Ethereum Event Explorer for Smart Contracts

BY MARKUS SPRUNCK

1. Motivation

Ethereum-Event-Scan is a lightweight Ethereum event explorer for smart contracts. Highly helpful when you develop smart contracts and your source code is not yet submitted to Etherscan.

Also in the case you work with a private Ethereum blockchain, you will need a monitor to see what happens in your contract. You can use the code as a basis for your own web3.js explorer implementation.

The following article describes the key ideas, design behind the implementation and also the usage as out of the box docker image. You may find the complete source code on GitHub and there is a complete docker container ready on DockerHub.

2. Ethereum Monitoring Basics

In principle there are two approaches to find out what happens in your deployed smart contract. The first way is just to monitor all transactions of your contract and the second is to monitor events emitted by your smart contract.

2.1 Transactions show just the method call parameter

It is easy to get all incoming transactions of your contract — but in this case you have to decode the transaction input based on the ABI description.

Decoding is not rocket science, however you see just the input parameters of the method calls. With this approach you never see what happens in the smart contract.

In most cases you are also interested in the internal states of your contract , so a kind of logging would be needed.

2.2 Events can show also internal states

When your smart contract emits events you can also add information of the transaction result, e.g., updated balance, statistics, success state. These internal states can give you the needed information for monitoring.

3. Solidity Event Basics

An event will be emitted in Solidity by emit keyword, followed by the name of the event and the arguments in parentheses. The invocation can be detected from the JavaScript API.

3.1 Let's have a look at an example contract

When the method bee is called, the internal attribute _count will be incremented. This attribute represents an internal state of the contract.

The emitted Bee events can output this internal state information. You may use the keyword indexed to filter later by this parameter.

3.2 How are events stored in the blockchain?

The needed storage for all events in the blockchain would be very expensive. How can we get events without actually storing them in the blockchain?

When a smart contract emits events, like in the bee method, just the contract address is stored in the transactions receipt as so called logsBloom. This data structure has a size of 2048 bytes and is part of the block hash calculation. So, it can't be changed after the block has been mined.

3.3 How can we find events data?

The addresses of events emitting contracts are as well as indexed fields added to the bloom filter. A bloom filter of the given size can store about 200 contract addresses with less than 2% expected false positive results (bloom filters have no false negative results).

When you query the log entries for a given contract address, it can be scanned in a very fast way over all the block headers, checking the bloom filter to find out this block may contain the entries.

In this case all transactions from that block will be re-executed and this execution recreates the expected logged events.

3.4 Let's talk about expense

The use of Ethereum events will cost some extra GAS, but in most of the cases it is a good investment. Usually, emitting an event from your contract costs less than 1000 GAS. In the case the smart contract doesn't need the stored data for processing — it's a good alternative to store data in logs.

The total cost of event logs are much more smaller than contract storage. According to the Yellow Paper the difference in cost for logs and storage is significant.

Storage Cost for Contract

Store a word in standard storage costs 20.000 GAS

Storage Cost for Events

Store a word in the indexed event storage costs about 1000 GAS (375 + 32*8 +375)

3.5 How to use events in your contract?

Find more information about events and logs in the Solidity Documentation which provides a detailed description of how to use events.

4. PULL Docker Image

In the case you don't like to spend time with the implementation, just pull the complete software of Ethereum-Event-Scan from DockerHub.

4.1 DockerHub Page

https://cloud.docker.com/u/sprunck/repository/docker/sprunck/ethereum-event-scan

4.2 Start Container

Use the following docker command to get the container started

$ docker run \

-dit \

-p 55226:80 \

--name ethereum-event-scan \

sprunck/ethereum-event-scan:latest

The default URL is

http://localhost:55226

5. Find Code on GitHub

Fetch the project sources (published under MIT License) from GitHub.

https://github.com/MarkusSprunck/ethereum-event-scan

5.1 Development Environment

The project has been developed and tested with following configuration:

• macOS 10.15.4

• IDEA IntelliJ (Ultimate Edition)

• Package Manager Brew (see https://brew.sh)

• Docker Desktop (Community Edition) v2.2.0.4

• Parity Node v2.5.7

• Ganache v2.0.1

• Web3.js v1.2.6

• Node v12.13.1

• Angular v9.0.4

5.4 Connect to Kovan via Blockchain Gateway

Use Infura.io to connect to a Blockchain is the fastest way to get events from a deployed contract. You will need an account and project id.

The following three steps will be needed:

• Create an Infura.io Project

• Update the Start Script

• Enter ABI and Contract Address

Create an Infura.io Project

Open Infura.io page and sign up for an account. On your dashboard, you can create a new project.

Usually, you change the endpoint to Kovan and directly copy the endpoint URL for connecting to blockchain. But, to get events via infura you must use the web socket connection provider, in the Ethereum-Event-Explorer.

The web socket URl is slightly different from the http interface — the correct pattern for web services is:

wss://kovan.infura.io/ws/v3/{your-infura-project-id}

Please, be aware that your personal API key to use Infura should be secret. So, don’t give it away to anyone else.

Enter ABI and Contract Address

Enter the ABI array and contract address can be done directly in the user interface or you can click on Import link. In the case you stored the ABI array in a file with the file name of the contract address.

5.5 Connect to Kovan via Local Parity Node

The installation of a parity node on your machine is simple. Three steps are needed:

• Install Parity Node

• Start and Synchronise Parity Node

• Start Ethereum-Event-Scan

Install Parity Node

For MacOS open terminal and enter the following two commands:

$ brew tap paritytech/paritytech

$ brew install parity

After parity has been installed you can start the partiy node and fetch the blockchain from Kovan network.

Start and Synchronise Parity Node

The following start script (see start-parity.sh) enables just the needed api for the Ethereum event scan for web socket connections:

The synchronisation may need a day. In the case the synchronisation got stuck, just restart. You should see an output of the Parity Node after complete sync and restart should look like this:

Please, be aware that the Public node URL has been slightly changed. So, don't try to connect to this node.

In the logging of this parity node you see also the open connection of the configured web service interface — here 127.0.0.1 with port 8546.

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