Symbiont{s} | Ecosynthesizer | Major Upgrade (CSExplorer, Account, Transaction, APIs, Blocks, ...)

Symbionts

Thriving through a Symbiotic Equilibrium

Symbiont{s} | Ecosynthesizer | Major Update

Greetings,

After the implementation of the witness, RPCs/Seeds, and proposals pages on Ecosynthesizer. We are happy to announce the introduction of more upgrades that we hope will benefit the Steem community and Steem in general. Some of the upgrades were influenced by some of the current explorers, others were built from the ground.

The Landing Page

We tried to follow the same philosophy as before by providing something clean and simple. People will also notice that the table are getting constantly updated. While this is not really important, it mostly plays on the aesthetic of the website.

• First. The search bar is pretty much straightforward, people just need to enter an account name, the transaction ID, or block number. We also implemented recommendations (even though not perfect) by playing with the condenser_api.lookup_accounts parameters. Before passing to the next point we would like to thank the witness @future.witness for providing a public API that allowed us to implement the mechanism of directly querying the transactions.

• Second. The info bar contains some general information about Steem such as the genesis block, price, market cap, and so forth. For the price, we are relying on the feed price of the witness @symbionts instead of using the feed price or the median, and the main reason behind this is accuracy.

• Third. There is the Latest blocks table which is continuously updated with the head block. We wanted at a later time to use the last irreversible block but decided at the end to stick with head_block. The table also contains the number of transactions in a specific block in addition to the witness who produced the block and the link to the BLK page. One could notice that we are not preloading 21 blocks to fit with the other tables when first visiting the website, and the reason is quite simple. We did it mainly to lower the loading time.

• Fourth. The transactions table displays the link to the transaction page and the type of transaction. Things are moving faster here since a block can contain a lot of transactions.

• Fifth. The schedule table refers to the shuffling mechanism that controls which witness is going to produce the next block. The average joe does not need such information, but it is a nice thing to see nonetheless.

• Sixth. The global properties table contains various information about the Steem blockchain.

• Last but not least, if some people are not pleased with the live update of the tables. They can easily switch it off and use the static version instead.
  

The RPCs/Seeds page

We have finally implemented an API that can be directly enabled/disabled from the dashboard, the API will directly test the IP and print the location accordingly. We usually do not like to use external APIs because we never know if the provider is going to change his prices/planes or simply change the get method.

^{https://ecosynthesizer.com/@nodes}

The account Page

So far in the development, the account page is where most of the time was spent. Not only because it is the page that is the most likely to be used, but also because we have added several features in the most compact way possible to make it easier for people to get what they want.

• First. The transactions feed contains the timestamp, the transaction ID, and the block that the transaction is part of in addition to printing. This addition was a request from the community that we believe is really helpful. For the icons, we actually started by using https://robohash.org but some of the generated robots were not compact, so we ditched Robohash and used Identicons instead.

^{https://ecosynthesizer.com/@symbionts}

• Second. The filtering feature (though not yet perfect) allow people to filter the transactions feed of a specific account. the range of choice is quite diverse, the operation is client-side and the response time depends on the capability of the querent's machine. As an example, if someone wants to find people who love him the most, or simply query for one user, he can simply do the following:

^{https://ecosynthesizer.com/@ecosynthesizer Yes, Boil!}

Third. The balance displays information about how much STEEM, STEEM POWER, and SBD an account contains. You may notice that the website will sometimes show different values than other available explorers which is explained below in the detailed balance section. The balance table also contains an overall estimation of the account value.

^{https://ecosynthesizer.com/@ecosynthesizer}

Third. The below tables contain all the information related to the vote weight, vote value, voting bars, RC, Mana, account age, account reputation, number of posts, and some useful links. For this table, we faced some issues related to the calculation of RC and Mana bars since all APIs that we used did not return consistent data (current_rc/max_rc). But we finally solved the issue by working around it, thanks to the valuable tips shared by the witness @steemchiller that saved us a lot of work time.

