Behind the Scenes of why we're shutting down mantlescan.info

•

Routescan is the first and leading multichain block explorer, offering unmatched unification and aggregation.

We aim to index the entire EVM blockchain, including L2s and L3s. For business development, chains can approach us for a quote and service.

But there are also other types of commitments that we explore: like with the Superscan thesuperscan.io/, 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.

Lastly, we might provide a demo explorer to prove our value to potential clients. For instance, we approached Mantle L2 on January 10, 2023, before their L2 was on mainnet. Although interested in our product, they were also in discussions with Etherscan.

Bullish on Mantle's future as a BitDAO spinoff, we quickly made them a good offer. They were interested, but our product lacked L1 <> L2 bridge transaction tracking and custom DA solutions like MantleDA. But the testnet launch was far off.

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 explorer ready 3 days before the mainnet launch, showcasing our speed and efficiency. The team requested improvements, and we happily complied, even without a signed contract, driven by trust and enthusiasm for the project.

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 secured the #2 spot after explorer.mantle.xyz without advertising or targeting "mante explorer" and "mantle scan." Developers want Etherscan features but not necessarily Etherscan itself. Boba Network, Avalanche, and others chose us over the big player for a cost-effective, efficient, multichain solution.

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.

Mantlescan.info isn't advertised as Mantle's explorer and isn't in their docs. Yet, in November 2024, we captured about 10% of unique users. We had even more market share before July, especially in Q2, approaching the official explorer's user numbers. Here's a snapshot of 2024's quarterly data highlighting our Q2 dominance.

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.

Users and developers won't notice changes, as we're protesting Mantle's refusal to support a quality block explorer for a low cost. With Mantle's low TPS, we only needed $20,000-$40,000 yearly to operate. If TPS increases, we can't promise to maintain indexing without someone covering server costs.

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.