A terminal dashboard for a running Blocknet node. Think top, but for your chain.
bntop reads the local node's API and renders a live, single-screen view of the
chain, network, mempool, mining, and the most recent blocks — refreshing in place
in your terminal.
- Chain — height, best hash, total work, on-disk size, average block time.
- Network — peer count, sync progress bar, sync target, ETA, identity age.
- Mempool — transaction count, size, and fee range.
- Mining — status, thread count, and live hashrate.
- Trends — sparklines for peers and mempool over time.
- Blocks — a scrolling feed of recent blocks with height, hash, tx count, reward, and age. Select one and open it to inspect the raw JSON.
There is also an ambient background animation tinted in the Blocknet brand color, which you can toggle off if you prefer a still screen.
A Blocknet node running locally. bntop finds it automatically, checking two
sources in order:
- CLI daemon —
127.0.0.1:8332, cookie at~/.config/bnt/data/mainnet/api.cookie. - GUI wallet (Tauri) — cookie in the app's data directory
(
~/Library/Application Support/com.blocknet.wallet/dataon macOS, the equivalent app-data path on Linux/Windows). The GUI binds a random API port, sobntopscans its port range and authenticates with the wallet's cookie to find the live one.
Either node's cookie is re-read on every request, so token rotations are picked
up automatically. If nothing is running yet, bntop shows a waiting screen and
connects on its own the moment a node comes up — whichever one it is.
bntop is read-only. It never mines, signs, or mutates node state — it only
polls the node's status endpoints.
go build
This produces a single bntop binary.
./bntop
It must be run in an interactive terminal. On start it connects to the node and
shows a splash until the first snapshot arrives. While the node is performing a
historic sync, bntop backs off the extra calls that contend for the chain lock
and shows sync progress with a live ETA.
| key | action |
|---|---|
↑ / ↓ |
move through the block feed |
enter |
inspect the selected block |
esc |
leave the inspector |
v |
toggle the background animation |
q |
quit |
Inside the inspector, ↑ / ↓ scroll the raw block JSON and enter or esc
returns to the dashboard.
BSD-3-Clause.