Aug 27, 2018
Solution To Extract Data From Ethereum
Ethereum is easy and fun, but it is also relatively new. The developer solutions today are going through the teething stage — so, it’s new and cool but also slightly painful. As an example, take data extraction from the Ethereum blockchain. I’ve been keeping an eye out on solutions to access smart contract data in a decentralized way. In this article, I also include centralized data query companies and centralized analytics dashboards.
Ethereum started in 2013, which became a DE-facto standard to develop and run smart contracts. Data is either value transfer in Ether, ERC-20 (think of all the ICOs), crypto-collectibles a.k.a. non-fungible tokens (NFTs, e.g. digital kittens in CryptoKitties, virtual land property in Decentraland) or custom smart contract calls. State of the DApps is counting 1,822 DApps on Ethereum. Another good resource is DAppRadar.
If you want to extract data from an already deployed smart contract — or right after deployment — one might shop for monitoring and analytics tools similar to Google Analytics or MixPanel. However, there’s no established player yet. Monitoring and analytics are just two use cases, further use cases for data follow after the list. Since decentralization and open source go hand in hand, I’ll start with it:
Open Source:
- EthQL: ConsenSys project, GraphQL endpoint to the public Ethereum ledger.
- QuickBlocks: collection of tools to retrieve Ethereum data.
- EthSlurp: Extracting TXs for specific address or smart contract to CSV or text file.
- EthEvents: Indexing transactions, events into ElasticSearch, talk.
- Kundera: JPA to extract data from nodes and ingest them into a variety of sinks.
- Presto-Ethereum: Presto Connector to Ethereum clients.
- The Graph: Decentralized scalable queries for blockchain data (ICO stage).
- Smart Contract Watch: A smart contract monitoring tool.
- Eventeum: Event-bridge between Ethereum and microservices.
- Seth: MetaMask for the command-line.
Data Query Companies:
- Alethio: ConsenSys-backed, Working on semantic lifting of data, talk.
- Chainalysis: KYC and AML services for exchanges and governments.
- Zapier: Ethereum integration into Zapier.
Analytics Dashboards:
- Bloxy: Analytics Dashboard for Ethereum.
- Etherscan: De-facto standard block explorer for Ethereum.
- Amberdata: Analytics for ERC-20 tokens, talk.
- TokenAnalyst: Analytics for ERC-20 tokens and ICOs, talk.
- Rufflet: Mixpanel for smart contracts hack by Axiom Zen, creators of CryptoKitties.
- Supermax: Another smart contract dashboard.
- Blockspur: Another smart contract dashboard.
- Trivial: Another smart contract dashboard.
Use Cases:
Here are five use cases for getting data out:
- Providing transparency and accountability for governance of e.g. DAOs or companies e.g. DACs.
- Automated tax returns for smart contracts
- Smart contract monitoring e.g. getting notifications when things happen e.g. anomaly detection
- Smart contract reporting e.g like website reports, sales resports
- Auditing support e.g. for ICOs (distribution of token holders).
Missed Any?
This article should serve as a list of resources for solutions in the smart contract analytics and monitoring space. Please let me know if I missed one, or important references. And also if there are tools you know.
