Grant Proposal - Vaibhav Arora

Name of Applicant - Vaibhav Arora
Contact Email - aroravaibhav817@gmail.com
Wallet Address - 0x5362fffC85632301293E78512063837c145c13F9

Grant for Tooling

Brief Description
ExplorerX simplifies deploying and managing smart contracts on multiple layer2 blockchains. Deploy your contracts on any supported chain with just a few clicks, without manual interaction. Easier layer 2 onboarding and enhanced developer experience.

Detailed Description
ExplorerX is a cross-chain explorer that allows users to easily deploy their contracts on multiple chains in a single go. Users can easily manage, query and interact with their smart contracts in a very simple way, this eliminates the overhead of deploying and managing their smart contracts on multiple chains separately and gives them a better developer experience to work on. In simple words, it is an explorer to deploy contracts on multiple chains. Users can also interact with any smart contract deployed on any chain in a single place.

We built ExplorerX at Scaling Ethereum hackathon where we used to UMA to verify contracts that are manually added by user to make sure that different addresses deployed on different chains share the same source code. Since ExplorerX was built at a hackathon it needs a lot of modifications to improve UX and DX to onboard next billion users. Security and availability of data is another major concern we will be focusing on so that we can then allow users to deploy on mainnets. We are also going to create a plugin for hardhat that will allow users to easily manipulate their cross chain contracts directly from their CLI. The graph protocol will be used to store the smart contract addresses and details regarding the smart contract. UMA contracts will be deployed on mainnet for better transparency and better results.

The term “Cross Chain” is gaining more popularity each day and almost all protocols have their contracts deployed on multiple chains so that a user can interact with their contract according to their personal needs, but sometimes it becomes hard to manage and deploy contracts on multiple chains. Developers find it hard to get their hands on the right smart contract address if smart contract is deployed on multiple chain. ExplorerX eliminates all that hassle with cross chain deployment and interaction, it improves Developer Experience hugely and saves the developer or user a lot of time that they sometime tend to waste in searching the right smart contract address then going on different explorer to interact with them.

How many UMA tokens are you requesting for this project?
4000

What percentage of the grant would you retain to secure the Optimistic Oracle by voting
10

What are the measurable goals and success factors.
Milestone 1: Add the graph protocol to store contract addresses.

Description: Integrate the Graph Protocol to enable users to efficiently store, search and retrieve contract addresses stored on the ExplorerX platform. This will allow for faster and more reliable data retrieval, improving the user experience and making ExplorerX more decentralized.
Estimated time: 1-2 weeks.
Expected Payout - 1000 UMA Tokens

Milestone 2: Improve UI to easily onboard next billion users.

Description: Redesign the ExplorerX user interface to make it more user-friendly, intuitive, and accessible to a wider range of users. This will involve conducting user research, creating wireframes and prototypes, and implementing design changes to improve the overall usability of the platform.
Estimated time: 2 weeks.
Expected Payout - 1000 UMA Tokens

Milestone 3: Add support for mainnet deployment and deploy UMA contract on mainnet.

Description: Prepare the ExplorerX platform for deployment on the Ethereum mainnet, including implementing necessary security measures and testing. Additionally, deploy the UMA (Universal Market Access) contract on the mainnet for better transparency and better reward to the disputer that will lead to increase security.
Estimated time: 2-3 weeks.
Expected Payout - 1000 UMA Tokens

Milestone 4: Onboarding 1000-5000 users on ExplorerX

Description: Develop a user acquisition strategy to attract and onboard a target of 1000-5000 users to the ExplorerX platform. This may include creating a referral program, running social media campaigns, and partnering with relevant influencers and communities.
Estimated time: 3-4 weeks
Expected Payout - 500 UMA Tokens

Milestone 4: Add plugin of ExplorerX to Hardhat.

Description: Create a plugin for the Hardhat development environment that allows developers to easily deploy their smart contract on multiple chains using just CLI. This will enable developers to leverage the features of ExplorerX, potentially increasing adoption of the platform.
Estimated time: 2-3 weeks
Expected Payout 500 UMA Tokens

Other Information
We are excited to apply for a grant to support the development of ExplorerX, a cross-chain explorer platform designed to make it easier for users to deploy, interact, and analyze their smart contracts on multiple blockchains.

Our vision for ExplorerX is to become the go-to platform for cross-chain smart contract deployment and interaction. We plan to achieve this by continuing to improve the user experience, expanding the range of cross-chain transactions available on our platform, and building out robust features to facilitate the smooth developer experience that are building cross chain products.

Thank you for considering our grant application. We believe that ExplorerX has the potential to make a meaningful contribution to the cross-chain ecosystem, and we look forward to working with UMA to make this vision a reality.

Thank you for your application for the UMA grants programme.

I had some of our engineers review this solution as a public good, aimed at UMA developers but with wider applicability. The feedback I received was while deploying apps to multiple blockchains in a single click is pretty cool, we were unsure who would use this as most teams who deploy to multiple chains have such complex requirements that a generic tool would not be well utilised.

There was also a feeling that there may be simpler methods to verifying that the code is identical such as using create2 and having it have the same address on every chain rather than an oracle, or alternatively, just calling getCode() on each and verifying the hash matches.

Thanks again for your interest in UMA and the time you have taken to apply to our grants programme.

Hey, thanks for replying, I am Vaibhav a member of team ExplorerX. As we are talking about the complexity we will be implementing various features in ExplorerX that are already included in our roadmap such as allowing users to import solidity files, openzeppelin support etc and we are already using create2 when user deploy contracts to multiple chains so that it becomes easy for user to manage. The ExplorerX is not only limited to cross chain deployment but contracts can be deployed on a single chain as well, this improves the Developer experience a lot where instead of creating a hardhat directory first than using different RPCs, it saves a lot of hassle. As for the verification part we added this verification so that one can manage their smart contracts deployed on multiple chain in a single place. Let’s take an example, when developer develops on any protocol let’s say UMA they had to go through docs and sometimes they were unable to find the address of the particular chain they are looking for. I faced this in scaling ethereum hackathon where I wasn’t able to find an address of UMA contract deployed on polygon mumbai but I had the address on goerli. Platforms like ExplorerX can save that hassle so I can just paste the goerli address in ExplorerX and get the mumbai address directly from there. Plus I can easily track my transaction on any chain I want instead of going through different blockchain explorers.