In the complex world of blockchain, understanding transaction flows and token movements most time requires navigating through numerous addresses and transaction hashes. With visualization tools, users can experience transaction flows through visual means, making data more accessible and intuitive for analysts, investigators, and traders. In this article, we take a look at some of these tools recommended for investigators, custodians, and crypto regulators to trace on-chain transactions for cases.
MoneyFlow by Bitquery is a specialized blockchain visualization tool that converts transaction data of money movements into graphical representations of fund movements using their proprietary Coinpath® API. It creates visual maps showing how funds move between addresses, via smart contracts, and across networks.
MoneyFlow visualization is powered by Bitquery’s blockchain infrastructure that:
- Processes transaction traces: This captures both standard and internal transactions across multiple blockchains
- Identifies transaction patterns: Makes use of advanced algorithms to categorize transaction types.
- Maps relationships: This creates node-based visualizations showing connections between addresses.
- Real-time updates: Processes new blocks and transactions as they occur on-chain
Visualization Capabilities of MoneyFlow
Transaction Flow Graphical Interface
MoneyFlow gives users access to transaction data via interactive node-based graphs that show the following:
- Addresses of sender and receiver
- Transactions
- Token amounts
- Currency
- Status of transaction, etc.
Cross-Chain Transaction Tracing
MoneyFlow provides consistent visualization across multiple blockchains, including: Ethereum, BNB Smart Chain, Arbitrum, Solana, etc.
Detailed Use Cases
MoneyFlow is a suitable tool for traders, analysts, and institutions to conduct the following:
- Whale Watching: With MoneyFlow, users can track large holders transaction patterns and predict potential market movements.
- Exchange Flow Analysis: With the MoneyFlow tool, users can monitor net inflows/outflows from major exchanges to predict buying/selling pressure.
- Token Distribution Mapping: Visualize how tokens move from initial distribution through the ecosystem
- Hack Investigation: Users can leverage MoneyFlow to trace stolen funds as they move through mixers, bridges, and exchanges.
- Smart Contract Risk Assessment: With the MoneyFlow tool, users can visualize the concentration and movement patterns of funds in DeFi protocols.
- Wash Trading Detection: Users can identify circular fund flows that may indicate market manipulation.
- Liquidity Migration Tracking: Visualize how liquidity moves between competing protocols.
Chainalysis Reactor is a cryptocurrency investigation software that is designed to link blockchain transactions to real-world entities, to help security experts and law enforcement combat illegal activity on the blockchain. It allows users to understand real-world activity and monitor the flow of funds across different blockchains.
Key Features:
Unique interface: The Chainalysis Reactor provides users with intuitive, Clean, and powerful visuals that make complex investigations effortless. Users can trace transactions and uncover every detail with unmatched clarity.
Insights depth: The Chainalysis Reactor connects the dots between counterparties, organizations, and services to surface intelligence beyond the blockchain. It leverages tested blockchain data, OSINT, and proprietary datasets to give users insights into blockchain transactions.
Tracing funds across blockchains: It gives users the ability to trace funds from their source to destination. It has an extensive coverage of over 25+ blockchains, which allows it to trace the movement of funds from source to destination and what happened in between.
Transaction interpretation: The Chainalysis Reactor allows analysts and security experts to tackle challenging crypto investigations with powerful automation. Complex DeFi transactions are broken down so users can quickly understand them.
Dune Analytics is a powerful blockchain platform that allows users to query, retrieve and visualize blockchain data from public blockchains like Ethereum, Solana, and Bitcoin. It makes use of SQL queries to explore specific aspects of blockchain data and offers various visualization options, allowing users to create custom dashboards and reports.
