Introducing: The breadcrumbs.app PathFinder
Staying true to our branding and our commitment to helping users find their way through the blockchain, breadcrumbs.app is launching a revolutionary feature that makes on-chain analysis faster and easier:
The PathFinder traces and plots the relationships of crypto addresses without the manual work of aimlessly expanding nodes. It automatically detects connections and unravels the graph in just one click.
There are four easy to understand concepts for users to get the most of the feature: source and destination address, path direction and hops.
Source address: the initial address you want the paths to originate from
Destination address: the endpoint address/es of the path you are tracing
Direction: the flow of funds you want the PathFinder to look into. It can be INCOMING or OUTGOING
Hops: the degree of relationships between the source and destination addresses you want to search. Currently, you can search up to 12 hops.
For a limited time, the PathFinder is accessible to all Breadcrumbs users while it’s on Beta.
Origins and the development of the PathFinder
Internal talks about the PathFinder started as early as 2020. Breadcrumbs.app Founder/CEO envisioned automatic expansion of graphs:
When I was using Breadcrumbs to investigate the ICO I was scammed on I spent a lot of effort manually searching around to connect specific people to the scammed funds, like searching for a needle in a haystack. I then wrote some basic algorithms to automate the process which helped speed up my investigation by automatically searching millions of possible paths that would connect specific people to the illicit funds.
Over the years in helping others, the same pattern emerged where users would spend lots of effort to find these connections, and for over 2 years now we’ve been researching and iterating behind the scenes of how to automate this process in a user friendly and accurate way. If we could build this feature, investigations that would take 10+ hours to research would take 15 minutes.
A year ago we had a name, Pathfinder, and a working prototype but never released it to the public because everyday it kept crashing our servers. Finally after lots of research and iterations to get over the technical challenges we’re comfortable to share the Pathfinder in it’s experimental beta form. — Lorne Lantz
But like the tool itself, this feature was very complex and difficult to build that the decision to shelve it was made to give way to the relaunch of the website in 2021.
Raising a seed round and growing our Team had the Team Members wonder if it’s the right time to revive the PathFinder and we decided to include it in our company 2022 vision board.
Dev Lead and Senior Devs had this to say about building the feature:
Using the PathFinder BETA
Using the PathFinder feature is as intuitive as the other features of the Breadcrumbs Investigation Tool. You can follow the steps below for a detailed walkthrough:
- Load a Breadcrumbs.app investigation graph. Currently, the PathFinder BETA only supports Ethereum addresses so make sure the address you are searching is an ETH address.
2. Hover over any node/address on the graph for the node container to show up. The node/address you click will be the source address of the PathFinder
3. Click the PathFinder icon on the top row of the node container for the PathFinder slider to show up.
4. Fill the details needed in the PathFinder slider.
5. Click expand.
6. The open graph will automatically unravel to reveal the paths between the addresses inputted and results will be shown on the slider. The speed of the results will depend on the number of hops you input — the greater the number of hops, the more time it takes to plot relationships.
If there are no paths, you will be notified (but if it goes on forever, you can flag the issue — sorry about that.)
Wen leaving BETA?
The PathFinder BETA is a test run before we launch the full version of the feature. Currently, bugs and issues might be encountered especially when selecting higher number of hops. The icons next to the hops indicate how fast results can show up to manage expectations for now.
We aim for this to work with ERC20s, NFTs and the other blockchains we support very soon. Apart from this, we will also add categories on the destination address dropdown when you do not have a specific destination address in mind.
We are also very open to your suggestions to improve the PathFinder feature. Breadcrumbs.app tools are built by cryptofolks for the cryptocommunity and we value your feedback. You can join our Discord to engage with our Team here.
