Bitcoin and Dogecoin data
Two different things are often confused, so they are stated apart.
Chain data is chain height, blocks, transactions, address activity, address UTXOs, and fee estimates. It comes from Universe-operated services.
Protocol data is what a metaprotocol index says about assets. Some families are read through an external provider. Where each number comes from covers that side.
This page is about the first.
The contract
Section titled “The contract”- Normal healthy requests stay within Universe-operated infrastructure.
- There is no public-provider fallback. A failed or slow service uses bounded retries and a circuit breaker, and is retried after a cooldown rather than being redirected to a public provider.
- Responses are checked for the expected content and shape before they are shown or used by a transaction workflow.
- Fee and chain-tip responses may use short-lived validated cache entries to smooth a brief interruption. Identical requests arriving together share one read rather than each opening their own.
- The public health contract reads its verified Bitcoin mainnet head through the same provider registry. An unavailable or invalid chain tip makes application read readiness fail closed.
- A failed protocol indexer stays visible in health diagnostics but never replaces the authoritative chain head with a zero.
- Address UTXO failure is reported as unavailable. It is never presented as a confirmed empty wallet.
- The primary service uses overlapping workers, so routine software reloads do not interrupt chain requests.
Caching
Section titled “Caching”Inscription images and previews are immutable, so they are cached and served with a long-lived immutable cache header and a content fingerprint. A browser that already holds a copy revalidates without downloading it again, which keeps a gallery of many tiles from competing with ordinary chain reads.
Health responses are the opposite: Cache-Control: no-store. A cached
readiness answer would be worse than none.
Broadcasts
Section titled “Broadcasts”A transaction broadcast is submitted once. If the network response is uncertain, Core checks whether the transaction is already visible before returning success. It does not blindly send the same transaction to a second provider, and there is no second provider to send it to.
During an outage
Section titled “During an outage”If the Universe-operated service is unavailable or returns invalid data, the API returns an explicit unavailable response. Short-lived validated cache entries may smooth a momentary interruption; a real outage produces a failure, not a stale figure.
Wait for recovery and refresh chain state before signing or repeating an action. Acting on stale chain data is how a purchase gets built around an output that is already spent.
Reading the tip yourself
Section titled “Reading the tip yourself”curl -s https://api.bitcoinuniverse.io/mempool/api/blocks/tip/heightcurl -s https://api.bitcoinuniverse.io/mempool/api/v1/fees/recommendedEvery response carries X-Universe-Release, X-Request-Id, and a
Server-Timing header attributing the time to database, upstream, and
application work. Quote the request id when reporting a problem.