Routescan is the world’s first multichain block explorer platform.
First means that we were the first to do it, and we’re now the leader in doing this. No other block explorer provider can offer the level of unification and aggregation that Routescan does.
To keep up with our naming, we strive to index the entire EVM blockchain world, be them L2s or L3s.
Our business development efforts include a variety of tools that we use to support more chains: the simplest one is for a chain to directly come to us, ask for a quote and get the service.
But there are also other types of commitments that we explore: like with the Superscan, our unified Superchain explorer, that’s been funded throughout 2024 with a 65,000+ OP grant from the Optimism Foundation through what’s now called Retro Funding.
And last, we may offer a demo explorer service for a while, to convince the prospect chain that we’re the real deal.
Mantle L2 has been worked on with this last method. We contacted Mantle way back in 2023 with the first contact being on January 10th, 2023, when the L2 was not even in mainnet, and the team was a bit curious to know about our product, but they were of course talking to Etherscan.
Since we were very bullish on the future of Mantle, launching as a spinoff of BitDAO, we quickly worked to present an offer to them. The offer was good, and seemed to want to accept it, but our product was still not complete: we didn’t have L1 <> L2 bridge transaction tracking and didn’t support custom DA solutions like MantleDA in their case. Fair enough, but I must also note that even testnet launch was very far.
In March 2023, we went back with another offer, including the work that we previously couldn’t do, because our product got more mature. They were in discussion with another provider (not Etherscan) to host the explorer, but they decided not to go through.
A few months pass by, and in July 2023 we met some from the Mantle team at EthCC that re-ignited the conversation, and we agreed on setting up a test explorer so that they could see what they would be paying for a few months later.
They liked it. And we also got to know that the ‘community explorer’ being worked on was mantlescan.org from AnyScan, a small team from India (I believe, after looking at their company info on the website) that’s now not operating anymore.
Everything was good! We launched the mainnet explorer and quickly built the support they requested for L1 <> L2 transactions, except for the MantleDA support, that we would have built after the contract signature.
We had the explore ready for mainnet 3 days before mainnet launch. We did everything in time, with our known speed and efficiency.
And the team even asked us to change some things to improve the explorer, and we were happy to do all of that to make them happy, even tough we still hadn’t a contract signed and were making all that just out of trust and bullishness in the project.
But we fixed everything, mostly within one hour.
Then they asked for some requirements and performance metrics, which we gave, and contract verification support around the first days on August. Then, on August 28, 2023, everything changed and we don’t know exactly what happened.
They wanted to continue developing their own explorer, available at explorer.mantle.xyz, and they completely stopped answering to us, then on September 19th we got word they were going with Etherscan.
But in the meantime, most developers were using mantlescan.info, our explorer, as default for their contract verification and debugging workflows!
We positioned #2 behind only explorer.mantle.xyz with no advertising and no specific effort for the keywords ‘mante explorer’ and ‘mantle scan’ because yes, developers want the Etherscan feature set, but they don’t necessarily want Etherscan! We found this out when Boba Network, Avalanche and other chose us instead of the big player to pay less, have a more efficient solution and one that’s natively multichain.
They even played ‘dumb’ asking us why we would have a ‘red banner’ saying that the indexing is not complete, when we said to them multiple times that that version of the explorer was live as a demo, and that we would complete the explorer once the service contract was signed.
They were kind enough to provide us with a (very intermittently working) RPC, fair enough. But they said they were going with Etherscan because ‘devs and users couldn’t stop bugging us about it.’
This was January 11, 2024. And a couple months later they even said that we would have to run our own nodes!
They continued to give us updates like we were a serviced partner: upgrade your node, mind the changes to this and that, and so on. But we still weren’t paid.
We even tried asking the grant route, but they said that they won’t fund infra through grants.
Now, a year after keeping the explorer online, we tried a couple more times with new team members that had to decline the offer again.
We spent thousands of dollars to keep the indexing running, and we did that because we believed (and we still believe, honestly) that the fact that we were the first to build a good explorer got us an advantage.
Looking at Semrush, in fact, we can see how Etherscan’s leadership with their explorer is not absolute.
You have to consider that mantlescan.info is not advertised anywhere as an explorer for Mantle. They didn’t even put us in their docs. And we still had about 10% of the unique users market share by doing nothingin November 2024. And we had even more market share before July. Here’s a snapshot of all quarters in 2024, with a focus on our dominance in Q2, closing in on the official explorer’s unique users.
So what happens now? Since Etherscan is in the market, we couldn’t sell any adv slots for our explorer because nobody is interested, so we have to shut down the explorer. But we won’t throw away the traffic and users, because we gained those.
So we’ll still continue to index Mantle, even though there won’t be a Mantle-specific explorer. When a user goes to mantlescan.info or any other sub-link, they will get the corresponding page on the multichain routescan.io platform.
