Rococo Testnet Explorer and PLO dashboard

Background

Rococo, as a testnet, is used to test the working method and connection process of Parachain. Up to now, Polkadot has released the access method and some interfaces for test, and the projects are connecting in an orderly manner as planned. As an experimental base for officially accessing Kusama/Polkadot network, we believe the states of Rococo network are important for users.

As a high-precision Web3 explorer that aggregates the Substrate ecological network, Subscan has integrated with 11 main nets and 8 test nets within the Polkadot ecosystem and has a strong technical accumulation for supporting new networks and Parachain features. One of Subscan's current goal is to provide a full range of explorer support for Parachain features. Based on our experience in the last 2 years, we are very confident that we can complete this task.

In order to achieve this, we will provide a program with the complete Parachain support, which can be summarized as follows:

• Explorer support for Rococo test net
• PLO Dashboard
• Open API, data analysis charts, and other data support
• Data interaction between Parachain and relay chain

These functions will be applied to Rococo network first and will be gradually applied to Kusama and Polkadot networks in conjunction with the PLO plan in the future.

According to the development process of the Parachain features, we divided this work into 2 Phases.

Features List

**Phase 1: **

Part of the work mentioned in this application has been completed or is in progress. The work of Phase 1 is expected to be completed before** April 15**.

Support Rococo network:

• Chain data query and display, such as blocks, extrinsics, events, and accounts
• UI costomization
• Data analysis: charts with visualize data presentation
• Compatibilities with Rococo runtime upgrades
• Open API

PLO dashboard:

• Candidate project introduction: including project introduction, social media, token issuance, para-drop rules, and other off-chain data.
• Auction rules and procedures: introduction of candle auction, the status of each stage of the auction, start/end time, etc.
• Auction details: display candidate project, Crowdloan details, current rankings, etc. The data will keeps up-to-date in real-time.
• Tools for participating in auctions and Crowdloan: Users can submit on-chain transactions in this tool by polkadot.js extension to participate in Crowdloan of Parachain.
• Auction result: Record the voting snapshot, winner, slot number/time, etc. of each block in the ending period.

Phase 2: (In Plan)
Currently, this part temporarily lacks the prerequisites for development, so the estimated development time is temporarily unavailable. We will evaluate it after the completion of phase 1 work.

The detailed work plan of Phase 1

Product and UI design

• Logic research and user requirement research on Parachain.
• Decomposition and arrangement of Parachain related functions.
• Product requirement documents and interactive prototype diagrams.
• UI design.

Frontend

• Add rococo network config, including：
  UI assets
  SS58 address format
  metadata
  token
  etc.
• Add PLO dashboard route module：
  show info on the corresponding sub page
  intros of the candidate projects
  intros of the auction
  the auction progress and result
• Import @polkadot.js packages：
  build tools to participate in auction and Crowdloan
  submit extrinsics on chains and show executed result

Backend

• Support runtime Slot module. (https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot/blob/400ecc581a31a653a9e00d4057c11114d69906db/runtime/common/src/slots.rs)
  Store storage, event, extrinsic, etc. (auction related data) into the relational database.
• Support runtime Crowdloan module (https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot/blob/400ecc581a31a653a9e00d4057c11114d69906db/runtime/common/src/crowdloan.rs)
• Obtain the storage, event, and extrinsic data of Parachain related data (such as Crowdloan, contribution, withdraw) from blockchain and save to a relational database.
• Provide Parchain, auction, Crowdloan related data to the frontend via HTTP APIs
  API documentation.

DevOps

• Compile Polkadot network node including Slot and Crowdloan module for development and production environments
• Continuous integration and deployment of Rococo network backing：
  https://rococo.subscan.io/
  - Run a test relay chain and use it to simulate the auction process
• Black-box and white-box monitoring of Subscan Rococo API endpoint

Test

• Unit tests and integration tests for all modules
  - Test the entire PLO process through the test relay chain
• UI complies with design standards and product requirements
• UX interaction tests

Cost of Phase1
Engineering costs：

• 1 product manager * 2.5 weeks（$1500 per * week）
• 1 designer * 1.5 weeks（$1300 per * week）
• Developer: 32 weeks （$1700 per * week）

· Invest 2 back-end developers:
4 weeks for developing and 2 weeks for writing unit tests (sum = 12 weeks)

· Invest in 2 front-end developers:
4 weeks for developing and 2 weeks for writing unit tests (sum = 12 weeks)

· Invest in 1 DevOps engineer
2 weeks for the assistance with other engineers to deploy and test the product and 2 weeks for follow-up occasional maintenance and operations (sum = 4 weeks)

· Invest 1 QA engineer, 4 weeks

Operation and maintenance costs for Rococo network:
Google Cloud Platform - Computing Engine
Google Cloud Platform - Cloud SQL instances
Google Cloud Platform - Operation Suite (Logging and Monitoring)
Misc (Storage, Network Egress, Cloudflare, etc.)

$400 per * month
From January to March 2021:
$400*3=$1200

Total costs: $61300

How to verify Phase 1

• https://rococo.subscan.io/
• Based on Rococo's code, run a relay chain and simulate the auction process, we will invite multiple projects to participate in verifying this function.
• We will post video demonstrations on Youtube.