Blockchain analytics API

A Scala framework for the development of general-purpose analytics on blockchains, by Livio Pompianu, Stefano Lande, and Daniele Stefano Ferru.

Our framework allows to combine data within the blockchain with data from the outside (e.g. exchange rates and tags). The workflow consists in two steps:

1. construct a view of the blockchain and save it in a database;
2. analyse the view by using the query language of the database.

The blockchains currently supported are Bitcoin and Ethereum. The DBMS currently supported are MongoDB and MySQL.

The library is dicussed in A general framework for Bitcoin analytics (an updated version is coming soon).

More material is available in the project page.

The Scaladoc (uploaded on this repository in the doc folder) is also available at the following link.

Install prerequisites

Prerequisites depends on the target analyses. Generally speaking the framework needs at least one blockchain client and one DBMS.

1. Blockchain clients:
   • Bitcoin Core (extracts data from Bitcoin)
   • Parity (extracts data from Ethereum)
2. DBMS:
   • MongoDB (constructs a NoSQL view of the data)
   • MySQL (constructs a SQL view of of the data)
3. Either
   • use an IDE for executing a Scala SBT project (we used IntelliJ IDEA) or
   • use the command line in place of an IDE (Install SBT)

Before building the project, execute the following commands:

git clone https://github.com/bitcoinj/bitcoinj.git
cd bitcoinj
git checkout segwit
mvn install -DskipTests
cd core
mvn install -DskipTests

Install blockchain analytics API

1. Execute the blockchain client in order to obtain a local copy of the target blockchain (this process may take several hours)
2. Enable the client RPC calls.
   • In the Bitcoin Core case

     bitcoind -datadir=path/to/blockchain -server -rpcuser=user -rpcpassword=password 

3. Run a localhost instance of the DBMS on the default port.
4. Clone this repository.
5. From your IntelliJ welcome screen: select "Import Project" and open the build.sbt file from your repository directory.

Running

1. Execute of one of the available examples. Either
   • open the file from your IDE and select run or
   • use the command line: from the root directory of the project, execute

     sbt "runMain tcs.examples.ClassName"

Our framework will build the selected database. Then you can query it for performing your analysis. For each available Scala script, we provide some default queries along with the resulting csv files.