Ten blocks a second, and what that does to an index
Chain 4663 produces a block roughly every tenth of a second. Every design decision behind this site follows from that number.
MadCool Seed ·
Ethereum produces a block every twelve seconds. Robinhood Chain produces about ten a second — measured at 9.93 to 9.97 blocks per second on 17 September 2026, by taking two block headers ten thousand apart and dividing. That is roughly 860,000 blocks a day.
A number that large stops being trivia and starts being a constraint. Everything about how this site reads the chain follows from it.
You cannot ask for much at once
Near the head of the chain, a 500-block window holds around 14,500 Transfer logs. Ask for ten thousand blocks and the answer is tens of megabytes, or a refusal — the endpoints cap a single query at ten thousand blocks and at 64 MiB of response, and a dense stretch hits the size cap long before the block cap.
So the reader asks in small windows, and halves a window when an endpoint says it matched too much. One airdrop inside one window is not normal density, and before the halving existed, one was enough to stop the whole index.
Most of it is not what we are looking for
Sampling five windows spread across the chain’s history, ERC-721 transfers — NFTs — are about four per cent of all Transfer logs. The other ninety-six per cent are tokens moving. There is no way to ask an endpoint for only the NFT ones: an ERC-20 and an ERC-721 transfer are the same event signature, and the only difference on the wire is that the NFT version indexes its third argument.
Reading this chain’s NFT history means reading all of its token history and throwing most of it away. There is no cheaper shape available.
Multiply that four per cent across 65 million blocks and the chain has somewhere on the order of forty million NFT transfers in it. That is why the backwards crawl keeps counts rather than rows — when a collection first appeared and how much it has ever moved, rather than forty million records nobody reads one at a time.
And a block is only ten seconds of certainty
Indexing right up to the head means indexing blocks that can still be reorganised out. Ours deliberately stays a hundred blocks behind — about ten seconds — so a reorganisation would have to be ten seconds deep to reach us. Nobody can perceive ten seconds of staleness on a gallery. Everyone would eventually notice a mint count built on a block that stopped existing.