Blockin Launches Bitcoin Explorer With Detailed Fee Guidance

Blockin, the parent company of one of popular Bitcoin (BTC) mining pools, Poolin, is launching a new block explorer on April 6. The explorer includes mempool statistics that would help users decide the correct fee to send their BTC payment.

Blockin’s explorer provides many of the standard features shared with competing offerings, like block data, transaction information and statistics on network hashrate and pool distribution. It adds to an already large suite of tools for miners to calculate profit or compare ASIC devices.

The company says that its explorer will also be useful for users wishing to send a transaction. Blockin will provide statistics for unconfirmed transactions that are pending in the network, called mempool. Based on this data, it is possible to calculate the optimal fee to have a transaction confirmed immediately within the next block.

Not many mainstream services provide this mempool data, despite the practical importance of setting the correct fee. Due to the UTXO model of Bitcoin, a single low-fee transaction can potentially make the entirety of the funds unusable until that transaction clears. 

This issue led to the introduction of schemes like “Child Pays for Parent,” where a higher fee transaction that depends on one that is stuck is submitted. This has the effect of averaging the fees between the two transactions, potentially making them attractive enough for inclusion.

Poolin, together with some other mining pools, also provides a manual method of confirming a stuck transaction. With its acceleration service, the user pays the pool separately to increase the transaction’s priority.

Mining industry braces for impact

The Blockin website also features a convenient countdown to the Bitcoin block halving, which is showing 39 days left as of press time (May 15).

This is a period of extreme uncertainty for the industry, as recent events questioned the narrative that BTC price will rise in response to the supply restriction. Hashrate has already dropped by 45% since early 2020 highs, and an even stronger fall is expected if the price remains at similar levels during the halving event.

As some miners shut down operations, new ASIC devices are getting sold out. This is expected, as more efficient miners will have an edge over their competition. 

Mining pools will find themselves competing over a dwindling pool of active miners, which is likely to result in the roll-out of even more features to entice new users.