Analytical Tools for Blockchain: Review, Taxonomy and Open Challenges

Abstract

Bitcoin has introduced a new concept that could feasibly revolutionise the entire Internet as it exists, and positively impact on many types of industries including, but not limited to, banking, public sector and supply chain. This innovation is grounded on pseudo-anonymity and strives on its innovative decentralised architecture based on the blockchain technology. Blockchain is pushing forward a race of transaction-based applications with trust establishment without the need for a centralised authority, promoting accountability and transparency within the business process. However, a blockchain ledger (e.g., Bitcoin) tend to become very complex and specialised tools, collectively called "Blockchain Analytics", are required to allow individuals, law enforcement agencies and service providers to search, explore and visualise it. Over the last years, several analytical tools have been developed with capabilities that allow, e.g., to map relationships, examine flow of transactions and filter crime instances as a way to enhance forensic investigations. This paper discusses the current state of blockchain analytical tools and presents a thematic taxonomy model based on their applications. It also examines open challenges for future development and research.

The Architectural Design Requirements of a Blockchain-Based Port Community System

“…APIs allow clients and applications to interact with the blockchain, and Software Development Kits (SDKs) provide mechanisms to deploy and execute transactions, query blocks, and monitor events on the blockchain. As the blockchain technology progress, platform providers develop data visualisation and analytics tools for on-chain data [84,85]. Nevertheless, usability and the ability to use analytic tools on blockchain transactions are understudied in the literature.…”

Research Trends, Challenges, and Emerging Topics in Digital Forensics: A Review of Reviews

“…A forensics investigator can set up a node in a public blockchain network, sync it with the rest of the nodes and obtain a local copy of the ledger. Even in such cases, the structure of the information stored in the ledger of blockchain systems is not optimal with respect to retrieving all required data (e.g., for a specific account or a specific smart contract), so efficient mechanisms are required [79] to extract valuable information out of the large volume of data stored in public ledgers [80]. In the case of private blockchain systems, the ledger data are not publicly available and traditional forensics approaches have to be applied to blockchain nodes to extract data.…”

Visualization of Blockchain Data: A Systematic Review

“…None of these past reviews refer to visualization, which is the focus of our review. Reviews on blockchain analytics: Balaskas and Franqueira [3] examined analytic tools for the Bitcoin blockchain that are available on the internet and proposed a taxonomy based on analysis themes: analysis of entity relationships, metadata, money flows, user behavior, transaction fee, and market / wallets. The found tools are mainly able to track and monitor cryptocurrency values, and therefore are useful for detecting fraudulent transactions.…”