neonewstoday.com
The NEO Tracker block explorer recently received an update designed to improve its reliability and user experience. The update is touted as the first among many, with new features and additional optimizations said to be in the works.
NEP-5 synchronization
A major focus of the update was NEO Tracker’s ability to report NEP-5 balances more accurately. Speaking with Neo News Today, NEO Tracker developer, Spencer Corwin, said, “a major problem we’ve sought to fix is inconsistencies between what appears on NEO Tracker and what appears on other Neo blockchain explorers.”
In order to achieve this goal, the team has upgraded its node to be more in-sync with the rest of the Neo blockchain. The upgrade involved a process of comparing the NEO Tracker node and the official Neo node on a block-by-block basis. Whenever a discrepancy was found, developers tracked down the invocation that was handled differently by the NEO Tracker virtual machine and applied a fix.
Over the next two months, the development team intends to make a permanent switch to the official Neo node. This change is expected to minimize development overhead significantly and eliminate inconsistencies entirely.
Colors & ecosystem
The NEO Tracker update also included a new color scheme and an updated logo in alignment with Neo’s 2019 rebrand. Additionally, visitors of the explorer will notice a new “Ecosystem” page, which highlights Neo-based projects and provides links to learn more about them. Corwin noted:
We want to support and promote the Neo ecosystem so that even if a user is just coming to NEO Tracker to check their coin balances they might see that Neo has other exciting projects worth checking out.
Updated color scheme. Source: NEO Tracker
Team focus
NEO Tracker is built by the same team as NEO-ONE, an all-in-one suite for TypeScript blockchain development that had its first MainNet ready release in October 2019. While much of the team’s efforts in recent months has been dedicated towards a push to finalizing NEO-ONE, Corwin notes that more focus is now being placed on NEO Tracker:
For at least the last 12 months, we’ve been working on various NEO-ONE fixes and upgrades. Since about early February, we’ve shifted focus to NEO Tracker to fix some lingering issues and add new features. We’re very optimistic about the future of Neo and NEO Tracker. We have a long list of features we’d like to add to NEO Tracker, but we are a small team, and adding new features takes time. So we are currently looking to hire several more software engineers to help implement new features and upgrades on NEO Tracker and on NEO•ONE.
New features
Looking forward, the NEO Tracker team intends to integrate a fiat-to-crypto on-ramp, crypto-to-crypto swaps, then a crypto-to-fiat off-ramp into the explorer. A tentative timeframe for users to purchase NEO with a debit or credit card is within a few weeks, with an additional two to three weeks for the implementation of each new offering, respectively.
Additionally, NEO Tracker intends to add the ability for users to add transaction fees when using its web wallet.