Following our announcement in August, we are excited to announce our new block explorer located at blockstream.info! Our block explorer allows users to search and view specific data that is published in real-time to the Bitcoin blockchain and the Liquid sidechain.
Our original driver for building the block explorer was for users on the Liquid sidechain to cross-check transactions. Also, Liquid functionaries themselves benefit from the explorer as a dashboard to monitor the network’s activity. We took this opportunity to also add Bitcoin support, and have made the combined explorer public and live at blockstream.info.
As a Bitcoin explorer, it offers many new features compared to existing block explorer choices - the information it presents is drawn from an up to date Bitcoin Core full node, as well as natively supporting SegWit, bech32, and other modern Bitcoin features.
We are starting off with a small set of unique features, and we’ll be building out a lot of more functionality in the coming months. Some key advantages of the new explorer:
- Bitcoin Mainnet, Testnet, and Liquid support
- No analytics scripts, no tracking
- Support for Bech32 addresses
- Support for Confidential addresses (Liquid)
- Monitor peg-in and peg-outs between Bitcoin and Liquid
- Better privacy through Tor support (version 2; version 3)
The Blockstream Explorer is intended to be easy to use for the casual user, but will increasingly pack some powerful features under the hood for developers. We’re keen to hear your suggestions and feature requests, so let us know what you’d like to see added by dropping us a message on Twitter or via email.