A quick tour of Symbol Blockchain Explorer

Ivy Fung
3 min readDec 16, 2020

--

“There is a whole world out there waiting to be explored.”

Symbol Blockchain Explorer is the window of the world of Symbol. It tells you its performance (price, traffic etc), its history (block heights), its activities (transactions), its community (nodes), and many more.

The explorer supports multiple languages. There are many ways to peek into what’s happening. First, at the top right-hand side, there is a box where you can search by block numbers, transaction hashes, addresses, mosaic IDs, and namespace IDs.

Let’s take a look at the subpages.

Blocks

Here, you can find the list of every block, starting from the latest block created. Block height is the number of the block created, started from block 1. For every block created, the number increases by 1. Symbol has an average of 30 seconds block time. To find out the distribution of blocktime, check out the Statistics subpage.

The clock icon next to block height tells that block is confirmed but have not reach finality. Blocks that have reach finality has a lock icon next to the block height. When a block has reached finality, it means that the block can’t be reversed or rolled-back.

“Transactions” and “Statements” of the titles of the list refer to the number of transactions and receipt statements included in that particular block.

Click on the block height to get the details of the block.

Transactions

Here is the list of all transactions that happened in the network. It shows the block height of the transactions , transaction types, senders (signer) and recipients. Click on the transaction hash to know more about the transaction.

Accounts

You can choose to view the details of any of the accounts listed here. The list can be sorted by the accounts that recently sent or received a transaction (Recent), or by the number of XYM in the account (Rich List) in a decreasing manner. Click on the address to view details of the account.

Namespaces

Click on the “Name” or “Namespace ID” to view the details. You may choose to view only namespaces attached to address or mosaic, or to view only root namespaces or subnamespaces.

Mosaics

Click on the “Mosaic ID” to view the detail. You can attach a namespace or subnamespace to a mosaic to make it easier to be recognised. If a mosaic has a namespace or subnamespace attached to it, it will be shown under “Alias”.

Nodes

Here you will be able to get the IP address and friendly names for nodes in Symbol network, and also their roles, either as a peer node, API node, voting node, or as a combination of those.

Statistics

You will be able to get the average block time and the traffic of the network here. Transaction fees in Symbol are dynamic and depend on the multiplier set by each nodes. Here, you will be able to find the average multiplier set by nodes.

Similar to transaction fees, namespace and mosaic fees are dynamic too. Check the effective rental fees in this section too.

Explorer makes users’ life easier. Symbol Blockchain Explorer is easy to navigate and very graphic, thanks to the team behind it.

(Visit here for the explanations on each property. On-going updates.)

--

--

Ivy Fung

On a mission to talk to everyone about Blockchain.