Key Features of Dune:
- Query Editor: With the SQL query editor, users can write SQL queries to analyze blockchain data
- Dune AI: Dune also has AI-powered tools to assist users with SQL queries and data insights
- Dashboards and Visualization: Users can build interactive dashboards that can also visual represent data used for monitoring metrics
- Advanced Search: Users can make a comprehensive search throughout the app with refined filtering options
- Extensive Data Catalog: Dune gives users access to its extensive data catalog, which spans various blockchains and provides data such as labels and owner details, EVM blockchain data, Entity information, and operational profiles.
- Data Integration: Developers and businesses can integrate Dune’s datasets into their applications and workflows using its API.
Nansen is a blockchain analytics platform that offers access to blockchain data from over 16+ chains via its data Query. Using Nansen Query as a blockchain data platform, analysts and engineers can perform blockchain research, combine their internal data with blockchain data, or feed the data into their pipelines.
Key features of Nansen;
Analytics: Nansen allows users to analyze data easily, perfect for beginners or professionals who want quick insights. It helps users discover valuable information, like spotting trends before others do.
Smart Alerts: Nansen has a Smart alert feature that allows users to set customizable alerts that get sent to their Telegram/Discord/Slack. These alerts can be adjusted by the user and get triggered whenever an on-chain activity meets the required condition set.
Nansen profiler: With the Nansen profiler, users can monitor and analyze wallet addresses, getting a comprehensive overview of the wallet’s activity and its holdings.
Monitor Tokens: Users can monitor who’s buying or selling tokens of interest. They can also monitor and analyze the entire movement of the token, its metrics, and other parameters to gain insights into its behavior.
Monitor Whales: With Nansen, users can monitor the behavior of addresses that are tagged and labelled whales using certain parameters. By using a feature called Smart Segment, users can input the conditions they want, and it automatically identifies Ethereum addresses that meet them, labeling them accordingly.
Elliptic is a web3 company that deals in cryptoasset risk management for crypto businesses and financial institutions. It provides blockchain visualization tools that help users analyze and trace cryptocurrency transactions across multiple blockchains. Its system aggregates blockchain data, identifies clusters of addresses likely belonging to the same entity, and visualizes fund flows between these clusters.
Its visualization tools help users to:
- Generate network visualizations of wallets, transactions, and entities with a single click
- Automatically visualize complex relationships between blockchain entities
- Trace illicit activity across 41+ blockchains and 123+ bridges
Key features of Elliptic include;
Investigation: It allows users to follow funds across chains and assets at scale, to identify the source or destination of funds. It detects connections to regulated exchanges and gathers relevant Know Your Customer (KYC) information involved in those transactions.
Deep analysis: With Elliptic, users can explore addresses and transactions with ease, and drill down from high-level insights on entities, clusters, and single addresses into granular transaction data.
Data & intelligence: Users can leverage Elliptic’s huge data collection and identify who controls wallet addresses to support investigations.
Workflow experience: Elliptic tools are designed to boost the operational effectiveness of users by streamlining fundflow activity reviews, adjusting statuses, adding notes, and exporting information as needed, or integrating data with their existing case management system using its flexible API.
TRM Forensics is a blockchain intelligence company focused on analyzing blockchain data to fight against crypto-related financial crimes and promote a safer financial system. They provide a platform that helps financial institutions, crypto businesses, and government agencies detect and investigate fraud and money laundering.
Key features:
Extensive asset coverage: TRM has support for over 200 million assets across 35+ blockchains, which includes NFT coverage and DeFi protocols.
Cross-chain analytics: TRM allows users to move easily across Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other blockchains by building visualizations while tracing the flow of funds.
Large Database: TRM gives users access to its large and fast-growing database, which records suspicious activities. Users can build from this database using its threat intelligence features combined with advanced data science.
Universal Tracing: With Universal tracing, users can trace between entities and addresses, while making rapid decisions at a macro level and having the ability to drill into specific fund movements, essential for legal processes.
Custom graphs: Users can also expand their analysis by using custom graph elements. They can also add off-chain data to their graphs to show the connection to any on-chain addresses or entities.
