How to show any crypto price in your Mac's menu bar
CoinNotch puts the live price of any major cryptocurrency in your Mac's menu bar, right next to the notch, refreshing about once a second. Install it, pin the coins you care about, and the prices stay in view all day without a window, a widget, or a browser tab. It is free, native on Apple Silicon and Intel, reads public market data only, and never connects to a wallet. This guide covers how it works, which coins are supported, and how to set up a watchlist, alerts, and a display that fits the way you work.
There is a strip of screen on every modern MacBook that almost nothing uses. The notch carved out space on either side of the camera, and macOS leaves those pixels to the handful of menu bar icons you already had. For anyone who keeps half an eye on crypto through the day, that strip is the most valuable real estate on the machine, because it is always visible and you never have to go looking for it.
This guide is the complete version of a simple idea: any coin you care about, live, in the bar. Whether you track one asset or a dozen, the setup is the same and takes about two minutes. The rest of this page explains how the price feed works, which coins are supported, and how to shape the display so it tells you what you want at a glance.
Why the menu bar beats every other way to watch a price
Most people check a coin price one of three ways. They open an exchange app, they pull up a chart site in the browser, or they drop a widget on the desktop or in Notification Center. Each one carries a cost that feels small in the moment and adds up over a day.
Opening an exchange or a chart means a context switch. You leave what you were doing, wait for a view to load, read the figure, then find your way back. Researchers who study task switching put the cost of a single interruption at well over twenty seconds of refocus time, and that is before you count the times a tab pulls you into ten minutes of scrolling. A desktop widget is closer, but it sits behind whatever window you have open. The menu bar is the only surface that is always on top, across every app, every Space, and every fullscreen video.
Setting it up, step by step
There is no onboarding wizard, no account creation, and nothing to connect. From download to a live price in the bar is about two minutes, most of which is the download itself.
- Download and move to Applications. Grab the build from coinnotch.app or install through Setapp, then drag it into Applications and open it. On first launch macOS may ask you to confirm, which is standard for any app from outside the App Store.
- Pin your first coin. Click the CoinNotch status item, open the coin picker, and type a ticker or name. Select it and it pins to the bar immediately. The picker searches across more than two hundred assets.
- Add more coins if you want. Repeat for any other assets you track. Choose whether they cycle through one chip or sit side by side, which we cover below.
- Click to expand. A click on any chip opens a panel with a sparkline, the 24-hour high and low, market cap, and the percentage move, plus a timeframe toggle.
Once a coin is pinned, the app remembers it across restarts, and you can add it to your login items so the ticker is in the bar from the moment you sign in.
Which coins are supported
CoinNotch covers the major assets people watch, the full top of the market by capitalization and well beyond. Each coin also has a dedicated setup guide that goes deep on what moves its price and how to read it. Here are the most popular starting points.
The largest assets: Bitcoin sets the tone for the whole market, with its own notes on ETF flows and showing a $64,000 five-figure price cleanly. Ethereum is the second most-pinned, currently around $1,680, with the gas-versus-price distinction explained. Solana sits near $71 and is the reference setup most people start with.
- Store of value and majors: Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Litecoin (LTC)
- High-performance Layer-1s: Solana (SOL), Avalanche (AVAX), Sui (SUI), Aptos (APT), NEAR Protocol
- Payments and settlement: XRP, TRON (TRX)
- Ecosystem and exchange tokens: BNB, Uniswap (UNI), Hyperliquid (HYPE)
- Smart-contract platforms: Cardano (ADA), Polkadot (DOT), Cosmos (ATOM), Polygon (POL)
- Infrastructure and community: Chainlink (LINK), Toncoin (TON), Dogecoin (DOGE)
How the price feed works
A price on screen is only as good as the pipe that feeds it. Every coin trades on dozens of venues at once, and the price is never identical across all of them. Quoting any single exchange means inheriting that venue's quirks and outages. CoinNotch instead reads an aggregated feed that blends prices across major exchanges, weighted by trading volume, so the number you see reflects the broad market rather than one order book.
