Bitcoin vs Ethereum block explorers

TLDR

Bitcoin and Ethereum are the two most-referenced blockchains, but they share little structurally. Bitcoin is a UTXO chain with multiple address encodings; Ethereum is an account-based EVM chain with one address format. tx.taxi routes Bitcoin lookups to mempool.space and Ethereum lookups to Etherscan based on what you paste.

Address & transaction format

Bitcoin has several address formats in active use. Legacy (P2PKH) addresses start with 1, use base58check encoding, and are 26 to 35 characters long. P2SH addresses start with 3 and use the same base58check encoding. Bech32 (SegWit v0) addresses start with bc1q and use lowercase alphanumerics. Bech32m (Taproot, SegWit v1) addresses also start with bc1p. The leading characters are diagnostic: an address starting with bc1 is SegWit-family, anything starting with 1 or 3 is base58check.

Bitcoin transaction IDs are SHA-256(SHA-256(tx)) of the serialized transaction, displayed as a 64-character lowercase hex string with no prefix. Block hashes follow the same format. Block heights are plain integers.

Ethereum has one address format: 20 raw bytes shown as 0x followed by 40 hex characters, 42 characters in total. EIP-55 mixed-case checksums are a display convention, not a separate format. Transaction hashes are Keccak-256 of the signed transaction, 32 bytes shown as a 66-character 0x-prefixed hex string. Block hashes use the same shape. Block numbers are integers.

The header byte versus prefix is the easiest tell: a 0x prefix is Ethereum-family. Anything starting with 1, 3, or bc1 is Bitcoin. A bare 64-character hex string with no prefix is most likely a Bitcoin txid, while the same hash with a 0x prefix is most likely an Ethereum txid.

Block explorers tx.taxi uses

For Bitcoin, tx.taxi's primary configured explorer is mempool.space. mempool.space is a long-running, widely-used Bitcoin explorer with a focus on mempool state, fee estimation, and block inspection alongside the usual address and transaction views.

For Ethereum, tx.taxi's primary configured explorer is Etherscan. Etherscan is a long-running Ethereum explorer covering transactions, contracts, token transfers, internal calls, and event logs.

Both explorers show the same conceptual objects but interpret them very differently. mempool.space draws transaction graphs of inputs and outputs; Etherscan shows from/to with token-transfer breakdowns and decoded contract calls. The displayed data reflects what each chain actually records.

When to use which

If your value starts with 0x and is hex, route to the Ethereum chain page. If it starts with 1, 3, bc1q, or bc1p, or is a 64-character hex string with no prefix, route to the Bitcoin chain page. tx.taxi performs this detection automatically when you paste at tx.taxi/{value}.

A practical rule: if you got the value from an Ethereum wallet (MetaMask, Rabby, Frame, a hardware wallet over an EVM app), it is almost certainly Ethereum-shaped. If it came from a Bitcoin wallet (Electrum, Sparrow, Bitcoin Core, a Lightning wallet's on-chain side), it is Bitcoin-shaped. The chains have different cryptographic curves (secp256k1 is shared, but signature and address derivation differ), so identifiers are not interchangeable.

For deeper background, see UTXO vs account model and what is a block explorer.

Common confusions

The biggest source of confusion is the transaction model. A Bitcoin transaction does not "send X BTC from A to B" the way an Ethereum transaction does. Instead, it spends one or more unspent outputs (UTXOs) and creates new ones. Change is explicit: if you spend a 0.5 BTC UTXO and want to send 0.1 BTC, the transaction creates a 0.1 BTC output to the recipient and a 0.4-minus-fee output back to your own address. mempool.space shows this graph directly. Etherscan shows only the net account-balance change, because that is what Ethereum actually stores.

The second confusion is address reuse and privacy. Bitcoin wallets typically derive a fresh address for each transaction from an HD seed, so a single user can have hundreds of addresses. Ethereum users tend to reuse a single address across many transactions, which is normal for an account-model chain but means activity is more easily clustered. When you paste a Bitcoin address into mempool.space, you are looking at one of many addresses a wallet might own; on Etherscan, an address usually represents one logical account or one contract.

The third confusion is block timing. Bitcoin blocks target 10 minutes; Ethereum blocks target 12 seconds. That changes how you read confirmation depth. One Bitcoin confirmation is meaningful; one Ethereum confirmation is barely a heartbeat. Both explorers display confirmations, but the implied finality differs. tx.taxi does not opine on finality, it just routes you to the right explorer to see it.