Master the Mempool.
Master Value in Motion.

Now You Can Monitor the Bitcoin Mempool with Blocknative’s Notify API

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.

Deploying Value On-Chain With Gold-Backed NFTs

What would coin collecting look like in the digital world? 

Jesse Johnson became obsessed with answering this question. And after he co-founded Mintable — a platform that makes it easy to mint and manage NFTs — he set to work to answer that question. 

Given his background in NFTs (non-fungible tokens), Jesse wanted to explore the idea of NFTs with intrinsic value. This eventually led to the creation of Bullionix — a decentralized gold mint where anyone can use Digix gold tokens to create NFTs. EachNFT minted on Bullionix has a specific weight of gold staked to it. Bullionix is the first crypto project to combine scarce NFTs with digital gold. 

Easily Support Custom Derivation Paths for Ledger and Trezor Wallets

While you can hold every private key in the palm on your hand, there are a staggering number of possible wallet addresses that can be generated from a seed phrase. And  advanced users may take advantage of these possibilities by using custom derivation paths on their hardware wallets to select new addresses. 

The ability to choose a custom derivation path is popular among developers (who need to access test nets) and whales (who have many accounts that they use to secure funds). And support for hardware wallets and custom derivation paths is a commonly requested feature for leading applications.

Having a native hardware wallet integration was the most requested feature for the 
Gnosis Safe multisig. Thanks to Blocknative, we were able to deliver an easy and trusted way to use a Ledger or Trezor device with a multisig using Onboard.js.

— Lukas Schor, Product Manager For Gnosis Safe

The latest release of Onboard.js enhances our hardware support module, adding the ability to choose from common derivation paths or enter a custom derivation path. Read on to learn about what custom derivation paths are and why supporting them matters. 

8 Lessons to Help You Master the Mempool

We want to wish the entire community well during the COVID-19 pandemic. While things are turbulent right now, we wanted to share a new post that dives deep into the mempool so that you can dig into an important part of the Web3 ecosystem.

Blockchains are transaction machines. But on-chain data represents value-at-rest — confirmed transactions. While pre-chain, or mempool, data explores value-in motion — transactions in flight. 

To date, the industry has largely focused on value-at-rest. This is an important piece of the Web3 puzzle. But for any transaction to be included in a block, it must move through the mempool. And unlike the blockchain — which acts as a definitive record — the mempool is chaotic, fragmented, and often unpredictable. 

In the course of building infrastructure to monitor the mempool, we've learned a lot about how it works. And at ETHDenver 2020 Matt Cutler, Blocknative's CEO and co-founder, shared some important lessons in his talk Mastering the Mempool: