Sui Ecosystem

Meet the Sui Explorer

Sui's emergence as a game-changing layer 1 amidst a burgeoning sea of pre-existing blockchains signals a new era of web3 infrastructure. This new era is made possible by Sui's mission to provide the infrastructure that will support the development of a wide range of applications, from dynamic games to secure DeFi protocols, all with unrivaled speed and incredibly low cost.

As part of Sui’s vision to create infrastructure to support the developers on-boarding the next billion users to web3, we released the Sui Explorer as a trusted transparency tool for Sui users and builders. Explorers are an essential part of any layer1 platform, serving as inspection and analytics tools for users and developers to troubleshoot, confirm their activities, and verify holdings on-chain.

Our Sui Explorer is designed to accomplish the following:

Keep the most updated and accurate on-chain data, activity, and metrics
Enable lookup, verification, and tracking of all assets and contracts
Be a fast, reliable, and transparent tool for debugging and auditing
Offer useful smart contract development and features unique to Sui

We have innovated and expanded on the standard explorer functionality, all while prioritizing a heightened user experience. The Sui Explorer’s design was guided by principles of usability and functionality—and we will continue to release more user-friendly and developer-friendly features.

Sui Explorer includes the following notable features:

1. Rich package details with go-to-definition

Blockchain explorers are particularly useful since, in addition to observability, they serve as powerful debugging and learning tools for smart contract developers. In some existing explorers, developers can go to each contract and view either the bytecode or source code if available.

The Sui Explorer takes these features to new heights by delivering go-to-definition support for all smart contracts, referred to as packages in Sui. With the move-disassembler, the Sui Explorer renders normalized bytecode, and clicking on any struct will jump to the package and module that defines it. This significantly improves code navigation, readability, and learnability.

Clicking on any struct (highlighted) will jump to the module where the struct was defined.

2. Object details

Objects are the fundamental building blocks of Sui operations. Object detail is rendered recursively, depending on what data is available. In this particular example, this object has an associated image, properties, as well as child objects. The main benefit of this feature is that it provides an optimized view of objects on our explorer.

The Object page displays details about the object, including description, properties, child objects, and associated transactions.

3. Address details

In the address detail view, owned assets are split into Coins and NFTs for easy navigation. Here you can get a clear view of assets this address owns as well as a list of transactions interacting with this address. Coins of the same type are automatically aggregated, but can be expanded into a paginated view for more detailed lookup

The Address page displays the details about the objects owned by the address and transactions associated with the address.

4. Transaction details

Each transaction detail includes gas fee, objects updated, token amount, and relevant addresses. Depending on the transaction, additional info can be included such as bytecode of published modules and emitted events. For each view in the Sui Explorer, we want to make it super easy for developers to navigate and find whatever information they are looking for.

Detail view of a transaction which published a package

The Events tab shows the events emitted by the transaction.

5. Validator table and Node map

Last but not least, we now have a validator table along with a map showing active full nodes and their locations. This is part of the Sui team’s ongoing efforts to provide information on Sui’s network operations as the network matures. Since Sui’s Testnet is not live yet, the current table is illustrative and the shown validators are not actually operating on Testnet at this point. This table will reflect the live set validators once the Testnet network operations go live.

The Validators page displays details about validators and a map of the location of full nodes on the Sui network.

We want to hear from you

Usability and impact are core principles that drive our product development. Please engage with us on discord and share any suggestions you have on our #sui-explorer channel on Discord.

Upcoming Sui Explorer Features