Blockchain Data Analysis: A Review of Status, Trends and Challenges

Blockchain technology is a new emerging technology that has the potential to revolutionize many traditional industries. Since the creation of Bitcoin, which represents blockchain 1.0, blockchain technology has been attracting extensive attention and a great amount of user transaction data has been accumulated. Furthermore, the birth of Ethereum, which represents blockchain 2.0, further enriches data type in blockchain. While the popularity of blockchain technology bringing about a lot of technical innovation, it also leads to many new problems, such as user privacy disclosure and illegal financial activities. However, the public accessible of blockchain data provides unprecedented opportunity for researchers to understand and resolve these problems through blockchain data analysis. Thus, it is of great significance to summarize the existing research problems, the results obtained, the possible research trends, and the challenges faced in blockchain data analysis. To this end, a comprehensive review and summary of the progress of blockchain data analysis is presented. The review begins by introducing the architecture and key techniques of blockchain technology and providing the main data types in blockchain with the corresponding analysis methods. Then, the current research progress in blockchain data analysis is summarized in seven research problems, which includes entity recognition, privacy disclosure risk analysis, network portrait, network visualization, market effect analysis, transaction pattern recognition, illegal behavior detection and analysis. Finally, the directions, prospects and challenges for future research are explored based on the shortcomings of current research.