Frequently asked questions about BTC Mate

BTC Mate is an iPhone app for tracking public Bitcoin addresses and estimating the performance of Bitcoin held in self-custody. You enter a public address and see balance, activity, estimated entry price, estimated profit/loss and historical performance, based on public blockchain data and historical prices. The app also includes a native blockchain explorer, an interactive map of reachable Bitcoin nodes, Bitcoin education, market data and a news reader.

No. BTC Mate is a tracking and analytics tool, not a wallet. It does not hold Bitcoin, does not manage keys and cannot send or receive funds. You keep using the wallet you already have; BTC Mate only reads public information about the addresses you choose to track.

No. A public Bitcoin address only allows viewing the blockchain activity associated with it. Moving Bitcoin requires the private key, which BTC Mate never asks for and never has. The app has no way to sign or initiate a transaction.

No. Public-address tracking only needs the public address. BTC Mate has no field for a private key and never requests one. As a general rule, never enter a private key into any app or website that only needs to display information.

No. BTC Mate never asks for a seed phrase (recovery phrase). A seed phrase can regenerate every private key of a wallet and must stay offline and secret. Any app that asks for it in order to "track" your balance should be treated with extreme caution.

Yes. Every Bitcoin transaction is recorded on a public blockchain, so anyone with a public address can see its balance and the transactions that involve it. BTC Mate uses exactly this public information to show balance, activity and estimated performance for the addresses you add.

Yes. A cold wallet keeps the private keys offline, but its addresses are still public. Add the receiving address of your cold wallet to BTC Mate and you get a watch-only view of its balance and estimated performance while the keys never leave cold storage.

Yes. BTC Mate only needs the public address. It reads the address's transaction history from the blockchain, combines it with historical Bitcoin prices and shows estimated entry price, estimated profit/loss and value over time. The wallet is never connected, and no private key or seed phrase is entered. How performance tracking works.

Yes, in the same way as any other Bitcoin address. Copy a receiving address from your hardware wallet and add it to BTC Mate. The device stays disconnected; the app only reads public blockchain data for that address.

You can track Bitcoin addresses that belong to a Ledger device by entering their public addresses. There is no direct integration or official partnership: BTC Mate does not connect to the device and does not use Ledger software. Ledger is a trademark of its owner.

You can track Bitcoin addresses that belong to a Trezor device by entering their public addresses. As with any hardware wallet, there is no device connection and no official partnership; BTC Mate simply reads public blockchain data for the address. Trezor is a trademark of its owner.

Watch-only tracking means observing a Bitcoin address without being able to spend from it. It uses only the public address, never the private key. BTC Mate is a watch-only tool: everything it shows is derived from public blockchain data, and it cannot control the funds it displays. Read more about watch-only tracking.

No. BTC Mate cannot send, receive or initiate Bitcoin transactions. It has no access to private keys and no transaction functionality of any kind.

No. BTC Mate is not an exchange or a brokerage and does not offer trading, buying, selling or payments. It shows market information for reference only.

BTC Mate looks at the incoming transactions of an address on the blockchain and uses the historical Bitcoin price at the time of each transaction as the estimated acquisition price for those coins. From this it derives an estimated entry price and compares the estimated acquisition value with the current market value to show an estimated profit or loss. Full explanation of the method and its limits.

For each incoming transaction to a tracked address, BTC Mate takes the historical Bitcoin price at the time the transaction confirmed as the estimated acquisition price of those coins. The estimated entry price is the average of these prices weighted by amount, and the sum is the estimated cost basis. It is an estimate because the blockchain records when coins arrived, not what you paid.

Estimated. The blockchain records when Bitcoin arrived at an address, not what you paid for it in fiat or where you bought it. If you bought on an exchange and withdrew later, or received Bitcoin as a gift or payment, the on-chain timestamp differs from your real purchase. Treat the figures as an informed estimate, not as a tax record.

For any address: its current balance, every transaction that sent Bitcoin to or from it, the amounts, the timestamps and confirmations, and the other addresses involved in those transactions. Not visible: who owns the address, the private key, and the price anyone paid. What can and cannot be seen from a public address.

No. A public address can receive Bitcoin and be looked up, but spending requires a signature from the corresponding private key. Sharing a public address does not give anyone control over the funds. It does reveal the balance and transaction history of that address, so it has privacy implications worth considering.

A block explorer shows raw data for one address at a time: balance in BTC and a list of transactions. BTC Mate saves your addresses with labels, values them in your currency, adds historical performance charts, estimated entry price and profit/loss, and puts market data, network insights and news in the same app. It also includes its own block explorer for looking up blocks, transactions and addresses.

A wallet holds private keys and lets you spend Bitcoin. BTC Mate holds no keys and cannot spend anything. It is a read-only companion for the wallet you already use, focused on tracking, analysis and information.

An interactive globe of reachable Bitcoin nodes, with a timeline from 2009 to today and current figures for hashrate, difficulty and block height. Node data comes from a public node-crawler snapshot that the app refreshes periodically, so it is current rather than real-time. More about the network map.

Yes. You can look up addresses, transaction IDs and block heights inside the app and see balance, inputs and outputs, confirmations, fees, the mempool and the latest blocks. BTC Mate displays public data from a blockchain data provider; it does not run a Bitcoin node. About the explorer.

Yes. The News tab gathers headlines from several publishers and opens articles in a native reader with text and images, always attributed and linked to the original publisher. It also shows upcoming market events and selected posts from curated accounts. BTC Mate does not write the news. About the news reader.

Yes. Short explanations sit next to the data: how a transaction travels, what the mempool is, what halvings do to supply, what nodes do, what sats and BTC dominance are, plus a glossary. What you can learn inside BTC Mate.

Yes. BTC Mate is available on the App Store for iPhone and requires iOS 26.2 or later. The App Store listing also shows compatibility with Mac (Apple silicon) and Apple Vision. There is currently no Android version.

Yes. You can add multiple public addresses, each with its own label; the app does not impose a fixed limit. BTC Mate shows them individually and combined. Since a wallet usually consists of several addresses, add each address that holds coins for a complete picture.

The addresses and settings you enter are stored on your device. To display balances and prices, the app requests public blockchain data and market data from third-party providers; the public address you track is sent to the blockchain data provider for that purpose. Details are in the Privacy Policy.

BTC Mate is listed as free on the App Store. Check the App Store listing for the current price and any changes.