Stellar Explorer

While Stellar block explorers have strong support for classic assets, the ecosystem currently lacks an explorer that displays Soroban events and transactions legibly. As Soroban enables DeFi, collectibles trading, and other emergent use cases, not having a way to clearly see what happened in a smart contract transaction dampens growth. Users engaging with new apps — swapping tokens on Soroswap, lending on Blend, providing liquidity on Aquarius — cannot easily verify what their transactions did. This limits innovation and erodes trust in what's happening on-chain.

Our explorer addresses this by displaying both Soroban and classic operations in human-readable, context-rich formats — showing not just "invoke_host_function" but "Swapped 100 USDC for 50 XLM at Soroswap."

Solution

We are building a block explorer that displays both classic asset and Soroban token transactions in a clean, human-readable format. The explorer is powered by a custom data pipeline that ingests, indexes, and serves the full history of Stellar on-chain activity with a focus on Soroban.

Core capabilities

Human-readable transactions — Every transaction is displayed in plain language. Classic operations like payments and offers are described clearly, and Soroban invocations show the function called, the arguments passed, and the outcome — e.g., "Address C...AAA swapped 1 USDC to 1 XLM at Soroswap."

CAP-67 unified event stream — Full support for the unified event stream introduced in Protocol v23, displaying all token movements (classic and Soroban) in a single view: transfers, mints, burns, and clawbacks. Swap heuristics detect when events represent a swap based on the function name and the presence of corresponding swap events.

SEP-41 and SEP-50 display — Reference implementation for displaying SEP-41 fungible tokens (name, symbol, decimals, holders, transfer history) and SEP-50 NFTs (collection metadata, individual token rendering, ownership history).

Soroban operations display — Contract invocations show both the technical detail ("address C...AAA called swap") and the human-readable summary ("Address C...AAA swapped 1 USDC to 1 XLM at Soroswap"), with decoded arguments, authorization chains, and resource consumption.

Smart contract function filtering — Users can filter events and transactions by specific contract function calls directly in the UI (e.g., show only swap or deposit calls for a given contract).

SEP-39, SAC, and Classic Asset support — A unified asset resolution pipeline that bridges classic Stellar assets, Stellar Asset Contracts (SAC), and Soroban-native tokens into a coherent display.

Complete Soroban history — Full transaction history from 2024 onward, with support for previous protocol versions (v20+), powered by historical backfill from the public RPC Data Lake.

Technical architecture

Ingestion Pipeline (Go) — Reads ledger data from Stellar RPC providers and the public Data Lake (S3), parses XDR using the Stellar Ingest SDK, extracts operations, effects, and events, and writes to our database. Processes CAP-67 unified token events via the Token Transfer Processor. Detects and classifies contracts (SEP-41, SEP-50) by parsing WASM contract specs.

Database + Search — PostgreSQL with TimescaleDB for time-series partitioning and compression. Typesense for sub-50ms fuzzy search across assets, contracts, and known accounts. Redis for caching and real-time event distribution.

API Layer — REST API with OpenAPI documentation serving ledgers, transactions, accounts, contracts, assets, and search. Cursor-based pagination, tiered caching, and rate limiting.

Frontend (Next.js + React 19) — A modern, responsive explorer built on our existing open-source codebase with 9-language internationalization, multi-network support (public, testnet, futurenet), and dark/light mode.