Bitcoin node counters go dark following Bitnodes expiry
It used to be easy to estimate how many Bitcoin full nodes were easily reachable over the internet, but almost all of those counters have gone offline this month. As of Tuesday, Coin Dances node counter reported a last-updated time of 476 hours ago. Indeed, the page displays 23,795 reachable nodes as of its latest update last month. Bitcoin node estimates plastered across dashboards, glossaries, and other webpages havent moved in roughly three weeks. The main culprit seems to be Bitnodes.io, a popular crawler that ran continuously since 2013 yet went dark after its domain expired on May 3, 2026. A single developer, Addy Yeow, ran the project with early financial support from Balaji Srinavasans 21 Inc, once the best-funded company in the Bitcoin industry. Neither Srinavasan nor Yeow have issued public statements on the GitHub repository or anywhere else about the outage. NewHedge used Bitnodes API and, therefore, has taken its counter offline. Another Bitnodes API user, SatoshiDashboard, also went down. Clark Moody‘s dashboard simply re-posts Bitnodes’ old cached number. Navigating to bitnodes.io itself returns a DNS error. Bitnodes was a fan favorite Two weeks into the outage, BitMEX Research proposed a rudimentary replacement crawler, Bitnod.es, using off-the-shelf tooling. With sincere modesty, BitMEX Research conceded that the substitute is