Sometimes scanning and analyzing a blockchain is challenging, especially when sorting through tens of thousands of blockchain addresses and millions of transactions. It is tedious and time consuming, and the stories told are often elusive. Startup Blocktrace hopes artificial intelligence will speed up the blockchain analysis process and make it easier to spot trends and anomalies.
Blocktrace is Building AI Chatbot
Blocktrace was created in 2018 by software engineer Shaun MaGruder. Shaun MaGruder’s background in blockchain comes from working as an education director at forensic firm Chainalysis. Blocktrace is an AI-powered blockchain forensics and analytics service provider. The platform uses a chatbot named Robby the Robot (after the iconic character in the sci-fi movie Forbidden Planet) to develop an AI that interacts with data on the Bitcoin blockchain.
Blocktrace CEO, MaGruder, told Decrypt in an interview that the company decided to launch the Robby project with Bitcoin due to its large sample size and track record.
“Bitcoin is a great project to start with and will likely always be around, just like Ethereum. It’s considered the OG because it was the first and has a large pool of user base addresses with a lot of activity.” – MaGruder said.
According to MaGruder, a copy of Bitcoin blockchain data is stored in Blocktrace’s database, which is already a significant engineering achievement. The company’s application is enhanced with an AI layer, allowing users to ask questions in natural language like a virtual assistant. A natural language model is a form of artificial intelligence designed to understand and process human language in the same way humans do.
“Users can quickly ask for specific information, such as transactions between dates and amounts. This saves time compared to the manual process, which could take one to two hours using a blockchain explorer.” – MaGruder added later.
According to MaGruder, Blocktrace aims to help investigators and users leverage technology developed by OpenAI to quickly locate Bitcoin addresses and identify transactions made on the network with greater accuracy and detail.
“Instead of requiring a data engineer or data scientist to translate natural language questions into SQL queries, Robbie has already been trained on the data model and can quickly fetch results for the user,” MaGruder explained, calling the process more efficient and one that does not require continuous training for new data scientists.
While still in beta, Robby is slated for general availability later this year. However, MaGruder said the chatbot will first be handed over to a private group for testing before Robby is released to the public.
“We want to make sure that Robbie is stable and that we don’t fall on our faces when we release it to the public. We want to make sure that the questions that the public is going to ask are questions we’ve already asked Robbie. As expected, people will compare Robbie to a traditional blockchain explorer and determine whether Robbie is correct or incorrect. To gather feedback, we will implement a thumbs up and thumbs down button. A thumbs up will serve as positive reinforcement, while a thumbs down will indicate areas needing improvement.” – MaGruder explained.
Blocktrace is the latest Web3 company to harness the power of artificial intelligence for blockchain analytics. Other companies using this technology are Elliptic, Chainalysis, CipherTrace, and Nansen.
“It’s something we’re looking at very deeply. You can use things like AI analysis on the blockchain to see if [wallets] are doing the same things at the same time.” – Andrew Thurman, a Nansen engineer, told Decrypt at ETH Denver.
Thurman later added that we can almost certainly assume that all of these wallets are associated with the same entity, even without an explicit connection.
Source
Check out more of our latest news here
Leave a comment