Non-profit · Open source · Austin, TX
Bitcoin has no annual report.So we publish one.
Bitcoin Data Labs turns the public record of Bitcoin (every commit, review, channel and block) into open dashboards, datasets and reports that anyone can check. Daily, weekly and monthly, with no paywall.
Live From the lab's own pipelines
In partnership with
The lab at a glance
Four programs. One public record of Bitcoin.
Bitcoin's development, funding and network activity are public, but scattered across GitHub, mailing lists, IRC, Lightning gossip and the chain. Each program takes one part of that record and turns it into answers anyone can check.
Bitcoin Core
Who builds Bitcoin Core, who funds it, and is the project healthy?
- Orange Dev Tracker
- State of Bitcoin Core
- This Week in Bitcoin
- Orange Dev Network
- Funding Explorer
- Ecosystem Map
- Code Topology
Lightning & L2s
Which nodes matter, where is liquidity moving, and how are sidechains run?
- Lightning Dashboard
- LN Graph Viz
- L2 Watch
- Daily Ledger
- Node Spotlight
Forensics & Research
When something happens on-chain, what actually happened?
- Coldcard RNG Investigation
- Mining Pool Profiler
- OSS App Stats
- Deep Dives
Learn
How does Bitcoin work, well enough to verify it yourself?
- The Bitcoin Express
- The Cryptography Express
- No-BS Lightning Analytics
- Simulators & decoders
Program 01 · Orange Dev
LiveWho builds Bitcoin Core, and is it healthy?
Most of the Bitcoin network runs Bitcoin Core, yet no one publishes its operating numbers. Orange Dev does: one open pipeline over 17 years of development history, answering what ships, who builds it, who pays for it, and what gets built beyond it.
Public sources
- GitHub PRs & reviews
- BIPs
- Mailing list
- Delving Bitcoin
- IRC meetings
- Optech
- Grant records
One open pipeline
orange-dev-dataIngest → process → analyze → deliver. Commits since 2009, review history since 2010, identities resolved across GitHub, mailing lists and IRC.
Published as
- Dashboards
- Monthly report
- Weekly digest
- Meeting summaries
- Posts on X, LinkedIn & Nostr
Orange Dev Tracker
What is shipping in Bitcoin Core, and is the project healthy?
- How much merges each month, and whether review keeps pace
- The vital signs a funder should watch: bus factor, maintainer load, new-contributor inflow
- The monthly State of Bitcoin Core report, with every past edition archived
This Week in Bitcoin
What happened in Bitcoin Core this week?
- What merged, and what is waiting on review
- What the Thursday dev meeting decided, in five minutes
Orange Dev Network
Who builds Bitcoin, and how do they work together?
- A profile for every contributor across code, review, research and BIPs
- Who maintains what, and who influences whom
Funding Explorer
Who funds Bitcoin developers, and which work do they fund?
- Which funders back which developers and projects
- A profile for every funder and grantee
Ecosystem Map
What else is being built on Bitcoin, and by whom?
- The communities behind wallets, Lightning, libraries and mining
- Which projects and developers anchor each one
Code Topology
How does the Bitcoin Core codebase fit together?
- The subsystems of
bitcoin/src, mapped from#includedependencies - The files that bridge one subsystem to another
Program 02 · Lightning & Layer 2s
DailyWhich Lightning nodes matter, and where is the money moving?
Lightning, every day: gossip snapshots since May 2023 joined with on-chain channel opens and closes, to rank nodes, map the graph and follow capital. L2 Watch brings the same audit approach to sidechains, starting with Liquid.
Lightning Dashboard
Which nodes matter, and where is liquidity moving?
- PlebRank: every public node ranked, with leaderboards you can filter
- Node and channel explorers, per-node profiles and side-by-side comparison
- A daily ledger of channel opens, closes and capacity, plus a Node Spotlight every day
LN Graph Viz
What does the Lightning Network actually look like?
- The whole network, or only its Highway (>5M sats) and Freeway (>1 BTC) channels
- The bridge nodes that hold it together
L2 Watch
How much Bitcoin lives on sidechains, and how are they run?
