Bitview and the Bitcoin Research Kit

This monorepo contains two layers:

• Bitcoin Research Kit (BRK): reusable Rust primitives for reading Bitcoin Core data, RPC, mempool tracking, storage, domain types, and the on-chain price oracle.
• Bitview: the self-hostable application that composes BRK with a typed indexer and analytics plugin graph, query layer, REST server, website, and generated clients.

Together they turn a Bitcoin Core node into a local Bitcoin data platform for chain exploration, mempool data, and on-chain research. The official free hosted instance is bitview.space.

Bitcoin Core ──> BRK reader, RPC, and mempool ──> Bitview plugins
                                                      │
                                                      v
                                            Query + REST server
                                              │      │      │
                                              v      v      v
                                           Website Clients  MCP

See Architecture for the component and data-flow details.

Repository map

Each publishable crate or client owns its detailed usage documentation. The main README is only the map and common entrypoint.

Use Bitview

The hosted website, API, and MCP endpoint require no account or authentication:

• Website
• Interactive API
• OpenAPI
• MCP client endpoint: https://mcp.bitview.space/
• CLI
• JavaScript
• Python
• Rust

curl https://bitview.space/api/mempool/price
curl https://bitview.space/api/series/count

The series catalog is discovered at runtime rather than documented as a hard-coded count. Use /api/series/search?q=<concept> to find identifiers.

Self-host Bitview

rustup update && RUSTFLAGS="-C target-cpu=native" cargo install --locked bitviewd
bitviewd

The default composition requires Linux or macOS, a Bitcoin Core node with RPC and readable blk*.dat files, about 290 GiB for Bitview plus Bitcoin Core storage and growth headroom, and 16 GB of RAM recommended for a full sync. The website and API listen on localhost:3110.

Bitview uses sparse files, so logical size is much larger than allocated disk space. Use du -sh ~/.bitview to measure actual usage.

See the bitviewd guide for installation, configuration, initial sync, storage, and custom compositions.

Build with BRK

Use the umbrella crate for BRK primitives without the full Bitview application:

[dependencies]
brk = { version = "0.11", features = ["reader", "rpc", "types"] }

See the brk crate guide for its feature map. For a new Bitview metric or composition, start with the custom plugin example and the bitview_plugin contract.

Develop

The repository pins its Rust toolchain in rust-toolchain.toml.

cargo check --workspace
cargo test --workspace

Documentation

• Architecture
• Changelog
• Self-hosting
• BRK crates
• Plugin contract
• Custom plugin example
• Professional hosting

Support and community

BRK is supported by OpenSats from December 2024 through June 2027.

Discord · X · Issues · Support

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License

MIT