Web : https://www.coinninja.comEmail : hello(at)coinninja.comBlog: https://blog.coinninja.comAboutCoin Ninja seeks to accelerate the global adoption of bitcoin through
educational content, relevant news and simple/easy to use products. The first of these products, our Block Explorer, has just been launched. In its early stages and our primary focus was to develop an explorer that was first and foremost extremely fast and reliable.
Our engineers designed a system to process information from the bitcoin network in real-time. Bitcoin is more than just a currency, at its heart is open source and free software. As such there are many different options to choose from for interacting with the network. Ultimately, our team settled on the reference implementation provided by the Bitcoin Core team. The reference implementation gave us several advantages over others:
- Under active development
- Thoroughly tested
- Keeps up with Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs)
The downsides of using the reference implementation are few in number, but present interesting challenges that we have overcome:
- Not designed to index arbitrary address information
- Minimal interfaces to process raw bitcoin data
- Functions as a full node _and_ a wallet
This means that it is a fantastic Bitcoin full-node and wallet. However, it is not good at exposing data about the blockchain.
To find the right balance of overcoming these shortcomings, our team set a few objectives for the block explorer’s use of Bitcoin Core.
- Make as few of modifications as possible to the bitcoin daemon (a piece of software that runs in the background).
- Do not modify the processing of information — consensus rules and network interaction code are left untouched.
Our team has developed a system to index information about the bitcoin blockchain, in real-time. The possibilities for this system include faster exposure of important statistics to power-users, traders, exchanges and merchants. The engineers are hard at work on feature improvements, application of recent data science technology and predictive behavior.
FeedbackWe would love to know what you all think of the explorer (and would certainly take any feedback on other areas of our site). This is the preeminent community of Bitcoin enthusiasts and will take all feedback into close consideration as we iterate on this and our future products.