A cryptocurrency is a digital or virtual currency that is secured by cryptography, which makes it nearly impossible to counterfeit or double-spend. Typically it does not exist in physical form (like paper money) and is also typically not issued by a central authority. Instead, there’s decentralized control.
Cryptocurrencies have not only had an impact on the world’s expectations surrounding money. They’ve also continued to evolve since the first Bitcoin block was mined back in 2009. Since then, thousands of unique cryptocurrencies have appeared.
Of these, Bitcoin remains the most popular with others such as Ethereum, Tether and BNB lagging a long way behind. Some economists, including several Nobel laureates, characterized it as a speculative bubble. But Bitcoin has seen significant adoption by professional investors.
cryptofetch is a terminal-based tool in the style of neofetch that displays cryptocurrency prices and statistics. This is free and open source software.
Installation
I evaluated cryptofetch using the Manjaro distribution. There’s an AUR package available but it currently fails to build on my test system. I’m showing the output using yay but other AUR tools like Pamac get the same results.
I could edit the PKGBUILD to circumvent this error (it’s very simple) and it’ll probably have been fixed by the time you read this. In Linux there are often multiple ways of installing a program. The software installs fine with its install script.
$ curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/julianYaman/cryptofetch/main/scripts/install.sh | bash
The developer also provides binaries for Linux, macOS, and Windows, but I haven’t tested them.
In Operation
Issuing the command $ cryptofetch with no flags displays Bitcoin information.
The --cur flag lets you specify other cryptocurrencies. In the images below, I’m showing Ethereum and Solana data.
$ cryptofetch --cur ethereum
$ cryptofetch --cur solana
Features include:
- Display cryptocurrency data in a neofetch-style layout.
- ASCII art for popular cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cardano, Solana, Ripple, Dogecoin, Polkadot).
- Real-time price data from CoinGecko API.
- Price change percentages for 1h, 24h, and 7d.
- Market cap, volume, and rank information.
- Color-coded price changes (green for positive, red for negative). The day change information (red) is a bit hard to read with my terminal emulator.
Summary
cryptofetch is a visually appealing way of accessing the CoinGecko API. It supports all cryptocurrencies that are available on CoinGecko.
cryptofetch only saw its initial release yesterday.
Website: github.com/julianYaman/cryptofetch
Support:
Developer: Julian Yaman
License: MIT License
cryptofetch is written in Go. Learn Go with our recommended free books and free tutorials.