- Liquid network activity and its reserve proof
- Federation signer participation, confidential-transaction adoption and asset issuance
- Measured from our own nodes, not a third-party API
Program 03 · Forensics & Research
When something happens on-chain, what really happened?
Standalone investigations that take one question and answer it with on-chain data, with the methodology published next to the findings.
1,983 BTC swept in 22 hours
What happened when a weak random-number generator was exploited?
- A wave-by-wave reconstruction across 4,925 drained addresses
- How the attacker's behavior changed, and where the funds went
- The full methodology, cross-checked externally
Mining Pool Profiler
How centralized is Bitcoin mining, and how has that changed?
- Every block since genesis attributed to its pool
- Market share, HHI concentration and top-3 dominance over time
OSS App Stats
Which Bitcoin open-source apps are people actually using?
- Downloads and release cadence for Bitcoin Core, LND, CLN, Sparrow, BDK and more
- Which projects ship often, and which have gone quiet
Deep Dives
When something breaks or shifts, what does the data say?
- Latest: The Summer Lightning Broke (a Little). Core Lightning lost a fifth of its public nodes and capacity; what gossip and the chain show about force closes and recovery
- Every piece ships with the numbers, the caveats and the code to reproduce them
Program 04 · Learn
How does Bitcoin work, well enough to verify it yourself?
Open data is only useful to people who can read it. Our books and interactive tools take a newcomer from first principles to decoding real transactions and routing real payments, free and in the open.
The Bitcoin Express
New to Bitcoin? Where do I start?
- Digital money, transactions, mining and wallets, from scratch
- From novice to knowledgeable in a few hours
The Cryptography Express
What cryptography do I need to understand Bitcoin?
- Symmetric and public-key systems, and hash functions
- A closing deep dive on the algorithms inside Bitcoin
No-BS Lightning Analytics
How do I analyze the Lightning Network with code?
- Nine hands-on notebooks: node counts, graph metrics, pathfinding, probing and HTLCs
- Real gossip data, plus the mempool, Blockstream and LND APIs
Simulators & Decoders
How do payments route, and how is a transaction built?
- Route a Lightning payment, hop by hop
- Decode witness data, channel IDs and HD addresses
- Simulate mining
The public square
The data comes to you.
Dashboards wait to be visited, so we also publish. Our automation renders each report from the same snapshot the dashboards use, then posts it to X, LinkedIn and Nostr on a fixed schedule.
Open data
Don't trust our charts. Check them.
Every dashboard reads files that sit in a public repository: more than ten datasets across four repos. Clone them, query them, cite them.
How we work
Open by default
Code is open source, data is public, and nothing sits behind a paywall or a login.
Reproducible
Every number on a page traces to a pipeline in a public repo, with a methodology page that explains it.
Honest about gaps
When data is missing, a chart says "unavailable". We never fill gaps with a guess. Development metrics are cut at T−1, so a partial day never skews a trend.
Measure, don't advocate
We report what the record shows about protocols, clients and people. We don't run a token and we don't take sides.
Who we are
Big-tech data discipline, run as a public good.
Bitcoin Data Labs is a non-profit based in Austin, Texas. It brings the standards of an enterprise data organization (reproducible pipelines, documented methods, fixed publishing schedules) to a network that has no central owner. More than 25 automated jobs keep the public record current every day.
Saurabh Kumar
Founder
15+ years leading data, analytics and experimentation: product optimization at PayPal, Head of Experimentation at realtor.com (News Corp), credit risk at HSBC, and an own consultancy that built mortgage and auto-loan risk models for a major US bank. In Bitcoin since 2017.
Author of two open books: The Art of Experimentation, on testing ideas cheaply and rigorously, and No-BS Lightning Analytics, a hands-on guide to data science on the Lightning Network.
Get involved
Build · Learn · Educate
- Build. Contribute to the pipelines and dashboards. Every repo is public and issues are open.
- Learn. Get hands-on with real Bitcoin, Lightning and developer data, the fastest way to understand the system.
- Educate. The tools you build become how the next cohort learns to verify for themselves.
Support the lab
Keep Bitcoin's public record free.
We run on grants and donations. Funding keeps the reports publishing and the data open, and lets us measure more of the ecosystem: more implementations, more layers, deeper research.