Overview
pool.pm is a free website for watching a blockchain as it happens (payments landing, tokens being minted, votes being cast), shown as a live timeline instead of a table of rows. Look up a wallet, a stake pool, or an NFT, and you get that subject's own activity stream, updating as new blocks arrive1.
The chain it covers is Cardano, and it maps the parts people tend to look up: stake pools and the wallets delegating to them, addresses and their balances, native tokens and NFTs, and DReps, the delegated representatives who vote on Cardano's governance decisions2. pool.pm has run since 2020, built and maintained by Rémi Lefèvre, who also operates the SMAUG stake pool3. A Project Catalyst grant later funded a ground-up rebuild, published as open source4.
Key Features
- See a wallet's whole story on one page. Enter a Cardano address, or an ADA Handle (the readable username, written with a dollar sign, that stands in for a long address), to get its balance, the stake pool it delegates to, its tokens and NFTs, and a timeline of its transactions5.
- Stake pool pages built for delegators. Search a pool by its ticker, the short code its operator picks, to see delegated ADA, its fees, the blocks it has produced, and a sortable list of the wallets delegating to it1.
- Governance activity in plain view. Each DRep gets a page recording how it voted on individual governance actions, plus the share of the actions it was eligible for that it actually voted on1.
- Transactions before they are confirmed. pool.pm watches the mempool, the queue of transactions waiting to be packed into a block, so a payment appears on screen ahead of settling1.
- Open code, and a testnet to practice on. The indexer that reads the chain and the website that displays it are published together under the MIT license1, and a separate deployment serves Cardano's preprod test network6.
What to Expect
You land on a page that is already moving. A header strip carries the network's headline figures: ADA in circulation, how much of it is staked, how many stake pools and DReps exist, and where the epoch (Cardano's five-day accounting cycle) sits. Beneath it, a feed of transactions, delegations, and votes scrolls past as blocks arrive2.
Search is the main way in. The box accepts a stake pool ticker, a DRep name, an ADA Handle, or a raw address or asset identifier pasted from elsewhere, and drops you onto that subject's feed1. From there you can open a minting policy's full gallery of NFTs (a minting policy is the on-chain rule that identifies a collection), or a pool's delegator list, without leaving the site.
It helps to know what pool.pm is not. A community-maintained comparison of Cardano explorers marks it as covering stake pool information, native assets, and metadata, while leaving general chain queries, analytics, and top-holder lists to tools such as AdaStat, Cardanoscan, and Cexplorer7. pool.pm is for watching the chain move and browsing what sits on it.
