Orcfax Explorer: Improving "Trust But Verify
An Explorer feature suite upgrade funded through the Catalyst F12 campaign.
This page will provide documentation pertaining to the execution of the proposal and links to each of the deliverables required for their respective Milestones. The full Catalyst proposal can be found here.
Problem statement
Users that rely on external oracle data to trigger their DeFi financial transactions need assurances that it can be trusted, but this information is difficult for a human to trace and read.
Proposed solution
The Orcfax Explorer allows users to "trust but verify" the oracle data that their Cardano dApps use. We will enhance it with visualizations, audit log downloads, real-time stats and incident reports.
Milestone 1
Orcfax developed a dashboard page on the Orcfax Explorer that utilizes highly informative visualizations to aid users in sense making. This dashboard highlights several new features that were the direct result of this milestone.
What follows is a mapping of what was promised for Milestone 1 to the newly integrated explorer features. Links will direct readers to additional context and the relevant code enhancements for each.
- Orcfax feed price charts
- State change timelines
- Data provenance
These Orcfax Explorer upgrades give users an enhanced ability to verify the authenticity and provenance of the collected data. While this information has been present within our archival packages from the beginning, these enhancements aid users by surfacing the salient archival details and visualizing them in a more accessible manner.
For test cases, we have recorded a walkthrough of the Orcfax Explorer so that users can see how the new features work in tandem to deliver an incredible explorer experience. This walkthrough also serves as a resource for users looking to better understand the upgrades within the context of the explorer UI.
Milestone 2
Orcfax developed new functionality for the Orcfax Explorer which allows users to download and read the audit log package for a given fact statement offline on their own computers; this new feature is the Explorer Viewer.
The upgrades which enable this functionality are now included in the public github explorer repo, along with additional context, source code, tests, and user documentation to aid in use.
Orcfax published the announcement for our explorer feature upgrade on X and Discord.
For test cases, we recorded a walkthrough of the explorer so that users can see how the new features work in tandem to deliver an incredible Explorer Viewer experience. This walkthrough also serves as a resource for users looking to better understand the upgrades within the context of the explorer UI.
Milestone 3
Orcfax has developed new features for the Orcfax Explorer which results in new dynamic displays; the new features enhance the existing dashboard page so that it now displays information about Orcfax network activity in real time.
The new feature set for the explorer brings the following changes:
- The dashboard now has a section which dynamically displays statistics
relating to node participation
- Identifies when each node last published.
- Identifies the feed each node last published to.
- Identifies the total number of publications (i.e. Facts) for each node.
- Provides the status/health of each node.
The upgrades which enable this functionality are now included in the public github explorer repo along with additional context.
For test cases, we recorded a walkthrough of the explorer so that users can see how the new features work in tandem to deliver an incredible Explorer Viewer experience. This walkthrough also serves as a resource for users looking to better understand the upgrades within the context of the explorer UI.
Milestone 4
Orcfax will develop a new Orcfax Explorer feature which notifies users in the event of a network issue, and provides users with links to incident reports.