Exploring the Skycoin Explorer
Take a closer look at Skycoin’s distributed ledger through the blockchain explorer.
Your Skycoin wallet displays a balance, but those coins are not actually in your wallet app on your mobile phone or on your computer. The software wallet is a convenient conceptual abstraction that allows us to interact with cryptocurrency in a familiar way. Since we’ve all owned real-world wallets or had bank accounts, the concept of money held in those places is easy to understand. But your Skycoin is not “in” your wallet; it’s on the Fiber blockchain, and your wallet software is just a convenient way to interact with the blockchain. You can see for yourself at explorer.skycoin.net.
This is the Skycoin blockchain explorer, and every wallet address and Skycoin transaction that takes place is posted to the blockchain and visible here. You can see the block height, which is the number of blocks that have been posted to the blockchain. You can also see the current supply of Skycoin, and the total supply, as well as the current and total supply of Coin Hours.
You can use the field at the top of the page to search for an address, a block hash or block number, or a transaction ID, and then see the details associated with that search.
Here’s the Genesis Block, which you can see contained the 100 million Skycoin that will ever exist, along with 100 trillion Coin Hours. This is because Skycoin is pre-mined, and all coins above 25 million are in time-locked wallets for gradual distribution over time. Learn more about Skycoin distribution and supply.
As the first block in the chain, it has no parent hash, but proceeding to the next block we can see the hash of the Genesis block in the parent slot. This second block took those initial 100 million Skycoin and sent them to 100 different distribution addresses in batches of 1 million Skycoin per address.
Let’s look at a transaction in a more recent block, number 105989, which was posted to the blockchain on May 6th, 2019. Here we can see someone has been sent a little over 112 coins. The wallet from which these coins were sent used a UTXO (or unspent transaction output) of 4,226 Skycoin, which means that 4,114 were returned to that address as change.
If this sending address looks familiar, that may be because it is associated with Binance.com, one of the biggest cryptocurrency exchanges. Clicking on their address shows that they are currently holding over 500,000 Skycoin for people on its exchange. This is their hot wallet, allowing them to maintain liquidity for Skycoin traders on their platform.
What about the address that received the 112 Skycoin? Clicking on their address reveals that they currently have a total of 130 Skycoin. Looking at their unspent outputs, we can see three transactions that add up to their balance of 130 Skycoin, including the most recent for 112.
Some people are surprised to see their wallet address, Skycoin balance and transactions are available for anyone who cares to search for it, but that’s part of what makes the blockchain function as a distributed ledger. This kind of transparency is part of the power and security of blockchain. Of course, people are welcome to create as many addresses as they wish, and no personally identifying information is included in transactions. As long as you don’t associate your real-world identity with a given address, you will remain anonymous, even if your transactions won’t.
This allows you to forego a software wallet altogether, if you wish, and simply use the explorer to verify transactions and check the balance on your Skycoin wallet address. Skycoin’s software wallets are secure, but if you are concerned about them being compromised, you may wish to delete them altogether and rely on the explorer instead, only installing the wallet software and loading your wallet seed, when you wish to send Skycoin.
When you’ve made a transaction, but you’re not sure if it’s gone through, you can easily verify whether it’s been posted to the blockchain by simply pasting the transaction ID into the Explorer.
For the privacy-minded, you’ll be pleased to know that Skycoin was designed to natively incorporate the CoinJoin protocol, which combines transactions together in a way that obfuscates the details, so that even using a tool like Skycoin Explorer, there is no way to disentangle the joined transactions to determine how much Skycoin is involved, or where it’s going. CoinJoin will be integrated with Skycoin transactions soon.
The Explorer also has a list of unconfirmed transactions. These consist of what are referred to as soft-invalid transactions, which means they may have included too many decimal places, the Coin Hour burn fee was set too low, or they exceed the maximum transaction size. (Hard-invalid transactions, like trying to to send zero coins, or spend coins that are already spent, are just ignored.) These unconfirmed transactions are checked periodically, and if they become valid, they will be executed, or if they become hard-invalid (if, for example, one of the unconfirmed inputs was spent elsewhere instead), they are removed from the list.
The other interesting feature of the Skycoin Explorer is the so-called Rich List. This allows you to see the balances of the 20 wallets that contain the most Skycoin. At number 3 is the Binance wallet we found earlier.
The 4.5 million Skycoin wallet at the top spot also belongs to Binance, and represents their “cold storage” Skycoin wallet; cold storage meaning it is completely offline and safe from potential hackers. (If you look at the transaction history for that address, you can see that the only transactions it receives are from the other Binance address.)
At the moment, it looks as though the price to join the list is to hold just a little over 50,000 Skycoin, so if you aspire to have your address featured on the Rich List, you better start accumulating.
At last, the Skycoin Explorer API allows developers to integrate Explorer functionality into their coding projects. (Read a tutorial on using the API.)
As you continue your journey within the Skycoin ecosystem, don’t forget about the powerful tool you have at your fingertips with the Skycoin Blockchain Explorer, at explorer.skycoin.net.
If you liked my writing and would like to contribute to me making more, feel free to donate some Skycoin: GCB5KK9LmJzxxxh2hMoKm3HRXwaJe9vRfd
