def METHOD_NAME(explorer_url: str):
    # Retrieve the JSON data from the "blocks" endpoint
    request = urllib.request.Request(f"{explorer_url}api/blocks", headers={"User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0"})
    with urllib.request.urlopen(request) as response:
        json_data = response.read()
    # Parse and return the JSON data
    return json.loads(json_data)