Bitcoin blockchain explorer, built into the app

A lookup is a question to the blockchain: what does it know about this address, transaction or block? BTC Mate answers it without sending you to a website.

Short answer: BTC Mate includes a native Bitcoin blockchain explorer for iPhone. Search a public address, a transaction ID or a block height and see balance, transactions, inputs and outputs, confirmations, fees, the mempool and the latest blocks inside the app. Any address you look up can also be added to your tracked addresses for performance tracking.

What you can look up

An address. Balance, totals received and sent, the number of transactions and the full list of them. Addresses start with 1, 3 or bc1.

A transaction ID (64 hexadecimal characters). Inputs, outputs, amounts, fee, size and how many blocks have confirmed it.

A block height or block hash. The block's time, number of transactions, size and the mining pool that found it.

The mempool and fees. How many transactions are waiting, how large the backlog is and the recommended fee levels in sat/vB for no priority, low, medium and high.

Latest blocks and mining. The most recent blocks as they arrive, plus difficulty, the estimated change at the next adjustment and the current hashrate.

Search accepts pasted text or a scanned QR code. Nothing you look up leaves the app except the query itself, which goes to a public blockchain data provider, as any explorer website would.

Reading an address result

Balance is the sum of unspent outputs. Bitcoin does not keep a running account balance; it is computed from the outputs that have not been spent yet.
Received and sent totals are lifetime sums. An address that shows a large received total and a zero balance has simply been emptied.
Confirmations count how many blocks have been mined on top of the block containing a transaction. Zero means it is still in the mempool, waiting.
Counterparty addresses in a transaction are just other outputs. Wallets often send change back to a new address of their own, which looks like a payment to a stranger.

Fees and the mempool

Transactions that have been broadcast but not yet mined wait in the mempool. Miners prefer transactions paying a higher fee per virtual byte, so during busy periods low-fee transactions wait longer. Seeing the mempool size and recommended fees is useful context when a payment to your tracked address shows zero confirmations, and when you are about to send from your own wallet and want to choose a fee.

Explorer vs. tracker: from a lookup to performance

A lookup answers a question once. Tracking keeps the answer current and adds meaning: a label, a value in your currency, a history chart and estimated entry price and profit or loss. In BTC Mate both live in the same app: look up an address in the Explorer, and add the ones you want to keep watching as tracked addresses. That is the difference between BTC Mate and a block explorer website: the explorer shows raw data, the tracker turns it into a portfolio-style view of self-custodied Bitcoin. More about address tracking and how performance is estimated.

What the explorer is not

BTC Mate displays public blockchain data retrieved from a third-party provider; it does not run a Bitcoin node and does not validate blocks itself. It cannot create, sign or broadcast transactions, so nothing in the explorer can move funds. Looking up an address sends that address to the data provider, which is the same privacy trade-off as using any explorer website and is described in the Privacy Policy.

Beyond addresses: the network as a whole

The same public data that answers a lookup describes the network as a whole. The Insights tab and the Network page show block height, hashrate, difficulty, average block time, circulating supply and an interactive map of reachable Bitcoin nodes with a timeline from 2009 to today, each with a short explanation of what the figure means.