Kabuto was started in 2019 to provide a high-speed asynchronous interface for developers to query Hedera Hashgraph and a simple-to-navigate object explorer. It was a passion project for the team at LaunchBadge with the hope that someday it could be decentralized and development could be funded through a decentralized tokenomics model. Once the technology had matured, the transition from “passion project + centralized” to “decentralized” was ready, but required an injection of funding. The timing was horrible.
This transition period was scheduled to take place in the Q2 2022, right as the crypto market crashed. Investments tightened up and The HBar Foundation grant process was delayed. The cost to continue maintaining the Explorer & Mirror Node was non-trivial and could not be justified in the current business model.
We decided to return the Explorer & Mirror Node software to the Kabuto backlog and turn our attention to projects that could bootstrap the decentralization process with minimal financial burden to LaunchBadge.
We hope that in the future we can bring the Kabuto Explorer & Mirror Node back into production, but in a way that organically incentivizes mirror node hosts; a feature that is sorely lacking in the Hedera ecosystem.