The concept of public transparency is crucial to cryptocurrencies. One of the most significant claims of blockchain is that it levels the playing field by preventing information from being restricted to a small group of individuals who are in a position of power.

But precisely what does that mean? Can you know how many Bitcoins your neighbor possesses? How can you check and validate the public data for yourself? Exactly that is what we will learn in this post. Although we concentrate on Bitcoin, there are specialized blockchain explorers for Litecoin, Ethereum, and pretty much any native blockchain as well.

In this blog, let’s find out what blockchain explorer is.

What is a Blockchain explorer?

A blockchain explorer is similar to a search engine because it provides information about the history and present status of a blockchain. This can be really advantageous if you want to monitor the status of a particular payment or look up the balance and history for a specific address. An explorer allows anyone with an Internet connection to view every transaction on a public blockchain.

Primary functions of a Blockchain explorer

#1) Explore any wallet address’s transaction history: In order to audit any wallet address and increase blockchain transparency, you can use a blockchain explorer.

#2) Look into changing and receiving addresses: In contrast to the transaction receiving address, you can also view the change address, which is an output that gives crypto to the spender in order to prevent an excessive amount of the input value from going to transaction fees. This enhances the transactions’ transparency as well.

#3) Study the most significant transaction of the day: This is available by various explorers.

#4) Analyze Mempool status: This enables us to analyze the specifics of unconfirmed blockchain transactions.

#5) Investigate double-spend occurrences: Some explorers are in favor of finding out how many double-spend transactions are occurring in a blockchain.

#6) Examine orphaned and stale blocks: These are blocks that, although having been mined, are not connected to the longest blockchain and whose parent blockchain is unidentified. Blocks that have known parents but aren’t yet joined the longest known chain are stale blocks. Thanks to some explorers, we can see how many of these blocks were actually realized in a blockchain.

#7) Discover the mining pool or individual who discovered or mined a specific block: In any specified blockchain, mining pools (groups that pool their computing power to mine cryptocurrency) compete to discover blocks, and explorers let us discover who successfully discovered a provided block defined by its height.

#8) Investigate genesis blocks: You can discover who mined the very first block on a specific chain as well as additional information about that block.

#9) Provides users with access to data such as hash rate, transaction fees, and blockchain difficulty.

How does Blockchain explorer work?

From a technical point of view, here’s what it appears like:

• Application programming interfaces (APIs), rational databases, and SQL databases are used by blockchain explorers combined with a blockchain node to extract data from a network.
• This data is organized into a database by the software program, which then presents the data in a searchable manner.
• A straightforward user interface (think: search engine) that enables individuals to conduct searches can then be used by the explorer to do searches across a structured table in response to user demands.
• Through the creation of a web page, the explorer server can communicate with users.
• The explorer can communicate with other computers, all because of the API.
• The backend server receives search requests and answers to the user interface.
• In the end, in order to make the results easy to understand, the user interface and API deliver web pages in HTML format to the user’s browser.

Key Takeaway

Blockchain explorers are practical tools that make use of the public blockchains‘ inherent openness and transparency. They offer helpful details regarding the network’s condition, such as transaction and address history. This makes tracking and verification simple.

Explorers make it possible to view wallet balances, read transaction histories, and determine whether a transaction has been confirmed or not. Identifying the mining pools that mine specific blocks, block heights, orphaned blocks, and genesis blocks are also helpful.