Introducing Namadexer: The Indexer for Privacy Blockchain Namada

TL;DR  
- Namadexer is an indexing solution designed by Zondax for Namada, addressing the challenge of non-searchable on-chain data.   
- As of today, it has helped the community participating at Namada´s Shielded Expedition   
-  This project was developed by Zondax in collaboration with Heliax

You're dealing with a system that manages who owns different pieces of land, and you want to quickly find out who owns a specific piece without having to dig through a lot of data manually. Normally, the way the system (blockchain) is built doesn't allow for this kind of quick search, so there's a need for an extra tool: an indexer. This tool makes it easy to find information about land ownership by creating a searchable list of all the land plots.

Here is where Namadexer comes in, a tool built by Zondax for the Namada blockchain, which focuses on privacy and can work with other blockchains through specific connections. Namadexer keeps an eye on the Namada blockchain and uses a SDK to gather and organize information about blocks, transactions, and other important data into a database. This setup is great for analyzing blockchain data, including storing and searching historical information.

The Namadexer was delivered before the Namada’s Shielded Expedition, a massive multiplayer role-playing incentivized testnet, that started back in late January 2024. Since the beginning, the Namadexer was built with a focus on performance whilst taking a minimalist approach, after all,  a solid base is what makes a project last.

Speaking with Lola, software engineer at Zondax, she says since the expedition started a lot of people have been running the Namadexer and actively contributing to the project. The Zondax team has been actively participating in the Discord server listening to the community, which has helped to see how the community reacts and needs - which wasn’t as easy at the beginning of the project. Now, in her own words “we have an active network and more interactions with the community, we have more precise goals and can iterate faster toward an enhanced indexer”. 

Namadexer is designed to be user-friendly, with its code available for anyone to use and set up, especially through Docker, which makes the data on the Namada blockchain easy to search.