Methodology to extract full blockchain transactions in NFT Trading

Abstract

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT) represent a sub form of cryptocurrencies, which allow investments into art, digital rights or any form of unique assets. Our study adds to a young body of research, which tries to analyze the characteristics of these new markets. In our study we present a new methodology to analyze peer-to-peer transactions in Non-Fungible tokens (NFT). We argument that this approach is superior to using prefabricated market data from NFT platform data, because it allows to track transactions to the point 0. Compared to that prefabricated market data could prove to be incomplete, missing peer-to-peer transactions. The difficulty of our approach was to develop a methodology which looks at all available transactions of a NFT on the blockchain, and not just at transactions which take place at specific trading platforms. This research is challenging due to the amount, and complexity of blockchain data which need to be stored and analyzed. For our study we constructed a dataset for the eth blockchain, which represented a complete chain of blockchain transactions, while then comparing our data with platform data on specific NFT’s. We found that our approach provides a more detailed view of the transactions in specific NFT’s. This detailed view allowed us to see specific transaction details. Our approach shall inspire future research to favor complete datasets of NFT transactions, before easily available data from trading platforms.