Visualizing Bitcoin On-Chain Data

[SovInd582]

Hi all,

I’m looking to learn how to chart on-chain Bitcoin data using my own full node.

Right now, I rely on APIs from third-party on-chain data providers and use Plotly with Node.js/HTML to visualize the results. But I’d like to take a more self-sovereign approach: run a full Bitcoin node, extract the historical chain data myself, and generate charts directly from that.

From what I’ve gathered, I’ll need to run a full node and build an indexer—but beyond that, I’m not sure how to proceed.

Any advice, documentation, or project examples would be really helpful. Thanks in advance!

[nc50lc]

Any advice, documentation, or project examples would be really helpful. Thanks in advance!

You can try "BTC RPC Explorer" by janoside but I'm not sure if its "tools" are comparable to those online APIs that you're using.
There is an online live demo (linked in the repo) for you to try its features, however it's somehow offline right now.

Link to GitHub Repository: github.com/janoside/btc-rpc-explorer

[apogio]

You could also check statoshi.info by J. Lopp.
It's basically data dumped on a Grafana instance, which makes it easy to visualize.
The code is here: https://github.com/jlopp/statoshi

[ABCbits]

Any advice, documentation, or project examples would be really helpful. Thanks in advance!

1. You can avoid building some index manually if you also run Electrum server.
2. I don't know what 3rd party API you use. But you may want to consider running self-hosted block explorer (such as https://github.com/mempool/mempool) which also provide API, rather than calling Bitcoin RPC-JSON or Electrum server manually.

[Forsyth Jones]

I'd try plug-in-play nodes like Umbrel OS or MyNode. I've been running electrs (Electrum server) and btc-rpc-explorer for a while (since 2020-2024), but for some reason I can't install and run either anymore. 
 I used to follow this guide: https://raspibolt.org/guide/bitcoin/electrum-server.html (Just yesterday I spent almost the entire day trying on Ubuntu Linux). I think the instructions are outdated.

I think the best solution for me (and perhaps for you) would be to run a ready-made solution like Umbrel or MyNode. Both will give you your own node, block explorer and other cool applications.

[SovInd582]

Any advice, documentation, or project examples would be really helpful. Thanks in advance!

You can try "BTC RPC Explorer" by janoside but I'm not sure if its "tools" are comparable to those online APIs that you're using.
There is an online live demo (linked in the repo) for you to try its features, however it's somehow offline right now.

Link to GitHub Repository: github.com/janoside/btc-rpc-explorer

checking this now. thank you

[Donneski]

If what you’re aiming for is full control of your own data and some nice visuals on top, then I'll suggest running Electrs (https://github.com/romanz/electrs) with your Bitcoin full node and then hooking it up to Grafana (https://grafana.com) through a simple metrics setup.

You can check out Statoshi (https://github.com/jlopp/statoshi) by Jameson Lopp, it’s a good reference. He uses Prometheus (https://prometheus.io) to pull data straight from his node and feed it into Grafana dashboards. Once it’s up, you can monitor almost everything including mempool, blocks, peers, fee rates, you name it all in real time and without relying on anyone else’s API.

It takes a bit of work to get going especially wiring up Prometheus and Grafana but once you’ve done it, you’ll have your own fully self-hosted setup. No third-party dependence, just pure Bitcoin data visualized the way you want it. I hope this helps you.