Live Bitcoin transactions as bubbles

Block explorers show Bitcoin transactions as a scrolling list of hashes. Technically accurate, and unreadable unless you already know what you're looking for. This page takes the same live data from mempool.space and turns each transaction into a bubble instead. Bigger bubble, bigger transaction. The BTC figure on each one is the transaction's real total value as recorded on the blockchain, with no rounding and no estimating on our end.

Up to 100 bubbles stay on screen at once. New transactions fade in as they reach the mempool, and the oldest fade out to make room. Click any bubble to see its transaction ID and the inputs and outputs behind it: which addresses funded it, and where the money went. Some people prefer reading the raw JSON. I understand those people less every year.

What the colors and sizes mean

Orange means the transaction is still waiting in the mempool for a miner to include it in a block. Green means it's confirmed. New arrivals get a small "NEW" badge and a ten-second ring so you can spot them before they drift into the crowd. Note that this isn't a gain and loss color scheme like the rest of the site: green here means a transaction cleared the network, not that a price went up.

Size is the transaction's total value, and it's exact for a reason. Bitcoin doesn't really do "wallet A sent X to wallet B." Under its UTXO model, one transaction can draw from several inputs and pay several outputs at once, so there's rarely a clean sender-and-receiver story to tell. Plenty of tools guess at one. I didn't want this chart built on guesses, so each bubble is one transaction, sized by what it actually moved.

How long does a Bitcoin transaction take?

Usually somewhere between ten minutes and an hour for the first confirmation, though the fee decides most of it. Bitcoin adds a new block roughly every ten minutes on average, and each block has limited space. Miners fill it with the transactions paying the highest fee for the space they take up, so a transaction with a competitive fee is often confirmed in the next block or two, while a cheap one can wait for hours when the network is busy.

That ten-minute rhythm comes from proof of work, which is also why Bitcoin will never match the second-level speeds some newer chains advertise; the proof of stake vs proof of work comparison explains the trade-off. For payments that need to be instant, most Bitcoin users now reach for the Lightning Network, the best-known bitcoin layer 2, and settle on the main chain later.

Most exchanges wait for more than one confirmation before crediting a deposit, commonly between one and six depending on the amount. On this chart, the moment a bubble turns from orange to green is that first confirmation.

Why a Bitcoin transaction stays unconfirmed

Almost always because the fee was too low for how busy the mempool is. When lots of people are transacting at once, low-fee transactions queue behind higher-paying ones, and an orange bubble can sit there long after it scrolls off this screen.

There are two standard fixes. If the sending wallet marked the transaction as replaceable, it can rebroadcast it with a higher fee (replace-by-fee). If not, the receiver can spend the unconfirmed coins in a new transaction with a high enough fee to pay for both (child pays for parent). Some services, including mempool.space's own accelerator, will also prioritize a stuck transaction for a fee. If nothing is done, most nodes drop an unconfirmed transaction from their mempool after about two weeks and the coins return to the sender's wallet.

When a bubble is huge

Most of what you'll see here is small: a few hundred dollars moving between addresses, over and over, all day. Then a bubble balloons past everything else because someone just moved 40, 80, sometimes 200 BTC or more in one go. Anything at 50 BTC or above is logged permanently in our bitcoin whale transactions table, so it doesn't vanish after a minute on screen. This chart shows the last few minutes; the whale table keeps the record.

Dormant coins are their own small subculture. Coins untouched for a decade occasionally wake up and move, and a corner of the internet tracks these events like birdwatchers logging a rare sighting. In May 2020, 50 BTC mined in February 2009 suddenly moved, and half of crypto Twitter spent the day arguing about whether Satoshi was back. Nobody ever settled it. If a bubble like that appears while you're watching, click it before it fades.

Who's behind the addresses

Click into a bubble and you'll usually see a raw address with no name attached, because Bitcoin doesn't identify anyone by default. Some addresses we've already labeled, mostly known exchanges plus wallets confirmed to belong to large holders, and when one matches you see the label instead. The full ranked list of the biggest labeled holders is on the bitcoin rich list, with their recent inflows and outflows.

Other ways to watch the network

This page is one view of Bitcoin's activity. The live transaction bubbles hub collects all of them, and if you came here looking for price bubbles instead, with every coin sized by market cap and colored by performance, that's the main Blockchain Bubbles chart.

Outside this site, mempool.space itself is the best place for fee estimates and for looking up a specific transaction ID. TxStreet turns the mempool into a city of buses and passengers (the buses are a nice touch), which is a fun way to see congestion. BitListen turns the same data into sound, so you hear transactions arrive instead of watching them, and it has been doing that for years. For technical analysis, meaning indicators and trendlines, TradingView is the right tool; this page doesn't try to be that.

A few questions people ask