Live Ledger Pulse

The newest block or ledger on four public networks, read straight from open data services as you watch. Each network produces records at a very different rhythm, and that rhythm says a lot about how it reaches agreement.

Latest ledger on each network

Sources: mempool.space (Bitcoin), the public XRP Ledger cluster at xrplcluster.com, Stellar Horizon and the Hedera mirror node. Your browser contacts these services directly. Figures are informational and can lag or pause if a service is busy.

What these numbers mean

A blockchain or distributed ledger is a shared record that grows in batches. Bitcoin calls each batch a block; the XRP Ledger and Stellar call it a ledger; Hedera’s public mirror nodes group activity into record files, which the mirror node API exposes as blocks. The number you see is the batch’s position in the chain, so it only ever rises, and the transaction count tells you how much activity that batch carried.

Bitcoin is designed to find a new block roughly every ten minutes using proof of work, so its counter moves slowly and each block is large. The XRP Ledger and Stellar agree on a new ledger every few seconds, because validators vote on the next set of transactions instead of racing to solve a puzzle. Hedera uses a different design, the hashgraph, in which nodes gossip transactions to each other and reach agreement by virtual voting. The practical result is a faster rhythm and smaller batches. Our consensus comparison sets the three approaches side by side, and the Ripple and Stellar deep dives walk through how the voting works.

Treat the transaction counts as a rough pulse rather than a measure of usefulness. A busy network is not automatically a better one, and counts include automated and low-value activity.

Where value is locked

“Total value locked”, or TVL, is the dollar value of crypto assets deposited in decentralised finance applications on a given chain. It is a common way to compare how much capital different smart contract platforms attract. It is also easy to misread: it moves with token prices, it can double count assets that are re-deposited elsewhere, and a large number does not mean a platform is safe or well used. The ranking below comes from DefiLlama and refreshes every fifteen minutes or so.

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Data: DefiLlama public API.

Latest software releases

Networks are run by software that volunteers and companies keep updating. Release dates show how actively a project is maintained, and a new release often precedes a protocol change. The list is sorted by release date, is cached for up to an hour, and links to each project’s release notes on GitHub.

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Data: GitHub public releases API. Only stable releases are shown.