For those looking for Blockchain info on other coins and a greater depth view into every transaction, it is worth taking a look at blockr.io. For those who are really curious, there are sections with interesting trivia and statistics, such as which addresses hold the most coins and blocks with the highest fees.
In a unique way, the site gives visibility for the "block savvy" with the above, yet also caters to beginners looking to learn the basics and move up from there.
DC Magnates touched base with the people behind blockr for a deeper view on their contribution to the crypto-sphere:
When and how did blockr.io come into being?
Well to start at the beginning, blockr.io was created more than half a year ago when we needed a stable API server for one of our project. That project was eventually postponed and we were left with this block parser. We felt it would be nice if we could deliver it to the general public and in some way help the community.
How do newcomers to the world of digital currency stand to gain from your site as opposed to places like blockchain.info?
When we started there was the big blockchain.info and smaller ABE based sites. While blockchain.info was stable and had only few outages, there were bigger problems with blockchains for other coins. Those were extremely unstable (apologies if we missed any stable ones) and communities really couldn't rely on them, so we agreed to make blockr.io public.
So here we are. Now with 6 officially supported coins, two more and Testnet yet to come. After this, we'll stop adding new coins for a while as we want to expand blockr.io and get some really nice features in.
The difference between blockchain.info and us is in support for other coins. They made public news that they'll keep supporting only BTC, while we feel that there are some really good alternative coins that should also benefit from a good blockchain. Blockchain.info also has online wallets and we don't. This was a decision we made in the beginning - to not fiddle with actual coins at this moment. Handling of people's wealth is not something one should take lightly. You need better security, people to answer customer's questions, additional servers on another server farm, etc. We'll add it when we have enough income to do so correctly.
How does blockr.io make money?
As far as income goes, blockr.io was meant to run by itself. Any revenue it receives is spent on servers. We (support, programmers and designers) are still doing everything out of our own enthusiasm. There are donation pages for every coin on blockr.io and if anyone feels blockr.io is doing a good job, please donate. We had coin masters who were able to see further (beyond coin trades) and realized that true potential is in people using their coins. Not just trading it, but using it in business. And for that one needs clear APIs - that's where we come in.
Also, what can you recommend to the newcomer or layman to get up to speed on understanding the blockchain, mining etc?
What do we recommend for newcomers? Well, blockr.io is not really a site you'd visit often; it's not a news site. Its primary usage is for API calls. So if any newcomers will have a brave idea that includes digital coins, blockr.io will be more interesting to them. Still, there are the trivia pages that show some interesting statistics, such as "Who has the most coins", "Who transferred the most coins", "Who paid the biggest fee", etc... There are also graphs which will soon be revamped to show more data.
