What Happened to Bitnodes.io?

[escodelrio]

Bitnodes.io was a website that tracked various Bitcoin node metrics that many other websites relied on for up-to-date figures. Their "reachable" nodes count was essentially unique to them. The website has been having issues since about March and is now completely offline. It seems a lot of other websites are now frozen as to the number of Bitcoin nodes since late April 2026.

Anyone has any information about the team behind bitnodes.io? Are they down temporarily or permanently?

It seems there is now a vacuum in the space as to the number of reachable nodes.

The only current site I can find is Luke Dashr's site, but he tracks all nodes, whether they have port 8333 open or not.

[hd49728]

The only current site I can find is Luke Dashr's site, but he tracks all nodes, whether they have port 8333 open or not.

Another site you can try for checking Bitcoin nodes is https://bitref.com/nodes/
Did you use that site before?

This https://newhedge.io/bitcoin/node-map is not technical but visual cool.

[escodelrio]

The only current site I can find is Luke Dashr's site, but he tracks all nodes, whether they have port 8333 open or not.

Another site you can try for checking Bitcoin nodes is https://bitref.com/nodes/
Did you use that site before?

This https://newhedge.io/bitcoin/node-map is not technical but visual cool.

Yes, I have that site bookmarked, but they have not updated their node count since late April 2026. I suspect they were using Bitnodes.io's API tools. All major sites other than Luke's have been frozen since that date.

[Smartprofit]

As far as I understand, Bitnodes.io is essentially a one-man project (Addy Yeow).🤷

It's one of the most important information services in the Bitcoin ecosystem. At the same time, it was likely unprofitable. Yes, Addy received donations in satoshis and earned a little from advertising, but he also incurred large expenses on server maintenance and software updates.

I see a paradox here. There's a very important and unique service. It has no equal. Meanwhile, the Bitcoin community can't find the money to support it. Everyone applauds Michael Saylor ("What a great guy, Michael, he's done so much for Bitcoin"). But no one cares about Addy Yeow...

And now he's disappeared, and everyone's scratching their heads (not knowing what to do next). Because the entire industry relied on information from Bitnodes.io to operate.

[escodelrio]

As far as I understand, Bitnodes.io is essentially a one-man project (Addy Yeow).🤷

It's one of the most important information services in the Bitcoin ecosystem. At the same time, it was likely unprofitable. Yes, Addy received donations in satoshis and earned a little from advertising, but he also incurred large expenses on server maintenance and software updates.

I see a paradox here. There's a very important and unique service. It has no equal. Meanwhile, the Bitcoin community can't find the money to support it. Everyone applauds Michael Saylor ("What a great guy, Michael, he's done so much for Bitcoin"). But no one cares about Addy Yeow...

And now he's disappeared, and everyone's scratching their heads (not knowing what to do next). Because the entire industry relied on information from Bitnodes.io to operate.

I was not aware of Addy Yeow. He really didn't advertise himself on the site. Nor was it obvious that donations were required to keep the project running. It seems to me he could have made that much clearer a long time earlier before running the site became untenable.

Also, it may have been possible for him to sell the site and continue running it.

It was a very useful site, but one that was not run with a lot of transparency...

[DaveF]

Domain Name: BITNODES.IO
Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.101domain.com
Registrar URL: https://www.101domain.com/
Updated Date: 2026-05-05T14:02:43Z
Creation Date: 2013-05-03T11:57:41Z
Registrar Registration Expiration Date: 2026-05-03T11:57:41Z
Registrar: https://www.101domain.com/
Registrar IANA ID: 1011
Registrar Abuse Contact Email: abuse@101domain.com
Registrar Abuse Contact Phone: +1.8582954626
Name Server: KAY.NS.CLOUDFLARE.COM
Name Server: CODY.NS.CLOUDFLARE.COM
URL of the ICANN WHOIS Data Problem Reporting System: http://wdprs.internic.net
>>> Last update of WHOIS database: 2026-05-05 <<<


It expired. Could be he forgot to renew it, could be he just walked away from it.
Unless he tells us we will never know.

-Dave

[ABCbits]

Someone also asked about it on https://github.com/ayeowch/bitnodes/issues/107 since 2 weeks ago, but there's no response from the owner.

And now he's disappeared, and everyone's scratching their heads (not knowing what to do next). Because the entire industry relied on information from Bitnodes.io to operate.

Bitnodes is open source, so what people could do next is running their own Bitnodes instance. Although who knows how many would actually run it, since it can't be cheap considering potential traffic.

[matthias.kit]

It seems there is now a vacuum in the space as to the number of reachable nodes.

We run a monitoring (https://www.dsn.kastel.kit.edu/bitcoin/) of the Bitcoin P2P network at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT).
On that website, we provide our results of a measurement of the number of reachable nodes similar to that offered by bitnodes.io. Although with the restriction that we currently count only reachable nodes connected over IP and we do not provide information about individual nodes as detailed as bitnodes.io does.

