On the Suitability of Process Mining for Enhancing Transparency of Blockchain Applications

Blockchain technology is known for its transparency properties due to its publicly available, immutable data. Yet, as data availability does not inherently ensure transparency, further analytical methods may be required for human interpretation of data traces. Process mining has emerged as a popular toolbox for understanding processes and how they are executed in practice. The paper studies process mining as a method to enhance the transparency of blockchain data. To this end, two popular Ethereum applications were analyzed using process mining: the prediction and betting marketplace Augur and the network marketing platform Forsage. Observations from the process-mining analyses are used to discuss if process mining can serve as a method to establish transparency of a blockchain. For both applications, new insights are generated for usage scenarios such as application redesign, security analysis, user behavior analysis, and revealing blind spots in Augur’s and Forsage’s documentation. The paper concludes that there is evidence that process mining can serve as a method to enhance transparency in blockchains at the cost of technical setup and knowledge acquisition.