SteemOps: Extracting and Analyzing Key Operations in Steemit Blockchain-based Social Media Platform - ACM

^{( April, 2021; Proceedings of the Eleventh ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy )}

Researchers from the Beijing Jiaotong University, IBM, and the University of Pittsburgh have created a public dataset with Steem transactions that occurred between March, 2016 and November, 2019 (block 1 to block 38,641,150). The researchers suggest that this data can be used for: (i) blockchain system analysis; and (ii) social network analysis. Under blockchain system analysis, they suggest analysis of decentralization, cryptocurrency transfers, and performance benchmarks. Under blockchain system analysis, they suggest researchers can study behavior analysis, the curation mechanism, and bot detection. The benefit of all this is that the data is well-structured and available to researchers without any special blockchain knowledge.

Abstract

Advancements in distributed ledger technologies are driving the rise of blockchain-based social media platforms such as Steemit, where users interact with each other in similar ways as conventional social networks. These platforms are autonomously managed by users using decentralized consensus protocols in a cryptocurrency ecosystem. The deep integration of social networks and blockchains in these platforms provides potential for numerous cross-domain research studies that are of interest to both the research communities. However, it is challenging to process and analyze large volumes of raw Steemit data as it requires specialized skills in both software engineering and blockchain systems and involves substantial efforts in extracting and filtering various types of operations. To tackle this challenge, we collect over 38 million blocks generated in Steemit during a 45 month time period from 2016/03 to 2019/11 and extract ten key types of operations performed by the users. The results generate SteemOps, a new dataset that organizes more than 900 million operations from Steemit into three sub-datasets namely (i) social-network operation dataset (SOD), (ii) witness-election operation dataset (WOD) and (iii) value-transfer operation dataset (VOD). We describe the dataset schema and its usage in detail and outline possible future research studies using SteemOps. SteemOps is designed to facilitate future research aimed at providing deeper insights on emerging blockchain-based social media platforms.

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Related:

• SteemOps github
• SteemOps dataset download
• SteemOps: Extracting and Analyzing Key Operations in Steemit Blockchain-based Social Media Platform ( April, 2021; Proceedings of the Eleventh ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy; arXiv/PDF )