Indexed PolkadotBlockchain Data

The Polkadot relay chain produced its genesis block on 26 May 2020 and opened transfers later that year, alongside a redenomination that moved DOT by a factor of a hundred. It is a Layer 0: the relay chain hosts no applications, and instead finalizes blocks, holds the validator set and passes messages for the parachains connected to it, the first of which arrived in December 2021 through slot auctions. Consensus is split in two. BABE assigns block-production slots while GRANDPA finalizes runs of blocks, and the validators doing both are selected by Nominated Proof of Stake, where holders back candidates and share their rewards and their slashing risk. The chain’s own logic is a WebAssembly runtime held as state and replaceable by on-chain vote, so upgrades happen without a hard fork. DOT carries ten decimal places, state changes arrive as extrinsics rather than transactions, and accounts are SS58-encoded, which means one public key displays differently on Polkadot than on Moonbeam.

SonarX indexes relay-chain blocks, extrinsics and the events the runtime emits, balance transfers, nominations and validator sets, era-level staking rewards and slashes, governance and treasury records, and the cross-chain messages moving between connected networks. The same normalized model covers every network SonarX indexes, so relay-chain activity can be joined to parachain activity in one query rather than assembled from separate pipelines.

Full historical coverage is available today as a data-share or a file delivery. Real-time delivery is enabled on request. The real-time balances API is available for Polkadot, and the batch wallets, tokens and balances API can be enabled on request.

A block here cannot be read without knowing which runtime produced it. Extrinsics and events are compactly encoded, and their type layout comes from the metadata of the runtime active at that height, so the decoder has to be versioned along the chain and storage migrations have to be replayed in the order they happened. Two other shapes catch people out. An extrinsic can wrap a batch or a proxied call, so the account paying the fee is often not the account acting. And staking rewards are paid per era against nomination shares and commission, never as an ordinary transfer, so a nominator’s income has to be reconstructed rather than summed.

Staking accounting is the workload this chain exists to support. What a nominator actually earned depends on which validators it backed in each era, the commission they charged, and whether either was slashed, and none of that is visible as a transfer. Validator performance research is the second, reading era points, uptime consequences and slashing history to compare operators over long periods. Treasury and governance analysis is the third, since spends, referenda and their outcomes are relay-chain records rather than off-chain decisions. Cross-network position reporting is the fourth, following DOT as it moves between the relay chain and the parachains a holder actually uses. Staking analytics covers the reward side across chains, and Astar is a common second dataset when the question reaches application activity.

Tell us the delivery target, how far back you need and how fresh it has to be, and the share is scoped against that. Relay-chain history is available now, and streaming is provisioned on request. Say which parachains are in scope as well, since most questions that start here do not end here. The published coverage matrix for every network SonarX indexes lives in the data documentation, and the rest of the catalogue is at all indexed chains.