Every minute, blockchains move over $2 million in value. But understanding and acting on this in-flight value is challenging for even the most sophisticated and well-resourced of teams. Before any transaction can be confirmed on-chain, it must move through the mempool. As we have previously discussed, this is an often overlooked portion of the blockchain ecosystem.

At Blocknative, we run Notify — a global node network that captures and organizes mempool transactions in real-time. Historically, we have focused on the Ethereum blockchain. Today, we are excited to announce the addition of Bitcoin support to our distributed node infrastructure.

Now developers can access real-time state change notifications for both Ethereum and Bitcoin transactions with a single, consistent API.

Multi-Chain Support

In 2019, the blockchain ecosystem crossed 1 billion transactions in aggregate for the first time. Transaction volumes are growing quickly — at a CAGR of 44%. Bitcoin and Ethereum are the two largest public blockchains, as measured by both transaction volume and total transaction value.

It is no surprise that adding Bitcoin support has been among our most requested features. This is important to any company that works across multiple chains — including many wallets and exchanges.

Notify Support for Bitcoin

Supporting Bitcoin has been an interesting challenge. Bitcoin's UTXO transaction structure is quite different from Ethereum, so we built new infrastructure that can handle both transaction types in a unified API. Importantly, as we continue to ship new features and capabilities to the underlying Notify API, all supported chains will benefit.

We now operate multiple Bitcoin nodes within our network. We created Bitcoin-specific monitoring extensions to track transactions as they move through the mempool. Finally, we implemented systems to organize, extend, and enrich the raw Bitcoin transaction data – just like we do for in-flight Ethereum transactions.

This initial release of Bitcoin supports Mainnet and Testnet and emits real-time API events for both pending and confirmed transactions. Developers can monitor both specific Bitcoin Transaction ID's (TXID) and Bitcoin addresses.

A Snippet of Notify's Bitcoin Payload

We are excited to bring many of the same powerful capabilities that we provide to Ethereum developers to the Bitcoin ecosystem. For instance, wallets that support Bitcoin can leverage Notify events to send real-time alerts about both incoming and ongoing transactions, as well as provide detailed status updates describing in-flight transactions. Notify API is also a powerful tool for automated trading systems and exchanges that need to respond instantly to value moving in or out of specific addresses.

This is a major milestone for our team, and we're just getting started with Bitcoin functionality and our support for multiple blockchains.

We would like to invite you and your team to explore Blocknative's Notify API today – getting started is free and takes just a few minutes. If you have questions or specific requirements for Bitcoin support, please let us know via our public Discord server.