A new blockchain search engine Ora emerges from Solana hackathon

A new blockchain search engine called Ora emerged from Solana’s summer camp hackathon to help bring blockchain technology to non-technical users by allowing them to search on-chain data using a natural language.

The team announced the launch of the new search engine on Aug. 18, explaining that users can search for complex queries using a natural language like:

 “Show me all successful Jupiter Exchange swaps between 42 and 420 SOL from two days ago”

This simple sentence tells Ora to filter transactions by time range, destination or sending address, and amount. Understanding the need, Ora sorts transactions by their balances and gives the user a summary showing what they asked for.

We let users query on-chain data with natural language 💬

Using large language models in the backend, we let anyone easily explore, navigate and inspect on-chain transactions 🧐 pic.twitter.com/02X6WTGCQG

— ora ▩ (@oralabs_) August 18, 2022

What problems is Ora solving?

Searching for transaction data on-chain requires SQL knowledge. The project team realized that the SQL search dashboards were designed to serve technical users.

As crypto usage spread beyond the tech-savvy, the Ora team decided to offer a tool to allow regular users to run SQL searches on on-chain data.

The team aimed to offer a Google-like experience to all crypto users. While announcing the launch of Ora, the project team also cited several individuals and companies who have pondered the idea of a crypto search engine.

The project team describes Ora as a “complementary piece to existing infrastructure” and says that Ora is already integrated with Solana’s block explorers.