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The GorillaPool team has launched BananaBlocks, a new block explorer for BSV blockchain network that its builders say is designed to be faster, more complete, and more independent than existing options.

BananaBlocks is live now, offering BSV block and transaction lookups, address balances, a live mempool view, network statistics, and a “rich list.” Under the hood, it runs as a single Go binary, powered by JungleBus for blockchain data. It’s backed by a Pebble LSM engine that maintains complete UTXO, transaction input/output, and address indexes.

GorillaPool co-founder Michael Boyd told CoinGeek he built the explorer because the network needed an additional independent option, particularly as existing services change their operating models.

“I felt the network needs an independent additional option for a complete blockchain explorer,” Boyd said. “We recently saw WhatsOnChain transitioning to BSV Association operational control, as well as competitor Bitails announcing they have switched to pruning—only serving a small subset of the most recent blockchain data.”

Boyd described BananaBlocks as “built for builders,” and the explorer reflects that mindset.

“It’s built for builders because at GorillaPool and bOpen we are ourselves builders, and we leverage the tools, products, and infrastructure we have built to keep moving up the stack and producing more interesting and useful things,” he said. “A missing piece for me was our own complete block explorer, with powerful APIs to extract data from the BSV blockchain.”

The explorer is protocol-aware, automatically detecting and labeling 1Sat Ordinals, BSV-20 and BSV-21 tokens, B:// protocol data, MAP, AIP, OrdLock, and other on-chain formats. Historical token data is tracked across on-chain records, giving users a complete picture of token movements and balances.

BananaBlocks offers three interfaces: HTML pages for browsing, a native REST API at /api/v1, and a WhatsOnChain-compatible API that Boyd described as a “drop-in replacement” for developers already using that service. The API supports Merkle Proofs, transaction broadcast, and other core functions.

Real-time updates are delivered via HTMX rather than WebSockets or polling, a technical choice that keeps the interface responsive, without the infrastructure overhead of persistent connections.

GorillaPool’s custom infrastructure

The explorer runs on GorillaCloud—GorillaPool’s own private datacenter infrastructure—which Boyd said gives the team advantages over relying on Amazon Web Services (AWS) or other third-party cloud providers.

“It lets us keep all the data in-house and our applications live next to each other, giving high speed, low latency, intra-application data sharing efficiencies,” he noted.

“We would like to offer bespoke application hosting solutions to other companies that can benefit from being hosted right in the center of the network: directly next to JungleBus, BananaBlocks, Teranode, etc. The idea is to productize this network centrality we’ve built over the years.”

BananaBlocks arrives as the latest addition to an infrastructure stack GorillaPool has been building since 2021. The company operates mining pools, runs JungleBus as a filtered blockchain data service, maintains GorillaNode as a Teranode implementation, and supports the ARC transaction broadcast protocol and 1Sat token indexers.

Boyd said each layer was built to solve specific problems the team encountered while developing their own applications, with the explorer filling a gap they felt directly.

“I didn’t want to rely solely on WhatsOnChain, and we have all the data already right here in our datacenter,” he said. “I just needed more diverse ways to extract usefulness from it.”

Boyd added that he was not sure how well the explorer would perform in its initial iteration, but was pleased with the results.

“JungleBus is great for producing app-specific filtered data but doesn’t quite give everything a full explorer needs, so I built one,” he said. “I wasn’t sure I would be able to make it efficient and performant enough, but I’m quite pleased with BananaBlocks even in this fresh early iteration.”

The launch adds another option to the list of BSV block explorers, at a time when existing services are consolidating or changing their data retention policies. Whether BananaBlocks can attract developers away from established APIs will depend on performance, reliability, and the depth of its feature set as it matures beyond its initial release.

Watch: BSV standards & developer empowerment at AWS Summit

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