Canton explorer
Does canton have an inbuilt explorer like hyperledger fabric? I dont mean the DAML navigator. I mean an explorer which tracks the transactions.
What are your expectations from such a tool, i.e. what information are you trying to get or are there features of the Fabric Explorer that you are looking for equivalents?
Remember that Canton provides privacy and thus there is no"single viewable ledger" in the same way as Fabric. Each participant node has a slice of the virtual ledger and, by design, it doesn’t get visibility into transactions or active contracts on another participant. The synchronizer, also by design, only sees the sequence of transactions but not the contents.
Thanks for your reply. I was indeed looking for a “single viewable ledger”, but I understand that such a tool would be unfeasible due to how Canton operates.
Hello, thanks for this question and response. Could I check if there has been any further development on this? i.e., is there a block explorer of Canton that I can view today?
@Saul_Hudson The Daml Shell has been released since the last post.
Daml Shell is a terminal-based application that enables you to inspect a Daml ledger by connecting to a live PQS datastore. With Daml Shell, you can examine current or historical states of the ledger by querying ledger events, transactions, and contracts.
Nothing has changed with regard to Canton privacy. Every node will only have visibility to the contracts on which it is a stakeholder.
We open-sourced Canton Lens, for browsing what a single participant can see. It reads the JSON Ledger API v2 directly, so there’s no PQS to stand up — updates, contract payloads, parties, Splice token holdings, installed Daml-LF packages.
It’s scoped to whichever identity you’re authenticated as, and it keeps no index of its own, so no deep history or full-text search. PQS is still the answer for that.
Apache-2.0, built at DSRV: GitHub - dsrvlabs/canton-lens: A private explorer for Canton participant ledgers, scoped to the selected Canton identity's permissions. · GitHub