Older solana blocks have no timestamp?

Question

Block on solscan: https://solscan.io/block/31810590 (no timestamp)

Solana beach: https://solanabeach.io/block/31810590 (transactions with timestamp 01.01.1970)

Solana explorer https://explorer.solana.com/block/31810590 (timestamp unavailable)

solana fm: https://solana.fm/block/31810590?cluster=mainnet-alpha ( timestamp 01.01.1970)

Even native rpc call to a node has a null blocktime:

curl https://api.mainnet-beta.solana.com/ -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d ' { "jsonrpc": "2.0","id":1, "method":"getBlock", "params": [ 31810590, { "encoding": "json", "maxSupportedTransactionVersion":0, "transactionDetails":"none", "rewards":false } ] } '

Response:

{ "jsonrpc": "2.0", "result": { "blockHeight": null, "blockTime": null, "blockhash": "6BAz3Jf8izERKitV1c9ywhV4C44E7nsdVsHTeTVBU92Z", "parentSlot": 31810589, "previousBlockhash": "5rCR9d3wprTKLJN1Jtjzwq8G1Xwv4KaXbtKd5wUC1yHX" }, "id": 1 }

What's the deal with these older blocks? I see all blocks older than 39600000 have no timestamp. Can it be found somewhere else?

Answer 1

Block times were only added to the long-term block storage at the end of September 2020 in this pull request: https://github.com/solana-labs/solana/pull/11955

You'll notice that the first timestamps that start appearing on blocks in the explorer start around October 2020, e.g. https://explorer.solana.com/block/39900000

Knowing that the network launched on 16 March 2020, and you have that first block timestamp, you could interpolate any blocks in between, but it won't be exact. That's the best solution I can come up with unfortunately!