# BlockSci: Design and applications of a blockchain analysis platform

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.02489 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.02489/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 8 Sep 2017.

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Enhancing Trust and Privacy in Distributed Networks: A Comprehensive Survey on Blockchain-based Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19178/) (2024)
- [Evolve Path Tracer: Early Detection of Malicious Addresses in Cryptocurrency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.05412/) (2023)
- [Pattern Analysis of Money Flow in the Bitcoin Blockchain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07315/) (2022)
- [How Agentic Is Agentic Commerce? A Population-Scale Measurement of x402 Adoption and Authenticity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.12575/) (2026)
- [Identifying Ransomware Actors in the Bitcoin Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.13807/) (2021)
- [Data Depth and Core-based Trend Detection on Blockchain Transaction Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14241/) (2023)
- [Toward Intention Discovery for Early Malice Detection in Bitcoin](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.12001/) (2022)
- [Argumentation Schemes for Blockchain Deanonymization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16883/) (2023)
- [Clean Up the Mess: Addressing Data Pollution in Cryptocurrency Abuse Reporting Services](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21041/) (2024)
- [ETH-TraceBench: A Large-Scale Event-Stream Benchmark for Ethereum DeFi under Temporal, Protocol, and Contract Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.23659/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Analysis of blockchain data is useful for both scientific research and commercial applications. We present BlockSci, an open-source software platform for blockchain analysis. BlockSci is versatile in its support for different blockchains and analysis tasks. It incorporates an in-memory, analytical (rather than transactional) database, making it several hundred times faster than existing tools. We describe BlockSci's design and present four analyses that illustrate its capabilities. This is a working paper that accompanies the first public release of BlockSci, available at https://github.com/citp/BlockSci. We seek input from the community to further develop the software and explore other potential applications.