Have you ever tried to track bitcoin transactions or address on a standard blockchain explorer? Then you must know that It’s almost impossible to conduct a blockchain investigation or track funds using a standard blockchain.
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Problem with tracking Bitcoin with Standard Blockchain explorers
Standard blockchain explorers are built for showing basic transactions related data. So when you try to trace bitcoins through them, you need to check one transaction after another and noting them in an excel sheet to understand the flow of funds.
This is a painstaking job, and there is a great chance you will miss transactions and won’t get the complete picture.
So problems with tracking bitcoins using standard blockchains are
- Time-consuming
- There is a great chance you will miss the transaction
- No annotations (Identifiable addresses)
At Bitquery, we have built extensive money flow APIs, and to showcase them, we have build Graphs to trace bitcoin transactions on our blockchain explorer.
This will show you how you can track bitcoin transactions or any other cryptocurrencies using Bitquery explorer for free.
How to track bitcoin transaction?
So let’s take this random Bitcoin transaction and trace the recipient of the transaction.
Let’s call sender Alice and recipient Bob.
To get the address of the recipient (Bob), you need to scroll down on the same page; you will see transaction Outputs.
As you know, Bitcoin has UTXOs, meaning every transaction has inputs and outputs. These inputs and outputs work like Cash. You give someone money and may or may not get changed based on the transaction amount.
Here, we use heuristics to identify which address is actually the recipient, which you can see labeled as “likely_not_change.”
Money Flow Graph
Now we have the recipient’s (Bob) Bitcoin address. Therefore, it’s time to check our first money flow Graph.
You can access them under the money flow tab on the explorer or use this link to jump on the page directly.
Once you open the tab you will see the following Graph.
This Graph shows all the address which sent or received money to the Bob (recipient) at one Hop. You can see Alice’s (sender) address here too. In one graph, you can see all the sender and recipient to the bob. Isn’t it more convenient? If you left-click on any address here, it will open that address in a separate tab on our explorer. The above graph shows all the senders and recipients to Bob at one hop; however, you can also increase the numbers of hops to check more detailed money flow for the addresses linked to Bob. This is helpful when you are trying to track a specific transaction. For example, if we want to know, who sent money to Alice, you just need to double click on Alice’s icon. Here “Depth level” option will increase the number of hops. You can increase it in both directions. Hops are counted based on intermediaries’ wallet addresses involved in the money flow. N Hope will contain N-1 intermediaries. For ex- one hop is a direct transaction from one address to another. 2 hops will contain one intermediary, and so on. These GraphQL are powered by our Coinpath GraphQL APIsa and you can add also add them to your website as a widget, just click on the “JS” button on the bottom right corner. Recently we have added another graph to show money flow in one image. This graph is based on the Sankey diagram. Let’s check the Sankey graph of Bob. For this, you need to click on the Sankey Radio button on the Money Flow page. Once you click on the Sankey radio button, you will see the following graph. Here you can see all incoming and outgoing transactions, and the width of the arrow is proportional to the transaction amount. You can increase the hops to see the source and destination of funds in our image. Isn’t it better than searching addresses and following transactions on standard explorer? So next time when you are following the money on the blockchain, use our Bitquery explorer. Currently, we support 30+ blockchains, and we provide money flow graphs for the blockchains and tokens build atop them. To learn more on investigating a particular token, read our blog post on investigating the Ethereum address. Above Graphs are built for public use and give you a glance at our Coinpath APIs’ capabilities. If you are looking for Coinpath APIs, please visit this page. If you have any questions or need help with your blockchain investigation, just hop on our Telegram channel. Also, let us know if you are looking for blockchain data APIs. You might also be interested in: Bitquery is a set of software tools that parse, index, access, search, and use information across blockchain networks in a unified way. Our products are: If you have any questions about our products, ask them on our Telegram channel or email us at hello@bitquery.io. Also, subscribe to our newsletter below, we will keep you updated with the latest in the cryptocurrency world. 
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