Also, see https://www.lopp.net/bitcoin-information/statistics-metrics.html for a collection of several other monitoring projects.

[suzanne5223]

As far as I understand, Bitnodes.io is essentially a one-man project (Addy Yeow).🤷

It's one of the most important information services in the Bitcoin ecosystem. At the same time, it was likely unprofitable. Yes, Addy received donations in satoshis and earned a little from advertising, but he also incurred large expenses on server maintenance and software updates.

I see a paradox here. There's a very important and unique service. It has no equal. Meanwhile, the Bitcoin community can't find the money to support it. Everyone applauds Michael Saylor ("What a great guy, Michael, he's done so much for Bitcoin"). But no one cares about Addy Yeow...

And now he's disappeared, and everyone's scratching their heads (not knowing what to do next). Because the entire industry relied on information from Bitnodes.io to operate.

In addition to what you said.
The Bitnodes website is also used for a Bitcoin node monitoring service, and estimating the size of the Bitcoin peer-to-peer network. Based on what i heard, the site started experiencing issues around March 2026, which i believe its funding, since the website domain expired on May 3, 2026, so shutdown operation close to the date of domain expiration is not a coincident.
However, the OP can use the alternative websites like bitref.com/nodes/, or newhedge.io/bitcoin/node-map

[cloxy]

I am the owner of BitRef. The tool has been using my own crawler for the past few days. This is a slow and resource-intensive process—it takes around 6–7 hours to check the status of all Bitcoin nodes. That is why I update the data on the site twice a day.

I have also enhanced the node-specific check to provide more detailed information. Starting today, a live check is performed to determine whether a given Bitcoin node is currently reachable. This is an important feature for users who are setting up a listening node and opening port 8333.

I am also working on a map of nodes by country. However, my main priority for now is the technical side of the system, and I am continuously working on improvements. The goal is to help users monitor the Bitcoin network and verify whether their own node is publicly accessible.

If you need any additional features or tools, feel free to let me know—I will do my best to implement them.

[brunneis]

Bitnodes.io was a website that tracked various Bitcoin node metrics that many other websites relied on for up-to-date figures. Their "reachable" nodes count was essentially unique to them. The website has been having issues since about March and is now completely offline. It seems a lot of other websites are now frozen as to the number of Bitcoin nodes since late April 2026.

Anyone has any information about the team behind bitnodes.io? Are they down temporarily or permanently?

It seems there is now a vacuum in the space as to the number of reachable nodes.

The only current site I can find is Luke Dashr's site, but he tracks all nodes, whether they have port 8333 open or not.

I (https://x.com/brunneis) am working on bringing back https://bitnodes.io/ around the end of August with most of the original functionality and API compatibility. I managed to secure the domain somehow. You can check https://btcnodes.io/ (WIP) in the meantime with some functionality already working.

I leave below what I already commented on https://github.com/ayeowch/bitnodes/issues/107:

A few months ago, I launched https://btcnodes.io/ (WIP) to restore access to some of the Bitnodes functionality used by https://bitdis.org/ and other dashboards that relied on the original service.

A couple of days ago, I managed to secure the original https://bitnodes.io/ domain.

I have some time off later in August, so I'm planning to dedicate much of it to this project.

I've been gathering as much material from the original Bitnodes service as possible: URLs, archived pages, screenshots, X posts, and anything else that remains available online. I also gained access to the domain's Google Search Console data, which contains thousands of previously indexed URLs.

My immediate goal is to bring back as many of those URLs as possible, along with the content and functionality users would expect from them.

https://bitnodes.io/ will aim to be a faithful reconstruction of the last publicly available version of Bitnodes. I'll fix existing issues and gradually introduce new functionality, but restoring the original site and preserving compatibility with its existing URLs are the priorities for now.

https://btcnodes.io/, meanwhile, will remain my more opinionated take on the service. In the future, I may run separate crawlers for the two sites.

I'm also making substantial changes to the crawler itself. I plan to publish all those changes soon in my fork of this repository (https://github.com/brunneis/btcnodes).

If there is anything you would like to see on Bitnodes (e.g., feature requests, improvements), please send them my way: https://x.com/brunneis.

If you would like to support the restoration and continued development of Bitnodes, donations are also welcome. Contributions will help cover development work and project expenses, including hosting and infrastructure, domain acquisition and renewal costs, and LLM usage.

Code:

bc1qagenl4lvx7vl8xu4dacvxh9rdqxy2kfqa6jw2p

Addy, thank you for all the work you have put into Bitnodes over the years. I hope you're doing well.

My intention is not to claim credit for your work or present it as my own, but to preserve and continue what you built after the original service became unavailable. Please get in touch if you would like the domain returned, would like to be involved, or have any concerns or suggestions regarding the project. I will respect your wishes.


Long live Bitnodes!

— Rodrigo