Viewing the world of cryptocurrency via a block explorer isn’t exactly exciting. That’s what data visualisations are for — the transformation boring bits and bytes into something pretty. CryptoLights is a website that takes Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum and Nano transactions and turns them into a glowing digital meteor storm.
While they’re nice to look at, the shape, colour and trail of each meteor provides extensive details about the transactions they represent, as the website explains:
You will see all live, unconfirmed transactions (except for NANO) being propagated to the net. Each transaction “meteor” will have a colour and size according to its monetary value and a trail according to the amount of fees paid for it.
The higher the value of the transaction, the bigger / redder the meteor. While higher fees make meteors go faster, the speed is not the actual transaction speed, because those can vary wildly between different coins.
If that’s not enough, you can click on each meteor for more information. Also, every so often you’ll see a descending blue bar — this signals that a block has just been mined.
The project is open-source, with the code available on GitHub. It includes a pretty extensive readme, if you’re especially curious about how it all works.