So, nothing’s going to change for users and developers, because we don’t want to get them down, but this is a stand against Mantle and their complete unwillingness to support a quality block explorer for a very low amount: since Mantle didn’t have high TPS for a lot of time, we only required between 20,000$ and 40,000$ per year to keep it running.
And we won’t guarantee that we keep the indexing running if the chain goes to high TPS, because nobody is paying our server bills for this!
So yes, we’re taking a stand because of course if a chain can pay Etherscan they do it, but they also need to at least pay for what they asked in the beginning. Mantle never paid anything, not even for the months-long demo.
Something needs to change. Explorers are perceived as a public good, but nobody wants to pay for it, except when it comes to Etherscan.
We’re trying to change that, but it’ll take a lot of time.
In March 2023, we went back with another offer, including the work that we previously couldn’t do, because our product got more mature. They were in discussion with another provider (not Etherscan) to host the explorer, but they decided not to go through.
A few months pass by, and in July 2023 we met some from the Mantle team at EthCC that re-ignited the conversation, and we agreed on setting up a test explorer so that they could see what they would be paying for a few months later.
They liked it. And we also got to know that the ‘community explorer’ being worked on was mantlescan.org from AnyScan, a small team from India (I believe, after looking at their company info on the website) that’s now not operating anymore.
Everything was good! We launched the mainnet explorer and quickly built the support they requested for L1 <> L2 transactions, except for the MantleDA support, that we would have built after the contract signature.
We had the explore ready for mainnet 3 days before mainnet launch. We did everything in time, with our known speed and efficiency.
And the team even asked us to change some things to improve the explorer, and we were happy to do all of that to make them happy, even tough we still hadn’t a contract signed and were making all that just out of trust and bullishness in the project.
But we fixed everything, mostly within one hour.
Then they asked for some requirements and performance metrics, which we gave, and contract verification support around the first days on August. Then, on August 28, 2023, everything changed and we don’t know exactly what happened.
They wanted to continue developing their own explorer, available at explorer.mantle.xyz, and they completely stopped answering to us, then on September 19th we got word they were going with Etherscan.
But in the meantime, most developers were using mantlescan.info, our explorer, as default for their contract verification and debugging workflows!
We positioned #2 behind only explorer.mantle.xyz with no advertising and no specific effort for the keywords ‘mante explorer’ and ‘mantle scan’ because yes, developers want the Etherscan feature set, but they don’t necessarily want Etherscan! We found this out when Boba Network, Avalanche and other chose us instead of the big player to pay less, have a more efficient solution and one that’s natively multichain.
They even played ‘dumb’ asking us why we would have a ‘red banner’ saying that the indexing is not complete, when we said to them multiple times that that version of the explorer was live as a demo, and that we would complete the explorer once the service contract was signed.
They were kind enough to provide us with a (very intermittently working) RPC, fair enough. But they said they were going with Etherscan because ‘devs and users couldn’t stop bugging us about it.’
This was January 11, 2024. And a couple months later they even said that we would have to run our own nodes!
They continued to give us updates like we were a serviced partner: upgrade your node, mind the changes to this and that, and so on. But we still weren’t paid.
We even tried asking the grant route, but they said that they won’t fund infra through grants.
Now, a year after keeping the explorer online, we tried a couple more times with new team members that had to decline the offer again.
We spent thousands of dollars to keep the indexing running, and we did that because we believed (and we still believe, honestly) that the fact that we were the first to build a good explorer got us an advantage.
Looking at Semrush, in fact, we can see how Etherscan’s leadership with their explorer is not absolute.
You have to consider that mantlescan.info is not advertised anywhere as an explorer for Mantle. They didn’t even put us in their docs. And we still had about 10% of the unique users market share by doing nothing in November 2024. And we had even more market share before July. Here’s a snapshot of all quarters in 2024, with a focus on our dominance in Q2, closing in on the official explorer’s unique users.
So what happens now? Since Etherscan is in the market, we couldn’t sell any adv slots for our explorer because nobody is interested, so we have to shut down the explorer. But we won’t throw away the traffic and users, because we gained those.
So we’ll still continue to index Mantle, even though there won’t be a Mantle-specific explorer. When a user goes to mantlescan.info or any other sub-link, they will get the corresponding page on the multichain routescan.io platform.
So, nothing’s going to change for users and developers, because we don’t want to get them down, but this is a stand against Mantle and their complete unwillingness to support a quality block explorer for a very low amount: since Mantle didn’t have high TPS for a lot of time, we only required between 20,000$ and 40,000$ per year to keep it running.
And we won’t guarantee that we keep the indexing running if the chain goes to high TPS, because nobody is paying our server bills for this!
So yes, we’re taking a stand because of course if a chain can pay Etherscan they do it, but they also need to at least pay for what they asked in the beginning. Mantle never paid anything, not even for the months-long demo.
Something needs to change. Explorers are perceived as a public good, but nobody wants to pay for it, except when it comes to Etherscan.
We’re trying to change that, but it’ll take a lot of time.