A block explorer is a critical piece of infrastructure that a BCH developer uses many times a day. They allow you to see the details about blocks, addresses and transactions. Today we’re happy to launch Explore—a BCH block explorer by BITBOX.
Explore
Explore features all the stuff you would expect from a block explorer. You can search by block height, by legacy or cash address and transaction id. You can also see OP_RETURN data which has been encoded per both the BlockPress and Memo protocols.
Advanced OP_RETURN support
Writing data to the blockchain is incredibly powerful. We’re witnessing the start of apps leveraging this and w/ OP_RETURN increasing from 80 bytes to 220 bytes on May 15th this is just the beginning.
Two of the most exciting apps to emerge which are writing to the blockchain are BlockPress and Memo. Each uses a similar protocol to prefix OP_RETURN data to give it semantic meaning around common Web actions such as ‘Like’, ‘Follow’ etc.
They allow users to post to the chain and then anyone can write a client which can read the OP_RETURN, parse out the prefix and understand the action.
Explore support the full protocol of both BlockPress and Memo.
BlockPress
BlockPress has a full protocol and Explore supports 100% of it.
Set Name
Set Profile Header
Set Profile Avatar
Memo
Memo also has a full protocol and Explore supports 100% of it.
Set name
Post memo
Highlight vin/vout
You can highlight either a vin or vout by adding a input= and/or output= query parameter to the URL.
https://explore.bitbox.earth/transaction/8b1f6ce290476b39c97335cb8028833fcf4177559a7d513086ea16416f265458?input=3&output=2
Summary
Explore is one more piece in the BITBOX ecosystem which we hope helps accelerate $BCH developers from idea to app.