Blockchair Adds Printable Receipts To Its Repertoire

Blockchair, a colorful block explorer, has added a new feature: printable receipts. This feature allows users to print a single page containing all of a transaction’s vital information, including its ID, sender, recipient, and a timestamp. It also includes a scannable QR code “to check the validity of the receipt” against the site.

Blockchair now has the ability to generate neat printable receipts for $BTC, $BCH, and $LTC transactions! Simply navigate to your transaction on https://t.co/5CywABewQ2 and click on the “PDF receipt” button 📜 pic.twitter.com/z1rd1agdti

— Blockchair (@Blockchair) September 15, 2018

What Is Blockchair?

Blockchair is a block explorer like BTC.com or Etherscan, but with a twist:

“Blockchair is a blockchain search and analytics engine… it’s an engine that consists of blockchain explorers on steroids. You can filter and sort blocks, transactions, and their content by a variety of different criteria, as well as perform full-text search over the blockchains.”

The site is best known for its colorful “eye candy” interface, which displays transaction data in a way that is easy to understand at a glance. The explorer shows hashes as color-coded barcodes, which are easier to distingush than strings of text. Meanwhile, graphs and charts use “heat signatures” to display numerical data: larger values are purple and smaller values are yellow.

The site also foregrounds human-readable information, with a search bar and pinned keywords similar to Twitter’s trending categories.

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Who Needs Printable Receipts?

Paper receipts are a “dead tree” technology, which contrasts with Blockchair’s typical presentation of data. The site usually puts extensive data “in the background,” but the receipt strips out excess information altogether. For example, each receipt excludes information that is only relevant online, such as the names of other block explorers. Each receipt also drops overly technical data, such as block size and transaction fees.

To some, the receipt feature may seem slightly underwhelming. But although blockchain explorers are meant to display large amounts of data, not every crypto transaction needs to be complex. Simplified receipts may be appealing to people who perform simple financial transactions.

In any case, receipts are rarely built into blockchain services (apart from expensive and exclusive point-of-sale devices) and Blockchair is certainly filling a niche by providing receipts that anyone can use.