mempool-galaxy

Real-time Bitcoin mempool visualized as a particle-physics galaxy in your terminal. Each unconfirmed transaction is a star — fee rate encodes its orbit and color. Blocks eat stars with a nova. No node required: ships with a --demo flag.

Live preview → open preview.html in any browser.

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What you see

Color	Fee rate
dim gray	< 1 sat/vB
cool blue	1–5 sat/vB
cyan	5–20 sat/vB
green	20–50 sat/vB
yellow	50–100 sat/vB
orange	100–300 sat/vB
white-hot	300+ sat/vB

High-fee transactions burn bright at the galactic core. Low-fee dust drifts in the outer arms. CPFP chains render as connected particles orbiting together — package relay made visible.

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Install

cargo install mempool-galaxy

Run without a node (bundled demo recording):

mempool-galaxy --demo

Connect to Bitcoin Core:

mempool-galaxy --rpc-url http://127.0.0.1:8332 --rpc-user <user> --rpc-pass <pass>

Falls back to mempool.space WebSocket automatically if RPC is unreachable.

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Controls

Key	Action
+ / -	Zoom in / out
Arrow keys	Pan
Mouse scroll	Zoom
Mouse drag	Pan
p	Pause physics
r	Reset view
d	Toggle demo mode
q / Ctrl-C	Quit

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Architecture

Five crates communicating over channels and shared state:

mg-pipeline  →  mg-core (MempoolState + TxGraph)
                    ↓
              mg-physics (rayon particle sim)
                    ↓
              mg-renderer (crossterm + half-blocks)
                    ↓
                mg-cli (clap + input handler)

• mg-pipeline — Bitcoin Core RPC + ZMQ, mempool.space WebSocket fallback
• mg-core — bdk_chain::TxGraph<()> for CPFP ancestor tracking, event broadcast bus
• mg-physics — per-frame gravity/spring/repulsion forces parallelized with rayon; nova effect on block arrival; spatial grid for O(n·k) at 10k particles
• mg-renderer — custom framebuffer, Unicode half-block (▀▄█) doubling, differential flush (~80% I/O reduction), Gaussian glow per star
• mg-cli — clap args, config from ~/.config/mempool-galaxy/config.toml, demo record/replay

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Requirements

• Rust 1.80+
• True-color terminal (iTerm2, Kitty, Alacritty, Windows Terminal)
• Bitcoin Core (optional — demo mode works standalone)

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License

MIT or Apache-2.0