Robinhood Chain network activity

A block explorer keeps its own copy of the chain: it runs a node, reads every block as it is produced, and files the contents into a database it can search. That index is what lets you look up an address from three months ago — and building one is a serious piece of infrastructure that two teams already run well for this network.

We do not duplicate it. For anything historical we send you to them. But an index is always a step behind the thing it describes, so for the live rows above we skip it and ask the node directly — the same source their indexer reads. That is why the newest block here is a second or two old rather than a minute.

Right now the node reports block #27,847,288 as the tip of the chain. At roughly ten blocks a second, that number is stale by the time you finish this sentence — which is rather the point of reading it live.

However many people are reading this page, we ask the network for fresh rows at one steady rate and share the answer. A busy minute here never turns into a flood of requests on someone else’s node.