Bitnodes

Bitnodes is an open-source Bitcoin network crawler and web service that estimates the size of the Bitcoin peer-to-peer network by finding all of its reachable and unreachable nodes^[2]. Originally created and operated by developer Addy Yeow, the project publishes network snapshots, geographic distribution maps, charts, and an API covering the population of publicly listening Bitcoin full nodes^[1][2].

The bitnodes.io service has been offline pending restoration: as of 2026 the original domain is held and maintained by Rodrigo Martínez, who announced an independent rebuild of the former service while inviting the original author to participate in the transition^[1].

What It Does

Bitnodes measures the health and size of the Bitcoin peer-to-peer network. Its headline metric is the count of reachable nodes — Bitcoin full nodes that accept incoming connections — together with breakdowns by protocol version, client user agent, country, and autonomous system^[1][2].

Beyond raw counts, the service lets any node operator verify whether their own node is visible to the network through a "Check Your Node" feature, and exposes historical archives of past crawls for longitudinal analysis^[2].

Data And Methodology

The crawler works by recursively sending `getaddr` messages over the Bitcoin peer-to-peer protocol, starting from a set of seed nodes, until it has enumerated all reachable nodes^[2]. It speaks Bitcoin protocol version 70001 or higher, corresponding to clients at or above Satoshi 0.8.x, so nodes running older protocol versions are skipped^[2].

Collected snapshots are enriched with GeoIP resolution and stored in Redis; companion scripts handle DNS seeding, ping latency checks, and packet capture analysis^[2]. The codebase is Python and MIT-licensed, with continuous integration via CircleCI^[2].

Products And Outputs

The project's public outputs documented in its repository include a network snapshot page, ASN health views, DNS seeder health monitoring, time-series charts, a live map and network map of node locations, a leaderboard of long-running nodes, Bitcoin client status tracking, and a global node address directory^[2].

An API exposes crawl data such as network snapshots for programmatic access, making the dataset usable for research dashboards and analytics beyond the website itself^[2].

Buyers And Use Cases

Bitnodes has been a free community resource rather than a commercial product. Its typical users are node operators checking their own visibility, researchers studying the decentralization and geographic distribution of Bitcoin infrastructure, and developers building tools that need node-count or node-list data through the API^[1][2].

History

Bitnodes was created and operated by Addy Yeow, whose GitHub repository remains the canonical source of the crawler code, accumulating hundreds of commits and several hundred stars and forks^[1][2]. The bitnodes.io site later went dark, and in 2026 the domain was secured by Rodrigo Martínez, who stated he is carrying out an independent rebuild of the service, explicitly noting the effort is not affiliated with or endorsed by the original author and offering to return the domain or coordinate the transition^[1].

Landscape

Node-crawling occupies a niche adjacent to broader blockchain analytics vendors: where commercial crypto data providers focus on on-chain transactions and market data, Bitnodes-type crawlers measure network-layer decentralization. The current steward also operates related projects btcnodes.io and bitdis.org for continued network observation^[1].