Introduction to Analyse Ether and What’s Next

Make analysis of ethereum as easy as possible

Market

The current ethereum blockchain has almost 6 Million blocks. Performing real-time data-analysis on this data-set will provide useful insights on decentralized exchanges, tokens, ENS, prediction markets etc. Unfortunately, performing data-analysis on this huge data-set takes significant time and cost from a user, moreover this problem will exacerbate when scaling solutions start appearing on the blockchain.

We want to make analysis of ethereum as easy as possible for everyone.

Proposal

Analyse Ether is a browser based social platform to perform real-time data-analysis of ethereum. The platform abstracts several operations, giving the users simple interface to perform cheap real-time queries, providing strong incentives to share analysis, reproducing other analyses and providing a common space to engage with other blockchain data analysts. The proposal involves two main parts.

1. ether_sql: A back-end library to stream ether data to an sql database. (https://github.com/analyseether/ether_sql)
2. analyse_ether: A frontend library to handle sql queries, visualizations, and interact with the ether_sql database.

Demo of the analyse ether front-end

Impact

Since the data of ethereum is open source, the capability to access and analyse it will become imperative and is a missing piece of infrastructure in the ecosystem. By easily providing access to data and a flexible query engine, we can analyse both the meta parameters of the chain and its flexible smart contracts. Moreover, due to the turing complete nature of the ethereum blockchain, analysing smart contracts using rigid block explorers will not suffice and the ecosystem needs a flexible analysis engine. This will significantly boost both visibility and understanding of the space.

Some possible use-cases are:

1. Building your own ethgasstation
2. Analysing behaviors of various miners, stakers, plasma protocols or shards: https://youtu.be/57mt8UeZc9E
3. Performing uncle rate analysis similar to this blog post: https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/10/31/uncle-rate-transaction-fee-analysis/
4. Analysing the usage of a particular token before deciding to invest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMaXN17vBQA
5. Building machine learning models for token investing on decentralized exchanges.
6. Analysing performance and behaviour of any smart contract

Update

We have released our MVP and working hard to develop our beta product. We have around 50 registered users, who have created 87 queries and have consumed ~6 Tb of data.

Roadmap

We would release the beta version of our front-end in the coming months. This version will include:

1. Dashboard to discover recent, trending and top analysis.
2. Provide the information of blocks, transactions, uncles, state, receipts, logs and transaction traces in a queryable format, and in real time.
3. Provide supporting features to easily analyse ethereum specific data, eg. decoding bytecode or deciphering contract calls.
4. Users can create sql queries, create visualizations, create alerts, and save data.
5. All the above features would be public by default, to enable reproducible research.
6. All our code will be open-source so that developers can perform data-analysis for their private blockchains.

Come let’s analyse ether together!