What's a Transaction? Unveiling the new Transaction Details page

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Today marks an important day for Avascan. Today is what I was waiting to call the day of Avascan 1.0 Today marks a milestone to build The Google of #Avalanche. Let me explain how.

Today we released a big UI/UX upgrade to one of the most viewed pages on Avascan, and on any blockchain explorer ever: the Transaction Details page. But the thing is, a Transaction on Avalanche is not always the same.

It can be on C-Chain, that is an EVM chain based on account addresses for DeFi and NFT activity..

... or it can be on X-Chain, that is an AVM chain based on UTXO addresses used for fast asset transfers..

.. or even on P-Chain, that is a PVM chain based on UTXO addresses used as a management chain for all Avalanche operations (subnet and chain creation, staking, etc.)

So, what is a transaction, regardless of the virtual machine it's being executed on? Well, it turns out it's a series of operations (at least 1) that leads to some addresses having more value, and other addresses having less value stored in them. It's a transfer of value.

These so-called operations are, once again, transfers of value. We **could** see these operations as UTXOs in some tx models (like in AVM and PVM)...

...and INTERNAL OPERATIONS in others (like EVM). Of course, this is a conceptual classification, not a factual/technical one. But it's the one we used to design the new layout. It helped us understand that we could, in fact, make all types of transactions be seen as one.

What you're seeing now on Avascan is one of the many, seamless, contextual pages that we're designing. A contextual page is one that has 90% of the same layout for every situation, but adds an extra 10% of info based on the context it's in.

Here, the base layout is the X-Chain Transaction Details page. avascan.info/blockchain/x/tx/2pPNo9EehtLnQNZi7zTLhWJ2xJ7pwPPGmBVD6EsD2ZtmncbUCS

When on P-Chain, then, if you look at a transaction that's involved in a staking operation (validation, delegation), you'll see contextual info about that. avascan.info/blockchain/p/tx/pifg6A2DRHzL6qySRvutghfqbJMfhjDNEqY19bJZNDVB44MiL

And when on C-Chain, you'll see contextual info about the gas price and all the relevant transfers made with this transaction. avascan.info/blockchain/c/tx/0x8d613adf535963f51a085c83c6a629526255d10b2c72f4cb03056f6de49b579c

To get more background on all the research that led to this moment, you can take a look at the transcript of the workshop I held at the Avalanche Summit earlier this year on Avascan's blog: blog.avascan.info/2022-03-22-exploring-subnets-mastering-avalanche-heterogeneity.html

All of Avascan will gradually be contextual like this. It will take some time, but we believe this is the future of understanding on-chain data. And we're just getting started.