Routescan is a unified multi-chain block explorer platform for the greater EVM ecosystem, and it's born as a spin-off of Avascan, the leading block explorer for Avalanche. Since launching Routescan in September 2023 in Seoul, we saw massive growth in new clients and chains to support.

Our vision for routescan is ambitious: democratise access to high-quality built block explorers on a unified platform ready for a seamless multi-chain modular future.

But we weren’t the only ones. Many new explorer providers popped up, especially last year.

Some include OKLink, Hoot.it, Dora, Lore. The reason is simple: explorers are perceived as the front face of the blockchain, much like Google is the front face of the internet. Attention on explorers in 5-10 years will be much like what's with Google now. And it's massive.

Just to give a context about the type of attention, during 2023 we built explorers that are now amassing a total of more than 600,000 users every month on the Routescan platform. And we started less than a year ago.

Different teams are chasing different strategies to get in the market and gain a foothold. There are product-driven strategies and business strategies, and everything in between.

Disclaimer: the information shared below are based on our business intelligence and some intuitions. Some of them may be inaccurate.

OKLink, Hoot.fi, even Debank (not much a block explorer, but an explorer in a general sense) are treated as products. What this means is that they index all the new chains for free and they invest (even massive) money to gain traction among users. Every single-chain explorer is a section of the greater website, under the same domain. Each chain does not have its own dedicated explorer.

Blockscout, Dora, Lore, Etherscan, Mintscan are developed as businesses, meaning that they make money off of chains, directly (via software-as-service contract agreements) or indirectly (by taking massive delegations from chains on their validators, and earning on commissions). Sometimes they own the domain of the block explorer, sometimes they don't. Their growth is *heavily influenced *by the success of the chains they build explorers for.

For example, Etherscan is a very successful business not directly because it's the leading explorer of Ethereum (it's certainly in part that), but because the first clients they had (BNB Chain, Polygon among others) were extremely successful, and that got users and developers in a lock-in for Etherscan explorers.

Routescan is a bit of both worlds: Routescan per se is treated as a product, but we build separate explorers as a business. Sometimes, explorers are built as a product for specific reasons, and the **Superscan **is a perfect example. We own the domain of the explorer, that's a unified multi-chain ecosystem explorer for the Superchain, and live off of RetroPGF rewards. And this approach is paying off.

For new users, their first explorer is often the one that goes with their wallet. And I must say, for this reason integration and growth for the Superscan will be extremely hard. I'm personally using Farcaster as a marketing tool to market the Superscan to the greater OP Stack community, and we'll be investing more and more in the Optimism Collective governance and some new tooling that can be built with our APIs to showcase what is possible to build on top of the Superscan.

The Etherscan lock-in I talked about already, it's really strict. But we're gaining more and more traction, especially with Zora and the new OP Chains launching in the next few weeks, like Mode and Lisk.

Sometimes it seems that users complain that explorers are hard to read, and they don’t offer human-readable content. But, as we learned the hard way over the past 2 years, that’s not true, and it’s not even a thing.

I believe block explorers, true block explorers don't need to be human readable. If we want human readability, we need to look elsewhere. Block explorers as they're currently built are heavily-focused developer tools. They're used to debug contracts, test contract behaviour, analyse patterns looking for rugs or exploits and study charts about chain statistics (e.g. active addresses, TPS, gas used, etc.).

Developers are the number one user type for block explorers. And that’s not going to change in the future, I believe. Everyone wanted an Etherscan-like interface and tooling, and that’s what they’re used to for years now. Especially for EVM blockchains.

This is a big assumption that many explorer providers make: that users will want to use a human readable block explorer. But that's simply not true. Users want to use a search engine, and that's a different product.

In fact, while we're continuing to build a dev-focused explorer on Routescan, we're also building a search engine on avascan, starting with Avalanche. Our payoff for Avascan is 'The Google of Avalanche', and we want to go there. But that's another product.

I know it may seem far-fetched, but it’s true. And it’s precisely the reason why I’m writing more and more about it: to make it seem it less far-fetched and more like the reality the industry is in, more transparently.