Explorer
A public, read-only window on the oracle network, kept outside the trust path.
The Explorer is a public, read-only window on the network. It lets anyone look up a DID, check a credential's status, watch a feed of verifications as they happen, and follow any record to its detail: what was asked, which chain answered, and what came back.
Why it is a separate thing
The oracle stores nothing. It answers a question and forgets it was asked. That statelessness is deliberate: the fewer things the oracle remembers, the smaller its trust surface. But a network with no memory is also a network no one can watch, so if history is to be recorded, something else has to record it. The Explorer is that something.
Keeping the Explorer outside the oracle, as a separate application, is not an accident of project structure. It keeps the oracle stateless and it keeps the historical record out of the trust path: nothing the Explorer does can change what an attestation says, and nothing wrong with the Explorer can make the oracle answer incorrectly.
What it is not
The Explorer is not an authority. A record in the Explorer is a log that a question was asked and what came back, it is not a second opinion on the answer. It never re-derives a verdict and never substitutes its own judgment for the oracle's. The evidence remains the signed attestation itself; the Explorer's record is provenance and history around that evidence, not a replacement for it. See Trust model for what a signed attestation means and why it, not any log of it, is what a contract should rely on.
How it reads the oracle
The Explorer talks to the oracle over HTTP, as a black box, using only its existing read endpoints: resolve, status, and verify. It adds nothing to the oracle's surface and requires no changes on the oracle's side. The oracle, in turn, knows nothing about the Explorer: it cannot tell an Explorer-issued request from any other caller's.
Current status
The Explorer is built: the application, the record-write path, and the detail views all exist. It is not yet running end to end against live services, its infrastructure (Postgres, Elasticsearch, a seeded oracle) is not yet stood up and connected. Treat this section, and the one that follows it, as a description of the Explorer's design rather than of a service available to visit today.