Latest transactions on the blockchain

Question

I was looking at the etherscan API and I did not find a request that would simply list the latest transactions done on the blockchain (so not dependent of an address).

Ideally I'd like to see the 1000 first transactions available here: https://etherscan.io/txs

Everything I looked for was assuming I know the address sending/receiving the tokens. But here I just want to get all the latest transactions.

Alternatively is there something that would give me all the transactions done in a particular block? In that case I could just say give me all the transactions for the last 10 blocks and do my analysis afterwards.

PS: My end goal would be to monitor at a given time where is the trading activity concentrated. For example if I see that lots of ETHER is send to a specific address, I could look at this address to see what's going on: ICO or other.

Thanks

Answer 1

There is a web3 library that is available in several programming languages. For instance, you may use python implementation (web3.py). Here is a link where you may find more details.

this is an example:

web3 = Web3(HTTPProvider('link to the node'))
recent_block_number = web3.eth.blockNumber
for i in range(recent_block_number - 3, recent_block_number +1):
    block = web3.eth.getBlock(block_hash, full_transactions=True)
    transactions = block['transactions']

But you will need a local node. For testing reason Ganache would be appropriate. Hope this will help!