15 Data Analysis Methods for the Ethereum Blockchain

Editor’s note: This article is from 8btc Information (ID: bitcoin8btc), and the original author is Alethio’s data scientists Danning Sui and Bogdan Gheorghe.

Last month, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin made his Ethereum address public so the community could see exactly how much ether he had liquidated. But for Ethereum developers, transaction logs are still just the tip of the analytical iceberg when it comes to deployment.

The Ethereum blockchain provides a wealth of data, but as a developer, you need a powerful data engine so that you can monitor and process everything from micro-behavior to smart contract activity. These indicators can help you understand the deployment and operation of the entire network in detail.

This article highlights 15 real-time Ethereum analysis data to enable you to interpret the network, mark risks, and monitor DAPPs. The following data charts are from Alethio.

(Image from: pexels.com)

Ethereum Network Health

The following data is based on reporting for the week of January 13-20, 2019.

1. Gas usage and fees Gas is a measure of the computational work performed by the Ethereum network. The amount of gas used for each data block shows the amount of computation triggered by the transactions included in that particular data block. The block gas limit is designed to keep the block propagation time low and limit the number of transactions included in the block, while preventing potential transaction misuse by adding a cost layer (the price per unit of gas, by making DoS attacks expensive to prevent potential DoS attacks) From a high-level point of view, the sender pays this cost in exchange for using the Ethereum virtual machine. Ethereum is designed to be a dapp hosting platform, and every transaction, every function call, and every token transfer will consume gas, so using the platform = filling blocks.

Because miners are responsible for packaging transactions, and there are always more pending transactions than can fit in a new block, miners are biased towards ordering transactions in a way that maximizes their profits. This usually means that by setting a higher gas price, you can incentivize miners to prioritize your proposed transaction, increasing the chances that it will be included in a block and executed (not stuck in the pending pool). For example, this week, Ethereum users paid an average of 6.07 GWei in gas fees to process transactions, which means they paid 0.2 GWei more than last week.

2. Active accounts During this week's analysis, 987,825 different users sent or received transactions, of which more than 40% were seen for the first time. The number of new users gives us insight into the development of the community. In terms of Ethereum addresses, you don't exactly "create" new addresses. When you create an account, you just generate a random private key and derive a public key from it. The 40-character hexadecimal address string we know (42 characters if you include the '0x' prefix) is just the hexadecimal representation of the rightmost 20 bytes of this public key. So when it comes to so-called new accounts, we can't say it's "new". It just means that this is the first time these accounts have been activated by sending or receiving transactions.

3. Transaction volume By comparing transaction volume with the past, we can see how active the network is. The Ethereum network processed 3,614,857 transactions this week, with a transaction volume of 15,687,020 ETH. Of these transactions, more than 98% were successful. This success rate indicates both efficiency and that people are using the network as intended. Most failed transactions are because they ran out of gas.

4. Computing power Computing power is the sum of the computing power of miners in the network, which is positively correlated with the difficulty of mining. The difficulty algorithm is sensitive to these changes, which means that it adjusts the difficulty accordingly without increasing the block time. The decrease in activity is always reflected in the computing power and difficulty of the network. Both computing power and difficulty fell in the week analyzed, as we can see in the figure below. One reason may be that the profitability of mining has recently declined, enough to cause some mining companies to withdraw or reduce the scale of their operations. Another reason may be related to the recent reduction in Ethereum production.

Ethereum Miner Behavior

The following data is based on reporting for the week of January 20-27, 2019.

5. Mining pool expenditures Here we list the number of mined blocks, the number of payment accounts (usually indicating the number of miners registered to the mining pool), the total rewards, and the payment amount. In the past week, all of the top 5 mining pools seem to have reduced their mining scale, with the number of blocks they mined and the number of miners participating in the pool falling, and ETH rewards and expenditures also falling.

6. The number of ETH created As blocks are mined, ETH is created and used as a reward for miners. In the week of January 20-27, the network created a total of 113,650.31 ETH, of which 95.22% came from normal block rewards, and the rest included occasional uncle block rewards.

7. Number of new miners joining the network Since the inception of the Ethereum network, there have been 4,593 different miners (or groups of miners) mining on the Ethereum network, and this week there were 86 different groups of miners actually participating in Ethereum mining. For 13 of these members, this was their first time. The number of new miners cannot be interpreted in the sense of "new mining entities", which will not be reflected on the chain. However, any address that mines the first block will be considered a new miner.

8. Uncle Block Rate In Ethereum, when two miners produce competing valid data blocks and broadcast them to the network, one of them will inevitably be excluded, which is called an uncle block. The "uncle block rate" is the ratio of uncle blocks generated compared to regular blocks. A high uncle block rate can mean high network latency, which means that the mined blocks cannot be propagated effectively. In the instrument chart below, we see that the uncle block rate over the past week means good network health.

Ethereum Whale Activity

Whales are top ETH holders who can have a huge impact on the network. Their fund flows can have a huge impact on the market price of ETH. The following whale activity is based on reports from the week of January 27 to February 3, 2019.

9. Top 10 Balance Changes This week, the top 10 ETH holders all maintained their positions: one is a contract address, 4 are known to belong to exchanges, and the other 5 have not yet been marked. The only change is that the balances of 3 of the addresses have increased slightly.

10. Top 1000 Balance Changes The top 1000 ETH holders collectively own about two-thirds of the ETH supply, and their total holdings are very stable. Currently, more than 34% of the addresses have changed within a week, and more than 65% of the accounts remain unchanged, but the total holdings remain quite stable.

11. The cryptocurrency exchange Binance sent and received the largest amount of ETH transactions this week, with a total movement of more than 1.2 million ETH.

Ethereum Contract Activity

The following data is based on reporting for the week of February 3-10, 2019.

12. The most popular contract is measured by the number of transactions. The most popular Ethereum dApp is the online "gambling" platform Dice2win. In the data analyzed this week, its transaction volume is more than any other Ethereum dApp.

13. Contract creation In the week of February 3, 184,933 new smart contracts were created on the Ethereum network, and 105,814 contracts were destroyed. The average success rate of both operations exceeded 99%.

14. Contract Interactions This week, contract interactions accounted for nearly 80% of the gas usage on the Ethereum network. This bodes well for the Ethereum network and its intended use as a DAPP platform. The high percentage proves that Ethereum's applications go far beyond the scope of cryptocurrency. 15. Largest Gas Consumers This week, the largest gas consumer was the contract at 0xae9b8e05c22bae74d1e8db82c4af122b18050bd4, which consumed 7.36% of the gas usage of the entire network. The second largest consumer was smart contract creation, which consumed 4.1% of the gas usage.

The Future of Ethereum Analytics

Through the above data analysis, we can understand that the current Ethereum blockchain is still very transparent. We can learn a lot of information through various analysis methods. However, with the development of more and more privacy technologies, the analysis of the Ethereum blockchain will become more and more difficult. This is a contest between spear and shield.