Data Freshness Score
Percentage of merchant listings verified or updated within the last 12 months. A quality metric that separates reliable adoption data from outdated ghost listings.
What is it?
Tracks the overall percentage of BTCMap entries that have been verified within a recent timeframe (typically 6 or 12 months). This is the global health score for the entire BTCMap dataset. A higher percentage means the community is actively maintaining and verifying merchant listings. This metric addresses a fundamental question for any community-sourced database: how much of the data can you trust right now? It is the single most important data quality indicator for all adoption metrics.
How to read
A single gold percentage line on the left Y-axis tracking the share of verified-recently merchant listings (0 to 100%), with a BTC price overlay on the right USD axis for cycle context. A rising trend indicates improving data maintenance; a falling trend warns that data is becoming stale faster than it is being refreshed. Sudden jumps typically coincide with verification campaigns; gradual declines suggest contributor fatigue or faster registry growth than verification bandwidth.
Key zones
Two named quality bands are drawn with dashed threshold lines and shaded zones on the percentage axis: above 60% is the healthy tier (green shaded zone) where the community is keeping pace with merchant additions; 40% to 60% is the moderate-quality band (amber shaded); below 40% is the stale zone (red shaded) marking contributor fatigue or that registry growth has outpaced verification capacity. 100% freshness is practically unattainable for a global community-sourced database, so the absolute reading should also be compared with the dataset's long-run average visible in the historical track of the gold line.
What to observe
Track the rate of change - freshness increasing by 5+ percentage points per quarter indicates strong community momentum. Freshness plateauing despite growing merchant count suggests contributor growth isn't keeping pace with data growth. Watch for the impact of community events (conferences, hackathons) on freshness spikes.
Historical context
Before BTCMap introduced verification tracking, there was no way to assess data quality. Many Bitcoin maps included merchants that had stopped accepting Bitcoin years earlier. The introduction of verification timestamps in 2022 was a watershed moment for data reliability. Since then, community-organized verification campaigns have steadily improved global freshness, though coverage remains uneven across regions.
Expert notes
Freshness is necessary but not sufficient for data quality. A merchant verified last week could still be incorrectly tagged (wrong category, wrong payment methods). Verification also varies in thoroughness - some contributors physically visit merchants, others check online presence. The metric measures recency of review, not accuracy of review.
Common mistakes to avoid
Freshness does not guarantee accuracy - a recently verified merchant may still have incorrect data. Freshness declining does not mean merchants are closing - it means the verification community is less active. Do not conflate data quality with adoption quality; a 90% fresh dataset showing 10,000 merchants is not better than a 50% fresh dataset showing 30,000 merchants - they measure different things.
Programmatic access
REST API
curl -sS \
'https://api.trinityinsights.io/api/v1/onchain/btcmap-data-freshness/history?days=90' \
-H 'X-API-Key: $TRINITY_API_KEY'MCP server
{
"tool": "get_chart_value",
"metric_id": "btcmap-data-freshness",
"timeframe": "1y"
}Required tier: free. See the pricing grid for the tier list and the MCP documentation for multi-client configuration.
Related metrics
Institutional disclaimer
Trinity Insights is an educational and analytical tool. The metric above does not constitute investment advice. Trinity Insights is not a Crypto-Asset Service Provider (CASP) registered under MiCA Regulation (EU) 2023/1114. See the full disclaimer.