Cryptocurrency Transaction Analysis from a Network Perspective

Cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, Ethereum and other tokens/altercoins, store their transactions publicly in blockchains. These longitudinal transaction records form large temporal networks of millions of nodes (addresses or accounts) and billions of edges (coin transfers or program function calls) connecting them together. They are probably the largest empirical datasets of complex networks, or graph data, publicly available.

Cryptocurrencies have a wide adoption in (dark) markets and financial activities (for example, goods purchasing, fundraising, etc.), criminal activities (for example, fraud, money laundering, pyramid schemes, etc.) and gaming (for example, gambling, lottery, etc.). The public transaction records contain rich information and complete traces of these activities. A comprehensive study of cryptocurrency transaction networks not only advances physics theories of complex networks and graph data mining techniques but also benefits the development of novel financial technologies and regulation technologies.

This Research Topic welcomes Original Research contributions including, but are not limited to, the following themes:

1. Structural properties of transaction networks
2. Evolution mechanisms of transaction networks
3. Statistical models of transaction networks
4. Large-scale graph mining techniques
5. Identification/de-anonymization of blockchain addresses/accounts
6. Market and financial activities mining
7. Criminal activities mining
8. Game activities mining
9. Visualization of transaction networks