AlterEgo: A Dedicated Blockchain Node For Analytics

Qi Guo, Mahdi Alizadeh, Ali Falahati, Laurent Bindschaedler

Abstract: Blockchains today amass terabytes of transaction data that demand efficient and insightful real-time analytics for applications such as smart contract hack detection, price arbitrage on decentralized exchanges, or trending token analysis. Conventional blockchain nodes, constrained by their RPC APIs, and specialized ETL-based blockchain analytics systems grapple with a trade-off between materializing pre-calculated query results and analytical expressiveness. In response, we introduce AlterEgo, a blockchain node architected specifically for analytics that maintains parity with traditional nodes in ingesting consensus-produced blocks while integrating a robust analytics API. Our prototype supports efficient transactional and analytical processing while circumventing the rigidity of ETL workflows, offering a better trust model, enabling distributed and collaborative querying, and achieving significant performance improvements over the state-of-the-art.