Inspiration / Vision
The idea is provide a live view into the bitcoin mempool with an aesthetically pleasing, artistic, and intuitive display, while still providing useful data, unifying financial information with any other data embedded in transactions (e.g. inscriptions, op_return)
What it does / How it's built
The browser shows a lazy loaded infinite scroll of raw transaction hex data in the mempool from mempool.space. Overlayed on top are any inscriptions found within the witness data. At the top of the page, stats, such as total # of transactions and total size, are shown.
Python was used with the requests library to pull mempool statistics and raw transaction data from mempool.space. The frontend is build with HTML, CSS, and Javascript and the backend is provided with the Flask python web framework.
Challenges / Accomplishments
The two most challenging aspects faced were trying to provide a live look into the mempool and trying to develop an aesthetically pleasing and informative display. Although many intended features are quite lacking or non-existent, I am proud I was able to deliver a basic proof of concept that may be educational and that I can build upon.
What's next for memepool.cool
As I alluded to previously, I think providing a better real time view into the state of the mempool is necessary. I at least want a real time view of a single node. Perhaps I can poll various sources and feed to a proper database backend. Or perhaps I can allow users to hook in their own node via RPC for public and / or private display, which may have a different mempool, as the consensus rules allow.
Furthermore, I intend to take great care developing a nice UI. I like the idea of displaying the raw hex mostly for artistic purposes but it also lends to allowing the user to understand size. Overlayed on top of this, can be useful statistics (perhaps with a tooltip on hover) and any inscription or other data overlayed on top as well. This may allow for the user to not only get an idea of the relative amount of data existing in mempool transactions but how it corresponds to fee rate, etc, while also providing a way to view and discover content they may be interested in.
I want this to be unifying source of practical details and displaying embedded content, that a user can look at and understand without necessarily dissecting the details too much, but also has those details there if desired.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.