Sonde

Sonde started from a frustration: most blockchain explorers are grids of raw hex with nothing prioritized, as if opacity were a feature. A new user should land on an address and understand it without feeling they wandered into a terminal. So type carried the hierarchy, and the page had to read before any color arrived.

Three users had to be served at once. The newcomer wanted plain English: what does this account hold, is any of it unusual. The trader wanted a dashboard: PnL, cost basis, allocation, performance versus XRP. The analyst wanted depth: raw blobs, six-hop fund tracing, risk scoring. Every screen answered the newcomer at the surface and unfolded for the specialist in deeper tabs. Motion followed the same restraint as color: eased transitions, slow pulses on live indicators, numbers that faded rather than snapped. Most people never noticed it. They noticed the product felt calm.

The name came first. Sonde, French for probe, is an instrument you send into something to measure what’s happening inside and report back. The color system was narrow: a cool slate foundation of near-black surfaces and muted neutrals, so the interface read as calm even while showing ten thousand transactions a minute. Against that, one warm accent: salmon #E8856C, the only saturated color in the core chrome. That scarcity was the point. When salmon appeared on a live indicator or a key metric, you knew it mattered.

Three fonts had three jobs: Satoshi for display, DM Sans for product UI and body, IBM Plex Mono for every address, hash, and amount, because financial identifiers must be monospaced to stay scannable. Transaction types carried a quiet semantic color system: payments blue, DEX fills gold, NFT operations purple, trust lines green, AMM actions pink, always as small dots or single-word tags, never full colored rows. A trained eye could scan a thousand-row feed and spot the pattern without reading every line.

The XRP Ledger closes a ledger every 3–5 seconds, each carrying hundreds of transactions across dozens of types. A universal search bar took any input (an address, a transaction hash, a CTID, a ledger index, or a token name), detected the type, and routed accordingly. Account pages ran twelve tabs ordered by depth, from transactions and holdings out to trust lines, NFTs, AMM pools, offers, and escrows, with React Suspense streaming each section so the page was usable before all the data arrived.

The explorer covered network analytics (live price and market cap, candlestick charts, a fee monitor, amendment voting), the DEX with AMM liquidity across 60+ pools, a wallet-connected portfolio tracker, and a directory of 1,000+ XRPL assets. On top sat the intelligence layer, which turned an explorer into an analytical product: smart money scoring ranked wallets by profitability and consistency, Neo4j pathfinding traced value across up to six hops, account labels classified addresses with cited evidence, and a risk module flagged wash trading. A Claude Sonnet agent with scoped tool access ran multi-turn investigations across all of it in a single thread.

Sonde shipped to production as a three-part product: a public block explorer, a network analytics suite, and an intelligence layer, with wallet-based auth and a subscription that took payment in both fiat and crypto. What began as a design exercise in information density became a commercial product that gave on-chain data the clarity of a well-made financial tool. I ran it end to end, design, engineering, and operations, until I shut down the hosted instance.