Block Insider
Crypto news and market intelligence with live prices, built on Next.js and Sanity.
Block Insider is a crypto-native news and market-intelligence platform covering digital assets, DeFi, and blockchain. Beyond daily reporting and analysis, the site carries live prices for major assets, a ranked market table for the top coins, sentiment indicators, NFT floor data, long-form guides, a glossary of more than a thousand terms, and interactive tools like a converter and a profit calculator, a newsroom and a reference desk in one product.
I built the platform end to end: a Next.js App Router frontend written in TypeScript, a structured content model in Sanity for articles, authors, guides, and glossary entries, and the market-data layer that keeps prices current across the site. The goal was a publication that reads fast like a static site but behaves like a live terminal in the places where the numbers matter.
Live market data surfaces
Prices show up everywhere on Block Insider: a ticker strip in the header, a ranked table of the top coins with 24-hour change and seven-day trend sparklines, movers and trending views, a Fear & Greed gauge, and NFT floor prices. All of it is fed from external market APIs fetched on the server and cached on short intervals, so pages stay cheap to render while the numbers stay reasonably fresh. Client-side code is reserved for the few places where values genuinely need to move without a reload.
Structured newsroom in Sanity
Every piece of content, articles, authors, categories, guides, glossary terms, is a typed document in Sanity. Articles reference their author and category, body copy lives in Portable Text with custom blocks for the components an editorial team actually uses, and GROQ queries are typed end to end in TypeScript, so a schema change breaks the build instead of the live site. Editors publish from Sanity Studio; the frontend simply renders whatever is published, with no developer in the loop for day-to-day coverage.
A 1,300-term glossary
The glossary holds over 1,300 crypto and DeFi terms, each with its own page, an A–Z index, and definitions that cross-link to related entries. Every term is a Sanity document, and the routes are generated statically from those documents, so adding a term is a publish action, not a deploy. The cross-links do double duty: they help readers move between concepts, and they give the site a dense internal-linking structure that search engines can actually crawl.
Converter and calculator tools
Alongside the editorial content sit two interactive tools: a converter that translates the top 100 coins into nine fiat currencies at live rates, and a calculator for trade profit and ROI after fees. Both are client components layered over the same market-data plumbing the rest of the site uses, so the rates they quote match the ticker in the header. They give readers a reason to return between headlines, the site stays useful even on a slow news day.
The architecture separates what changes on a publish from what changes on a tick. Editorial content, articles, guides, glossary pages, is served from statically generated routes that revalidate when editors publish in Sanity, so the bulk of the site behaves like a static publication: fast first paint, cacheable at the edge, indexable. Market data flows through a different path: fetched server-side from price APIs, cached on short intervals, and hydrated on the client only for surfaces like the header ticker where movement matters.
TypeScript runs through the whole stack, schema definitions, GROQ query results, component props, which matters on a site with this many content types; the compiler catches a renamed field before the newsroom does. The App Router keeps most of each page as server components, with client JavaScript confined to the ticker, the tools, and the interactive market tables. Images go through Next's image pipeline for sizing and formats, and a shared set of templates covers article pages, guide pages, and the thousand-plus glossary entries rather than one-off builds.
Block Insider is live and publishing daily: breaking coverage and analysis alongside live prices, a ranked market table, sentiment gauges, learning guides, a 1,300-plus-term glossary, and standalone tools. The newsroom publishes from Sanity without touching code, market data updates on its own schedule, and the site holds up as both a fast editorial product and a reference readers come back to between headlines.