An Analysis of Data Modelling for Blockchain

Abstract

The popularity of blockchains has been steadily rising since the end of the 2001–2010 decade. Its original focus was the creation of a distributed trustless system for a digital currency. Bitcoin was the first widely used blockchain. However, many more have been further created: Ethereum, Solana, Hyperledger Fabric, IOTA, to name a few. Due to it, blockchain networks and its properties are being scrutinised by data scientists. This topic is known as blockchain analysis. However, analysis’ tasks are hard to be accomplished over multiple blockchains. Even though most have similar concepts, each one has its own data modelled differently. As a consequence, scientists end up needing to do rework in order to apply similar analytics in more than one blockchain network. In fact, blockchain data modelling is an open issue. This paper researches the state-of-the-art on this issue. We also present a comparative analysis of the related work and suggest some directions for future researches.