StarGear Ticker

A no-nonsense macOS menu bar Bitcoin price ticker. No telemetry, no shitcoins, no charts. Just the price.

What it is

StarGear Ticker is a single binary macOS app that lives in your menu bar and shows the current Bitcoin price in USD. It polls a handful of well known public price APIs, picks the first one that answers, and prints the number.

That is the entire product.

Who it is for

Bitcoin holders who want a quiet, honest price ticker on their Mac. No analytics. No accounts. No altcoin tabs. No upsell. If you have ever closed a price app because it tried to sell you a yield product or asked for your email, this is for you.

What it does

• Shows the current Bitcoin price in USD in the menu bar, formatted as ₿ 76,234.
• Polls five public Bitcoin price APIs in priority order, with automatic failover: mempool.space, Coinbase, Kraken, blockchain.info, CoinGecko.
• Click the menu bar item to see the source API, the last updated time, and a Refresh / Quit menu.
• Caches the last successful price to UserDefaults so the menu bar shows a number immediately on launch, before the first network fetch completes.
• 60 second default polling interval.

What it does NOT do

Being explicit so there are no surprises:

• It is not notarized by Apple in v0.1. It is ad hoc signed. Gatekeeper will warn on first launch (see Install).
• It does not support currencies other than USD in v0.1.
• It does not show charts, 24h change indicators, alerts, or order book data. By design, this is a ticker, not a trading terminal.
• It does not convert to BTC native sats. USD only.
• It does not send telemetry. It does not phone home about your machine or your usage.
• It does not auto update. New releases must be downloaded manually.
• It does not embed any wallet, exchange integration, or shitcoin price feed. Bitcoin only.

Install

One line install from the official site:

curl -fsSLO https://stargear.xyz/ticker/StarGear_Ticker.dmg

Open the DMG and drag StarGear Ticker.app into /Applications.

First launch: macOS Gatekeeper will warn because the build is ad hoc signed and not notarized. The simplest bypass is:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/StarGear\ Ticker.app

Then double click the app. After that, normal launch works.

Build from source

Requirements:

• macOS 13 or later, Apple Silicon
• Xcode 15 or later
• xcodegen (brew install xcodegen)

Steps:

git clone https://github.com/StarGearx/StarGear-Ticker
cd StarGear-Ticker
xcodegen generate
xcodebuild \
  -project StarGear_Ticker.xcodeproj \
  -scheme "StarGear Ticker" \
  -configuration Release \
  -derivedDataPath build \
  build

The built .app bundle lands in build/Build/Products/Release/.

Privacy and network calls

StarGear Ticker makes a small, fixed set of outbound network calls. There is no analytics SDK, no per user identifier, no telemetry of any kind.

The app talks only to these public Bitcoin price APIs, polled in priority order with failover:

• https://mempool.space/api/v1/prices
• https://api.coinbase.com/v2/prices/BTC-USD/spot
• https://api.kraken.com/0/public/Ticker?pair=XBTUSD
• https://blockchain.info/ticker
• https://api.coingecko.com/api/v3/simple/price?ids=bitcoin&vs_currencies=usd

That is the complete list of hosts the app contacts. No other outbound calls are made.

No usage data, no crash reports, no machine identifier, no IP logging on our side. Whatever IP based logging the upstream price providers do is between you and them. If you care, route the app through a VPN or Tor and inspect the traffic. The source is here.

Architecture

• Pure Swift.

• SwiftUI App lifecycle with an AppKit NSStatusItem for the menu bar entry and an NSPopover for the click panel.

• LSUIElement = true, so no Dock icon.

• Ad hoc signed for distribution at this stage. See SECURITY.md for the rationale.

• Built with xcodegen so the project file is regenerable. project.yml is the source of truth.

• No third party Swift package dependencies.

• Layout:

  Sources/
    App/      Entry point, app delegate, Info.plist
    Engine/   Price providers, polling, cache
    UI/       Menu bar item and popover view
  Resources/  Assets, plists, CHANGELOG
  Tools/      Build and packaging scripts
  

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md.

Security

See SECURITY.md for how to report vulnerabilities.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the public Bitcoin price API operators whose feeds make this tool trivial to build: mempool.space, Coinbase, Kraken, blockchain.info, and CoinGecko.

StarGear Ticker is part of the StarGear product family, alongside StarGear Scanner, a local macOS threat scanner for Bitcoin self custody users.