Join us at the Beach!
VGNG and Staking Facilities officially join forces to push the development of Solana Beach, the blockexplorer for Solana.
Our Genesis Story
In March 2020, we launched the first version of Solana Beach to provide stakeholders with a basic dashboard through which they can track the activity of the Solana blockchain. While it was lightyears away from where it stands today, Solana Beach quickly became a popular community tool with hundreds of daily users.
Towards the end of 2020, we collaborated with VGNG to bring Solana Beach to the next level and evolve it into a full-fledged blockexplorer for one of the most performant blockchains out there. We revealed the fruits of our collaboration in March 2021 and have seen tremendous feedback from the community ever since. Big shout out and thank you to everyone using Solana Beach and providing us with feedback — this really means a lot.
With our daily users now in the thousands, we are far from being done, and rest assured, this is only the beginning of our mission to become the go-to block explorer for the Solana ecosystem!
To best achieve this mission, we are officially joining forces with VGNG to further develop, maintain, and improve Solana Beach.
Who we are
Solana Beach is a joint venture between two teams with years of experience working in the blockchain industry. Since our team members are lead users themselves, we can draw from a great set of insights and best practices.
VGNG are seasoned builders with expertise ranging across multiple blockchain ecosystems such as Solana, Ethereum, and Cosmos. They are a diverse team of blockchain architects, developers, designers as well as analysts. Since they have also built Solflare and Solrise Finance, they know the Solana architecture inside-out.
Staking Facilities has been active as a validator and node operator in the Proof-of-Stake space ever since its’ inception in 2017/2018. They run industry-grade, highly secure physical infrastructure co-located in certified data centers for several blockchains projects across the web 3.0 stack. This provides them with a unique perspective on the requirements of a tool such as Solana Beach.
Support us on our mission
Solana is a different kind of beast, given its ultra-high performance and the Cambrian explosion that the ecosystem has recently seen. Running the necessary infrastructure for Solana Beach as well as supporting a hard-working team obviously incurs quite significant costs. As Anatoly Yakovenko, CEO & Co-Founder of Solana likes to put it: ‘Developers gotta eat too’.
Therefore we spun up our very own validator node, whose revenues we are using to cover the costs of our operations and improve the Solana Beach experience through better performance and new features. We want to stay independent and develop Solana Beach as a community-focused tool. Our validator allows us to do so and sustainably develop Solana Beach tailored to community needs. It also enables any $SOL-holder to support an ecosystem-wide tool and contribute to the security of the network while still earning yield on their funds. As a special perk for Solana Beach delegators, we will offer them the option to download their staking reward overview as a CSV. It’s a classic win-win-win situation that ensures the sustainable maintenance and development of a community-driven tool.
Hard facts:
commission fee: 10%
address: BeachiopjxQxL7CaHNSZsynApiZCKx9QFVtcWNz3jDBo
In addition to supporting us through delegations to the Solana Beach validator, you can always reach out and share feedback, feature ideas, or bug reports too! See the links below for more info on that.
In case you are looking for guides on how to stake on Solana, we got you covered too:
Stake via Solflare and a Ledger device:
https://stakingfac.medium.com/how-to-stake-on-solana-with-solflare-a-ledger-nano-s-bdcc90d769c7
Stake via Solflare and a Keystore file:
https://stakingfac.medium.com/how-to-stake-on-solana-with-solflare-a-keystore-file-9f7cd5fba169
The way forward
Despite seeing tremendous growth and new people as well as projects entering the ecosystem each day, we are still in the early days of Solana — heck, the first of many Solana Summers has just started! We are in it for the long run so we plan to sustainably grow along with the overall Solana community. Hence, our main focus will be to constantly improve our backend architecture and RPC setup so that we can handle an ever-increasing demand. Keeping up with the worlds’ fastest blockchain is quite the task given its’ unique approach to scaling and horizontal processing of transactions.
Furthermore, as a community-driven tool, we see it as our obligation to educate any kind of stakeholder about the Solana blockchain. Therefore, we are implementing a set of tooltips and a glossary that helps our users get familiar with Solana and ultimately empowers them to dive deeper into the ecosystem.
While quite the challenge already, we strive to be more than a simple blockexplorer. Our main objective is to become your financial cockpit for the Solana ecosystem. Going forward we will focus on several subpages and continuously tweak them in order to provide you with the best Solana experience. Finally, we’ll continue our work on parsing more transaction and account types to make your experience as smooth as possible! So stay tuned, there’s a lot in the works right now!
Let’s connect
In case you have any further questions, provide feedback, or simply want to touch base, we have several channels through which you can reach us:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/solanabeach_io
Feedback/Feature Request: https://solanabeach.typeform.com/to/uAF4KesC
Bug Report: https://solanabeach.typeform.com/to/VVVofB0H
Token Listing: https://solanabeach.typeform.com/to/Isy4jm0E
API Access: https://github.com/solana-beach/api
Telegram: https://t.me/stakingfacilities
