According to Blockworks, Ava Labs will discontinue its Etherscan-run block explorer and launch a new product, Routescan, on November 30. Users must back up their information on the block explorer, including addresses, private name tags, and private transaction notes, before the deactivation date. The decision to sunset block explorers is often due to various factors, such as the expiration or non-renewal of a service agreement or lack of team bandwidth.
Luigi D'Onorio, the head of DeFi and developer relations at Ava Labs, stated that Snowtrace as a domain will continue to exist, but the Etherscan deployment will be deprecated and replaced with a new product launch from the Avascan team. Avascan has been a loyal, native team to the Avalanche ecosystem and provides support for Subnets, X-Chain, and P-Chain, as well as the C-Chain. The Etherscan deployment only covered the C-Chain. As Avalanche continues to scale with Subnets, it is crucial that infrastructure partners cover this as well.
Austin Blackerby, an analytics manager at Flipside Crypto, noted that the costs of pulling data from subnets would be quite high for outside vendors like Etherscan. It would be more cost-effective for Ava Labs to bring these resources in-house. By doing so, they can take advantage of internal resources and create a seamless experience across different subnets.
However, there are downsides to this move, according to Trevor Wenokur, a senior data analytics engineer at Flipside Crypto. In the short term, there will be a loss of shared expertise and tooling across EVM-compatible chains for both users and the team creating the new explorer. EVM compatible chains often share the same processes and upgrades, allowing for efficient solutions to decoding or new approaches for data type changes and new values.
Carlos Mercado, a data scientist at Flipside Crypto, explained that block explorers often profit from foundations that pay for their services. They also sell enterprise API access to their data sets and build a competitive advantage by offering unique data. General-purpose block explorers can remain competitive by integrating off-chain data like contract code or ABIs to decode transactions and providing better, faster, cheaper enterprise access to historical data on user interactions with contracts.
D'Onorio emphasized that the key to remaining competitive as a block explorer is to have a diverse set of well-funded teams working together on the product. Deciding who to work with depends on who has long-term alignment in terms of incentives and focus on your ecosystem and a technically capable team.
