Afterglowscreensavers

State Of The Chain Screensaver

The State Of The Chain screensaver shows the Bitcoin network's operating numbers rather than its price: block height, blocks and transactions in the last 24 hours, mempool backlog, total pending fees, difficulty, coins in circulation and the size of the chain on disk. It runs in the browser with nothing to install; press ESC to exit.

Live preview

Press ESC to leave fullscreen. Settings are saved in your browser only.

How the State Of The Chain screensaver works

The saver reads Blockchair's public statistics endpoint, key-free.

No account and no key: the request goes straight from your browser, or from this site's own refreshed copy of the feed where the source does not allow browser access.

Values are drawn on a canvas that resizes with the window, so it works on a laptop or a wall display.

If the source is unreachable the saver says so on screen rather than showing stale numbers as though they were current.

A worked example

Ten labelled figures in a grid. Difficulty moves slowly — it retargets every 2016 blocks, roughly a fortnight — while the mempool count and its total pending fee swing within hours as the queue builds and clears. Circulation is divided down from satoshis, because drawn raw it would read as two quadrillion bitcoin.

Settings & tips

Frequently asked questions

What is the mempool?
The queue of transactions that have been broadcast but not yet included in a block. When it grows, fees rise, because users bid against each other for the limited space in the next block.
Why does difficulty change?
The network targets one block every ten minutes. Every 2016 blocks it recalculates how hard the mining puzzle must be to hold that pace as mining power joins or leaves.
Is this real data?
Yes. It comes from Blockchair's public statistics endpoint, key-free. Nothing is invented or simulated, and if the source cannot be reached the saver reports that instead of drawing something plausible.
Does it cost anything or need an account?
No. Every screensaver here is free, runs in the browser and needs no sign-up. This one uses a public API that requires no key.

← All Crypto & Blockchain screensavers