BitSQL: A SQL-based Bitcoin Analysis System

Abstract

As cryptocurrency markets such as Bitcoin and Ethereum increase worldwide, cryptocurrency exchanges, service providers, and governments need to monitor and analyze cryptocurrency transactions. There are a few studies to analyze Bitcoin data in open-source projects. However, under massive data volume in the blockchain structure, we still meet the challenges of data processing or analysis speed and efficient data structure. For this purpose, this paper introduces BitSQL, which minimizes significantly database construction time and analysis performance using well-known RDBMS. BitSQL maintains the compact database due to a data mapping technique and a transaction split technique for Bitcoin analysis and it achieves the fast response time due to the index of the database. In addition, as BitSQL is based on the well-known RDBMS, we can easily support web integration or visualization tools. Through experiments, we demonstrate that the data mapping technique can decrease the database size by 95% compared to the simple Bitcoin data storing method. We also show that BitSQL can perform easily analysis regarding balances, transactions, and Bitcoin address clustering heuristics through SQL query statements. This study contributes to the scalable Bitcoin analysis software construction method for analyzing and tracking cryptocurrency blockchains and creating services.