Being first, and what that bought
blockchain.info appeared in 2011, when Bitcoin was two years old and looking at the chain meant running a node or knowing someone who did. For most of the decade that followed it was the block explorer — the link in every forum post, the screenshot in every news article, the thing people meant when they said they had checked the blockchain.
That history has two consequences today. The first is enormous residual traffic: an immense number of old links point here, and search results still favour it heavily for generic queries. The second is that its API endpoints became a de facto standard by adoption, and a lot of code written between 2012 and 2018 still calls them. Impressively, most of it still works.
What changed is the business around it. Blockchain.com is now a wallet and an exchange with an explorer attached, rather than an explorer that later added products. That is not a criticism of the data, which remains accurate. It is a statement about incentives, and it is the lens through which the rest of this review reads.
The legacy API is the best thing here
Genuinely: this is the part still worth your attention, and it is the part nobody writes about.
The /q/ endpoints return a single value as plain text. Not JSON, not an envelope, not a status wrapper — just the number:
curl https://blockchain.info/q/getblockcount
967384For a shell script, a status board or a monitoring check, that is about as convenient as an API gets. No parsing, no key, no rate-limit dance. There is a family of these: getdifficulty, totalbc, hashrate, addressbalance, 24hrtransactioncount.
The fuller JSON API sits at blockchain.info/rawblock/, /rawtx/ and /rawaddr/, and the WebSocket pushes new blocks and transactions live. All of it works keyless. In a year when several competitors have moved behind registration, that is worth noting — the irony being that the most commercial operator here has kept the most open API.
A caution
These endpoints are legacy in the literal sense: maintained, not developed. We would not build something new on them without a fallback, and the obvious fallbacks are Blockstream's Esplora and mempool.space, both of which are actively developed and equally keyless. Our API comparison has the full picture.
Charts: the other genuine strength
The statistics section is deep and, crucially, long. Hash rate, difficulty, transaction volume, mempool size, average fees, unspent output counts — many series running back to 2009, which no younger explorer can offer because they were not there.
For anyone writing about Bitcoin's history, or trying to establish what conditions looked like during a particular period, that archive has real value. BitInfoCharts is the other place to look and covers more chains; Blockchain.com's Bitcoin series are cleaner and better presented.
It is worth applying the usual caution to derived metrics. Figures like "unique addresses used" are frequently quoted as a proxy for user count and are nothing of the sort — one person can generate thousands of addresses, and modern wallets do exactly that by design. The chart is accurate; the interpretation usually is not.
The explorer itself, honestly assessed
Paste a transaction hash and you get a clear, readable page. Inputs, outputs, fee, confirmations, block. Nothing is wrong with it. It is simply that the specialists now do each part better.
The transaction page does not show a fee rate in sat/vB prominently, which is the number that decides when you confirm. It has no mempool visualisation, so an unconfirmed transaction gets you a label and no context. For the specific moment when most people open an explorer in the first place — something has not arrived and they want to know why — it is the wrong instrument, and mempool.space is not slightly better here, it is in a different class.
The Ethereum support is thinner still. It will show you a transaction and a balance. It will not show you verified contract source, decode a contract call, or list token approvals. For anything involving a contract, Etherscan or Blockscout are the only sensible answers.
The privacy question is different here
Blockchain.com operates a custodial wallet and an exchange. Those businesses are subject to know-your-customer and anti-money-laundering obligations, which means the company holds verified identity documents for a large number of people and, separately, receives explorer lookups from a large number of IP addresses.
We are not suggesting those datasets are joined. We are pointing out that they exist under one roof, that no other general Bitcoin explorer has that combination, and that you cannot verify anything about how either is handled because the system is closed.
If you are checking a public address out of curiosity this is irrelevant. If you are repeatedly checking your own cold storage, prefer an explorer with no commercial interest in identity — Blockstream.info over Tor, or better, your own node. Our privacy guide lays out the reasoning.
Should you still use it?
For the plain-text API endpoints, yes, with a fallback configured. They are a small piece of genuinely excellent design that has survived fifteen years, and there is nothing else quite as convenient for a one-line query.
For the historical charts, yes. The depth of the Bitcoin series is real and hard to source elsewhere.
For day-to-day lookups, probably not. It is not bad — it is 2016's best explorer, still working, in a field that moved on. If you arrived from an old bookmark, the specialists are worth the thirty seconds it takes to try them: mempool.space for Bitcoin, Etherscan for Ethereum, Blockchair when the question spans both.