Data sources

Summary table

Per-source details

Ordiscan (BYOK)

Primary source for everything ordinals-related. Called via an authenticated server proxy with your personal (encrypted) key. Automatic rotation between your keys if quota is hit. A shared server-side cache may temporarily store some sat-ranges (immutable) to reduce quota consumption.

mempool.space (read proxy + direct broadcast)

Read/query traffic (fee rates, prices, chain tip, address and UTXO lookups) may go through our /api/public/mempool/* proxy. Light server cache: 15 s for fee rates, 60 s for prices, 10 s for chain tip, no cache for UTXO and address requests (always fresh). Broadcasting is different: once your wallet has signed, your browser sends the finalized transaction directly to mempool.space via POST /tx, without passing through our proxy. For the Inscriber, the atomic commit+reveal package is likewise posted directly to POST /api/v1/txs/package.

Blockstream.info (broadcast fallback)

If mempool.space rejects or doesn't respond for a broadcast, Bitcoin Tools automatically tries Blockstream.info. The already-known case is handled gracefully (txid extracted locally).

Sandshrew (Alkanes)

JSON-RPC call to detect whether a UTXO contains an Alkane asset. Without this call, an Alkane could be treated as a common UTXO and therefore burned.

ordinals.com

Used only by the Inscriber to fetch a visual preview of a delegate inscription.

Luke Dashjr node crawler

Source for the Active Bitcoin nodes counter on the Bitcoin Overview. We read the live total, listening (reachable) and unreachable counts from luke.dashjr.org/programs/bitcoin/files/charts/, and backfill the 31-day history from the same crawler. The dataset is refreshed daily; we sample once per day on our side.

WecSats (rare sats)

Second opinion on rare sats, used in addition to Ordiscan — never instead of it. WecSats can answer at three different levels of precision, and Bitcoin Tools keeps that precision visible instead of pretending it knows more than it does:

• Exact findings: WecSats names a specific sat. This is the only case where a badge can be attached to one identified sat.
• Range-level categories or counters: WecSats says a category exists somewhere inside a sat range, without naming the sat. The badge is then shown at range scope.
• Outpoint-level aggregates: WecSats says the UTXO as a whole carries a category. The badge is shown at UTXO scope.

Bitcoin Tools never invents an exact sat out of range-level or outpoint-level evidence. The optional WecSats score only applies to sats that are individually identified; a missing score never removes a category and never downgrades a badge.

Efficiency and privacy: enrichment goes through a single batched call (POST /search/batch_sat_ranges) covering up to 100 not-yet-cached outpoints at a time. Results are stored in a dedicated cache inside your own browser, separate from the Ordiscan cache. No wallet content and no WecSats enrichment is persisted in our backend. An administrator can switch the whole WecSats integration off globally; when it is off, no WecSats logic runs at all.

Local calculations and their references

Many rare-sat attributes are pure arithmetic on the sat number and are computed in your browser. Each one carries the reference that actually defines it:

• Casey Rodarmor's Ordinals Theory — the rarity ladder itself (common, uncommon, rare, epic, legendary, mythic).
• The community magicoss/ord-kafka reference, at a pinned commit, for the satributes it defines (alpha, omega, palindrome, vintage, block 9, block 78, block 286, block 666, Nakamoto, Pizza, JPEG, Hitman, Legacy, Silk Road, palinception families…).
• Bitcoin Tools local formulas for the remaining attributes, which no external reference defines (name palindromes, 2D/3D, Nova, prime, Fibonacci, Tesla 369, Trump, Rodarmor name, Hal Finney, sequence palindromes, the black-* tiers).

How a classification is presented

• “Confirmed” means at least two independent sources assert the same thing about the same exact sat. Two claims about different sats, or about a range instead of a sat, are not a confirmation.
• “Sources differ” is evaluated per sat and only when the evidence is comparable: one source explicitly says present and another explicitly says absent about the same sat and the same attribute.
• Missing or incomplete coverage is unknown, never a contradiction. Silence from a source is not a denial.
• Derived implications (one badge logically implying another) and manual flags you set yourself are shown as such, and never count as an independent confirmation.
• black-* satributes are badges only: they never promote a sat on the Ordinal Theory rarity axis.