We're thrilled to announce that Rumble Fish has been awarded a $131,200 grant from the Stellar Community Fund (SCF #41) to build a Soroban-first Block Explorer, a tool designed to bring full transparency to the Soroban smart contract ecosystem on the Stellar network.

What Is the Stellar Community Fund?

The Stellar Community Fund is an initiative by the Stellar Development Foundation that supports developers, startups, and companies building on Stellar and Soroban. Each funding round allocates resources to projects that strengthen and grow the ecosystem. Being selected is both a validation of technical capability and a signal of trust from one of the most established names in blockchain infrastructure.

Why Does Soroban Need Its Own Block Explorer?

Soroban is Stellar's smart contract platform - the layer that enables decentralized finance (DeFi), collectibles trading, and a new generation of on-chain applications. While classic Stellar assets have solid support across existing block explorers, Soroban has been significantly underserved.

Current block explorers display Soroban events and transactions in raw, technical formats - often unreadable to folks without deep protocol knowledge. This creates friction for everyone: developers debugging contracts, investors tracking DeFi activity, and users simply trying to understand what an application did with their funds. A block explorer that displays Soroban operations in human-readable, context-rich formats improves the user experience and builds trust, both of which are essential to driving further adoption.

What Are We Building?

The Soroban-first Block Explorer is a full-stack infrastructure project, delivered in three phases.

The first phase, the MVP, focuses on ingesting and indexing all on-chain data: ledgers, transactions, Soroban smart contract invocations, and CAP-67 events, stored in a PostgreSQL database and served via a NestJS API. The second phase brings that data to life through a public React-based frontend with transaction detail pages, account views, contract pages, and global search - all displaying live mainnet data, with Soroban events decoded into clean tables rather than raw XDR. The third and final phase is a production-grade deployment: security-audited, load-tested (targeting p95 response times under 200ms), fully documented, and monitored, ensuring reliability from day one.

The entire architecture runs on AWS, with infrastructure-as-code via AWS CDK and CI/CD through GitHub Actions.

What the Team Says

Marek Kowalski, CEO/CTO of Rumble Fish, sees this grant as a natural next step for the company's presence in the Stellar ecosystem:

“Soroban is where the most exciting things on Stellar are happening right now - DeFi, new token standards, complex smart contract interactions. But if users and developers can't clearly see what's going on-chain, adoption stalls. We're building this block explorer because the ecosystem needs it, and because it's exactly the kind of infrastructure challenge our team is built for.”

What This Means for the Stellar Ecosystem

Block explorers are often the first point of contact between a user and a blockchain network. They're how you verify a transaction went through, how a developer confirms a smart contract behaved as expected, and how an investor tracks on-chain activity. When that tool doesn't fully support the newest and most powerful features of a network, the whole ecosystem pays the price.

By building a Soroban-first block explorer, Rumble Fish is filling a critical gap - one that will make Stellar more accessible, more transparent, and more compelling for the next wave of builders and users entering the space.

You can explore our full architecture documentation on GitHub and track the project's progress on the Stellar Community Fund. If you're building on Stellar or Soroban and looking for an experienced technical partner, our team is ready to help - we welcome you to get in touch.