BlockSci: Design and applications of a blockchain analysis platform
This provides a versatile tool for researchers and commercial users to analyze blockchain data more efficiently.
The authors tackled the problem of analyzing blockchain data by developing BlockSci, an open-source platform that is several hundred times faster than existing tools.
Analysis of blockchain data is useful for both scientific research and commercial applications. We present BlockSci, an open-source software platform for blockchain analysis. BlockSci is versatile in its support for different blockchains and analysis tasks. It incorporates an in-memory, analytical (rather than transactional) database, making it several hundred times faster than existing tools. We describe BlockSci's design and present four analyses that illustrate its capabilities. This is a working paper that accompanies the first public release of BlockSci, available at https://github.com/citp/BlockSci. We seek input from the community to further develop the software and explore other potential applications.