Namecoin Blocks

What the block height counts

One block is one 10-minute heartbeat of the chain, so the height is a clock as much as a counter: 845,324 blocks as of 2026-10-03 works out to about 16.1 years of target-pace heartbeats — against an actual chain age of 15.5 years since the genesis block our node holds (timestamped 2011-04-17). The gap is itself a measurement: across its whole life this chain has averaged about 9m 37s per block, slightly fast — the signature of difficulty epochs forever catching up to fifteen years of growing parent-pool work. What makes our figure different from an explorer’s: this tip is verified block-by-block by our own node from genesis, over the coin’s P2P network. Nothing on this page is quoted from anyone.

The 10-minute target, and what the interval tells you

The interval tile is the chain’s pulse against its target. Averaging under 10 minutes — 575.6 s as of 2026-10-03 — means more work is pointed at the chain than the current difficulty assumes; on an epoch chain nothing answers until the retarget, up to 2,016 blocks later, so the fast pace simply persists and the epoch finishes early. The signed version of this story is the e_hafeer gauge on the difficulty page, recipe included.

One caveat we keep making because it keeps being true: luck dominates short samples. Block discovery is memoryless, so individual gaps scatter from seconds to the better part of an hour on a perfectly healthy chain. Read the average, not the gap.

Where’s the block table?

There is no trusted public NMC block feed left to borrow even if we wanted one — when we checked on 2026-10-03, namecha.in was unreachable and cryptoid had dropped its NMC explorer — and our public endpoint serves aggregates today, so this page shows aggregates, honestly. The better news is that NMC is the chain where a real table is closest: AuxPoW chain ID 1 is clean and constant, and our node already stores every block’s Bitcoin parent coinbase — 128 blocks captured in the first day, nine distinct pool tags read out of them. A table built from our own archive, with parent-pool names that are receipts rather than guesses, is the version worth waiting for.

Why it matters for miners

Blocks per day times the per-block reward (subsidy plus fees) is the entire revenue stream this chain shares out — about 150 blocks a day at 3.125 NMC each as of 2026-10-03, verified from coinbases on our own node, plus fees whose history our archive is still banking. And interval drift is the earliest own-node tell that basket work moved: a Bitcoin pool re-aiming its roster shows up here as fast or slow blocks long before any third party reports anything — on this chain, often before the difficulty itself is allowed to respond. This is where merged mining began: chain ID 1, running since block 19,200 in October 2011 — the longest-lived AuxPoW arrangement in existence.

FAQ

How often does Namecoin find a block?

The target is one block every 10 minutes, with difficulty re-aimed once per 2,016-block epoch to hold that pace. Our own node measured the recent average at 575.6 s as of 2026-10-03 — running slightly fast, as this chain has for most of its life; the live tile above updates every 60 seconds.

How many NMC blocks per day?

144 at the 10-minute target — 86,400 seconds in a day divided by 600. The measured figure was about 150 as of 2026-10-03: the actual count wanders with block-time luck and parent-pool basket shifts, and runs above target whenever the basket has grown since the last retarget.

Why do intervals average below 10 minutes?

Two reasons. Randomness: block discovery is a lottery, so short samples scatter widely around the target even on a perfectly healthy chain. And epoch lag: when Bitcoin parent pools grow the work pointed at this chain, difficulty — frozen between 2,016-block retargets — takes up to two weeks to answer, and blocks run persistently fast in the meantime. Persistent deviation is exactly what the difficulty-pressure gauge on the difficulty page is reading.

Why is there no list of recent blocks here?

Because we will not borrow one — and on this chain there is nobody left to borrow from: the public explorers were down or frozen when we checked on 2026-10-03. Our node records every block with its Bitcoin parent coinbase, and the per-block table ships from that archive — with parent-pool attribution that actually works here, because AuxPoW chain ID 1 is constant and the receipts are stored. We say so rather than guess.