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This post describes work done by Anirudha Bose (Staff Engineer, Web3) and Michele Ferri (Search Engineer).
Today, we’re excited to introduce on-chain capabilities to Brave Search, enabling users to receive better results than traditional search engines and blockchain explorers by delivering live data with privacy protection. Available today for all Brave Search users around the world, this feature lets users look up any Ethereum address, Ethereum Name Service (ENS) domain, or Solana account, and view their entire portfolio of token balances.
We deliver these results with a real-time guarantee and uncompromising privacy. Traditional block explorers can link wallet addresses to IPs and later send this data to those interested in removing the pseudonymity of blockchains. Brave has a long proven history of caring for the privacy of your browsing and searching, and now it can also maintain the privacy of your on-chain lookups.
Brave Search as a blockchain explorer
A search engine is the first place we go to for answers. This is true for simple informational queries, and also for much longer, more specific ones. For example, the Brave Search team noticed a larger-than-expected number of queries that were 40 characters long. While these weren’t typical search queries, they clearly served a purpose to the user. We realized our users were looking to access blockchain data, and specifically, to check token balances associated with these addresses. This insight led us to enhance Brave Search with integrated functionality that instantly surfaces valuable on-chain data directly in search results, without requiring users to visit external websites.
Token balances of vitalik.eth ENS domain on OP Mainnet
Token balances of a canonical EVM address on Ethereum
Token balances of a canonical Solana account
Real-time results
The nature of on-chain data is such that it needs to be current in order to be useful. Search engines that surface rudimentary on-chain data typically rely on third-party indexers, which can introduce lags and inconsistencies between what is shown and the current chain state.
EVM address balances on Google can often be outdated
Based on our experience building Brave Wallet, we took a different approach to on-chain searches that guarantees results have real-time accuracy. This means you can trust that the information you’re seeing is accurate at the moment of your query, not what it was minutes or blocks ago.
Having real-time querying capability is particularly important for handling rebase tokens that automatically adjust their supply and holders’ balances. For example, Staked Ether (stETH) by Lido Finance uses a rebase function in order to maintain price parity and pay out staking rewards. While traditional indexers only refresh balances when triggered by external transactions, our approach ensures that token balances are correctly captured even if elastic supply mechanisms cause them to change between transactions.
Privacy preserving
Brave Search does not profile you, or retain your IP address. This eliminates scenarios where blockchain explorers could potentially aggregate and analyze patterns in your address lookups, and thus build a comprehensive profile that’s linked to your IP address.
Such information, if shared or breached, could be exploited by entities seeking to unmask the pseudonymous nature of cryptocurrency transactions. By choosing Brave Search for your on-chain lookups, you can protect yourself from surveillance and potential deanonymization attempts.
Feature comparison
| Brave Search | ||
|---|---|---|
| Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) | Yes (6 networks) | Yes (5 networks) |
| Solana | Yes | No |
| Native asset balances | Yes | Yes |
| Token balances | Yes | No |
| Ethereum Name Service (ENS) support | Yes | Limited |
| Rebase tokens support | Yes | No |
| Real-time results | Yes | No |
| Pricing data | Yes | No |
| Privacy preserving | Yes | No |
Available now for all Brave Search users
Starting today, on-chain address lookups for EVM and Solana are available to all Brave Search users worldwide, regardless of what browser they are using. ENS domains are also supported, making it easier to look up EVM addresses using human-readable names.
This feature represents a significant first step towards helping users search on-chain data in Brave Search, and we’re committed to innovating on this front in the future.
About Brave Search
Brave Search is the fastest growing independent search engine since Bing. Unlike Big Tech search engines, Brave Search does not profile its users; unlike supposedly alternative engines, Brave Search serves results from a truly independent index of the Web. This means Brave Search can offer both industry-leading privacy and an effective counter to the bias and censorship prevalent in Big Tech’s personalization.
Brave Search continues to reach new all-time highs, serving more than 42 million queries per day (and more than 1.2 billion queries each month). It’s the default search engine for most new Brave browser users, which now has over 77 million users worldwide.
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