The 30-second version
- Copy a Bitcoin address from anywhere.
- Paste it into the search box on the home page and press Sniff.
- Read the Overview, then switch modes to dig deeper. Every address you see in a result is a link — click it to move to that address.
The six modes, in order of depth
- Overview (DF) — the health check. Balance, total received, total sent, transaction count and the address type, each with a live USD / GBP / EUR value.
- Received from (RF) — every address that has recently paid into the one you’re looking at, ordered by total value. Click one to walk backwards toward a source of funds.
- Sent to (ST) — the mirror image: every address this one has recently paid out to. Click one to follow the money forward.
- Highest outgoing (HO) — follows the single largest payment out, then the largest payment out of that address, and so on for up to five hops. The fastest way to see where a big balance ended up.
- Highest incoming (HI) — the same idea, inbound: the biggest single deposit, then the biggest into the address that sent it, up to five hops.
- Flow (FL) — the five biggest inflows and five biggest outflows on one screen, each card clickable, plus a running trail of the hops you’ve taken. On a desktop you can switch to the Graph view and see the whole spread as green (incoming) and red (outgoing) circles, traced three hops further in and out.
How to follow the flow of value
“Following the money” on Bitcoin means moving from one address to the next along the payments between them. Here is a typical trace:
- Start on the address you care about — say a project wallet you invested in. Run Sent to to see where it has been sending funds.
- One address stands out by value. Click it. You are now one hop downstream, looking at that address’s own Sent to list.
- Repeat. Each click is one hop. The trail at the top of the Flow view keeps the path so you can step back.
- When you just want the headline — where did the bulk of it go — switch to Highest outgoing and let BTC Sniffer take the five biggest hops for you.
- The trail usually ends at an exchange deposit address (money leaving the open chain) or fans out into many small amounts. Both are useful conclusions.
Because every amount is also shown in your currency, you can see value, not just coins: “this hop moved about £42,000” is easier to reason about than a string of satoshis.
Good to know
- Received from, Sent to and Flow read roughly the 50 most recent transactions, so they describe recent behaviour rather than an address’s whole life.
- One person can control many addresses, and one address can be shared by many people. A hop is a movement of coins, not proof of who is on either end.
- Prices come from public feeds and refresh automatically; fiat figures move with the market.