bsv.lol is a new site that turns live BSV network activity into animated visualizations and retro-style games, but it’s more than just addictive fun. CoinGeek spoke with its creator, GorillaPool co-founder Michael Boyd, to learn more.
The project is part data art, part nostalgia trip, and is built entirely from actual blockchain transactions as they happen. But it’s also an educational tool. The games include pop-up information that shows players what’s happening on the blockchain in real time—how many transactions of certain types are moving, which apps are generating the most activity, how often blocks are mined, and which miners are processing them.
Boyd said he built it partly to resurrect bitcoinblocks.live, a much-loved but now sadly defunct site that displayed BSV network activity in real time. Someone posted an old screenshot of it, and he felt the pull of nostalgia.
“I wanted to bring that back, and it seemed popular with the community,” he said.
The centerpiece is “BSV Highway,” a five-lane road through a stylized city where every vehicle represents a live BSV transaction. Motorcycles carry IoT and sensor data. Police cars represent locks. Sports cars carry game transactions. Buses haul 1Sat Ordinals. Semi-trucks move files and media. Taxis carry social and chat data. Sedans handle regular transactions. The vehicles stream past in real time, their speed and density reflecting actual network activity.
There is also a button that adds a frog to the scene. Click it, and you are playing Frogger with live blockchain traffic. When the frog inevitably gets squashed, an on-screen message shows who was responsible: “Squashed by Metanet,” or whatever transaction type happened to run it over.
“Immediately, people wanted a Frogger-style game from it, so I quickly added that,” Boyd said.
That success got him thinking about what other retro games could use the transaction firehose as a mechanic. He landed on “BSV Paratrooper,” a port of the classic 1980s DOS game “Paratrooper“—itself a clone of the Apple II game “Sabotage.” For every BSV transaction, a helicopter drops a paratrooper. Players can shoot choppers and parachutists, just like in the original. When a block is processed, a jet arrives for an airstrike that clears the field (and announces which miner found the block).
Our live test list is incomplete because Boyd continues to add more features by the day. The newest is “Blocktris,” and if you think that sounds suspiciously like Tetris… you’d be right.
bsv.lol also includes a screensaver-like aquarium where different aquatic creatures swim by for different transaction types. Click a fish to view the transaction details behind it. Boyd said the aquarium is still evolving; he’s working on a more ambitious ecosystem simulation in which creatures grow and change based on UTXO lineage.
“A transaction is a reproduction event: the inputs (parents) die, and the outputs (children) are born,” he said. “Every Satoshi’s ancestry can be walked back to a coinbase, which means miners are a primordial energy source from which all life descends. Sats are like conserved energy. Fees are energy lost each generation, and miners recycle the entropy, like decomposers.”
The entire ecosystem, he noted, is a deterministic function of the blockchain. Change the biology rules, and you can re-evolve the world from Genesis whenever you want.
Boyd described bsv.lol as a personal side project, though it carries the “powered by GorillaPool” label. He said it could drive traffic to BananaBlocks and GorillaPool, but for now, the goal is simpler: make blockchain data accessible and entertaining.
“It’s mainly for fun right now,” he said.
The visualizations are genuinely striking—the highway, in particular, has a hypnotic quality that makes it easy to leave them running on a second screen. The sound effects and color themes add to the atmosphere without overwhelming the data underneath. And the retro game ports, while simple, are surprisingly addictive. The BSV Paratrooper game captures the same tension as the original: too many choppers, not enough ammo, and the desperate hope that the next airstrike arrives before you’re overrun (especially when someone, somewhere, fires up the “TX Blaster”).
What’s less obvious at first is that the games are quietly teaching you about the network itself. Pop-up notifications appear as you play, showing how many transactions of each type are moving, which apps are generating the most activity, how often blocks are mined, and which miners are processing them. After an hour or two of playing, you realize you’ve absorbed information you would probably have ignored on a simple chart: the names of the miners, the frequency of different transaction types, the rhythm of block production. The data sinks in because you are engaged, not because you are studying.
Whether bsv.lol becomes a serious research tool or remains a toy is an open question. But it does something valuable either way: it makes the blockchain visible. Most people never see the transactions they are reading about. Boyd has turned them into traffic, paratroopers, and fish and made the network feel more alive.
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