Defier

Defier Dashboard

I started out as a delegator and wanted to find out more about validators before delegating to them. I found it hard to find all useful metrics in a single view for easy comparison. Some dashboards had uptime, but no jail count. Some had ranks, but no fees. I would have to click through multiple pages for each validator and write them down to do my own comparison. This was tedious and inspired me to write my own dashboard. In that process, I also decided to become a validator myself and I'm currently running on Crypto.org, Cronos, and now Evmos testnet.

Defier shows useful validators information in a grid view for easy comparison. The data helps both validators and delegators who want to research the reliability of a validator before delegating to them. The blocks page shows useful stats for every block such as how many validators signed, missed, times, transaction count, and block size. You can also export to excel for further data analytics.

I first wrote a PowerShell script to connect to the websocket service of my full node to scan every block and upload the data to my REST API that stores the data in a SQL server database as well as push out updates to all browsers via websockets simultaneously. The service and website is written in C#, JQuery, HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

I had a lot of problems in the beginning with websockets since there's very little resource online how to do it with Powershell but I managed to get it working. Some of the data conversion was difficult to figure out such as how to get the consensus address using Bech32. There's very little documentation online and there are some differences between versions.

I reached out to other community devs and was able to get all the data I wanted to include in the dashboard. The community is full of very talented individuals and groups and I'm proud to be part of that by building tools to help the community. The most exciting technology I used is websockets. I love how we can push data from server to client instead of the old days where clients polled the server over and over until it finds an update.

I learned a lot about how the blockchain works. I know there's still more to learn and it's continuously evolving. I hope to quit my current job and do this full time some day.

Defier will continue to evolve with new chains and new features based on community feedback.