How to Conduct Blockchain Analysis for Free

Blockchain analysis is the work of reading a public ledger to see who paid whom, how much and when. You can do a fair amount of it without paying. There are three free routes, and each one stops somewhere. We tested every step on 2 October 2026.

Three routes at a glance

Route	Cost	Account	Good for
Bitquery explorer	Free	None	Looking up a token, a payment or a Bitcoin address
GraphQL API	Free for 7 days, then from $49 per month	Yes	Queries you want to save, repeat or build on
MCP server	Trial with 100 credits, then $19 per month for trading data or $149 for tracing and labels	Yes	Asking questions in plain English

What people use it for

• Risk checks. An exchange looks at where a deposit came from before it credits the account.
• Tracing. Police, lawyers and victims follow stolen funds to the exchange where they were cashed out.
• Token research. A buyer checks how many wallets hold a token and how much the largest ones own.
• Study. The ledger is a large, open data set, which makes it good practice material for anyone learning data work.

Free with no account: the explorer

The Bitquery explorer opens in a browser and asks for no sign-up. Here is what worked when we tested it.

Token pages. Search for a token and you get its transfers, the count of wallets that sent and received it, and a tab for its DEX trades. The page shows the last seven days by default, and a date picker changes the range. On the day of our test the page for USDT on Ethereum listed more than 700,000 sending wallets for the week.

Bitcoin address pages. Paste an address and you see what it received, what it spent and what is left. Three tabs go deeper: Inflow, Outflow and a Money Flow graph that draws both. Our Bitcoin tracing guide works through one address step by step.

The query behind each chart. Tables and charts carry a Get API button. It opens the GraphQL query that produced the data, which is the easiest way to learn how the API is used.

Not everything worked. On Ethereum, the Holders tab, the address pages and the transaction trace page each showed an error in place of some charts. Treat the explorer as a first look, and move to the API or the AI route when a page comes up empty.

Free for seven days: the API

Every paid plan starts with a seven-day trial, and no card is needed. You sign up, open the GraphQL IDE, and run queries of your own. The docs explain how to write a first query.

A good first exercise is token ownership. The Token Holders API answers the questions a token buyer cares about:

• How many wallets hold the token?
• Who are the ten largest holders, and what share do they own?
• When did a holder's balance first and last change?

Mind one catch when you read the answers. An exchange wallet holds coins for thousands of customers, so one large holder is not always one owner.

The trial has limits. Plans come with a rolling window of history, and older data is sold as an add-on. The pricing page lists what each plan covers.

With trial credits: ask an AI

The third route skips query writing. The Bitquery MCP server connects to Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor. You ask a question in plain English and the AI calls Bitquery's tools to answer it. A trial comes with 100 free credits. After that, tracing and address labels sit on the $149 plan, and the $19 plan covers trading data only.

Questions that suit it:

• "Where did the funds from this wallet go? Stop at the first exchange."
• "Is this address an exchange deposit address, a mixer or a known scam?"
• "Who are the most profitable traders of this token this month?"

The install guide covers each client.

Following stolen funds

A thief rarely sends stolen coins straight to an exchange. The coins pass through a chain of wallets first, and each step is called a hop.

In November 2019 the Upbit exchange lost about 342,000 ETH. Our Upbit investigation followed the coins hop by hop until wallets at known exchanges began to appear.

That trace used Coinpath queries. To run the same kind of trace on Ethereum today, use the MCP server above. For Bitcoin, the Bitcoin Coinpath API is still documented and the explorer's Money Flow graph works.

Where free stops

Free covers a first look. Long history is paid, and so are live streams once the trial ends. The pricing page lists what each plan includes. If your own funds were stolen, our crypto investigation service starts with a free first assessment.

First published in November 2023 by guest author Yash. Updated on 2 October 2026 by the Bitquery team, with AI tools helping to test the steps and redraft the text. The original carried five sample queries; we could not re-run them for this update, so the post now links to the current docs. Bitquery sells the API, the MCP server and the investigation service named above.