The 26.03 release focuses on giving developers better visibility into their API usage and improving the underlying infrastructure that powers production applications. Enhanced dashboard analytics provide complete usage transparency, and infrastructure improvements ensure reliability at scale.
Better Visibility into Your API Usage
The dashboard now includes historical usage analytics, giving teams complete visibility into API consumption patterns over time.
Understanding usage patterns helps teams optimize integration points, forecast costs accurately, and identify opportunities to reduce unnecessary API calls. For teams managing multiple environments across development, staging, and production, per-key analytics make it clear where resources are being consumed. Additionally, access token expiration time is now customizable. The default is 5 minutes, but teams can set custom expiration periods from 5 minutes up to 300 minutes (five hours), depending on their security policies and workflow requirements.
What's new:
- Historical usage tracking across configurable time periods
- Per-API-key breakdown showing exactly where traffic originates
- Visual charts separating Bitcoin mainnet and Liquid Network requests
- Time-range selection for custom usage analysis
- Current billing period summary with credits consumed and remaining
- Customizable access token expiration (default 5 minutes, configurable up to 300 minutes)
The analytics page makes it easy to identify usage spikes, track trends across billing cycles, and understand which parts of your application consume the most resources. Teams can pull historical data for financial planning and optimize their integration based on actual consumption patterns.
Electrs Performance Improvements
The underlying Electrs infrastructure has been upgraded with performance optimizations that improve query response times and overall system stability. These improvements benefit all users across free and paid tiers.
Production-Ready Rate Limiting
To ensure consistent performance as usage grows, we're introducing rate limits across free tier access to both REST API and Electrum RPC.
Free tier rate limits are designed for individual use, prototyping, and development. Production applications requiring higher throughput should use paid tiers, which offer production-grade rate limits that scale with your business. This change helps maintain service quality for all users while ensuring the infrastructure can continue supporting the growing Bitcoin developer ecosystem.
Paid tiers (Basic, Advanced, Enterprise) include significantly higher rate limits designed for production workloads, with Enterprise tier offering unlimited API calls.
Coming Soon: Electrum RPC for Bitcoin Dev Kit
Electrum RPC integration with Bitcoin Dev Kit (BDK) is in progress. Once released, BDK users will be able to authenticate and access both RPC and REST endpoints directly, bringing real-time blockchain monitoring to the broader BDK ecosystem.
Get Started
The 26.03 release continues our focus on providing production-ready Bitcoin and Liquid infrastructure for developers building at scale. Enhanced analytics give you visibility, infrastructure improvements ensure reliability, and new integrations expand what's possible to build.
Create an account through the self-service dashboard, generate API keys, and start building. The dashboard provides real-time usage monitoring, billing management, API key rotation, and access to comprehensive documentation.
Choose Basic, Advanced, or Enterprise based on your application's needs. Monitor API usage in real-time, track costs, and manage multiple API keys across environments, all from the dashboard.
- Learn more: blockstream.info/explorer-api
- Enterprise enquiries: blockstream.typeform.com/enterpriseAPI
- Documentation: github.com/Blockstream/esplora/blob/master/API.md