Mirror-nodes are an important component of the Hedera ecosystem, and fundamental to the overall architecture of the Hedera network. Thanks to DragonGlass (app.dragonglass.me) and Kabuto (kabuto.sh) the community has had two public options with nice user interfaces to access information about transactions on Hedera since Open Access of the Hedera network in September 2019. However, in the spirit of decentralization, it’s important to have multiple options for querying data to ensure the same information is available across different explorers. Therefore, today we are excited to announce that here at Swirlds Labs, we are hosting a new explorer for the Hedera community to use, that is built on the open source mirror-node software from Hedera. The ledger explorer is available at hashscan.io and you can start using it immediately. 

HashScan open-source ledger explorer for the Hedera community

The Hedera mainnet reflects the current state of the network via the hashgraph, and so mirror nodes are crucial for applications and individuals as they provide a way to store and cost-effectively query historical data from the public ledger while minimizing the use of Hedera network resources. Mirror nodes support all the Hedera network services and can be used to retrieve information such as account information including balances, transactions records, HCS messages, token information and details about smart contracts.

The core engineering team for Hedera has developed open-source mirror node software (https://github.com/hashgraph/hedera-mirror-node) which has made it possible for anyone to run a mirror-node, and many developers choose to run their own with the easiest way to do so being via Hedera’s one click deploy on the Google Cloud Platform Marketplace. (https://docs.hedera.com/guides/mirrornet/one-click-mirror-node-deployment). 

Recently, the core Hedera engineering team also developed a user interface for the mirror-node to turn it into an easy-to-use hosted solution. The code is available here: https://github.com/hashgraph/hedera-mirror-node-explorer. We hope to see more community members decide to host public ledger explorers in the future. 

Happy exploring!