The app polls its data source about once a second and updates the bar when a new figure arrives. That is fast enough to feel live without hammering the network or your battery. When a coin moves between two polls, the digits flick green or red to signal direction, so you read the move before you read the number. If the connection drops, the price is marked stale and the indicator dims rather than showing a frozen number that pretends to be current.
Put crypto in your notch, free
macOS 13 and later. Apple Silicon and Intel. No account, no wallet, no tracking.
Download for MacTracking several coins at once
Most people pin more than one coin. CoinNotch handles a watchlist two ways, and which you want depends on how much menu-bar space you are willing to give up.
Cycle mode
In cycle mode the bar shows one coin at a time and rotates through your list on an interval you set, the way a departure board rotates flights. The footprint stays tiny, a single chip, while every coin you track still passes through your peripheral vision. This is the mode most people settle on once they pin more than two coins.
Side-by-side mode
If you have the bar space and want everything visible at once, side-by-side mode lays your coins out as a row of compact chips, all live at the same time. The trade-off is real estate, so it suits larger displays or sparse menu bars. Reordering is drag and drop, so your most important coin sits first.
Price alerts that respect your attention
A live ticker tells you where a coin is now. Alerts tell you when it crosses a line you care about, so you can stop watching and let the app watch for you. CoinNotch fires native macOS notifications, and there are two kinds.
A threshold alert fires when a coin crosses a fixed price in either direction, the right choice when you have a level in mind. A percentage-move alert fires when a coin moves more than a chosen amount inside 24 hours, which catches the days that matter without you resetting targets as the market drifts. The fastest way to start ignoring alerts is to set too many, so pick the one level or percentage that would change what you do.
Shaping the display to fit your eye
The default chip is sensible, but a few choices change how much information the bar carries without taking more space. The most compact display is the bare price, a few characters that vanish into the bar. Adding the 24-hour percentage gives you direction and magnitude at the cost of a few pixels. Adding the ticker makes the chip self-explanatory when you pin several coins. Most people start verbose and trim to price-plus-percentage once they can read the chip at a glance.
Precision adapts to the coin. A five-figure asset like Bitcoin shows no cents, because nobody needs them cluttering a ninety-thousand-dollar number. A sub-dollar asset shows four decimals, because that is where the movement lives. CoinNotch picks sensible defaults per coin and lets you override them, so a price is never uselessly imprecise or needlessly long. Color behavior is configurable too: the chip can flick green or red on each tick, or hold a steady color that reflects the day's direction.
Reading the expanded panel
Clicking any chip opens a panel with a sparkline, the 24-hour high and low, market cap, and the percentage move, plus a timeframe toggle that reaches back over different windows. Read together, these turn a single number into a small story. A price near its 24-hour high on rising volume reads very differently from the same price near its low on fading volume, and the panel gives you both in one click without sending you to a chart site.
How different coins behave in the bar
Coins do not all move the same way, and watching a few together teaches you more than watching one. Bitcoin sets the tone for the whole market, so a sharp BTC move usually drags everything with it. Higher-beta assets like Solana, Avalanche, and the newer Layer-1s tend to amplify those moves in both directions. A sentiment-driven coin like Dogecoin can sit quiet for weeks and then jump double digits on a single catalyst. Pinning Bitcoin alongside whatever else you track gives you the context to tell a coin-specific move from the market simply turning.
This is why the multi-coin watchlist is more than a convenience. With BTC and one or two others in the bar, you can read at a glance whether a four-percent move on your altcoin is its own story or just the tide moving every boat, which is the single most useful thing a passive ticker can tell you.
Battery, memory, and privacy
CoinNotch is a native macOS app, not a web view wrapped in a window, so it holds a tiny resident memory footprint against the hundreds of megabytes an Electron-style wrapper would carry. The polling loop is the only meaningful background work, and a one-second poll for a small payload is trivial. When your Mac sleeps, polling pauses, and on battery the app can back off its interval automatically.
On privacy, the app needs only one thing to work, a public price, and a public price requires nothing from you. There is no account, no wallet connection, and no tracking. It cannot leak what it never collects, which is the right security model for something that lives in your menu bar all day.