Avascan blog

EXPLORE_#2

Oct 2nd, 2020

Starting this week, Explore is partnering with the This Week in Avalanche to get news about the Avalanche network.

Announcements

Ditto is our new validator

Last week we launched our new validator and published a poll to vote for the name. The community decided for Ditto!

If you want to look at its specs and delegate to it, you can find all the info in its Validator details page on Avascan.

Structuring the Avascan Trustless Lending Program

We talked about this a few times already, but we have updates: the Avascan Trustless Lending Program is a staking program that lets

  • Avascan borrow AVAX from interested investors (know as Validation Partners, also referred to as Partners) to offer a wide range of validators and increase decentralisation of the Avalanche network;
  • Partners lend AVAX to Avascan to run nodes without technical knowledge and boost their profits from delegation fees.

We are already in talks to start new validators within the next unlocking date on December 9th, and if you have more than 100,000 AVAX you can join the Program, too. Just head in our Telegram community.

Distributing the first batch of SCAN tokens

There’s so much to do and so little time to do it all: we have not yet come up with a comprehensive overview about what the SCAN token will serve, but we can tell you a bit more than before. You will earn about 1 SCAN for every AVAX spent in delegation fees, but since there’s no P-Chain indexing yet, we can’t calculate the delegation fees correctly. So we’ve come up with a formula that calculates that amount with an excess evaluation: that means that, until P-Chain indexing is available, you will earn more than 1 SCAN per AVAX spent in delegation fees. This is a sort of early bird promotion, so to say.

We will distribute SCAN tokens to the first delegators after their delegation expires, but remember that P-Chain indexing may not be available for weeks, so it’s better if you actually renew your delegation(s) or start one in order to earn more SCAN tokens at the end of the validation of Avascan nodes.

This week in Avalanche

  • Sergey Nazarov from Chainlink confirmed that Chainlink Oracles will be coming to Avalanche;
  • JellySwap, a cross chain DEX launched AVAX support
  • NoTex, a global censorship resistant blogging and intellectual property platform, added support for Avalanche by deploying on the C-Chain.
    Read more on This Week in Avalanche, Oct 1, 2020

This week in Avascan

Thank you so much for all the support you showed this month! We had a huge growth on Twitter, with over 580 followers now, our Discord went over 100 users and our Telegram grew beyond 400 members!

We are so grateful for all the support you show, and for all the feedback that you give us every day: we had 7 new features suggestions on our Changemap roadmap page. You can suggest new features at anytime, and we take those seriously.

What’s new on Avascan:

  • You can now toggle between AVAX and USD visualization on transaction, address balance and staking pages;
  • You can now understand better the difference between our Observed uptime and the objective Uptime in the validation page;
  • Diluted market cap in the home page stats in now expressed in billion dollars;
  • Sorting in validators and delegations pages now works properly;
  • By default, validators will now be sorted by start time, so you’ll see the last validator that started as first on the list;

Known issues:

  • P-Chain and C-Chain indexing aren’t ready yet, but we are ready with a revamped design for the whole website when those two get on the explorer. We think you’ll like it;
  • Observed uptime is not the objective truth about how a node is actually performing. This value is observed by **’Lazy’ Snorlax that is a well connected and high-weight validator, but it cannot represent the overall situation. If the vale is around 60%, you may have nothing to worry about, since there are nodes that can reach you validator better than us. But if it’s lower than 40%, there’s a high chance that you are not running your validator properly, and that is not connected to the network. Use this guide to connect the node to the network, and you will see improvements in uptime within 24 hours. This is not an issue of Avascan, it’s just how the network is built, but we’re aware that the value may confuse.

Explore the Road

  • As per the issue about the uptime defined above, we will be deploying a new Validator details page that will collect information about the uptime of each node from the 30 biggest validators in the network that our nodes can connect to (including ‘Lazy’ Snorlax). The value that you’ll see is the average observed uptime from all those, so it should be much more accurate than what is now.
  • We are working on a way for users track delegations on Avascan. This is still in early development, but we are going quickly;
  • A new set of API to interact with the AVAX Supply are now ready, but they’re an alpha version and we are still working through bugs and issues. We will have them ready soon, but there’s not certain ETA yet;
  • We are working on Aliases for validators, so if you want your validator to get a name on Avascan, head in our Telegram community to be the first to know about when the feature will be ready;

See you next week, and you for reading!