To those who have been with us since the beginning, you may have noticed that this year has been an especially exciting one for Shell Protocol as we’ve hit several major milestones.
Most recently, we launched the most capital-efficient AMM in DeFi, Proteus — which offers excellent swap rates with only a fraction of the liquidity of its competitors. Of course, Proteus couldn’t exist without the most composable accounting layer in DeFi, the Ocean — now live for almost four months. But none of this would matter without our devoted community, many of whom are proud collectors of our April 1st Government Toucan NFT, likely the most popular NFT on Arbitrum. Toucan holders are also the members of our Snapshot community, one of the largest and most active of all DeFi protocols. And it’s clear the community is still growing — only a few weeks ago we revealed Bro Kwon’s Booty, the mysterious Shell World NFTs that also help users earn Shell Points — which sold out within hours of its release.
All this seems like a lot of growth and innovation for a short amount of time. But you can bet the Shell team isn’t done yet. We have one more surprise this year…
Lost in Etherscan
Based on insights from our community, we realized there was one final hurdle: the block explorer.
Why are block explorers so critical to our users? Let’s take a step back and look at our favorite block explorer, Etherscan. Etherscan is a great tool for developers and software engineers (and the NSA). If you know what you’re looking for, it can give you incredibly detailed insight into transaction patterns, wallet activity, etc. It’s a veritable goldmine of information.
However, Etherscan isn’t great for end users.
If all you’re looking for is a breakdown of your own account activity, Etherscan can be a bit overwhelming. Even for experienced DeFi natives, it’s often quite hard to figure out what’s happening. Moreover, Etherscan is its own entity, existing outside of DeFi apps. That means you’ll end up switching incessantly between multiple tabs, always double-checking addresses, copy-pasting things several times — when all you’re trying to do is look up your last transaction.
Start exploring with Shellscan
And that’s why we’d like to introduce Shellscan: a user-friendly block explorer just for Shell Protocol transactions, right there in the Shell App. With Shellscan, you can now easily see every Shell transaction you’ve ever sent. You can even see a breakdown of the sub-transactions, giving you insight into the inner workings of the Ocean and the Shell primitives you’ve used. For example, you can now see the transaction path of a swap.
Right now, Shellscan is relatively minimal. It allows users to get all the essential information they need to maintain responsible oversight of their holdings. Over the coming months, as new primitives are launched and the Shell ecosystem grows, we will be adding more features. Eventually Shellscan will become a powerful, dynamic tool to explore what’s happening in Shell World.
Remember, Shellscan wouldn’t exist without our community! To all Shell users, thank you for joining us on the journey this year. It’s been a wild ride! The team is looking forward to all your Shellscan thoughts, feedback, feature requests, and perhaps even memes. Please share with us on Discord or Twitter.