Welcome to the wiki for Blockchain Watcher! Here, you'll find the latest information about the app which compliments the information you can find on the official website: http://blog.alexrichardford.com/portfolio/blockchain-watcher

Overview

Blockchain Watcher is a responsive (mobile, desktop, and web) app for the simple goal of displaying the value of addresses on the various cryptocurrency blockchains.

It was born out of the developer's desire to watch a multitude of addresses, spread across many different cryptocurrencies, and finding no way to do it that would be ubiquitous across mobile and desktop environments.

The app makes use of Ionic Framework, which is a beautiful UI library with a technology stack comprised of AngularJS and Apache Cordova, allowing for the creation of responsive apps using HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript/TypeScript programming languages.

See the Latest Screenshots page for screenshots of the app!

Contents

Users of the app will be most interested in the usage pages:

• User Documentation
  • Finding your addresses
  • Notifications
  • Portfolio
• Latest screenshots

Other content, mostly for me to flush out my thoughts, can be found on the following:

• Business Model
• Development and Design
  • Development notes
  • Software development process
  • What makes a good block explorer
• Testing
  • Test Addresses

Motivation

In addition to the desire to have something for watching multiple addresses across multiple cryptocurrency blockchains, this project also serves as a learning exercise for me! It's introducing several technologies that I have little to no experience with. This will help me when I develop far more complex projects, such as REALMs.

Use Cases

Here we will go over some of the most prominent use cases, or reasons why users may want to use the app.

Watching cold storage addresses

This is actually the main reason why I created this app. I started getting interested in moving my cryptocurrencies away from online wallets and exchanges, towards keeping them in cold storage. Because of the increased security measures that come with cold storage, I found it difficult to keep track of my balances on several points:

1. Only a few apps support the ability to watch addresses, and those apps are all single crypto oriented.
2. Using block explorers directly works, but it's not as convenient, especially on the go, and you still have to go to a different website for each type of crypto.
3. Want an easy way to monitor my public addresses across any blockchain, to know when transfers are confirmed and to recognize fraudulent activity ASAP.

Watching shared addresses

Some entities use one or more addresses as a shared account for various reasons. It's useful to be able to monitor the balance of these addresses, especially when lots of other players and involved and lots of transactions are happening.