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Sourcify
@sourcifyeth
🚨 Ethereum's centralization crisis: the monopoly no one is talking about Etherscan controls smart contract verification. It’s closed-source and holds the keys to Ethereum’s most critical data as a single company. This is a monopoly over Ethereum’s most fundamental data. And it’s not just inconvenient—it’s complete opposite of everything Ethereum stands for. Ethereum promises decentralization, trustlessness, and open-source. But in practice a single entity controls access, and profits off its chokehold on the ecosystem. This is a crisis. This is unacceptable. This must change. 🔴 Verification must be: • Decentralized—No single gatekeeper. Multiple verifiers, not one. • Open-source—Fully transparent and reproducable verifications. • Open-data—No API keys, full unrestricted access.
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glbkst
@glbkst
verification is free, though? And in principle anyone could repeat the verification. But there is at least one alternative (i forgot the name).
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Kaan
@kaanuzdogan
The alternatives are Blockscout and Routescan. Yes the verification is free but of course, you are providing the valuable data. The problem is the dataset is not open and accessible
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Kaan
@kaanuzdogan
And of course the other alternative is @sourcifyeth lol
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glbkst
@glbkst
ah yes, lol. There is one thing i doubt with it: not all contracts are permanent which means they get updates or become obsolete. With ipfs storage that means there is a lot of history quickly. Also useful, but less so. Contract sizes are usually small ofc, but there is a lot of duplication with EVM contacts. I assume most contracts aren't used any more.
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Kaan
@kaanuzdogan
I'm not sure if I get the point. If they are duplicates then the ipfs hashes of sources will also be duplicates. Still what's the main issue here?
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glbkst
@glbkst
no i only meant that there probably exist 1000s of Openzeppelin variants. Different versions. The decentralization creates some inefficiencies. As i understand it Solana might need no etherscan, because it's mostly a few central contract logic for NFT. And i think expensive to deploy so a high bar for new deployments. So EVM has great flexibility for building, but a central verification is still convenient. Long story short i see no issue with Etherscan because alternatives exist and new could exist. Still convenience or maybe perf of APIs might favor the largest offer. But it's not a monopoly.
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Kaan
@kaanuzdogan
Centralization is not the issue. As long as you get the data from somewhere and verify yourself it doesn't matter where it comes from. The problem is the ownership of the data and where the monopoly is at. Just try to do some data analysis on contracts. The dataset is non existent. It has to be fully public and available. What happens if etherscan goes away tomorrow? This isn't even an imaginary case this happened. Where are the kovan, rinkeby, görli contracts?
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