Automating ETL and Mining of Ethereum Blockchain Network

Abstract

The popularity of blockchain technology led to the development of many web platforms with different functionalities. Ethereum, a decentralized, open-source blockchain featuring smart contracts, introduces an interesting ecosystem of human users and autonomous agents (the contracts). It is the most actively used blockchain platform, hosting ether, the second largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, as its native store of value. The Ethereum blockchain contains a vast amount of user-to-user, user-to-contract, contract-to -user, and contract-to-contract interactions that can be modeled as complex networks. To mine these interactions as graphs through a preferred analytics toolbox, an end-user has to extract, transform, and load (ETL) the required data into the desired network format. However, it is costly and time-consuming to manage the ETL pipeline for the massive and complex blockchain data. To support research in this domain, we develop an end-to-end, automated tool - EtherNet, which performs ETL tasks from a single source of truth (Google BigQuery), and provides graph equivalent representations for visualization and mining on the entire Ethereum blockchain network.