In November 2018 we announced Blockstream Explorer, which was subsequently open sourced the following month. Since then, the block explorer has proved to be immensely popular; with many praising its speed, lack of tracking, and comprehensive data set. We were also delighted to see organizations like Bitcoin Magazine launching their own block explorer based on the Esplora code base.
Over the past few weeks we’ve been hard at work improving Blockstream Explorer, and today we’re launching an update that adds a bunch of cool new features, boosts performance, and addresses some of the limitations of the initial launch implementation.
Unlimited Transactions
The most visible new feature is that Blockstream Explorer now supports address search with unlimited transactions: this required a radical redesign, and the entire database backend was changed under the hood. This change also improved overall performance, so the explorer is now even faster (at the expense of higher disk space requirements).
No JS? No Problem
We’ve added support for users disabling JavaScript: we think this is a very important feature because it allows for people to use the explorer with higher degree of privacy. JavaScript has been used by attackers in the past to de-anonymize users, and disabling it is an essential practice especially when using Tor.
Broadcast Transactions
We’ve added an API endpoint and a web form to broadcast transactions, which might be useful for developers, or users looking for an easy way to broadcast a transaction to the Bitcoin network, perhaps via Tor. API documentation for V2 is available here!
Other New Additions
- Additional statistics: we’ve moved away from the confusing account-balance terminology used by many explorers, to terminology that more accurately represents how the UTXO-based model works.
- QR code scanning via the web browser.
- Block time stamps for confirmed transactions.
- Display of input and output cardinal number.
- The Bitcoin and Liquid backend implementations have been merged.
Explore The Blockchain Now
Blockstream Explorer is a performance and privacy-focused block explorer that supports Bitcoin mainnet, Bitcoin testnet, and the Liquid Network. Head to blockstream.info to get started.