Report launches dashboards, online pages that display regularly updated datasets coming from the Tezos blockchain network.
Use these dashboards to keep track of the latest activity on the Tezos blockchain, monitor the activity on the smart contracts powering your DApp or investigate the history of experiments & platforms deployed on the Tezos chain.
At launch we have an initial set of dashboards available focussed on Tezos Smart Contracts. For each contract on the Tezos blockchain there is a unique page which can be searched here.
In this announcement we go into what these dashboards deliver to builders and users within the Tezos ecosystem, how to use them, and share some graphs that already showcase what makes the Tezos community unique.
Smart contract analytics
As The Stack Report, we want to discover, capture and tell the stories of the builders in the Tezos ecosystem. The Tezos blockchain is an open-ended platform for people to ‘permissionlessly’ add functionality & applications on top of by publishing smart contracts. Because of its permissionless nature, it is a constantly evolving ecosystem with new systems and experiments being deployed all the time onto the chain. As storytellers we want to continuously be on top of: What DApps are being used the most right now? Which functionalities are receiving traction from users? What were the key moments in an apps growth (or decline)?
To answer those questions we see the blockchain data itself as one of the core sources of truth for what is being built and used by the Tezos community. Two core datasets embedded in the block data is smart contracts and smart contract calls. The smart contracts enable users to perform more complex transactions on the blockchain by calling its endpoints.
We have built a data pipeline that aggregates smart contract usage statistics and makes it available for visualization and analytics. This is useful for us, to get a historic perspective on what happened “on the chain”. At the same time these dashboards can be useful for builders and users as well, which is why these are now publicly available & searchable for everyone.
Read on to learn more about what is available on the dashboards right now.
Measuring on-chain web3 engagement
Before getting into the details, a brief introduction on how to interpret on-chain contract data.
A blockchain provides a distributed compute/storage layer for a variety of applications to be built on top. Translating to ‘web2’ language, by publishing a smart contract onto the blockchain you are introducing a database table, one or multiple API endpoints, possibly supported by some code logic, that can be called by users of that blockchain.
| web2 | web3 |
|-----------------------|----------------------------------|
| Database table | contract storage (map or bigmap) |
| Public API | contract entry points |
| Serverless deployment | contract origination |
A smart contract neatly packages all these things together. All paid for directly through gas & baker fees, charged to the people using the contract. From the on-chain block data, we can directly trace how many transactions are calling these contract endpoints. Sometimes this directly relates to user actions in interfaces, in other cases a contract call is being executed by an automated script or application.
Depending on the type of contract, you’ll have to read the data differently. But put abstractly, what you’ll be able to get by looking at the calls to contract endpoints, are pulse checks on every core on-chain data flow for the distributed Apps being built on top of the Tezos blockchain. Another analogy would be to think of this as the google analytics of a smart contract.
For some contracts this means being able to see how many NFTs were minted per day. Other contracts might give a view on how many new users signed up or which DEX routes are currently popular. In most cases you will need to have a bit of contextual knowledge to fully be able to read that data. On the contract dashboards themselves this kind of contextual information can already come from the contract alias or the naming of endpoints, which usually are pretty well labeled by developers. For further context of course follow The Stack Report to get more in depth analysis!
Q&A
Where to find the dashboards?
To search through available dashboards for contracts go to: https://thestackreport.xyz/dashboards/tezos
Search through contracts by alias or contract address on thestackreport.xyz/dashboards/tezos
What do the dashboards currently show?
At launch the dashboards display one core chart for each contract, which is the historic nr of contract calls per day, split by entrypoint. Think of this as the “google analytics” of a smart contract. This chart shows you:
- When a contract was popular*
- If usage is trending upward or downward
- Which features of the contract are used most
*in the case that this is a contract that people are supposed to actively interact with. Other types of contracts such as oracle possibly only receive predetermined calls.
Dashboard features
These dashboards & charts were designed with usability & accessibility in mind.
Fully responsive from mobile to xl screens
Tooltip to inspect details per day
Mouse hover shows details per day, tooltip works on touch as well.
Zoom on specific date range
Falls back to a multi-handle slider control for zooming on mobile devices.
Dashboard highlights
To get started here are some interesting contract dashboards to check out to get a sense of the Tezos ecosystem.
Still by far the most used tezos contract, even though hicetnunc.xyz the website has been discontinued (again), this contract remains in use because of the many clones & community fork still relying on this minting contract to create the initial NFTs.
Called every minute to track off-chain exchange rates between xtz/usd, xtz/chf & usd/chf pairs inside of the contract storage.
Contract created by the https://teia.art/ community to replace the HEN contract for swapping objkts.
Contracts to exchange swap and use ctez instead of xtz, so that your xtz can still be used for baking & governance.
This is the initial launch of The Stack Report dashboards. As more datasets and data pipelines are created new charts, visualizations and dashboards will become available.
The currently available dashboards can be searched at:
thestackreport.xyz/dashboards/tezos
Dashboards is a newly announced feature, if you have any ideas, suggestions or questions, do reach out to us through any of our digital channels!
And of course, also follow @thestackreport on twitter for more in depth analysis, visualizations and announcements.