Your first five minutes
Who this is for: anyone opening Core for the first time. Goal: find your way around and read one figure correctly. Prerequisites: a browser. No wallet, no account, no extension. Chain and network: Bitcoin and Dogecoin mainnet. Safety: nothing in this walk asks for a signature. If a wallet prompt appears during it, something is wrong: reject it and read market safety.
1. Open the right address
Section titled “1. Open the right address”Go to www.bitcoinuniverse.io.
The www matters. The bare bitcoinuniverse.io address redirects to a
different Bitcoin Universe application.
Expected result: a home screen that states how many protocols this build serves, counted from the same registry that builds the navigation, with start cards below it.
2. Search something
Section titled “2. Search something”Press Ctrl+K (or Cmd+K) to focus the search field, and paste any Bitcoin address.
Expected result: a result list with a confidence label. Core tells you whether it is confident, whether the input matched more than one thing, or whether it could not resolve it at all. It does not guess.
If you paste something ambiguous, such as a bare number, you will see several candidates: that number could be a block height, an inscription number, or a bitmap district. Core offers all three rather than picking one.
Verify: the result names the kind of thing it found. A result that says nothing about what it matched is a defect worth reporting.
3. Explore the address
Section titled “3. Explore the address”Open the address result.
Expected result: what that address holds, across the protocols Core reads, with no wallet connected and nothing to sign. Protocols that could not be read say so individually rather than being left out of the list.
Common failure state: a protocol row reading “unavailable”. That is a fact about the read, not about the address. See reading the numbers.
4. Open a protocol index
Section titled “4. Open a protocol index”Use the navigation to open an index, for example the Ordinals index.
Expected result: a table of that protocol’s assets with the figures the protocol publishes. Figures Core could not measure appear as a dash. Where a protocol’s index also reads the mempool, a Pending column shows unconfirmed mints; where it cannot answer that question, the column is absent rather than showing zero.
Verify: find one dash. Confirm you can tell it apart from a zero elsewhere on the same screen. That distinction is the product working correctly.
5. Open a market, and find one that is not available
Section titled “5. Open a market, and find one that is not available”Open Trade and pick a market.
Expected result: a family picker, the period the figures cover, a searchable table, and an activity feed.
Now find a market whose reader is down, or a protocol marked read-only in the support matrix.
Expected result: the page states plainly that the read failed and offers a retry, or that the protocol is browsable but not tradable. It does not present either as an empty market, and it does not show a buy control that cannot execute.
6. Check the source yourself
Section titled “6. Check the source yourself”Open api.bitcoinuniverse.io/indexer-health.
Expected result: a JSON document with one entry per protocol, naming the index that answered, its tip, the node tip, the lag between them, when it was last read successfully, and a reason code if it is not ready.
This is the answer to “where did that number come from”, one request away, for every protocol at once.
What you should now be able to do
Section titled “What you should now be able to do”- Reach Core at the correct address.
- Search without being guessed at.
- Read an address with no wallet connected.
- Tell a dash from a zero, and an outage from an empty market.
- Check any protocol’s data source and freshness yourself.
Recovery path
Section titled “Recovery path”If a screen looks wrong, reload once. If it still looks wrong, check
/indexer-health for that protocol before concluding anything about the market.
If the product and this documentation disagree, the documentation is the
defect: open an issue
and name the page and the screen.