All articles

User contribution: Trueblocks Plotter

A user-built tool that queries and plots Ethereum data
Matt Solomon, over at ScopeLift, used TrueBlocks as a backend to build a cool tool. TrueBlocks plotter lets you visualize and plot Ethereum data in your browser. Thanks for expanding the TrueBlocks universe!
Posted October 29, 2021 ‐ 1 min read
tags: [ community ]

User post: Local Data Extraction

TrueBlocks user Perama wrote a blog post about using TrueBlocks and some other Ethereum software.
Go read the post. Thanks for the support and shoutout!
Posted October 29, 2021 ‐ 1 min read
tags: [ community ]

Recipe: List Tokens I Own

What do I Own?
A TrueBlocks recipe to show ERC 20 token balances for an address. Note: The following assumes you have a copy of (either by having built it yourself or downloaded it) the TrueBlocks Appearance Index. Preliminaries We start by extracting from the chain all the transactions for the address in question. We will use a randomly selected address that we know owns a number of different tokens. chifra list 0x03fdcadc09559262f40f5ea61c720278264eb1da This produces a list of 2,129 appearances (at the time of this writing).
Posted April 13, 2021 ‐ 6 min read
tags: [ tutorials ]

Running Against Multiple Rpc Endpoints

Can I run against different RPC endpoints?
One user asked if it was possible to run TrueBlocks against multiple RPC endpoints at the same time. This is short recipe to accomplish just that. Preliminaries The first thing to understand is that the TrueBlocks core runs against a local configuration file stored in your $HOME folder called $HOME/.local/share/TrueBlocks/trueBlocks.toml. It’s an almost ridiculously simple file. The file gets created and populated with default values the first time you build TrueBlocks.
Posted April 21, 2021 ‐ 3 min read
tags: [ tutorials ]

Showing ERC-20 Transfers

Can I show all token transfers on a contract?
A TrueBlocks recipe to show every ERC20 Transfer event from a given smart contract. Note: The following assumes you have a copy of (either by having built it yourself or downloaded it) the TrueBlocks Appearance Index. These instructions also assume that the address you’re querying is an ERC 20 smart contract. Preliminaries To get started, we want to extract (from the TrueBlocks index) a list of every transaction that our address has ever appeared in.
Posted April 13, 2021 ‐ 6 min read
tags: [ tutorials ]

A Long Winded Explanation of TrueBlocks

How TrueBlocks indexes the Ethereum blockchain
Recently, I was engaged in a tweetstorm with Nick Johnson, for whom I have deep, deep respect. The storm was about the topic of indexing the Ethereum blockchain. As is usually the case with my tweetstorms, I don’t think I explained myself well during the thunder and lightning, so I thought I’d take a moment during the lull to better explain myself. So this is an explanation for Nick (and anyone else who’s listening) about how TrueBlocks indexes the Ethereum blockchain.
Posted April 5, 2021 ‐ 20 min read
tags: [ trueblocks ]

Dynamic Traversers for TrueBlocks

Customized scraping of the index
Dynamic Traversers in TrueBlocks Ethereum nodes come to consensus on a world-wide global ledger of smart contract invocations every 14 seconds. Everyone know this. This is what we celebrate about the chain. Not only is this data world-wide and consented-to, but it is also permissionless. At least that’s what we’re supposed to believe. But, is it really permissionless? I think the answer to that question is a resounding “No.” Ask yourself how you personally get data from the Ethereum blockchain.
Posted December 9, 2020 ‐ 7 min read
tags: [ trueblocks ]

How Safe are My Private Keys?

Let's Look at the Numbers
Posted December 9, 2020 ‐ 0 min read
tags: [ ethereum ]

Every 15 Seconds…

Something special happens
…a piece of open source software called an Ethereum node collects together a random, unordered collection of transactions, and after throwing out the invalid ones, puts the rest in a well-defined order. The system then seals this newly ordered list for the rest of human history (modulo re-orgs) by creating a 32-byte block hash that stands in a one-to-one correspondence to that ordered list. The system then quickly moves on to a newly growing collection of unordered transactions, leaving behind it a trail of sealed blocks.
Posted December 9, 2020 ‐ 2 min read
tags: [ ethereum ]

Ethereum’s Issuance: uncleReward

Second in a series about issuance
This the second in a series of two articles detailing Ethereum’s issuance. Read the first part, which discusses the blockReward calculation. Also, see the code base for the actual code. This article discusses the uncleReward. Uncle Reward Previously, we looked at the ungrammatical second sentence in Section 11.3 of Ethereum’s Yellow Paper. In the first article, we discussed the first half of that sentence concerning blockReward. In this article we discuss the remaining half of that sentence (shown below) which details the uncleReward.
Posted August 15, 2020 ‐ 6 min read
tags: [ ethereum ]