Late last night, I stumbled across an interesting new Bitcoin-related project called Merkle. Do not confuse this project with Merkle trees Bitcoin developers have been talking about for the past year or so though. Merkle is a Google-esque search engine for anything related to Bitcoin, whether it is news, charts or even creating a new address with a private key.
When you open the Merkle.io website for the very first time, you might be shocked by what you see, as there isn’t too much going on. Then again, if you open up the Google.com page for the very first time, you are presented with a nearly identical page. Granted, Google has a better logo than Merkle has, but that shouldn’t matter much in terms of functionality.
Merkle.io calls itself the “Google for blockchains”, and that is exactly what this search engine wants to become. Functionality is currently limited to Bitcoin only, but there are plans to hook into other coins’ API’s as well in the future in order to extend the same functionality to those coins. And there are some nifty features to be found when using Merkle.
For instance, whenever you want to generate a new Bitcoin address, you can do it through Merkle. Simply open the website, enter “getnewaddress”, and you will be presented with a new Bitcoin address and its very own private key. Whether or not Merkle stores all of this data somewhere is not clear at this point, so use this feature at your own risk for now.
Are you looking for the current Bitcoin charts? Click on the “charts” menu item on the left-hand side of your screen, and you are presented with the latest price charts. It has to be noted that, at the time of publication, the charts feature was still under development and currently shows fake data. However, it does give us an indication of what kind of information we will see on this page in the near future.
Speaking of what we can expect to see on this page, the creator has also embedded a small news feed on the charts page. For the time being, it shows the latest CoinDesk news, but we can only hope to see other news outlets appear on this page as well. All in all, it’s a good combination to show the price charts and the latest Bitcoin news on one and the same page, so kudos to the creator for doing so.
Other features to be found on the Merkle website include looking up Bitcoin addresses and transactions, and a “proof exploration feature” will be coming soon. On the topic of new features being added, Merkle will soon be able to look up assets [such as colored coins] as well. Once all of these features have been rolled out, Merkle could prove to be a very versatile and valuable tool to digital currency enthusiasts.
Note from the Author: For those of you wondering who is running the Merkle project, it is the same person who created Bitproof.io
Website: https://merkle.io/
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