About the Onstacks' Explorer
Viewing the explorer
- Price feed - Displaying the current price of Bitcoin and Stacks. The current price is referred to Onstacks. This will be updated to using a price feed from Chainlink.
- Block Height - The block height, also known as block number, indicates the position of a particular block in the blockchain.
- Search - Search the explorer via an input from the users. Supports TXhash, STX address or BNS name and Block Height
- Total Transactions (24h) - The total transaction that has been confirmed in the past 24 hours
- Microblocks - Numbers of microblock recorded in the past 24 hours. To read more about microblock, please refer to here .
- Avg transaction per block - The medium number of transactions in a single block. Stack allows batched transaction in a single Bitcoin block.
- Pending Transaction - The current numbers of transaction that are not confirmed on the network. Stack confirmation required an Bitcoin anchor block to be confirmed as well. Please read here for more information on how Proof of transfer works.
- Recent Transactions - List of recent transaction that has been transmitted to the network. By default it will only show confirmed transaction. To see pending transactions, please refer to 13.
- Anchor block - A stacks block refers to a Bitcoin block to achieve finality or full confirmation, you can find more information on how proof of transfer works.
- Anchor block snippet - A preview of all the stacks block that anchored to a bitcoin block. Contains information such as a Stack to Bitcoin block relation, numbers of transaction in a single block, age and the hash.
Searching the Blockchain
Onstacks allows users to explore the Stacks network by searching the explorer.
Accepted input
- Transaction Hash
- Address
- BNS
Onstacks currently supports BNS or .btc domain search. Users are able to input any valid .btc domain on the search bar from https://onstacks.com/explorer .
The result from the search should return BNS Name and the address of the BNS name is associated to as shown below.
Result return from the search bar with BNS name
The BNS name will also be displayed on the address detail page, along with the full address associated with the BNS name.
BNS name on address detail page next to the full STX address associated to the BNS address
Other supported formats
In the example above, we demostrate a BNS address that ends with .btc. However, the search function also supported other BNS formats such as .id shown below
To secure your own BNS name, please visit the link here to acquire your own BNS name.
Address Details
- BNS name - The current address BNS name attached to it
- Total balance - The current balance of STX in the address wallet
- Total received - The total amount of STX received in this address wallet since the creation
- Total spent - The total amount of STX withdrawn from this address wallet since the creation
- Total mining reward - The total STX received to this address wallet during mining activities.
- Total fees - The total fees incurred to this address wallet from all transactions
- Token - See all token in this current wallet address
- Collectibles - See all NFT owned by this current wallet address
- Transaction snippet - A preview of a transaction performed by this wallet address that contains the function, method, age and anchor block ID.
- Asset - The asset owned by this current wallet address includes the current balance for STX and other tokens.
- Stacking - The STX locked by the address wallet for stacking. To read more about stacking, please refer to this doc
- Mining - A snippet of information performed by the current wallet address. This includes the total mining reward earned in STX and the BTC spent by miners.
Transactions Detail
User can search for a specific transaction by using the search bar available on the Onstack home page. To search for a transaction, simply copy the Transaction ID that you would like to search and paste it in the search bar.
Viewing the transaction detail page
- Confirmation flow - The flow which a STX transaction is confirmed by anchoring to a BTC block and being confirmed on the BTC block as well to achieve finality.
- Anchored chain - The STX block height number that is anchored to a Bitcoin block height number
- Finality achieved - Once the anchored block on the Bitcoin network has been confirmed, the transaction will be marked as confirmed on the Stacks network.
- Bitcoin anchor block info - The information of the Stacks transaction anchored to the Bitcoin block.
Importance of the anchor block
Stacks uses the Bitcoin blockchain only as a reliable storage and broadcast medium for recording the set of all Stacks blocks ever produced, as well as the parent/child linkages between them. The state of the system settles on Bitcoin the act of creating a new Stacks block entails sending a well-formed Bitcoin transaction that records the hash of a Stacks block and where it attaches to the blockchain. Settling the system on Bitcoin grants Stacks novel security properties not seen in other blockchains it leverages the security of Bitcoin to guarantee that all Stacks forks are public, and to help bootstrapping Stacks nodes identify the canonical Stacks fork and find Stacks blocks they have not yet downloaded.
To learn more, please refer to this article by Jude