Bitmain officially launches the BTC Chain bitcoin block explorerdirect to
www.btc.com On September 28th 2015, Bitmain Technologies Limited launched a new bitcoin blockchain explorer, BTC Chain. Although Bitmain has traditionally been a producer of bitcoin mining hardware, this new software product was developed entirely in-house. BTC Chain launches with a full suite of data lookup tools and an API service.
BTC Chain features a bitcoin block explorer, detailed statistics, blockchain tools, and an API. The front page of the service displays information on latest blocks found, mining pool distribution, and Bitcoin network status. The statistics page gets real time data using the WebSocket protocol and displays information on various bitcoin network metrics. The block explorer contains both real time and historical data on every transaction made over the bitcoin network since the genesis block in 2009. The API function, which will have more features added in the near future, allows developers to build lightweight applications without worrying about complicated backend infrastructure. Bitmain’s newly released BTC Wallet is already using the BTC Chain API.
Although BTC Chain is just now being made available to the public, it has been used internally by Bitmain for some time and this public release marks the second version of the software. The new version features improved processing capabilities, more data analytics, and greater speeds. As the number of total transactions on the bitcoin network approaches one hundred million, being able to initialize the database in a short amount of time becomes both more difficult, and more important. Developers can let BTC Chain do the heavy lifting.
Future plans include deploying nodes in Europe and the Americas to decrease request latency, to add more statistics and data, to add more tools, and to add more functionality to the API. Bitmain continues to dedicate its efforts towards building bitcoin network infrastructure and providing worthwhile services to the bitcoin community.
