XBlock-ETH: Extracting and Exploring Blockchain Data From Ethereum

• Published in: IEEE open journal of the Computer Society Vol. 1; pp. 95 - 106
• Main Authors: Zheng, Peilin, Zheng, Zibin, Wu, Jiajing, Dai, Hong-Ning
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 2020; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Big Data; Bitcoin; Blockchain; Cryptography; Data analysis; data analytics; Data mining; Datasets; Digital currencies; ethereum; Smart contracts; Software engineering
• ISSN: 2644-1268; 2644-1268
• DOI: 10.1109/OJCS.2020.2990458

Blockchain-based cryptocurrencies have received extensive attention recently. Massive data has been stored on permission-less blockchains. The analysis of massive blockchain data can bring huge business values. However, the absence of well-processed up-to-date blockchain datasets impedes big data analytics of blockchain data. To fill this gap, we collect and process the up-to-date on-chain data from Ethereum, which is one of the most popular permission-less blockchains. We name such well-processed Ethereum data as XBlock-ETH, which consists of transactions, smart contracts, and cryptocurrencies (i.e., tokens). However, it is non-trivial to partition and categorize the collected raw Ethereum data to the well-processed datasets since the whole processing procedure requires sophisticated knowledge on software engineering as well as big data analytics. Moreover, we also present basic statistics and exploration for each of the well-processed datasets. Furthermore, we also outline the possible research opportunities based on XBlock-ETH, with the data and code released online.