^{https://ecosynthesizer.com/@ecosynthesizer}

Fourth. This is also related to the third point. The Upvote Value CALC allows poeple not only to see a worth estimation of their votes but also to use it as a calculator by entering custom values. We may clarify that the value that people are getting is just an estimation because, in the end, the value of a vote involves a lot more things that are dynamic and defined in the span of 7 days.

^{https://ecosynthesizer.com/@steem}

Fifth. The detailed balance table displays more precise information about the balance of an account. The thing that we did differently than other explorers is that we have included all the data in the detailed balance in the final balance. More precisely, the unclaimed STEEM/SP/SBD, the STEEM/SBD in the market, and the SBD in a conversion process.

^{https://ecosynthesizer.com/@ecs.pay}

Sixth. The metadata, account info, and man bar tables contain general and various information about the account.

^{https://ecosynthesizer.com/@ecosynthesizer}

Seventh. The authority tables show that different dapps that access the key(s), or if an account is using multi-sig. The witness votes show if the account is using a proxy or voting for a set of poeple. The witness table will only show up if the account is a witness, the table mainly contains technical information about the witness.

^{https://ecosynthesizer.com/@symbionts}

The Post Page

The post page is as simple as it gets, it contains the property of the post, rewards, beneficiaries ... and we also added the comments below the post.

^Post/Commnet

The Block Page

The block page contains the block information, the list of transactions ID, the actual transactions, in addition to virtual operations.

^{Block 49,544,947}

The Transaction Page

The transaction page show information the transaction such as the nature of the transaction, the block and so forth.

^{Transaction: fff25f66d8009ea338e737dea56892eeec9a7500}

The Witnesses/Proposals Pages

We did not add too many things for those 2 pages apart from fixing some bugs, adding linking and fractions, and improving the UI a bit.

Potential future Improvements

There are surely a lof of things left that w want to add in the future, this is just the begning. Below, you will find a few things that we want to work on (not final):

Note: The below points only concern the ecosynthesizer.com project.

• Short-Term:

1. Improving the dashboard.
2. Allow admins to automatically schedule automated reports directly on Ecosynthesizer.
3. API auto-switch.
4. Gouvernance analytics.
5. Add documentation.
6. Worke on load speed and performance.
7. The possibility of implementing non-invasive ads.
8. Account registration.

• Mid-Term:

1. We are exploring the idea of turning the project into a multichain solution to allow people to explore not only Steem but also blockchains.

• Long-Term:

1. We are currently relying on public RPC nodes run by several witnesses, especeially Steemit Inc. Although this an efficient way to fetch data, we believe that it is of the utmost importance to base the data on a database for a higher level of redundancy and availability. We also hope to provide a few useful APIs once we are have done with building our own dedicated database.

Support Request

It has comes to our attention several times that the user bullionstackers is targeting the communities that we are supporting and working with. It started with eth AR community which the moderator was forced to change his account several times then give up because of the constant downvoting. The members of the symbionts team are also getting targetted, then the community manager of the Latino community @acostaeladio started receiving downvotes from the same user on his reports along with other Latino steemian. Our daily reports that were supposed to generate rewards for our curators are also always zeroed out, and a few days ago, the same account started targeting one of our Latino developers that we are supporting @alejos7ven, his only crime was that he worked for us and posted in the Latino community.

We would like to ask for a delegation of 500,000.000 Steem Power from @steemit (@steem, @steemcurator01) to support the project and our curation efforts. We also hope the community to entrust us with more power. We are currently the 3rd most profitable (curation only) project on the Steem blockchain.

While we understand the goal of always seeking a higher APR, we also believe that exploration and curation play a major role on Steem. If the main goal of PoB is not exploration and catalyzing retention then there no point in having it, and we would probably better off by just distributing the reward pool directly to SP holders.

If you have suggestions, want to report a bug, or want to work with us, please make sure to leave a comment below or reach out to us on Discord.

If you would like to support us, please consider voting for our witness, setting us as a proxy, joining our Discord server, or delegating to the ECS project by using one of the following links:

^{500SP | 1000SP | 2000SP | 3000SP | 4000SP | 5000SP | 10000SP | 100000SP}

Thank you all for your continuous support,

Steem on!

The Symbionts Team,