As blockchain development becomes more widespread, it has become increasingly important to offer tools and applications to miners so that they can interact as efficiently as possible to enable seamless reading and writing.

This was unpacked in more detail during a panel at the recent London Blockchain Conference. The panel was hosted by financial journalist Victoria Scholar and included:

• Kurt Wuckert Jr. (Chief Bitcoin Historian at CoinGeek);
• Pieter Den Dooven (Chief Information Officer at Mintblue);
• Thomas Giacomo (Head of Product at BSV Blockchain).

WhatsOnChain – A real-time explorer tool

An example of one such tool offered to miners is WhatsOnChain, which provides real-time BSV blockchain Explorer and enterprise-grade blockchain services. WhatsOnChain was the very first BSV block explorer and its beauty is in its ability to provide more succinct data in an easy-to-use package that is worthy of global attention.

Using WhatsOnChain is straightforward. With just a piece of information, like a transaction ID or a wallet address, you can effortlessly retrieve comprehensive details about the corresponding transaction, including information about when and by whom the data was mined.

Simply input the information into the search bar, and you’ll receive a prompt response in less than a second. Additionally, WhatsOnChain provides a clear overview of the miners, their activities, and the size of the mined blocks.

Offering more through ARC

Another important tool, ARC, allows applications to use a clearly defined interface that reliably validates transactions, provides clear feedback, a less complex submission path, and re-submit capability for transactions that were erroneously rejected or evicted by the node. ARC covers the basic service of a standardised transaction submission and will be available open-source for miners to adopt and build on.

ARC is designed to connect to every mining node on the network and includes peering logic, retry logic for transaction tracking, transaction validation, and an API for clients. It also calculates Merkle paths for broadcasted transactions. ARC’s microservices include the API server, validator (with the ability to scale for increased workload), metamorph for managing changing transaction statuses, and a peer manager to handle connections.

Additionally, ARC stores a new format of blocks containing transaction IDs rather than full transaction data. This architecture aims to enhance transaction reliability and efficiency in the Bitcoin network. ARC consists of four microservices: the API, Metamorph, BlockTX and Callbacker.

JungleBus

Finally, the conversation turned to JungleBus. JungleBus is a highly optimised, proprietary light node for BSV with a focus on ingesting mempool and on-chain data, indexing it for various specifications, and allowing clients (typically apps) to subscribe to sets and subsets of data while ignoring everything they don’t need from the rest of the blockchain.

JungleBus is also unique because it is run by the Gorilla Pool mining pool – meaning The company operating the node and its services are motivated by financial incentives. As a transaction processor, they are already responsible for running and maintaining the node software. Consequently, offering a parallel service using data they already handle is a logical decision. The previously flawed approach had a minimal chance of success because the companies were running the node for a purpose unrelated to its intended use.