Breadcrumbs is a blockchain analytics platform that offers a range of tools for investigating, monitoring, tracking, and sharing relevant information on crypto transactions. It helps users find their way through the blockchain by following the digital breadcrumbs.
Key features:
Graph Visualization: BreadCrumb allows users to visualize transactions and trace the flow of funds between wallets. Users can expand wallets to see who they sent or received funds from.
Address Clustering: It identifies and groups wallets that likely belong to the same user or entity. This is useful for uncovering relationships and connections between different addresses.
Real-Time Alerts: Users can set up custom alerts to be notified of specific activities, such as large transactions or movements involving watched addresses.
Multi-Chain Support: Breadcrumbs has support for analysis across multiple blockchain networks, including Ethereum, Bitcoin, Binance Smart Chain, Polygon, Avalanche, and more.
Labeling and Risk Scoring: Breadcrumbs has an extensive labeling system with over 330 million labeled addresses that is enhanced by community contributions. It also assigns risk scores to these addresses based on their behavior and associations.
Arkham Intelligence is a blockchain analytics platform that makes use of artificial intelligence to demystify on-chain data and reveal the identities and activities of individuals and institutions involved in cryptocurrency transactions. The platform helps users understand the flow of funds, identify suspicious activity, and track the behavior of participants in the crypto ecosystem.
Key Features
De-anonymization: Arkham Intelligence makes use of AI to connect anonymous wallets to real-world entities. This provides insights for users to know who is transacting and what they are doing.
Transaction Analysis: It helps users to analyze and visualize transactions, movement of funds, and to understand the connections between different wallets and entities.
Market Intelligence: Its market Intelligence feature provides insights into the behaviors of whales, hedge funds, and other market participants, allowing users to gain a deeper understanding of market dynamics.
Intel Exchange: With the Intel Exchange feature, which is basically a marketplace, users can buy and sell intelligence related to blockchain activity, including address labels and other data points.
Tenderly is a blockchain platform that helps users build, test, and operate smart contracts on various blockchains. It also provides tools that simplify the development process, including debugging, testing, monitoring, and infrastructure components.
It allows developers to visualize blockchain transactions in a clear and interactive manner. It achieves this by breaking down each transaction into human-readable steps, showing data such as function calls, state changes, gas usage, and token transfers.
Tenderly’s Simulator UI gives users an IDE-like experience when simulating transactions. Users can build a transaction from scratch or load an existing transaction into the Transaction Simulator.
While replaying an existing transaction using a simulation, users can:
- Access decoded transaction trace, with 100% accurate gas usage overview, asset and balance changes, and storage modifications.
- Validate bugfixes by running simulations on modified smart contract source code.
- Validate adjustments to transaction parameters to find optimal inputs.
- Troubleshoot an existing transaction, either a reverted one or a successful transaction with undesired effects.
CryptoQuant is a blockchain data & analytics platform that bridges the gap between digital assets, blockchain technology, and traditional finance. It is an institutional-grade blockchain data firm that supplies reliable and timely on-chain and crypto market data directly from major blockchains and cryptocurrency exchanges.
Key features
Unified and Modular Data Solutions: CryptoQuant gives users access to comprehensive on-chain and off-chain data made available through multiple delivery mechanisms.
Pre-built Charts and APIs: It provides users with pre-built metrics through charts and industry-leading, high-quality APIs.
No-code Analytics: It offers its users the opportunity to create interactive dashboards with a drag-and-drop interface. It achieves this by offering various levels of datasets from raw blockchain data to high-level metrics.
Real-time Alerts: It gives users access to an alert system, which allows them to create and receive custom alerts via Telegram, email, and browser notifications for important market signals
As the cryptocurrency ecosystem continues to grow in complexity, tools like MoneyFlow and others that prioritize visualization and accessibility will play an increasingly important role in maintaining transparency and understanding. The ability to follow the flow of funds and transactions opens new possibilities for blockchain analysis, investigation, and insight that benefit the entire ecosystem.
