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Blocks in Blockchain

For simplicity, we will use MultiversX blockchain and MultiversX Explorer.

Notarization of blocks​

Inspect the image below: Blocks on MultiversX

We can observe 4 blocks from 1 second ago for 4 different shards: Shard0, Shard1, Shard2, Metachain. These shard a sub-blockchains and enables MultiversX to scale. You can read more about shard here.

We can observe 4 more blocks from 7 seconds ago. That's because each shard outputs a block every 6 seconds.

NOTE

We previously saw that every 6 seconds starts new round, but not necessarly a new block gets notarized. In this case all the blocks successfully passed the consensus round and got notarized.

Block details​

Here is the link for one of the blocks in the previous image (Block Height: 16826695).

Block 16826695

Observe the block details:

  • Round
  • Epoch
  • Age (timestamp)
  • Shard

Based on a simple calculus, the epoch is 1168 which means this blockchain started 3 years and 73 days ago.

We will talk about the other fields in the next section.

Practice​

  1. Go to the MultiversX Explorer and check more blocks from different shard;
  2. Go to the Ethereum Explorer and check some blocks details.