Blockchain Meets Network Analytics: A Tale of Heuristics, Location, and Fraud Detection

The information provided by blockchains of cryptocurrencies is immense and diverse. Blockchain information is represented by networks, the transaction network and the user network, approximated by the entity network. We review heuristics for constructing the entity network out of the transaction network and discuss how they have been used, improved, and developed over time. We introduce network analytics applied to blockchain data, which supports finance and economics research to look into location identification, fraud detection, and price investigations of cryptocurrencies, among other topics. We inspect how they make use of network analytics, often tailored to the specific properties of blockchains. By this comprehensive overview, we intend to aid research on the use of blockchain information to understand user behaviours and the corresponding price behaviours of cryptocurrencies.