We partnered with Bastion Digital to build Tonscan, the most user-friendly explorer of the TON blockchain, handling both the frontednd and backend from the ground up.

Bastion Digital is the global leader in secure institutional custody, staking and asset management for The Open Network (TON), the largest TON staking institutional provider in the world. Their team approached BB back in 2023, asking us to help them with a variety of products, including a set of better tools to support the TON Blockchain. As part of our long-term collaboration with Bastion Digital, we were also tasked with building the blockchain explorer Tonscan. The challenges included making the blockchain approachable to novice users while offering developers technical detail, designing a sensible information hierarchy for an open exploratory application, storing and updating the 5M+ daily transactions, and keeping the UI snappy.

We built both the frontend and backend of the explorer, replacing an open-source TON Indexer we’d previously built, with a new Python indexer that talks directly to the TON Node's LiteServer interface. A PostgreSQL database (around 500GB) serves all Tonscan API requests, supported by three layers of caching (Redis, Vercel SSR, and Cloudfront). We built our own framework for decoding Bag-of-Cells data, indexed message and transaction content as JSON, surfaced human-readable labels for accounts and contracts, and created a flexible frontend system with custom interactive graphs that clarify complex data for both novice and advanced users.

• Backend
  FastAPI, PostgreSQL, Redis cache
• Crawler
  Go
• Fronted
  Next.js, Tailwindcss, Vercel, Cloudflare