● Modern block explorer open sourced: after recently announcing a new block explorer website, Blockstream has announced the open source release of both its backend and frontend code. The code supports Bitcoin mainnet, Bitcoin testnet, and the Liquid sidechain.

Although block explorers have been a mainstay of Bitcoin web applications since 2010, we do note that the method used by block explorers of maintaining multiple indexes over all block chain data inherently has a poor scalability characteristic—their cost increases over time as the block chain grows—and so it is generally inadvisable to build software or services that depend upon your own block explorer. Trusting someone else’s block explorer (which is a common cost-cutting measure when indexing data yourself becomes too expensive) introduces third party trust into Bitcoin software, increases centralization, and decreases privacy. If at all possible, it is preferable to build software and services in a way that doesn’t require the types of fast and arbitrary searches that block explorers make convenient.

That said, the new open source explorer appears to be quite efficient compared to earlier open source alternatives such as BitPay Insight. It also includes modern features (such as bech32 address support) and a very nice default theme.