Blockchain research group at MPI-SWS

We are a research group at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS) interested in understanding how miners prioritize transactions in the both Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains. One of our goals is to make all our data sets and code available to the research community. We believe that this will enable other researchers to build on top of our work and explore other interesting research questions.

Who we are

Our recent peer-reviewed publications

Complementary work

Data sets and scripts

Data from permissionless blockchains (e.g., Bitcoin and Ethereum) are publicly available. However, accessing them would require the user to deploy a full node of that particular blockchain, which can be challenging due to computing resources (e.g., RAM, internet bandwidth). Bitcoin, for example, allows users to export data from a particular block via an RPC JSON interface. Unfortunately, given a transaction ID, the exported raw JSON does not contain the data from which the transactions spend, making it difficult to roll back the transaction chain to calculate the transaction fees.

To enable scientific reproducibility of our results and other research areas to explore the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains, we make our pre-processed Bitcoin and Ethereum data sets available for download here.

We believe this data set is key to any research group interested in understanding and providing insights into the Bitcoin ecosystem.

Ethereum

This data set was used in our FC 2023 paper. It contains the transactions ID (txid), transaction input and output data, fees, transaction receipt data, and other essential features for Ethereum research.

Similarly, the Ethereum data set contains the transactions ID (txid), transaction input and output data, fees, transaction receipt data, and other essential features for Ethereum research.

The full data set is available for download in a compressed dataframe format (CSV.GZ) here.

Below are direct links for each part of our data set:

The Ethereum data set description is available at ./docs/ethereum.md in our GutHub repository.

Bitcoin (2018 -- 2020)

This data set was used in our FC 2023 paper. It contains the transactions ID (txid), transaction input and output data, fees, among other essential features for Bitcoin research.

The full data set is available for download in a compressed dataframe format (CSV.GZ) here.

Below are direct links for each part of our data set:

The Bitcoin data set description is available at ./docs/bitcoin.md in our GutHub repository.

Bitcoin (2020)

This data set was used in our IMC 2021 paper. It contains the transactions ID (txid), transaction input and output data, fees, among other essential features for Bitcoin research.

The full data set is available for download in a compressed dataframe format (CSV.GZ) here.

Below are direct links for each part of our data set:

The Bitcoin data set description is available at ./docs/bitcoin.md in our GutHub repository.

Talks

Selfish & Opaque Transaction Ordering in the Bitcoin Blockchain: The Case for Chain Neutrality

On Blockchain Commit Times: An analysis of how miners choose Bitcoin transactions

Countering Misinformation on Social Media Platforms

Café com BIT (in Portuguese)

License

If you find any of our work useful, please consider citing one of our academic peer-reviewed papers:

@inproceedings{Messias@FC2023,
  author = {Johnnatan Messias and Vabuk Pahari and Balakrishnan Chandrasekaran and Krishna P. Gummadi and Patrick Loiseau},
  title = {{Dissecting Bitcoin and Ethereum Transactions: On the Lack of Transaction Contention and Prioritization Transparency in Blockchains}},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC '23)},
  month = {May},
  year = {2023}
}
@inproceedings{Messias@IMC2021,
  author = {Johnnatan Messias and Mohamed Alzayat and Balakrishnan Chandrasekaran and Krishna P. Gummadi and Patrick Loiseau and Alan Mislove},
  title = {{Selfish \& Opaque Transaction Ordering in the Bitcoin Blockchain: The Case for Chain Neutrality}},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC '21)},
  month = {November},
  year = {2021}
}
@inproceedings{messias-sdbd-2020,
  title={On Blockchain Commit Times: An analysis of how miners choose Bitcoin transactions},
  author={Johnnatan Messias and Mohamed Alzayat and Balakrishnan Chandrasekaran and Krishna P. Gummadi},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the KDD Workshop on Smart Data for Blockchain and Distributed Ledger},
  series = {SDBD '20},
  month = {August},
  year = {2020}
}

Acknowledgements

Our research is supported in part by a European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant "Foundations for Fair Social Computing", funded under the European Union's Horizon 2020 Framework Programme (grant agreement no. 789373). It is also supported by MIAI @ Grenoble Alpes (ANR-19-P3IA-0003) and by the French National Research Agency under grant ANR-20-CE23-0007.