A general framework for blockchain analytics
This provides a unified tool for researchers and analysts working with cryptocurrency blockchains, though it is incremental as it builds on existing ad-hoc approaches.
The authors tackled the challenge of analyzing diverse and complex blockchain data by proposing a general-purpose framework that supports analytics on Bitcoin and Ethereum, integrating blockchain data with external sources and organizing it in SQL or NoSQL databases, and released it as an open-source Scala library.
Modern cryptocurrencies exploit decentralised blockchains to record a public and unalterable history of transactions. Besides transactions, further information is stored for different, and often undisclosed, purposes, making the blockchains a rich and increasingly growing source of valuable information, in part of difficult interpretation. Many data analytics have been developed, mostly based on specifically designed and ad-hoc engineered approaches. We propose a general-purpose framework, seamlessly supporting data analytics on both Bitcoin and Ethereum - currently the two most prominent cryptocurrencies. Such a framework allows us to integrate relevant blockchain data with data from other sources, and to organise them in a database, either SQL or NoSQL. Our framework is released as an open-source Scala library. We illustrate the distinguishing features of our approach on a set of significant use cases, which allow us to empirically compare ours to other competing proposals, and evaluate the impact of the database choice on scalability.