Currently, too many public blockchains exist and they all use different API and data structure, meaning that non-blockchain experts have to concern themselves too much with the intricacies of blockchain technology, as well as, their products and service development (DApps).
In other words, they have to bear huge costs, along with the difficulty of developing their own services for appropriate structure and API for Ethereum, EOS, and other blockchain mainnet.
To solve this problem, many interchain projects such as Icon and Cosmos came out in the blockchain world, but they have been stuck with technical limitations, so their developing direction shifted to link with own individual chains. In fact, if there isn’t a standardized interface that is compatible to all blockchains with different API and data structure, it is impossible to interconnect different blockchains.
Unlike a traditional database that saves and deletes data on its own, the data on blockchain is processed and saved through a consensus algorithm. Once the data is stored in the blockchain, it is almost impossible to change.
As such, the important implication is that processing method and understanding of data are important.
However, most of blockchain’s development, API and operating and managing tools are at a basic level, so engineers are faced with many difficulties when developing their own service. For example, many difficulties arise due to lack of the ability to find out cause of problems arising from tracking, debugging, revert issues in EVM. To address these fundamental problems, various developing and operating tools based on standardized interface like SQL of RDBS are in dire need.
1. Understandable Blockchain
Unlike regular data processing steps that create immediate input/output, a blockchain model where anyone in the world can participate in the consensus process goes through asynchronous transaction processes, which makes it difficult for engineers to understand the whole process.
As such, it is important to create a more intuitive and productive environment where data and its processing are easy to understand. In particular, an understandable blockchain environment is especially important, because smart contracts can define various types of data structure and processing.
We name the blockchain that provides a series of environments that help to efficiently process and analyze blockchain data as “Understandable Blockchain (UBC)”. Visualization of blockchain data is essential to establish the UBC environment.
2. Understandable Blockchain Environment
The visualization of blockchain is divided into two parts: visualization of the blockchain event and its processing. Visualizing the flow of input data and blockchain events help non-experts to have a better understanding of blockchain data processes (block, smart contract , node connection network).
Visualization of blockchain events
- Internal data: Blocks, transactions, smart contracts, function call history,
- Network information: Miners or validators, P2P node networks
- Node information: Node types, status, uptime
The understanding and monitoring of unpredictable and asynchronous blockchain transaction process help engineers to leverage blockchain's characteristics of decentralization, irreversibility, and traceability. Luniverse, one of the best enterprise blockchain platforms, provides the necessary tools and APIs to deploy decentralized applications and set up, track, and audit smart contracts.
Visualization of blockchain process
- Transaction and contract process — Monitoring exceptions, the cause of error, transaction Queue (Pending Queue, Debug, Trace, Revert)
- Blockchain creation process — Understanding consensus mechanism among miners or validators
In particular, tracking the process of transactions and smart contracts is crucial to developers as they can easily debug technical issues while building their own DApp service.
3. Understandable Blockchain Use Cases
Here’s a few examples of UBC-oriented services; Bit bonkers, Bitcoin City, Binodes, Daily blockchain, Live globe and Luniverse. In particular, Luniverse is at the forefront of promoting development productivity by simplifying and streamlining complicated blockchain processes.
Bitbonkers visualizes Bitcoin transactions in real time. Every time a Bitcoin transaction is made, it is shown as colored ball dropping on the square plate. You can click on the transactions to find out exactly how much they are worth in BTC. The cube represents the last block from the blockchain which are mined on average every 10 minutes and its size of the block is determined by the total BTC value transacted within.
BitcoinCity graphically represents bitcoin transactions. It receives information on the latest bitcoin transactions, mostly still unconfirmed, and draws a little city based on the transaction information. Each building shows either an input (north side of the street) or an output (south side of the street).
Bitnodes estimates the size of the Bitcoin network by finding all the reachable nodes in the network. Its global map shows concentration of reachable Bitcoin nodes found in countries around the world. As of writing this article, about 11,000 nodes are distributed worldwide and United States(21.56%), Germany(17.10%) are among the top countries to have nodes.
Dailyblockchain uses blockchain.info api and vivagraph.js library to visualize bitcoin transaction including unconfirmed ones.
The Realtime Bitcoin webGL globe shows all transactions and blocks happening in realtime in a cool 3d interface.
6. Luniverse
Luniverse provides outstanding GUI and robust analysis development tools to help users analyze transactions with ease.
4. Examples of realization of UBC
Different types of blockchain data in public, private and consortium blockchains should be connected and stored in memory. And then it needs to be analyzed and visualized with better GUI tools and APIs.
SAS visual analytics, Tableau, and D3 are widely used in the big data space and Luniverse is expected to follow similar path to realize UBC in the blockchain space.
Summary
Blockchain is no longer just the backbone of cryptocurrencies. Its application in various fields is as wide as the seas. However, the mass adoption of Blockchain technologies lies in an environment where users use them without understanding the science behind these technologies.
Likewise, the mass development of blockchain technology starts when engineers and non-blockchain experts are given powerful, productive blockchain building tools.
Luniverse, a UBC-oriented Baas model, provides a middleware for monitoring application development, a modular and preconfigured network and infrastructure and an auditable smart contracts. Here are our clients creating new business value together with Luniverse.