Network analysis and traceability on ethereum blockchain

• Main Author: Su, Voon Hou
• Other Authors: Sourav Sen Gupta
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2021
• Subjects: Engineering::Computer science and engineering::Data::Data storage representations
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/148692
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The rise in popularity of blockchain technology has led to the development of many interesting cryptocurrencies with different functionalities. One such blockchain technology is Ethereum, a decentralized, open source blockchain featuring smart contract functionality with Ether as its native cryptocurrency. Ethereum introduces a novel ecosystem of human users and autonomous agents in the form of smart contracts. As the most actively used blockchain and second largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, the blockchain contains a vast amount of information documenting the interactions between user-to-user, user-to-contract, contract-to-user and contract-to-contract, all of which can be represented in a network. To analyse these interactions in the form of networks, the required data has to be extracted from the blockchain, transformed, and loaded into the desired format and/or software of choice for analysis. As the data is large, it is difficult to manage and ETL the data. We have come up with a tool named EtherNet that aims to facilitate the process of performing ETL tasks from a single source of truth, namely BigQuery, into its graph equivalent representations for network analysis.