UTXOAnalysis: A distributed graph storage and analysis system for UTXO-based cryptocurrencies

Abstract

Relationship analysis of cryptocurrencies is crucial for understanding and regulating their ecosystems with graph structures. In particular, the relationships of the UTXO-based cryptocurrencies, which were developed earlier, form ecosystems with more integrated and larger graph structures. It is a challenge to efficiently store such large graphs and to efficiently query and analyze these graphs. In this paper, we propose UTXOAnalysis to solve these problems. UTXOAnalysis is a distributed graph storage and analysis system with a three-level structure. In the data collection framework, UTXOAnalysis adopts batch queries and block pruning. In the parsing and storage framework, UTXOAnalysis utilizes the parallel approaches of multi-graph parsing and storage. UTXOAnalysis also provides these methods for incremental data. In the analysis framework, UTXOAnalysis supplies address relationship analysis, transaction relationship analysis, and cryptocurrency flow tracing, which are the three basic analysis methods. In our experiments, we collected data from Bitcoin and Zcash to demonstrate the efficiency of data collection, parsing, storage, and basic analysis. UTXOAnalysis is more efficient in storing and analyzing UTXO-based cryptocurrencies than the baseline methods.