Probing the Mystery of Cryptocurrency Exchange: The Case Study Based on Mt.Gox

Abstract

The birth of Bitcoin has created the cryptocurrency exchange, the average daily trading volume of cryptocurrency exchanges is now more than 100 billion. Cryptocurrency exchanges serve as a place for users to exchange cryptocurrencies, acting as a bridge between the blockchain ecosystem and the real world. Based on the transaction mechanism, cryptocurrency exchanges can be divided into centralized exchanges(CEXs) and decentralized exchanges(DEXs). CEXs still hold the dominant position, and we focus on Mt.Gox with the leaked dataset. By preprocessing the data, a usable internal dataset was obtained. To better study CEX, we further provide a comprehensive analysis of Mt.Gox based on three types of records and conclude its characteristics. Finally, we propose a matching method for on-chain and off-chain data, which restores the complete transaction path of the transaction account and some strange transaction phenomena are discovered. The results of this experiment showed that our algorithm can find addresses on blockchain and de-anonymize to a certain extent.