Live network statistics

What these figures mean

Block height is how many blocks have been produced since the genesis block. On Bitcoin it advances roughly every ten minutes; on Ethereum every twelve seconds. It is the most reliable way to tell whether an explorer is keeping up with the chain — compare an explorer's reported height against this page, and a gap of thousands means that deployment is lagging.

Next-block fee is the rate in satoshis per virtual byte currently needed to be included in the next Bitcoin block. It moves with demand and it is the number that determines your position in the queue. Our fee tracker breaks it into bands.

Mempool backlog is the count of valid transactions broadcast but not yet confirmed. A large backlog means competition for block space and rising fees; a small one means almost anything confirms quickly.

Next difficulty is the projected change at Bitcoin's next retarget, which happens every 2,016 blocks — about a fortnight. A positive figure means mining is becoming harder, which generally indicates more hash rate has joined the network.

Solana slot is the current slot number, advancing roughly every 400 milliseconds. Slots and blocks are not the same thing on Solana — not every slot produces a block — which is why the two figures differ and why comparing them across explorers confuses people.

Why this does not update continuously

Because these are somebody else's free APIs and polling them on a timer for a figure nobody is watching is wasteful. A dashboard left open in a background tab making a request every five seconds is exactly the behaviour that causes free tiers to be withdrawn.

The pattern is worth mentioning because it applies to anything you build on these APIs. Cache, poll slowly or not at all, and self-host if your usage becomes material. Our API comparison covers the current rate limits and which services remain keyless.

Verifying these numbers

Every figure here comes from an API you can query yourself. The Bitcoin tip height is available from blockstream.info/api/blocks/tip/height, the fee bands from mempool.space/api/v1/fees/recommended, and the Solana slot from a single JSON-RPC call to the public mainnet endpoint.

We mention that not to be exhaustive but because it is the whole point of this site. A figure you can independently reproduce is worth more than a figure you have to trust, and the ability to reproduce it is what makes a public ledger useful rather than merely interesting.

The most useful thing on this page

It is the block heights, and specifically using them to check whether an explorer is telling you the truth about recent activity.

An explorer is an index built by reading a chain. When that index falls behind — because of load, a bug, a resource constraint, or a chain producing blocks faster than the deployment was sized for — recent transactions simply do not appear. To a user that is indistinguishable from the transaction not existing, and it causes a great deal of unnecessary alarm.

The check takes ten seconds. Find the explorer's reported latest block height, compare it against the figure above, and if the gap is more than a handful of blocks that deployment is lagging and everything it shows you about recent activity is stale.

This matters most on self-hosted Blockscout instances, because anyone can run one and quality varies enormously between a well-resourced deployment and one somebody set up eighteen months ago. It matters on multi-chain explorers covering long-tail networks for the same reason. It rarely matters on the major commercial explorers, which are well funded precisely because uptime is what they sell.

What these figures are not

They are not prices. There are deliberately no asset prices anywhere on this site, and the only percentage shown is Bitcoin's mining difficulty retarget — a protocol parameter that has nothing to do with what anything is worth.

They are not a measure of how much a network is used in any economic sense. Block height counts blocks, not activity. Transaction counts are inflated by consolidation, dust and automated systems on every chain, and comparing raw counts between chains with different block times and fee structures produces conclusions that sound precise and mean very little.

And they are not a health indicator. A large mempool backlog is not a problem; it is a fee market working. A negative difficulty adjustment is not a decline; it is a routine response to hash rate moving. Most of the alarming readings people draw from figures like these come from applying intuitions borrowed from other kinds of market.

If you want to build something similar

Everything here comes from four public APIs, none of which requires a key, and the code is about forty lines of ordinary JavaScript.

The three rules we would pass on. Cache. Block data older than a handful of confirmations never changes, so refetching it is pure waste. Do not poll on a timer. A dashboard left open in a background tab making a request every five seconds is exactly the behaviour that causes free tiers to be withdrawn for everyone. Have a fallback. Any single API will have an outage, and the free ones have no obligation to you whatsoever.

Because Blockstream and mempool.space share the Esplora API shape, using one as a fallback for the other costs almost nothing in code — which is the single most practical piece of advice in our API comparison.

And if your usage becomes material, run your own. These services are largely public goods maintained at somebody else's expense, and our self-hosting guide is honest about what that actually costs.

Why these numbers do not compare across chains

The temptation with a page like this is to line the figures up and draw a conclusion. It is worth explaining why that mostly does not work.

Block height counts blocks, and block intervals differ by orders of magnitude — ten minutes on Bitcoin, twelve seconds on Ethereum, four hundred milliseconds per Solana slot. A higher number means the chain has been producing blocks faster, which is a design choice rather than an achievement.

Transaction counts are worse. Every chain counts different things. Solana records failed transactions and vote transactions; Bitcoin records neither. An Ethereum transaction that triggers twenty internal calls counts once. A Bitcoin transaction consolidating a hundred outputs also counts once. Any ranking built on raw counts is measuring accounting conventions rather than usage.

Fees are the one figure with a defensible cross-chain comparison, and only if you compare like with like — the cost of a simple value transfer at a given moment, in the same currency, acknowledging that it moves constantly and that a rollup's fee is mostly the cost of posting to Ethereum rather than anything about the rollup.

What the figures on this page are genuinely good for is checking whether an explorer is current, watching a specific chain over time, and understanding one network's own behaviour. They are not a scoreboard.

Worked example: spotting a stale index

Suppose someone tells you a payment has been sent, gives you a hash, and the explorer you open shows nothing. There are three possible explanations and this page separates two of them in about ten seconds.

Compare that explorer's reported latest block height with the figure above. If they agree, the explorer is current and the transaction genuinely is not in its index — which means either it has not propagated, or you are on the wrong chain, or it does not exist.

If the explorer is thousands of blocks behind, it is lagging and its silence means nothing at all. Open a different one before drawing any conclusion.

That distinction matters because the emotional response to "the explorer shows nothing" is the same in both cases, and the correct action is completely different. Our guide on unconfirmed transactions works through the remaining possibilities once you have ruled out a stale index.