Avalanche’s blockchain explorer SnowTrace shuts down operations

What is Avalanche?

Layer-1 contract platform Avalanche announced Monday that its blockchain explorer, SnowTrace, had ceased operations.

“The instance of SnowTrace by @etherscan will be discontinued on 30th November (00:00 UTC). Thank you @avax and the community for the last 2 years of support and we wish you the best moving forward,” said Avalanche in a social media post.

SnowTrace users must save their backup information, including private name tags and contact verification details, before November 30. Although the developer team did not specify the reason for closing SnowTrace, some have mentioned the possibility of Etherscan’s service fees for its Explorer-as-a-Service (EaaS) toolkit.

Mikko Ohtamaa, co-founder of Trading Strategy, said that an annual subscription to EaaS can range from $1 million to $2 million.

“EtherScan is a very good product, but smart contract verification is something that needs to be decentralised. Regulators and other are not going to be kosher with ‘how do you check this?’ ‘the source code is hosted by a private company in Malaysia,’” Ohtamaa said.

On the other hand, Phillip Liu Jr., head of strategy and operations at Ava Labs, assured that the protocol was progressing to something improved and had no plans to shut down.

“Yup. Moving onto something better,” said Liu Jr on X.

Avascan’s new version replaces SnowTrace

Avalanche announced on social media that a new Avascan version of the service will replace SnowTrace.

“The current version of SnowTrace by Etherscan is being sunset and replaced by a new version run by @AvascanExplorer.,” said Avalanche.

Avalanche said Avascan would maintain user access to a similar interface, URLs and APIs, with support for the C-Chain and all Subnets. A demo of this Avascan version is accessible through http://SnowTrace.dev.

“The http://SnowTrace.io domain will still be live and transition fully to Avascan on Nov. 30th with no disruption in services,” Avalanche said.

In a reply to the post, Liu Jr. said, “New explorer with subnet support and also multichain! Imagine DeBank and etherscan in one product.”

After the announcement, Avalanche’s token AVAX’s price went up by 2.63 percent to $11.20, and its 24-hour trading volume increased by 12.12 percent to $164.63 million. Over the past week, Avax’s price has risen by more than nine percent.

Positive growth in Avalanche’s performance, analyst reports

In its Q3 report, crypto analyst firm Messari provided insights into Avalanche’s performance over the past year. Messari reported that active addresses on Avalanche had exhibited remarkable stability throughout the year, particularly when the influence of LayerZero-related activity was removed. However, Messari noted that when this activity is taken into account, there is a noticeable decline from the peak observed in the second quarter.

Messari highlighted a 28.8 percent decrease in DeFi Total Value Locked (TVL) in Q3 compared to Q2. However, stablecoins remained an exception to this trend.

Avalanche’s Q3 activities featured gaming and RWA (Real World Asset) partnerships. These include the launch of new subnets that took advantage of Avalanche’s customizability.

While DFK Chain, Avalanche’s largest subnet in terms of transactions, saw a 62 percent decline in activity, Avalanche’s Dexalot demonstrated steady growth during the bear market, with transactions increasing by 110 percent in Q3.

In July, the Avalanche Foundation granted Dexalot up to $3 million worth of AVAX. This initiative was part of Avalanche’s Multiverse, which aims to encourage the expansion of new subnets, independent networks that establish their own membership and token rules.

Messari also reported that Hyperspace’s support for Avalanche NFTs and the release of the Dokyo collection had led to the highest NFT sales in over a year, with more than 160,000 transactions in Q3.